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JEREMY: Tonight, two swans move their heads about.
I eat a shoe.
And James says he's not fat.
I'm not fat.
Hello everybody. Hello, good evening, thank you so much.
Now... thank you.
Now, our deep and profound love on this show
for Alfa Romeo is a triumph of hope over reality.
We always pray that their new models will be brilliant,
but we sort of know they won't be and then they never are.
But, what about this? The new and very pretty 4C.
Well, Richard Hammond has been to northern Italy, in the sunshine,
to find out all about it.
Jammy little ba...
(BELL TOLLING)
(ENGINE REVVING)
Right, let's get this straight.
I'm in a mid-engined, two-seater Alfa Romeo.
The first proper Alfa sports car for twenty years.
And I'm driving it in northern Italy on a lovely day.
In theory things don't get much better.
But predictably there are one or two problems.
First of all it's going to cost around forty-five thousand pounds,
and that's a fair bit,
especially as you don't get a V8, or even a V6.
What you do get is a turbo charged, reworked version of the 1.7 litre
4 cylinder engine from a Julietta hatchback.
And under here, well I don't know what's under here
cos the bonnet is bolted shut.
It's bolted shut for the same reason this car has no power steering
and no proper climate control. To save weight.
That's why it has the same sort of carbon fibre chassis as a Formula One car.
It's why there's almost no metal in the body at all.
The upshot is the 4C weigh just 925 kilos.
That's about half what a Mercedes weighs.
And on a road like this, that really pays dividends.
Oh come on! Lovely.
Because it's light, it's unbelievably agile.
It changes direction like a kitten chasing a spider.
And because there's no power steering, I can feel far more at the steering wheel,
I know what the wheels are doing.
It grips...
...fabulously.
And it doesn't need a massive engine.
It's got 237 brakehorsepower and do you know what?
That is enough. More than enough.
0-60 takes 4 1/2 seconds.
The top speed is 160.
And yet because of the lightness, it'll do 40 miles to the gallon.
Drop the window. Sample the noise.
Ohhh, lovely little crackle on the upshift.
Oh that's great.
This little Alfa is growing on me
with a speed and ferocity I've never before encountered.
It's just getting under my skin.
Because it's not like anything else you have to live with it...
Oh my god! What?
What are you doing here?
As you well know, Hammond, we receive thousands of letters every single week from viewers
and they all say the same thing.
Dear Top so-called Gear. The Alfa 4C, is it better than a quad bike.
Well I can clear that one up straight away.
Yes it is, because quad bikes are slow,
ugly, noisy, stupid and incredibly dangerous.
And I don't mean dangerous like you might fall off,
I mean like they want to kill you.
Everybody I know, pretty much, who's ever tried one,
has been killed by it at some point.
Yeah, that's as maybe. But we need to settle this, so we're gonna have a race.
-What, we're gonna race? -Yeah.
-You on that presumably. -Yeah.
-Me in that. -Yeah.
RICHARD: Jeremy's proposal was a race from the top of Lake Como,
to a hotel terrace at the bottom.
I would take the forty-three mile lakeside route,
whilst he would attempt to go as the crow flies.
Good, you're gonna be killed and last.
And so, at exactly 10:37am, the race began.
Here we go.
Let me talk you through my quad.
It's called a Gibbs quad-ski,
designed and engineered in Britain,
built just outside Detroit,
and the engine is German, a 1.3 from a motorcycle.
And you have 40 horsepower.
Doesn't sound like much but, like the Alfa, it's light.
Apparently it has the same power to weight ratio, woherrr, as a helicopter.
He's mad. I mean he doesn't stand a chance. I know what he's thinking.
He's imagining he'll be crashing off road and cutting corners.
He won't. He'll be bumbling through the woods on little tracks,
he'll get stuck, he'll fall off, he'll break a leg, maybe two.
JEREMY: Hammond was wrong.
My legs were fine, but I had got into a bit of a pickle
trying to find a short cut.
Totally lost. Literally no idea which...
No idea where I... I'm just in weeds.
Oh now which way?
RICHARD: With Jeremy stuck in the undergrowth
I had time to admire one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Oh, mountains, pretty village, all present and correct.
Coming through. See this scooter rider will not mind me whizzing past in my Alfa Romeo
because I know he loves Alfa Romeo just as much, if not more, than I do.
We have to love Alfa, it's the law.
JEREMY: Meanwhile...
-(BIKE REVVING) -Oh god, no wait.
Many nettles.
This may have a top speed of 40 but I'm not doing that now really.
Happily, however, Hammond was about to discover one of the Alfa's drawbacks.
It's girth.
Ohh no! Oh my god, this is narrow!
Oh that's... That is a wide... This car is wide.
That's a problem.
So what were they thinking when they've got streets like this?
I mean ohhh!
JEREMY: Still, could be worse.
(EXCLAIMING)
Ohhh, oh no! Now look what I've done.
I've accidentally crashed into Lake Como.
But it's ok because if I push this little button here.
(WHIRRING)
The wheels have folded up and now I'm on a jet ski.
Oh and it gets better because on land it has 40 horsepower,
but here on water it has 140.
I know exactly what music we have to play now.
