The Top Gear Story (23 page)

While various
Top Gear
staff looked at the car and the news presenter, and revered journalist John Humphries even drove the P50 around the corridors, Clarkson was seen ‘phoning’ Hammond and apparently asked him why he doesn’t clean his teeth more often – he was astounded that it might cost £4,000 to have them whitened. It was another of the running gags that makes
Top Gear
at times more akin to a sitcom than a factual car programme.

Then Jeremy headed off in the vehicle to an important BBC meeting, sitting in the car at a table ready for a meeting tabled as ‘How to Reduce the Carbon Footprint of Our Ethnically Diverse Disability Access Policy for Single-Parent Mothers’. The camera panned across the table of attendees, showing all sorts of ethnic minorities: so we had a hippy, a white man, a black man, a dwarf, a Sikh, a Japanese woman and then JC in his tiny car. It’s brazen, it’s blatant … the team know it will offend certain viewers but they don’t really care, it’s all done for humour. After driving past the background of the newsroom and announcing the P50 is the future of city driving, Clarkson was then left stranded by newsreader Dermot Murnaghan, who turned him the wrong way round on the main road outside the BBC. Classic
Top Gear
!

And there have been other features which
Top Gear
could claim to promote environmental issues. In Series 12, Episode 7, James May fronted a piece about the new Honda FCX, a vehicle that he described as, ‘the most important car in 100 years.’ The Los Angeles’ test highlighted the stunning potential for Honda’s new hydrogen car, whose only emission was water. It’s an electric car but one with no batteries, instead it uses a hydrogen fuel cell. James started to explain the technology behind the miracle car and even suggested viewers could switch channels while he did the boring science bit. Indeed, as he droned on, even the cameraman scanned across a beach where they were filming to focus on a bunch of busty, bikini-clad girls playing volleyball. But the piece was not just a jest: May harshly derided previous electric cars as ‘appalling little plastic snot boxes’ but passionately championed the hydrogen Honda. The feature closed with James looking down on LA, while lamenting the forthcoming energy crisis: ‘This,’ he said, was ‘the car of the future’.

In Series 10,
Top Gear
ran a piece that proved you don’t need a car at all in a modern city. It wasn’t perhaps their intention, but
that’s ultimately what they did prove. They staged one of their most preposterous races in Episode 5: James May was ostensibly showcasing the brand new Mercedes ‘Chelsea Tractor’ 4x4, Richard Hammond was to cycle across town on a state-of-the-art carbon fibre racing bike, while Jeremy Clarkson was to take a powerboat up the River Thames and The Stig would use only public transport.

They were to start in west London and the finishing line was City Airport, right across the capital in the East. The Stig got himself an Oyster Card so that he could hop on and off buses and tubes without needing to mess about with change, although we were told the card is, ‘useful if you have no understanding of money.’ Surprisingly, the normally laid-back James May soon becomes irate in the ludicrous London congestion and even called one particularly aggressive driver a ‘bullying bus-driving Nazi’, words perhaps more likely to come from Clarkson’s mouth.

At first, Hammond was flying along and appeared to be an easy winner, but The Stig and Clarkson began to catch him. For good measure, they threw in a red herring about The Stig’s identity: when he sat on the Tube, he picked up a discarded newspaper but when he saw the sports-page headline, ‘LEWIS ROARS TO F1 GREATNESS’, he threw it down in disgust, which suggests that maybe he could be a rival F1 driver after all or even Lewis himself double-bluffing.

Eventually, Hammond and his bike was declared victor, but Clarkson was gutted – not just for losing the race but also because of what the result said about the petrol engine. He chastised Richard, saying, ‘You’ve ruined
Top Gear
!’ and suggested this would now have to be the last-ever show. The Stig arrived next, beating James May’s car by 15 minutes.
Single-handedly
, the team had proved that for city living, you don’t need a car – a final insult to the combustion engine.

I
n retrospect, all the speculation about the true identity of The Stig seems odd … because in Series 4, the real Stig actually appeared in the studio, without his helmet on, in full view of the public. So, who was he?

The BBC never wanted us to know. It was rumoured that initially only three people (Andy Wilman and two other producers) knew the true identity of the second Stig; apparently the presenters were also kept in the dark at first. However, in 2010 the man behind the white mask decided to publish his memoir with HarperCollins, which led to a bitter and high profile wrangle in court. The BBC and the
Top Gear
production team reacted angrily to news of the impending publication and announced an immediate attempt to gain an injunction to prevent its release. Perhaps the most anger came from an always-vocal Andy Wilman, whose blog told it as he saw it, saying the BBC had a right to protect the character’s anonymity ‘from a bunch of chancers’ who were ‘hoping to cash in on it’. He
also described The Stig’s identity mystery as ‘one of the best and most harmless TV secrets’, a passionate summary that was hard to argue against.

