‘If anything, I think my boss counted my Oxbridge background against me but I came across as hugely interested in cars. I wrote things on my application form like the fact that I had several thousand car brochures – which was absolutely true. Back at university, for my rural geography dissertation I’d interviewed all the inhabitants of a village – the Top Gear producers liked that – and the combination of being able to mention sufficient eccentric statistics to demonstrate an interest in cars plus the fact that I’d done quite a few media related things (some journalism at college and an interest in photography) all added up, and they thought it was probably worth giving me a go.’
He remembers being thrown in at the deep end with a rather peculiar first assignment: ‘It was very boring – the sort of thing that shouldn’t really have been on the programme! I went up to Lancashire to investigate a company that had devised a tool for the home motorist to extract dents: you screwed a device into a hole in the wing and pulled out the dent. I don’t think we should have done the item but I remember driving up the M6 in a rented dark green Sierra, thinking, “This is a wonderful way of earning a living”, especially after having been chained to a desk at Ford.’
It seems strange in the media-saturated post-Millennial world that you could just apply for a job at such a prestigious programme with no previous television experience, but that is what happened to Bentley. ‘It’s never been that easy to define TV roles so at first it was a bit vague: when we visited a foreign motor show, I’d provide information for William Woollard on what to say, I’d look into stories and see if they stood up. I can remember having to drive round a director who didn’t have a driving licence. There were very few researchers on the show back then, just me and someone else. It was a very small production team.’
He also remembers being struck by the approach of the existing presenting team: ‘The existing presenters back [then] were very professional – people like William Woollard, Sue Baker, Frank Page and Chris Goffey (who was in my opinion the 1980s show’s enfant terrible).’
However, despite the obvious respect Bentley had – and still has – for the veteran presenters, as a young buck taking his first steps into TV land, he was very rapidly and ambitiously projecting his own ideas onto the show’s format. After six months his researcher’s contract was renewed and he began to offer up more and more ideas for new features. Within a year of first starting, he would be directing his own pieces on the programme: ‘I felt we needed a more opinionated, controversial and passionate view. As soon as I got established on the show, I started ringing up editors of car magazines to assess their potential presenting abilities. However, I found to my great disappointment that some of the best [magazine and newspaper] journalists weren’t right for TV – they wrote wonderfully in print but weren’t able to communicate their enthusiasm through speaking or in a way that would work on TV.’
While searching for new on-screen faces, Bentley was fast becoming a major player in the show’s directing, even though he was first offered elements of that role when still only twenty-three years of age: ‘I think it was my passion that won through – a lot of TV is still like that.’ One of his first directing jobs perhaps reflects the (initially) more staid atmosphere on the programme: ‘I did a piece about an elderly chap called Tom Swallow, who had written a motoring magazine in a German prisoner-of-war camp, called The Flywheel. He died recently and I recall hearing bits of my item on the Radio 4 obituary series, Last Word.’
Another item was inspired by Bentley’s beloved car magazines: ‘One of the great things about car magazines at the time – and you can still see it in Evo today – is the obsession with the corner on a deserted mountain road. I tried to replicate that in some of my first items by going up to the Yorkshire Dales, filming around Buttertubs Pass. There was a road test of the Fiat Uno Turbo and an item on the Naylor, which was a replica MGF made by a company in Bradford. The tests back then were more factual and less humorous, certainly.’
But it wasn’t just the content of the scripts and reviews themselves that was vastly different to the current crop of Top Gear: the actual cars they reviewed were in huge contrast to the latter-day supercar focus of Clarkson and his crew (this monopoly of unaffordable supercars on the new generation of the series is the source of much criticism, which we will come back to later). Back in the 1980s, there was no such focus, far from it, as Bentley recalls: ‘When I joined, we weren’t supposed to road test supercars at all – it wasn’t thought to be the sort of thing the BBC should do. I remember having to persuade my boss’s boss that we should be allowed to do a road test of the Ferrari Testarossa versus the Lamborghini Countach as one of my first few items, and that it wasn’t in some way a betrayal of BBC values to have cars in the show which almost all viewers couldn’t afford. My argument was always that it was more elitist to suggest that everyone could afford to buy a new Austin Maestro (which nobody seemed to have any objection to us featuring) than it was to suggest that everyone didn’t have the right to dream about owning a Ferrari.
‘So I did get to direct the Testarossa versus the Countach at Bruntingthorpe … on 16mm film! We had Chris Goffey at the wheel, and it included some shots from the side of a VW Caravelle to get some good close-up tracking and a microphone under the bonnet for some cracking wild-track engine noise. [I was allowed to do this] providing I also shot a sort of apologetic intro, which would prepare viewers for the shock that we were testing cars that cost as much as a house.’
Another contrast to the post-2002 Top Gear is that the older series occasionally looked at two-wheeled vehicles. ‘There was always no shortage of new cars,’ recounts Bentley. ‘However, I introduced a bit of bike culture with my early items as well – I can remember an eventful day shooting at a scooter rally in Scarborough – interest in scooters was going through one of its many revivals in the mid-1980s. Towards the end of the day, the scooter enthusiasts became quite lively and started throwing bricks at the camera car while we were doing tracking shots, albeit in a friendly sort of way! Fortunately no harm was done and the resulting positive piece was well reviewed by (of all newspapers) the Daily Mail.’
Another area of the motoring world that Top Gear featured very heavily back then, but plays virtually no part in the current format was rallying. William Woollard also presented Rally Report, the Top Gear spin-off focussing on the Lombard RAC Rally. Interest was reinforced by the presence of retired rally driver Tony Mason, who had been navigator to Roger Clark in winning the 1972 RAC Rally, as well as actually competing in the race himself in other years. One notable feature saw Mason join forces with Clark to test out a replica Ford Escort RS1600 rally car in a forest.
By the late-1980s – 1987 to be precise – Jon Bentley had graduated within the Top Gear ranks through the roles of researcher, assistant director and on to director. With the incumbent greater power and responsibility of this senior role, he felt able to instigate yet more changes: ‘I found that when I moved on to directing items that focussed your mind much more, you were responsible for delivering so many minutes of television and it was up to you to make it happen. So, item ideas were never a problem but it was more difficult coming up with ideas for whole programmes. We were [still] a very small team, about six or seven people, excluding presenters. At that stage there was the executive producer Dennis Adams, a producer, an assistant producer, one or two researchers and two production assistants. It was a very low-budget programme – we had about ten shooting days for a half-hour show in the budget and about seven editing days plus some time for research and preparation. The team did grow a bit over the years but it remained quite a low-budget programme right through the 1990s.’
By now, Top Gear was winning substantial ratings, moving from the hundreds of thousands into 1.5 million and over the course of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, on towards a peak of 5 million. This represented