(SLOW MUSIC PLAYING)
No, not that! Cue the Bond!
(BOND MUSIC PLAYING)
Here we go, 45 miles an hour.
Hammond, you've had it, wherever you are! You can't beat this.
Narrow, really narrow, really wide car.
I'd like to be driving something narrower now, like a bus.
Right, clear of the town, press on.
So let's just get this straight. I'm wearing a wet white shirt and I'm in a lake.
I'm Mr Darcy! Come on!
There is Richard Hammond.
Aha, ha ha ha!
I'll slow down a bit.
Hammond. Hello.
Er hello, where are you?
Er to your left mate, to your left.
You can't be to my left, there's... How can you be to my l...what?
Ha ha ha ha! Have you ever seen a cooler machine than this?
What are you on? Is that the same quad?
It's certainly is. And I'm afraid I must now say goodbye.
Cheerio, see you soon.
Cheating sod! He's...
He can just go straight across the lake now.
I've gotta go all the way down the bottom here and back up the other side.
I'm gonna lose this. And he's gonna do his stupid smug face.
Spurred on by the horror of his face...
I put the hammer down.
Come on little Alfa.
We were neck and neck, but then Jeremy got distracted by an Italian ferry.
Look at that.
What a machine.
Oh I'm sorry, I'm hearing the Bond music again now.
(BOND MUSIC PLAYING)
Do you want a race? I'll give you a race.
(ENGINE REVVING)
Oh come on, I can't lose this!
JEREMY: By this stage I'd disentangled myself from the hydrofoil,
but had run into another problem,
Lake Como's weird winds.
Argh, argh, argh, argh, argh, argh, argh!
Really got some chop.
Whoa! Whoa no!
I've lost ten miles an hour. Oh.
Oh, my back bottom!
Whoa no, wow! They slow you down a bit.
Oh my god that's a big one.
I'm now down to
fifteen miles an hour and I can't realistically go any faster
cos I can't see where I'm bloody going.
The vicious chop had put Hammond back in the lead.
We have to beat him.
JEREMY: Thankfully on the lake I'd found calmer water.
45 miles an hour.
We are back in this race!
There he is. There is Richard Hammond.
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!
Right, goodbye Hammond. He is history.
It certainly seemed that way because pretty soon the hotel was in sight.
There it is, there's the finishing line.
So I was definitely going to win this.
But then I realised the victory would be a bit hollow.
Obviously I want to beat Hammond, of course I do.
But I don't wanna beat that Alfa Romeo
because to me Alfas are special,
they're really special
This is a bit like having a running race with your four-year-old son.
Yes, of course you can win
but you don't really want to.
It's not far now.
Little Alfa, I think we have to accept the inevitable.
He's not there, is he?
In a few minutes Hammond would arrive and see my quad ski
moored alongside the hotel's jetty.
Damn and blast, I'm gonna win this.
Nothing I can do.
But then I spotted a hidey hole.
Yesssss!
Sometimes I stagger even myself with my genius.
Oh no, oh no, I'm so sorry.
Right, where is he?
This is the terrace.
Up here maybe.
Do you know what?
He no here. I don't know how.
What I've done is win.
-In that little Alfa. -JEREMY: Hammond.
Mate. I don't know what to say.
Well done, you beat me fair and square.
-I did! In the Alfa. -Unbeliev...
Do you know I could have... I'd have bet a million pounds
when I overtook you I was gonna win.
(CHEERING)
So there we are. Your question is answered.
The Alfa 4C is better than the quad bike.
Yeah, but we saw you lose on purpose.
A bit, just a bit.
Did you not like the jet ski quad ski thing?
Oh yes, it's brilliant. Do you know the best thing about it is its reliability?
It performed faultlessly all day.
And then it performed faultlessly all the next day
when we had to re-run the rac
because an American knocked the camera with all the film in it into the lake.
Really?
Mmm. I was on this thing for two days, two days.
By the time we finished my sausage looked like a beaver's tail.
Umumumumum.
Right. Um, is it expensive?
What my sausage?
No, the...the thing.
Oh the thing. Yes, it's twenty-six thousand pounds.
But no, hang on, you do get a lot of
health and safety warning notices for that.
This is my favourite down here. It's wa...
...warning about what you have to wear and it says, hang on, er hang on.
"Normal swimwear does not adequately protect
"against forceful water entry into *** or ***."
(AUDIENCE LAUGHING)
He's not making that up! It is actually, it says... It says *** on it and...
Um, um, excuse me, does anyone mind if we talk about the car for a bit?
-Yes, good idea. -It's a car show and everything.
-Cos I've got some questions about this. -What?
How wide is it?
It's wider than a Range Rover.
-Is it, seriously? -It is very wide.
And let me just get this straight, Alfa Romeo is selling a car
where you can't open the bonnet.
Yeah, I know.
-Ballsy. -Yeah.
Ballsy.
It is, yes, but that's not the interesting thing about it.
What is the interesting thing?
Well it costs forty-seven thousand pounds yeah, but when you get in it
everything just feels a bit sort of cheap and plasticky and un...
Look at this handbrake, it's just it...
It's like something that came out of a cracker.
