I’m watching my brief television career implode from a control room at 20th Century Fox Studios in West Los Angeles. On a sound stage where they normally tape shows for Fox Sports, comedian Adam Carolla is floundering through a segment I helped write for a new television show about cars.What seemed so clean and witty on paper has gone horribly pear-shaped under the lights. The jokes are flat, the cue cards are out of order, and the live studio audience is laughing only at Carolla’s impromptu jibes about how badly the segment is flopping. Head in hands, I suddenly realize that I’m actually trying to pull out my own hair. Wow, talk about living a Hollywood cliché!Many months earlier, I had auditioned for a new Speed Channel show called, plainly enough, The Car Show. The format is simple: Four dunderheads engage in a variety of situations involving cars. Hilarity and mayhem ensue. They didn’t pick me or fellow journalist and New York Times contri­butor Ezra Dyer, but then last March, the producers called both of us back to invite us to be writers.

Knowing exactly nothing about television writing, I eagerly agreed.Well, I do know one thing about TV: Trying to create a new car show is like trying to create a new sitcom about an Army field hospital in Korea. lenda white curtainsAny fresh whack is dogged by The Big Question: Will it be as good as Top Gear? curtain pole brackets argosAnswer: almost certainly not.paradise curtains vijayawadaBesides being reliably ingenious, Top Gear—and I’m talking about the British version here—has stupendous advantages over any newcomer. curtains takaniniFirst, it’s had 34 years to hone its act. dinosaur curtains tesco

The first episode aired in 1977, hosted by a bunch of  boring stiffs you’ve never heard of. Jeremy Clarkson, with his honky ’fro, didn’t debut until 1988, long before there was a sneering blogosphere to instantly flay to death the unworthy. divisoria curtains priceWatch clips of those early shows on YouTube; brown curtains 90x72they’re about as engrossing as mail being sorted.Secondly, Top Gear airs in the U.K. on the commercial-free BBC, a unique venue that allowed the show to build its reputation for piquant verbal assassinations. Finally, Top Gear is a huge multinational cash dispenser with a budget that shoestring American cable channels can only dream of.Outsiders can’t know for sure, but it’s believed to be about $1 million per episode. In 2009, the publicly funded BBC successfully went to court to prevent disclosure of production costs for Top Gear and other programs.

If Top Gear  were cheap, they wouldn’t be trying to hide it from the show’s lefty detractors in Parliament and their muses at the Guardian newspaper.Try to imagine Top Gear’s three-decade rise happening in America, where fireflies live longer than most new shows. The U.S. version of Top Gear, advantaged as it was by a well-recognized name and reputation, was canceled twice before it even made it to the tube. The show that finally appeared on the History Channel has entered its second season—despite unfavorable comparisons with the British original—with slightly improved numbers.One rule of car shows is that they can’t be car magazines for television. A penetrating, well-crafted essay of the kind that sustains this magazine turns a car show into the PBS NewsHour. Mass-market television, it seems, has no attention span for any concept that can’t be fleshed out in a sentence or two. Thus, while a camera may add 10 pounds, it also knocks off a few dozen IQ points by necessity to hold the audience.

Top Gear learned that years ago and has switched almost completely from reviews to stunts. The problem with stunts is that they must always be more dazzling (along with the budgets), or they, too, grow stale. , and four-time NBA champ John Salley make up the cast of disparate personalities on The Car Show. Between the field segments, they yak around a table and interview studio guests.The producers, Michael and Neil Mandt, best known for the ESPN sports show Jim Rome is Burning, believe in a hustling pace. Unlike both the British and U.S. Top Gear, which commit huge resources to a single gag and then drag it out over 20 or 30 minutes, The Car Show’s segments never last more than seven or eight minutes. If you hate the gag, it’s over before your gorge rises. If you like it, you’re left wanting more, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.The writing has been difficult, honestly. Have you ever squared off with a blank sheet of paper to write a joke? It’s a lot harder than writing car-magazine copy.

Watching Carolla prune a wordy train wreck down to a single, sharp wisecrack has been a revelation. All at once you realize why funny guys get paid fortunes. They can break up an audience with a one-liner, often improvised, that might not occur to a roomful of writers in a week. They are actually cost-effective.So far, The Car Show isn’t even on the same lap as Top Gear. But that’s like complaining that your toddler can’t play Rachmaninoff. Give it a little time—hopefully less than 34 years—and you might just witness genius that is made in America.First Gullwing Stretch Limo Ferrari9/12/07 1:30pm This here is the world's first Ferrari 360 Modena converted to a gullwing stretch limo. It's 23 feet long, but with 400HP, goes zero to 60mph in about 6 seconds. These mods, and the extra 6 Recaro seats, cost £200k. Sounds like a deal to me. We've got one more photo of the gullwing in full splendor, but Gizmag, who broke the story, has a few more photos.Jeremy Clarkson is finally gone but his executioner, BBC director-general Tony Hall, has promised to continue Top Gear in 2016.

With early front-runner Chris Evans having ruled himself out as a replacement host, bookies are instead backing as favourite a man most international Top Gear fans won’t have heard of: Guy Martin. Martin is certainly a surprising choice. His charming, thrilling series for Channel 4 – including Speed, where he set out to break unusual speed records, and How Britain Worked, his hands-on guide to the engineering marvels of the Industrial Revolution – have been labours of love by a part-time amateur. To take over one of the biggest shows on TV, Martin would have to ditch his day job fixing trucks, not to mention his great passion as one of TT motorcycle racing’s top competitors. The 33-year-old doesn’t see himself as a natural presenter, refusing to address the camera directly or watch his finished programmes, in part because he doesn’t own a TV. “Whatever happens, the truck fixing will always come in front of everything,” he told Motorcycle News last year, saying he planned to take 2015 off from filming to decide whether he wants to continue.

“I’m not a TV presenter.” Still, the lure of playing with such a colossal train set could tempt anyone, and Martin has a lot of the necessary qualities. His love and deep knowledge of cars is sound: he drives a heavily modified 1967 Volvo Amazon estate, which he has taken up to 205mph. His most recent series, Our Guy in India, saw him buy an unfashionable Royal Enfield motorbike and travel across the country to enter a race in Goa. That’s the sort of ambitious foreign jaunt Clarkson and co did brilliantly, and which made Top Gear an international hit – except Martin was uninhibitedly delighted and fascinated by what he saw. When Jeremy Clarkson went to India, he rode around in a Jaguar with a toilet fitted to the back, doing gags about everyone getting the trots. Martin might introduce an even more radical new element to Top Gear: women. There are obvious demographic benefits in replacing Clarkson’s jowls and grey perm with Martin’s piercing eyes, high cheekbones and Wolverine side-chops.

But the effect might be visible on screen too. How Britain Worked had a whole section on the importance of women to coal mining. In the last episode of Speed, most of Martin’s advisers on his attempt to break the world gravity-racing record were female, and he hit it off roaringly with French street luge champion Helene Schmit. A Top Gear fronted by Martin, with his mix of boyish humility and insane bravery, would essentially be a show reimagined: still getting off on the growl of an engine but without all the rancid, boorish stuff. It would, admittedly, mean instantly shedding a proportion of the audience. Clarkson freely admits that his personality was forged by bullying at his public school: to avoid being thrown into the swimming pool every morning, he learned to say the unsayable. For many fans, the sneering and bullying was why Top Gear was good. They enjoyed listening to a posh man insult homosexuals or Germans, and fully understood when he threw a tantrum because he was hungry.