Top Gear's top 10 greatest stunts
We don't know about you, but we thought the best bit about Top Gear was all those daft bits where they smash stuff up. Unfortunately, they're cutting them out.
So for those of you who agree with us, here are 10 of their finest (or most idiotic) moments.
Car darts
A classic Top Gear moment, as Telegraph columnist James May and Richard Hammond take turns to fire cars into a quarry using a gas-powered cannon on to a crudely drawn dartboard. And they smash up a caravan for good measure. It seems to be a professional obligation, as you will see.
Sinking car
A slightly frightening experience for Hammond (we refuse to call him "the Hamster") as he attempts to escape from a sinking car. The trouble is that the water pressure outside the car is far stronger than that inside, keeping the doors firmly closed. Does he survive? (Yes. Yes he does. Obviously. But it still looks quite distressing.)
Volvo jumping caravans
Two of the team's pet hates, Volvos and caravans, brought together in one needlessly destructive moment.
Train crushes Renault Espace
If you can stand the five minutes or so of not particularly funny build-up, as Clarkson mugs away with all the sensitivity and comic... ...sorry, hang on a moment... ...timing for which he is rightly famed, this shot of a fast-moving train smashing the hell out of a people-carrier really is very impressive.
Jet Car v Nissan
Here is a car. We do not particularly like this car. Here is a big destructive thing with all flames and stuff. We shall destroy the car that we do not particularly like using the big destructive thing with all flames and stuff. It's not complicated television, but you have to admit it's effective.
Caravan Conkers
Well, it's conkers, only using caravans. And a slightly tired riff about "health and safety killjoys", but we can forgive that, because things get smashed up, which is funny.
Crossing the Channel
Our three intrepid pioneers set out to cross the English Channel in boats made out of cars. It's as ramshackle as it sounds. Somewhat inevitably, May ends up bumping into the Dover harbour wall quite a lot and getting hit on the head by the boom.
Racing the Eurofighter
Hammond, in a Bugatti Veyron, attempts to outpace the Eurofighter Typhoon in a two-mile drag race - the twist being that the jet fighter has to do it vertically. A chance to remember that, even though it was billions over budget, years late in production and conceived to fight a Cold War that ended two decades ago, the Typhoon still looks pretty damn cool.
Motor home Destruction Derby
The motor home is really just a caravan with an engine, so it's hardly a surprise to see the Top Gear boys find an excuse to smash a few up. This destruction derby seriously lives up to its name.
Airship caravan
May, who seems perpetually to be cast as the hapless buffoon of the Top Gear triumvirate (alongside Hammond's perky teenager and Jeremy Clarkson's implausible tight-trousered sage), lives up to his billing here, flying a caravan hung under an airship and apparently managing to end up flying through the airspace of a rural airport.
We hope the show paid the bill for the police helicopter that gets called. Unusually, the caravan ends the clip in one piece. Just about.
Flying in a U-2 spyplane
We're cheating here: it's not Top Gear and it's hardly a "stunt". But May got so much unfair treatment in the other clips that we thought it might be nice to show this incredible and oddly moving segment from his own show James May on the Moon, in which he takes a ride in a USAF U-2 spyplane to 70,000 feet - twice as high as most airliners.
To illustrate the point, he catches one on camera, miles below him, and films the curvature of the Earth. Great television. Particularly as he struggles to scratch his face inside his space suit.