Do you know, if I got a handbrake in a Christmas cracker I'd be a bit disappointed.
You know, you know what I mean.
Yeah, I do actually. It's just that there are a lot of rules
coming very soon on fuel efficiency and emissions and so on,
and the only way that cars can meet them
is if they get very, very light.
Yeah. And pretty soon all cars will have to be made like this, but do you know what?
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
Yes, you get a shonky handbrake, but your car is more nimble.
It's faster and it's more economical.
Yeah, and for the ultimate expression of that art,
later in the show we have a review of this,
the new McLaren P1, which is astonishing.
Well I am very much looking forward to that, but first it's the news.
Yesss.
Now Kia is working on something called um gesture control.
It's very interesting this. Instead of having buttons all over the dashboard of your car
you would just sort of wave your hand around a bit and the car will do stuff.
-Very futuristic. -Yeah.
But I only make three gestures when I'm driving a car.
-What? -One of them is
oh, which means I'm really sorry I didn't mean to do that,
and then there's hi, to a friend.
-And... -Call Jeremy Clarkson.
Or navigate to James May's house.
Oh now, now you know those um motorway gantries
that are supposed to be used to tell you about
-stationary traffic ahead or ice? -Yes.
But they're actually used for telling you stuff that just doesn't matter.
We've got a picture of one here. "Check your fuel level."
What, really.
It might as well say wash your hands after going to the lavatory.
Brush your hair.
Yeah, well the committee that decides on what messages are flashed up,
and it is a committee, we checked,
has been told to stop doing that sort of thing, ok,
because the government says it's distracting.
But it isn't distracting, it's irritating.
Scarlett Johansen in a short skirt on a windy day on a motorway bridge,
that is distracting.
-That would be. -That's distracting.
Yeah, it's distracting me now.
I think what would be distracting would be
if you painted the surface of the motorway
so that it looked like the opening sequences of Dr Who as you drove along.
That would be really distracting.
I think they should use those signs to put up pub quiz questions as you drive past.
Just ask you, come on
That's a really good idea. What and then you have the answer on the next one along.
Yeah, journey's would just fly by.
-Oh I don't know, and then you get the answer. -That's brilliant.
Yes, thank you.
Not if my little sister set the questions.
Cos you'd get...you'd get the question on one and then the next one would go
oh come on, you must know that.
Please can we move on. I'd like to talk about this.
It's the new Corvette Z06.
Oh yeah, supercharged V8 6.2 litre, 625 brake horsepower.
It's got magnetic ride control,
electronic dif, carbon fibre,
all the high tech stuff you get on a European sports car, but you have...
Yeah, it doesn't really have the European self-restraint though, does it?
That's a bit more shock and awe than stiff upper lip.
Yeah, but look at it, it's really good.
No, Hammond, you can't drive a Corvette in England.
It's like talking in a lift.
You can do that in America, you can't do that in Britain.
In fact we should have signs at Heathrow, telling American visitors
please drive on the left and don't talk in lifts.
Yes, yes, whatever. But I think that looks stupendous. It looks great.
Yes, yes, it would look stupendous in Texas,
but it would look ridiculous in Tewksbury.
It would!
Hammond, if you bought one of those and drove it around in England,
the next thing you'd do would be hanging up a Confederate flag outside your house.
I did paint a Confederate flag on the roof of my Toyota Corolla when I was seventeen.
-Where were you? -Ripon, North Yorkshire.
What, looked brilliant.
Let me just get this straight, you drove around North Yorkshire
in a crappy little Japanese hatchback
with a Confederate flag on the roof.
Yeah. Yeah.
A symbol of slavery.
Ladies and Gentlemen, twelve years o' Hammond.
I didn't realise. I just thought it looked nice.
-The base model of this? -Yes.
-Not the Z06, the normal one, sixty grand, there... -Sixty-two yes.
Well for about the same sort of money you can have this, which is the new Jag, ok.
This is the F-type Coupe.
That's around the same sort of money and I put it to you that what we have here
is a lovely piece of double Gloucester on a water biscuit.
Your Corvette is six hundred kilos of Monterey Jack on a taco.
Yeah I know. I'd rather have that.
-You'd rather have the Monterey Jack, wouldn't you? -Yeah.
Hang on a minute.
Surely it's six hundred kilograms of Monterey Jack on a taco
-with a strawberry on top? -Strawberry.
Cos there's always a strawberry on top of... Are there any Americans here?
-Are there any Americans... Yeah, no. -WOMAN: Wooooooo.
-You are? -Oh god.
Hey. We've wondered about this for years.
-Why do you put strawberries on everything? -Because they taste good.
Yeah, but not on a shepherd's pie.
This is not an exaggeration. I stayed in a hotel in LA,
I had to have some dry cleaning done and when it came back in the morning
it was all wrapped up and there was a strawberry on it?
-What on your dry cleaning? -On my dry cleaning.
Now this isn't news, it's a question.
Why is the world still incapable of working out a way of dispensing petrol?
Anyone been to America?
Well you must have all been to America, I suppose, at some point.
You go into a petrol station, you have to pay for the fuel before you've filled your tank.
Well you don't know how much you want.
Or how much it's gonna take.