The legal discussion was rightly held in private – as the court stated, to make it a public hearing would completely defeat the object of the anonymity issue – and the process took over a day and a half. Eventually it was announced that the judge had rejected the BBC’s call for an injunction and The Stig was free to publish his work. Indeed, this had always been HarperCollins’ argument: that he had a ‘perfectly legitimate right’ to release his book. However, the BBC stated that the driver in question had signed a confidentiality agreement and to reveal his identity would ruin the enjoyment of millions of
Top Gear
fans.

And so The Stig was revealed as Ben Collins, aged thirty-three from Bristol, a former Formula 3 driver and stuntman. The secret was out.

Several weeks later, on 5 October 2010, the judge explained his decision to allow HarperCollins to publish The Stig’s memoir, saying his identity was in the public domain. In a public ruling, Mr Justice Morgan said: ‘In the present case, the identity of Mr Collins as The Stig is in the public domain. If that has caused and/or will cause harm to the BBC, I do not see how any further harm will be caused to the BBC if Mr Collins is not allowed to publish his autobiography [
The Man In The White Suit
] in time for the 2010 Christmas market.’

Ben Collins actually attended court for some of the proceedings but was not seen in the public areas – again, with some speculation suggesting he was The Stig, a sighting would have defeated the object of the court case. In numerous TV interviews, he himself later pointed out that his name had first been mentioned as a possible Stig two years previously in the
Radio Times
. In the H&SE report into Hammond’s crash, Ben
Collins was referred to as someone who, ‘worked closely with
Top Gear
as a high performance driver and consultant’, which perhaps didn’t leave much to the imagination.

In January 2009 some newspapers had legitimately obtained company documents from Ben Collins’ business files at Companies House, which showed he had provided ‘driving services’ to the BBC and some cited this as evidence of his
Stiginess
. The timing of this original invoicing documentation – just a month after the first sighting of the white Stig on the show – was further evidence, it was claimed. The
Telegraph
claimed he was said to earn between £5,000 and £10,000 per show. However, the BBC freely admitted that Ben Collins often supplied himself as well as other drivers for both the programme and
Top Gear
Live shows. The
Daily Mail
later mentioned him in an interview with James May in the summer of 2009, but he laughed it off, saying it was in fact himself.

When news of the failed injunction bid broke, the BBC issued the following press statement: ‘The
Top Gear
audience has always made it clear that they enjoy the mystery surrounding the identity of The Stig and the BBC felt it important to do all it could to protect that anonymity. The BBC brought this action as we believe it is vital to protect the character of The Stig which ultimately belongs to the licence fee payer.’ It was in direct contrast to HarperCollins, who also highlighted the same funding issue by saying it was ‘disappointed that the BBC has chosen to spend licence fee payers’ money to suppress this book.’

While I respect HarperCollins’ decision to publish his memoir as a choice he has made, as a fan of
Top Gear
, I have to admit to being slightly saddened that I now know the identity of The Stig. I’d heard so much about him over the many series that I actually started to believe that he was indeed made of metal, his heart ticked like a clock, that he was terrified of ducks and Lorraine
Kelly has a restraining order out against him. Standing back from the furore for a moment, it’s a striking indication of the success of
Top Gear
and The Stig’s character that a side-part in a BBC2 show about cars could become headline news in every household across Britain.

For their part, in the aftermath of losing the application for a court injunction, the
Top Gear
presenters reacted with a mix of dismissive comedy and outright anger. Shortly after the news broke, James May appeared on Richard Bacon’s
Radio 5 Live
show and was inevitably asked about the court case. He appeared to stumble and stutter before he finally revealed that he had in fact been The Stig from 2005 to only four weeks ago, before lambasting HarperCollins’ book as therefore containing about four weeks of material alone: ‘Obviously I’m now going to have to take some legal action of my own because I have been The Stig for the past seven years and I don’t know who this bloke is, who’s mincing around in the High Court, pretending it’s him.’

The publishers’ victory was not met with any humour by Jeremy Clarkson, however: quoting his words in a later
Sun
newspaper column, he said public school had taught him that, ‘you never rat’ – an attitude to life that his close friends say makes him an immensely loyal friend.

A reflection of the sheer size of The Stig scandal can be ascertained by the way in which Jeremy reacted and the subsequent series of events thereafter. As a famous local resident, he was attending a charity auction in Chipping Norton lido shortly after the court case, where he gave an interview to the west Oxfordshire local community station, Witney TV. A regular viewer, Clarkson was happy to talk to them about the recent legal wrangle. In the resulting video, he lambasts Ben Collins for being greedy, saying, ‘You may remember a film called
Wall Street
, in which Gordon Gekko said greed was good and
greed works. It doesn’t: if you’re watching this children, greed is bad, he’s just decided he’d rather be … put it this way, he’s history as far as we’re concerned!’ He went on to say that the programme has ‘thousands of people queuing up to be whatever it is we create. I’ve spent the last three weeks doing nothing but trying to work out what to do instead.’ He went on to insist: ‘We’ll get somebody, don’t you worry!
Top Gear
is damaged, but not out.’

