The View from Mudsock Heights: Woodland Isolation Leads to Affection for Odd Foreign Television Show

By Dennis E. Powell | Oct 23, 2009 at 0:36:9

Out here in the woods, if you’re going to watch television chances are you’ll get it via a satellite dish.
This has its annoyances — the “local” stations the satellite company chooses are in West Virginia, for instance. I wonder what television news covered there before they had meth lab explosions to lead the newscasts, but never mind. There’s no television at all when it is raining.

But it has its advantages. There are lots of stations. Eliminate the half that are selling stuff and there are still lots of stations.

The weirdest of these, though one I find myself watching disproportionately, is the one that repackages programs from the BBC.

Once upon a time, television programs had a fairly predictable calendar. A television season was 39 weeks long, and 39 episodes of each show would be produced. After that, there were reruns or summer replacement shows, chock full of promos for the new season, coming in September, of the show that had been replaced for the summer. There were exceptions, but this is pretty much how it worked.

This seems to have changed, and I wonder if the British are in some way to blame. The BBC channel is wont to promote some new series. The series comes on and, as soon as you’ve gotten into it and have grown to know the characters, to like some and dislike others, they announce that the “series finale” is coming up, when it seems as if the first episode was week before last. This unhappy practice now extends to American cable channels that produce original series.

(The Brits use nomenclature different from that of American broadcasters. To us, a “series” is a show which may or may not run many seasons. To the BBC, a series is what we call a season.)

My favorite show is a BBC “programme” — it has run for many series, which is to say many seasons, which is to say many years — called “Top Gear.” It is a quirky, delightful show about automobiles, hosted (“presented” in British terms) by three fellows. One is the noted and cranky car writer Jeremy Clarkson. One is a former disc jockey, a short Davey-Jones type named Richard Hammond. The third, and the one I like best, is a wry, staid fellow named James May, who seems to know everything about cars except how to drive them, but I think that this is a design element of the program.

(May was fired from a British car magazine, the result of a stunt. He was asked to put together a long, catalog-like section, each entry of which began with a big red letter. He wrote it so that the red letters, if strung together, spelled, “So you think it’s really good, yeah. You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse.”)

I love the show. It is gloriously, delightfully politically incorrect and irreverent. But there’s more. It’s almost a contradiction, the idea of the British holding forth on automobiles when they’re really never actually built a good one, if reliability fits into the definition of good.

It makes me think of a visit years ago with friends who lived on a big farm on stately Quaker Hill in Pawling, New York. Their experience of automobiles was quintessentially British.

They had two Land Rovers. These were not the new, trendy ones but the old, African-safari variety complete with spare tire bolted to the hood. At least once a year at least one of these boxy but delightful old things could be made to run. I do not believe there was ever a time when both were in running condition. They also had two Jaguars, including the first XKE convertible imported into the U.S., which in the time-honored tradition of motor vehicle restoration had been allowed to dissolve into little more than piles of rust before they were expensively restored to their original unreliability.

I remember one afternoon there, when someone drove past in his old MGA. The fellow was smiling and waving, wearing a British driving cap at a jaunty angle. My friend Mark said, “He wouldn’t be smiling if he knew the likelihood of his car bursting into flames in the next mile.” British cars had electrical systems made by the Lucas company. There was a popular bumper sticker in the 1960s which said, “Do you know why the British drink warm beer? Because they have Lucas refrigerators!”

So the British take on cars is always fun. The cars sold in the rest of the world are markedly different from those sold here, and it’s interesting to look at the cars we can’t have. And of course there are stunts, as when they actually tried to make a Reliant Robin — an odd, three-wheeled car — into a space shuttle. It almost worked, but it failed to separate from the rockets and crashed in a huge explosion.

Living in the woods has changed my television viewing habits. I have no idea if anyone sane would like “Top Gear,” but I sure do.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.