Yes, but I hate those European stations
where they have those automatic credit card ones, you know.
-Don't work. -No they never, ever work.
Never work.
The other...the other one that doesn't work, and especially in France
are those ones where you're supposed to put Euro notes in little slot.
-No, they don't -No.
You put it in and it goes ererer. Ererer. Oh.
There's a lot of people doing that and they go ererer. Ererer.
I'll give you the worst scenario James, worst scenario is ererer,
yeah, there we go, get the pump out. Errrr.
But the worst country in the world for filling up with petrol is Britain,
because petrol stations here now are also supermarkets,
which means that people pull up at the pump
and then go and do their shopping.
No, no, no, but that's exactly why I was late this morning,
cos I pulled up behind the car that was at the pump,
ready for my turn,
and I knew who it was through the window, it was a woman,
she was doing the whole weekly grocery shop.
And it was... And she came out with four massive carrier bags.
I thought well that's finally it now, and then she went to the cash machine
and sorted out Greece's national debt with her card and a lot of numbers.
I mean I am a patient man but I mean even I, I was thinking
I want to put your head in a brown paper bag
and bludgeon you to death with the blunt end of an axe.
And that's...that's it, isn't it?
It's quite bad.
Do you know the... My question in petrol stations, and we could ask this here,
and it's, it's mostly women,
what do you do in the fifteen minutes between getting into the car and driving off?
No. I know what it is. I know what it is cos I watched it.
What?
She turned round and she put her handbag on the back seat, fair enough,
but then interfered with it for about ten minutes.
Doing what though?
No well I sus... I suspect women try to make sure their handbag doesn't fall over,
which I don't understand,
because women's handbags are not well organised so it doesn't matter if it falls over.
I mean I reckon I could put a house brick in a woman's handbag
and she would not know it was in there ever.
-Have you got a handbag with you? -No.
-You haven't? Anyone got a handbag? -It's in the car.
Cos well that's a shame cos I was gonna do this game.
I was gonna put my car keys, and it's a Jag this week, in your handbag,
and then if you could find them by the end of the show
you could have the car.
You wouldn't be able to.
Two angry old men rampaging on about petrol stations.
Him in his cardigan, him, just him.
Now, as I'm sure you know, after thirteen years the British military forces
are pulling out of Afghanistan.
What you may not know is that that operation has been the biggest deployment
of British military vehicles since World War II.
Now bringing that lot home is quite a big job.
So I packed my tin helmet and went out there to get in the way.
If you want to get a sense of just how big
the British involvement in Afghanistan has become
you just have to look at the size of its main base.
Camp Bastion.
In 2006, when British forces arrived here,
it was just a scrap of desert with a few tents in it.
But now look. It's the size of Reading!
And inside its twenty-five miles of blast-proof perimeter wall,
alongside the few comforts of home, you'll find a vast armada of vehicles.
At its peak, the number was five thousand.
We've got a few of them here.
The names will be dimly familiar from news reports.
That is a Ridgeback. That is a Mastiff,
then you have a Foxhound, the pale coloured one is a Husky
and that weird looking thing with the tracks on over there, that is a Warthog.
Don't expect cute and cuddly names like Panda or Fiesta.
Everything here is named after a dog.
Except the Warthog, which is named after a warthog.
To keep the wheels turning the army has built this enormous workshop,
which, at full strength, carries sixty million pounds worth of spares
and employs a hundred and fifty mechanics.
Bastion even has its own purpose built driver training ground,
approved by a squad of driving instructors.
The sheer size of this operation is truly impressive,
but equally fascinating
is what the Afghanistan campaign has done to Britain's military vehicles.
It has brought about the biggest change in a generation.
When the British first arrived here,
their staple patrol vehicle, the *** Landrover,
offered woeful protection against IED's.
In 2009 alone,
seventy-nine soldiers fell victim to such devices.
The twenty-nine ton American-made Mastiff offered a quick fix,
but in Leamington Spa
a small British firm devised a more twenty-first century solution.
This is a Foxhound.
And it's very clever because it's actually made out of armour.
It's not a normal vehicle to which armour plate has been added.
It's a sort of a armour monocoque, if you like.
The Foxhound also has a V-shaped hull to deflect mine blasts,
and thanks to its state-of-the-art armour
it weighs just seven and a half tons,
which makes it a featherweight around these parts.
To drive it's pretty much like an off-road car.
It's a positive mountain goat this thing.
Now, history will record the government bureaucrats
dragged their heels over the military vehicle crisis in Afghanistan.
But, the Boffins who developed the Foxhound certainly didn't.
This machine was designed, engineered, tested,
proved and got on the ground in large numbers in just over three years.
Try doing that with a small hatchback or something.
Alongside the Foxhound...
The military drew on a policy called Urgent Operational Requirement, or UOR,
which saw them combine operational demands
and the best vehicle-related suggestions from soldiers on the ground.
Here's a very simple example of UOR. This is a Mastiff.
It's got cameras mounted on the sides.
Er Commander Buzz here can look at the pictures on his screen.
Now on the early ones they were rigidly mounted.
When you went through things like villages they got smashed.
So somebody said well why not put them on a hinge? So they did.
