The BBC’s Top Gear motoring show took advantage of a deserted Alton Towers during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Paddy McGuinness, Chris Harris and Freddie Flintoff tested three electric cars around the Staffordshire theme park in tonight’s season finale on BBC One.
The team tested the battery-powered Honda E, Vauxhall Corsa-e and Mini Electric in a race around the park filmed in June.
Alton Towers serves as an interesting backdrop of course, and the camera work – tonight including the use of drones flying past in-use rollercoasters – remains superb.
Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are now a distant memory of Top Gear’s past, but they left a colossal hole in Top Gear’s audiences, from which the show has nowhere near recovered.
The BBC’s decision to move the show onto BBC One appeared almost as a final roll of the dice for Top Gear.
The tried-and-tested model of choreographed stunts and staged lines was wearing thin during Clarkson et al’s final years, and for all of the incarnations of replacement presenters since, the show’s fate seemed bleak.
But this last episode of season 29 finally sees McGuinness, Flintoff and Harris beginning to show some chemistry and real humour.
While audiences will ultimately decide, it would appear that Top Gear could have a future after all.