The direct interview was quickly picked up by a media anxious to get the scoop on Clarkson’s views on The Stig case and via the internet and word-of-mouth on fan sites, the piece went global in a matter of hours. Within a day, news sites as far afield as Australia were reporting on Witney TV’s scoop. According to one source, Witney TV is, ‘pulled together on Apple Macs, without a wealthy backer’; their news is released via a website, on YouTube, as downloads, and is also available on iPhones.

The original impetus for the station was that in their opinion the mainstream multi-billion pound news corporations do not offer local coverage of any quality (and frequently not at all, as in the case for the Abingdon area where Witney operates) and so the grass-roots model was designed to meet niche demand. Their usual stories are upbeat, with a strategic decision made to cover only ‘positive’ news, so horrific disasters are never featured. The formula proved highly attractive and with over 100,000 hits, the station was now paving the way for alternative news, not least with the global Stig scoop, the biggest entertainment story of the week.

Ben Collins’ book reveals many fascinating insights into his life as The Stig. He never parked in the same place twice, he didn’t talk about his role to anyone other than the small inner circle who already knew his identity, he always left any identifying documents, phones or credit cars, etc. locked in his car in case someone invaded his dressing room, he wore a balaclava on his
face when driving home from the
Top Gear
test track (often as far away as eight miles, in case prying paparazzi lenses were following him) and he would never, ever appear in his white suit without the helmet on.

However, the subterfuge became increasingly difficult to keep up and Collins later revealed that he would often chat to people he’d met when dressed as The Stig but forget that he was not supposed to have met them before. He revealed that Mark Webber knew he was The Stig because of the way he stands, having raced against him many times in Formula 3. Also,
Dragons’ Den
entrepreneur Theo Paphitis walked past him in his civvies and said, ‘Hello, Stig’, something that still baffles him. How did
he
know?

Jeremy Clarkson placed an ‘advertisement’ for a new Stig via an article in the
Sun
, which included such requirements for the successful candidate as ‘hating Boy Scouts, being able to punch a horse to the ground and having eyes that blink sideways.’

So, how exactly had The Stig been unmasked as early as Series 4 then? For years, there had been rumours about his true identity but a long time before he was finally revealed, Ben Collins actually made an appearance, both in a challenge and subsequently in the
Top Gear
studio without any helmet or form of disguise. This came in Series 4, when the team wanted to attempt a tricky and dangerous stunt: getting a parachutist to land from a plane and into the back of a convertible, speeding at 50mph.

The feature is set at the
Top Gear
track and we are first introduced to Tim, a parachutist expert. Then the camera pans to his side and we are told this is Ben, ‘his racing driver mate’. It was in fact The Stig, unbeknown to everyone watching at the time.

Once the stunt began, it became obvious why Ben needed to wear no helmet. Time after time, the parachutist descended from
the skies and attempted to land in the back of the Mercedes
soft-top
. Meanwhile, Ben was driving along at 50mph, with a microphone and headpiece so that he could be in constant contact with the parachutist. Furthermore, he was always looking up to the skies to see exactly where the human bird was. Of course, neither task could have been achieved wearing a full-face helmet.

The stunt proved to be extremely difficult and it was only after many attempts and with the light fading and the wind picking up that they finally managed to land in the passenger seat. Cue James May skipping across the runway and Ben Collins – aka The Stig – doing doughnuts on the track. We even hear The Stig/Ben talk, as he said ‘Good effort, my son, well done!’ to his parachutist ‘friend’. The feature then flicks to the studio, where both Tim and Ben (again, with no helmet on) are introduced to an admiring crowd. The Stig was among them and they didn’t even know it. Collins was also visible in Series 10, driving a Honda Civic Type R against Clarkson, and raced alongside various British Touring Car drivers in a five-a-side car/football sequence.

Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, Ben Collins no longer works for
Top Gear
and has instead signed up for the rival show,
Fifth Gear
. On his first episode of that show, Vicki Butler-Henderson introduced him as, ‘A world famous driver who’s recently found himself out of a job and his name rhymes with The Twig.’ Ben was then seen on camera, unmasked and says, ‘Yes, I can speak and it’s a massive pleasure to do so. I’ve spent too long trapped inside a stormtrooper’s outfit for my liking.’

Whatever the aftermath of the court case (still pending at the time of this book’s publication), the fact remains that everyone now knows the identity of The Stig. Indeed, it’s a shame because it wasn’t just the BBC who enjoyed all the pretence: the media and the viewers did so, too.

With the extensive powers of modern-day investigative
journalism, which exposes corrupt politicians and drug-runners every week, it’s highly likely that Fleet Street might have discovered the true identity of The Stig, had they wanted to. In fact, it has been suggested that many journalists already knew him, but chose to keep quiet. Like a TV motoring show version of Santa Claus, the real fun was to be had joining in the ruse.