Soldiers also needed their vehicles to be more stealthy in the dark,
so a night vision system was developed
that would allow them to switch off their headlights.
I'm now driving the Mastiff completely blacked out but using the night vision system,
suspended in front of my face, and this is quite amazing.
This is actually my eyes. I can't see a single thing through the windscreen.
These lamps on the outside are infra-red and illuminate the surrounding area.
Our camera can see the light they emit,
but it's invisible to the naked eye.
We ought to point out that normally we wouldn't even have these red interior lights on.
Those are there so that our cameras are working properly.
But actually you could drive this,
we could be completely black in here, couldn't we?
Yeah, could be completely black out, yeah.
Right so I've missed those... What are those, are they rocks or are they...
Yeah, they just mark the zone in front of you.
Straightening up, sir.
-You see that compound ahead of us. -Yeah.
Yeah, you wanna be going sort of round to the left of that.
I can see that as clear as day.
-It's a good piece of gear, innit? -It's brilliant, isn't it?
Now, on a machine as heavily armoured as a Mastiff,
the protection against roadside bombs is good.
But Afghanistan threw up another issue that needed sorting.
What if the vehicle is blown over? How do you train for that?
Brace, brace, brace, brace, brace.
Well what you do is you build one of these.
It's a Roll Over Egress Trainer.
Oh. I think we're upside down.
All these improvements have had a dramatic effect on military motoring out here.
Since the new generation of PMVs was introduced,
that's Protected Military Vehicles,
the Mastiff, the Foxhound, the Husky, the Warthog, all those things,
there have been over one thousand survivors of IED strikes on vehicles.
And a senior British officer admitted to me the other day
that in the old days, when we had the soft skin vehicles, the *** Landrover and so on,
that might have been more like three casualties per vehicle.
With our troops now coming home, this stuff is too valuable to leave behind.
So a massive operation is underway to bring it back to Britain.
At forward bases like this one,
all the vehicles and spares are being gathered up for the drive back to Bastion.
Which meant that in the middle of the night
I found myself in a convoy of returning vehicles
in full Ross Kemp mode.
We're in a Mastiff, we're in a convoy of thirty-one vehicles.
These legs belong to Sue,
who's up the top on the gun keeping look out. Hello.
-Morning. -Morning ma'am.
-Is there room for two of us up there? -Um we can give it a go.
-Hang on, I'll move this way a bit. -Up we go.
Ow.
I don't think we're going to fit, are we?
I've pulled something off. Oh.
-Well... -I'm not fat.
What's to stop somebody out,
cos I mean we can't really see very much out there,
what's to stop somebody out there just taking a shot at you?
Er absolutely nothing at the moment.
So they're out there somewhere.
They are. They're not that far away.
And when was the last time a roadside bomb went off on this bit, do you know?
Very, er, very recent.
-Very recent. -Very recent.
Daylight found us still in one piece
and back within the walls of Bastion, the packing up process could begin.
Alongside a strip down service, each vehicle gets a twenty-four hour long jet wash,
a biological decontamination and, at the very end, its own passport.
And look at the size of it.
All these pages, all these signatures, everything signed off.
Every single vehicle and piece of equipment has one of those
and there are over three and a half thousand of them.
So don't complain next time you have to tax and MOT your car.
For some poor souls the new machinery came too late.
But the military has responded to the brutality of this conflict.
And the vehicles we're bringing home from Afghanistan
are much better than the ones we went out with.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)
And there it is.
The big military Foxhound.
Or, since the army loves an acronym, the big MF.
Anyway it's, er, it's now time to put an S in our RPC.
Er, Britain has produced many great Toms over the years,
Daley, Jones, and of course, Mas the Tank Engine.
But, tonight our Tom is the newest of them all.
He's from Thor, and Avengers Assemble, and War Horse.
Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Hiddleston.
(CHEERING)
-How are you? -How are you?
-Are you well? -Very well thank you.
-Look. -Thank you.
-Have a seat. -Thank you.
I was half expecting you to ask the audience to kneel before you.
Not here. I haven't got my horns with me.
-So let's get onto your car history, if I may. -Yeah, sure.
Your first car then, what was it?
So it was a Peugeot 106.
-Er one... -Mmmmmm.
Yeah. It's quite adventurous. Um 1 point 1.
Wow.
It was really, phwoar, when you floored it, you felt it. Um.
It was a 1 point 1 what? They always had silly names.
-Zest. -Yeah, there you go.
Sounds like a washing powder.
It's was incr... It sounds like lemon juice.
It does.
I bought it with my first um paycheck
for some er work that I got while I was at university,
-and I kept that for ten years. -Ten years?
Ten whole years, all the way through my twenties, yeah.
But I presume that obviously now, as a result of you being Loki in the Thor franchise.
Indeed yeah.
There's no need now to drive around in cars with zesty names.
Well I'm very er fortunate to drive a Jaguar
and um, as you probably know, I'm...I'm part of a campaign that they have recently done.
And they are, weirdly, Jaguar's been like part of my life
for the last couple of years cos I keep playing characters in films that drive Jaguars.
Well does Loki drive a Jag?
I think Loki drives a spaceship.
Yes he does, is it a Jag spaceship?
