Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, shut up jeremy, you blithering idiot Richard Hammond (subtext) ‘Why have you made this so complicated?’ he complains. He bemoans James’s inevitably over-complicated twenty-step start-up procedure. Jeremy narrates his ordeal, to the amusement of the viewer. They ingeniously use a Bond Bug (a three-wheeler from the seventies the drunk uncle of the Reliant Robin) fitted with a jet ski engine, in order to achieve a more stable ride. As expected, this is all tremendously entertaining.Ĭue Richard and James taking over. With just a thin sheet of Perspex separating him from the colossal force of the jet engine fan, and kitted out in safety gear and a neck brace, after much faffing about, he finally unleashes all that immense power, eventually achieving a top speed of… 3 mph. Still persistent in his ill-placed confidence, Jeremy takes his almightily powerful and utterly deadly creation onto a nearby, unsuspecting body of water. Seeing bits of plane flying every which way and watching an oblivious Jeremy desperately trying to figure out his endless rows of knobs and switches is extremely entertaining. I laughed far too hard as Jeremy ‘demonstrated’ his jet engine to his befuddled colleagues, simultaneously deafening all three of them and obliterating two aeroplanes at the non-existent Huddersfield International Airport. Nonetheless, that didn’t detract any of the viewing pleasure. Obviously, we knew from the offset that this was going to be a catastrophic failure. With the two halves of the segment sandwiching Celebrity Faceoff, we first saw Jeremy’s typically Clarkson-esque creation, which consisted of a small Suzuki 4x4, some bits of old boat and an enormous jet engine – ‘blu-tacked together’, as James put it. The episode’s central film, documenting the team’s attempts to break the British water speed record for amphibious cars, was undoubtedly this week’s standout piece. A weird Conversation Street this week, to say the least. Last week’s edition of Birdwatching Weekly was far too pigeon-centric, so thank Heavens for this follow-up. Before long, the trio had digressed once again into a bizarre exchange about the relative speeds of different types of birds. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, shut up, Jeremy, you blithering idiot. ‘Can we get back to the BMW now, which is a car?’ says Hammond. Instead, Jeremy somehow transforms the conversation into an impassioned debate about the gender-related etiquette surrounding jumper removal. Here comes some intelligent conversation and analysis from three legendary petrolheads about a car.