-Is it a Jag. I'm sure... -Does he get to the petrol station and go,
oh dear, my dear, I seem to have left my wallet at home.
-Most embarrassing. -Yes, probably he would approve.
-A sort of caddish, caddish spaceship. -Yeah.
Um no this, this Jag commercial actually, I don't know if anybody's seen it.
Let's just have a look at this.
Have you ever noticed how in Hollywood movies all the villains
are played by the Brits.
-Maybe we just sound right. -Good evening sir.
Thank you Mary.
We're more focused.
More precise.
We're always one step ahead.
With a certain style, an eye for detail.
And we're obsessed by power.
Stiff upper lip is key.
And we all drive Jaguars.
Oh yes. It's good to be bad.
(AUDIENCE CHEERING)
I have to say the line I like most in that is Mark Strong's,
-"cos he goes and we all drive Jaguars." -Yeah.
What it should be is we all drive Jaguars, now.
Right. .
As a result of this.
Yeah, or indeed a helicopter.
-Was that really filmed in London? -It was all filmed in London.
It was one of the most extraordinary evenings of my life.
I...I um, we were allowed to go over um over Central London about five hundred feet,
and er the door of the helicopter was open
and um Tom Hooper, who directed, was sitting behind the camera.
And we were up sort of banking right,
and I was leaning out the window, and at a certain point he said
"I'm afraid we have to cut, we have to change the... We have to change the roll."
I said ok, good, that's completely fine.
Cut. Ahhhhhhh!
It's really high! You know what I mean? So like it...
-You were holding -When the camera was rolling, I was like I got this,
bit more focus, more precise, and as soon as it was cut, I was like
"Ohh god, the window's open.
"Someone sh... Someone shut the door."
It is a good point though, I mean it's a very good business, isn't it,
that is raised in that commercial,
about the number of Brits who are baddies.
I mean obviously Rickman and then Hopkins and...
Alan Rickman, Anthony Hopkins. I guess it started with James Mason back in the day.
I thought you were gonna say James May!
The world's longest and most boring film. Uh.
The undiscovered British villain, James May.
Yes. But what...what is it that you think that the Brits bring to a Hollywood movie?
I genuinely think it's because Americans think we're inherently distrustful.
They think oh my god, your accent, you're so sneaky.
Er or something. I mean it's a... It's er illusion, of course.
-They like seeing us fail, I think that's what it is. -That's it.
Shooting the White House, I think that's what it is,
-cos you have to fail obviously, you're the baddie. -Yeah.
That's probably what it is.
Now um your career began, I believe, at Slough Comprehensive.
-It certainly did yeah. -As the front leg of an elephant?
I was... I was the front leg of an elephant carrying Eddie Redmayne.
He was grand enough to be the passenger of the elephant.
-Really? -Yeah.
I was the *** of a donkey once.
I suppose I ended up here as a result of that
but and then you did the obligatory...
The greatest *** of a donkey in the world.
That was very good.
Sorry, couldn't help it.
No that was good, that was deep, deep, cos somebody said you were a good mimic.
-Is that something? -I mean it's... I...
It's something I've done... I've done it my whole life.
I remember when I was a child we used to have a double tape deck
and I would...I would record my own radio show with all these different voices,
and they were basically voices of people I'd heard off the telly, you know.
Um Philip Schofield and...
Could you still do Philip Schofield?
I don't know, I don't even know if I've um...
Actually don't bother, I wouldn't know what he sounded like.
Throw me... Throw me an... Throw me another one.
Anthony Hopkins.
(MIMICS ANTHONY HOPKINS) Oh er Tony Hopkins, yeah.
Have you had him on the show, Top Gear? Oh yes, I'd love to be on the show.
I'd like to drive fast around the track,
being taught to drive by the Stig. Stig, great man, great man, I'd love to do that.
Let's think of some more names.
Anyone got any more names we can fire, try to make them men.
-Is that probably easier? -Yeah.
What, Arnold Schwarzenegger?
-Arnold Schwarzenegger. -Paul O'Grady.
-What was that? -Paul O'Grady.
I don't know. I think I'd go for Schwarzenegger, what's his...
I'm trying to think of something he says.
(MIMICS ARNOLD) Um I know how why you cry.
That sounded a little bit like Peter O'Toole. Sorry about that.
I know now why you cry.
-No that's a... That is quite a skill. -Yeah.
And what are you doing now, anything exciting?
I'm just finishing a run of um Coriolanus in the West End, which I've enjoyed hugely,
and I'm about to go to er Toronto
to make a horror film with Guillermo Del Toro,
dunno if you know, a Mexican director who directed Pan's Labyrinth.
Did you do one with Tilda Swinton as well just recently?
That's correct. There's a film called Only Love is Left Alive, which is coming out in the UK in
I think on the 21st of February.
And it's...it's basically a love story, it's...
Tilda and I play a couple who are vampires, so...
-Oh it's a vampire film? -It's a vampire film,
but we're vegetarians, we don't bite.
Vegetarian vampires. Vegetarian vampires.
This I need to see.
We're much...much too classy for all that fifteenth century nonsense.
Now I'm conscious of the time cos I know you are appearing on stage
this evening in Coriolanus.
In Coriolanus, yeah.
Which calls for you at the end, I understand, to be strung upside down, bleeding profusely.
That's how it goes down. Yeah. Spoiler.
Yeah.
It is a four hundred and fifty year old text, so I think it's ok.
Did it occur to you, when you were driving around the track, that if you had an accident
you could save the make up?
-That if I just roll the car, -Yeah.
-Crash it. -You could turn up going look...
Turn up and say I have my twenty-seven wounds upon me.
Yes, twenty-seven wounds, blood gouting from up there. So did you crash?
I didn't crash per se. Um...
Because well shall we c... Shall we have a look?
Let's have a look. I'm very nervous. It was very wet out there.
Who would like to see the lap?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
Let's have a look. Play the tape.
Oh I've stalled it!
No way!
Oh the shame.
Yeah, you got a double first from Cambridge, have you not, in classics?
I did, I did.
But you can't set off in a Vauxhall Astra.
Oh dear.
Anyway, let's see the finished product shall we, when you actually set off. Here we go.
Oh that's a lot of clutch slip.
Come on, come on! Come on.
JEREMY: God almighty, that's wet.
Doing well though.
Just go, go. Take the bend hard, take the bend hard. Use the track.
JEREMY: Yeah, use the track. Better.
God you've actually got that thing sliding.
Normally it's got very good grip.
Look for the bend, look for the bend, and brake, there's puddles!
JEREMY: Right, could you see the lines at the hammerhead?
-TOM: Yeah, just about, it was very tight. -Cos it looks very difficult.
Yeah.
No er Hugh Bonneville was here last week,
he said he couldn't see the lines because it was so wet.
It's weird in England to have two wet days.
Yeah, it's a... It looks...
Floor it.
JEREMY: You're not doing it flat you're not... TOM: Come on!
JEREMY: You are... No you're not, you...
I was gonna say that's ballsy on a day like today.
Stupid but ballsy. Right.
Oh the tail coming out there, you are very committed to this.
There you go, second to last corner, that's very nicely done.
Gambon. More understeer.
-A bit, a bit safe, a bit safe. -No, I disagree.
That was understeer, there we are, across the line.
No, we've only ever had one wet lap, which was last week, Hugh Bonneville.
So where do you think you've come, bearing that in mind?
Oh I...I w... I'm a bit worried I haven't beaten Hugh.
It would be nice to be somewhere...
Somewhere around that, that area.
Right, somewhere around that.
There's Ron Howard look, he directed Rush. It would be nice to...
He did. Ron Howard one for... That was dry,
he was just basically hopeless.
Um Hugh was one fifty point one.
You, Tom Hiddleston, one...
-It's good. -It's good ok.
-Forty. -AUDIENCE: Ooooh.
But only just.
Nine point nine.
Ohhh there you go.
So. Well.
Oh wait.
Oh right, thank you. In the wet.
Very wet.
Thank you, I got a V, yeah.
Special very wet lap.
Well I must let you go, which is a shame, cos I'm much enjoying all of this.
Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Hiddleston.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Now.
This is the brand new
eight hundred and sixty-six thousand pound McLaren P1.
Probably the most advanced and jaw-dropping car the world has ever seen.
Mm, the attention to detail in this thing boggles the mind.
It is...it's almost science fiction.
And so there was only one place on Earth
where I could test it properly.
Belgium.
JEREMY: This is Bruges.
It's a quiet, friendly, cobbled sort of place.
And it's just a stone's throw from Brussels,
home to all the environmental EU lawmakers.
All of which makes it an ideal starting point for our test of the new McLaren.
Because behind the front seats
there are three hundred and twenty four laptop style batteries,
which power a silent, polar bear friendly, electric motor.
This means that even the most frizzy-haired sandal enthusiast
would welcome this car into their city centre.
It's like that other two seater electric car, the G Whizz.
It's Al Gore with a windscreen wiper.
Do not think, however, that it has the get up and go of Jabba the Hut.
Because the electric motor in this produces
a whopping hundred and seventy-six horsepower.
And that's about what you get from a Volkswagen GTI.
So it's pretty nippy.
The only problem is that after just six miles
the batteries will be flat.
So you'll need to plug your car into the mains
and sit about eating a chocolate shoe for two hours,
until they're charged up again.
Or if this doesn't appeal, there is an alternative.
Because you see the P1 is fitted as standard with an on-board petrol-powered generator.
And it is quite a big one.
In fact it's a 3.8 litre,
twin turbo charged, 722 horsepower V8.
You push this button,
-there it is, firing up. (ENGINE REVVING)
And the great thing is it's not just charging the batteries,
it's also working alongside the electric motor
to power the wheels.
So the P1 then is not like a G Whizz at all, in any way.
Thanks to that generator you can take this out of a city centre,
and onto the open road.
And that's another reason I've come to Belgium.
Because there are so many roads to choose from.
Belgium has three times as many roads
and fifty percent more cars per square mile
than we do in Britain.
And the stats from this remarkable country just keep on coming.
There are so many miles of street-lit motorway here
that Belgium is officially the brightest country on Earth.
It's a little known fact that Buzz Aldrin's first words
when he set foot on the moon were,
"Good God! you can see Belgium from up here."
Made that up.
On the road I chose there was rain.
There was sunshine.
There were clear stretches
and there were traffic jams.
And the McLaren was quiet and comfortable through it all.
But, it was not what you'd call luxurious.
It is, frankly, as well equipped as a pair of monk's underpants.
And that's because, like the Alfa we saw earlier,
this car was designed to be as fat as Iggy Pop.
Inside there's no glove box and no carpets.
The glass is just three and a half millimetres thick,
one and a half millimetres thinner than the glass in normal cars,
except in the back windows, where there's no glass at all.
No lacquer is added to the carbon fibre trim to save one and a half kilograms.
The whole chassis weighs less than James May.
The trimmings are Titanium and the body is made from just five panels,
which means less glue and fewer bolts are needed to hold it all together.
All of this means that despite the bank of batteries
and the fact it has two engines, this car weighs less than a Vauxhall Astra.
That, of course, makes it economical. And fast.
Really fast.
Mind-blowingly fast.
Oh my god!
Ooooooh, ha ha!
The speed in fact is the main reason
I've brought this car to Belgium,
because Belgium is home to this place.
Spa. The longest, wildest racetrack on the F1 calendar.
How have they made something go this fast?
Ok, ok, let me just slow it down
while I explain what's going on here.
The electric motor and the big V8 generator are working together
so that I have, at my disposal,
903 brake horsepower.
Ohhhh!
Obviously I've... I've driven a Bugatti Veyron that has more than that.
But a...a Bugatti Veyron...
Oh... It has four wheel drive and it weighs more than most mountains.
This is rear wheel drive
and the only significant weight comes from the air passing over the body.
Right, oh.
Flat in a Formula 1 car, not flat in this.
Oh they should have called this the widow maker!
The throttle is a hyperspace button.
Step on it and you're gone.
And yet somehow, even in this appalling weather,
it got round all of the corners without crashing once.
So how?
Well that's partly because it's made of stuff from the future.
And partly because it's clever.
It adapts. It moves around to suit its environment.
As the speed climbs the rear wing rises,
to generate more down force.
But as you go past 156 miles an hour
it starts to go back down a little bit.
Otherwise the weight of the air passing over it would be so enormous
it would break the suspension.
Then you have the exhaust, which works with the rear diffuser
to generate an area of low pressure,
into which the back of the car is sucked.
The wheels are made from military grade aluminium.
The brake discs from a material
that's only ever been used in the Arianne Space Programme.
And they're coated with something called silicon carbide.
Apparently it's the hardest substance known to man,
apart from dried Weetabix obviously.
And then the whole thing sits
on four tyres that were designed and made by Pirelli.
All of this means you really have the confidence to open it up.
This thing goes from 0-160 miles an hour
faster than a Golf goes from 0-60.
One thirty, one forty, one fifty, one sixty,
one seventy, one eighty, one ninety. Bloody fire!
And as you hurtle round in a puddle of your own faeces,
gurning like an infant, the car is working on ways of going even faster.
Let me give you an example.
The electric motor is used to fill in the little gaps
when the petrol engine isn't working at its best,
like for example, during gear changes
or while the massive turbos are spooling up.
And what I find hysterical about that is that McLaren
has taken this hybrid technology,
which is designed to reduce the impact
of the internal combustion engine
and is using it to increase the impact.
That's like weaponising a wind farm.
Or buying the Rainbow Warrior and turning it into an oil tanker.
For years, cars have all been basically the same, but this really isn't.
It's a game changer, a genuinely new chapter in the history of motoring.
In a town it's as eco-friendly as health food shop.
On a motorway it's comfortable and produces
no more carbon dioxide than a family saloon.
And on a track it can rip a hole through time.
And it's all been achieved using something that's been around for centuries.
Brilliant British engineering.
You could argue that it doesn't have the
passion or the flair of a Ferrari
and I'd probably agree with you.
But look at it this way.
It was passion and flair that built the Leaning Tower of Pisa
and it was British engineering that built
the plumb-dead-straight Westminster Abbey.
(AUDIENCE CHEERING)
Hair on end.
Yeah, great, but weren't we supposed to test that against the hybrids
that Porsche and Ferrari are developing?
-Yeah, but the Ferrari isn't ready. -Yeah, but the Porsche is.
Yeah, but it wasn't when I filmed that.
-But it is now. -Yes.
And I shall be driving it on the show in a few weeks' time.
Yes, and after you've done that
we're going to put the Stig in both of them
and do some timed laps around our track.
Now that should be quite something, I think.
I don't think it will be.
Eh, why not?
-Well because were you not listening to the film? -Yeah.
The speed of this is beyond anything I've ever experienced, it's...it's animal savagery,
it's beyond belief.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, but the Porsche might be faster.
-Well it won't be. -Yeah, but it might be.
No, but it won't be.
But it might be.
-I guarantee it won't be. -But it might be.
Hammond, I'll do you a deal.
If the Porsche is faster round our track than this,
I will change my name, by deed poll, to Jennifer.
-Really? -Yes.
-Promise? -Yes.
And on that potential bombshell, it is time to end.
Thank you so much for watching.
See you next week. Goodnight.