La Bree 1 Assignment 1.

Top Gear By Alex La Bree

Rules and Conventions: I have chosen to observe the figure world of the television show Top Gear This show takes place live in the UK but in many episodes the three hosts Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May are in many parts of the world ether to test cars to the limit and see if the cars are as good as the manufacturers say they are or they are proving points about cars that fans have emailed them about. The show also has weekly celebrity appearances where they will sit and talk to the hosts and get to do a lap time around Top Gears track in a specific car that they all will use and each celebrity is trying to best one another on the time board to see who can get the fastest lap time. They also have extreme stunts and challenges that the hosts are given and some of the challenges consist of having a specific price on a car that all three hosts get to choose their own cars and then they have challenges that they will test the cars limits with some of these challenges may be extreme but they are all in the end testing the cars limits and seeing how they stand up against one another and the manufacturers. In some episodes the hosts will race cars against boats or other means of transportation to see which will get across the town the fastest and the cheapest or to see which type of transportation is the best choice for the everyday person. They also have special episodes where they talk about cars history and how they came to be they talk about the fifty years of James bonds greatest cars through the movies. Some of the different discourse communities can be car fanatics, could also be people looking to buying a new car and watching an episode where they are told specific specifications and facts about the car, or just normal people who like to watch three guys who do just about anything to test a car no matter if it consists in shooting it or blowing it up to have some fun. Location: Top Gear takes place in the United Kingdom where they have their live show in the studio where most of the episodes take place as well as the test track . Some episodes they are traveling around the world doing challenges that they have to do. The three hosts have a central stage they sit at where they will have special celebrity guests and where they talk about the latest cars or challenges they have with the TV and a table that is in the stage, which they all sit around. Also on stage they have a leader board for the fastest lap that each guest will do on the track in the reasonably priced car. The stig also will do lap times in cars that he is given and he is to push them to the limit and try and get the fastest lap time he can get. Figured World: A figure world is who you are through the worlds that we participate in and how they relate to others within and outside these worlds. Actors: Actors are the people in the figure world who create the show that surrounds them or the environment that they live in. In the show top gear the actors are the ones who keep the show going and explain the figured world within the show. -James May: is one of the two co-hosts in the show James has several parts through out where he is known as "Captain Slow" as he regularly finishes last in the high

La Bree 2 speed track races, as well as for his laconic presenting style. He might come of as to being a little boring but his knowledge about cars and his interestingly humorous parts in the show keeps you entertained. -Richard Hammond: Richard is also a co-host in the show where he has his own portions of the show that set him apart from James only because they usually do completely different things another thing that separates him is his size and fitness compared to the other two hosts. He sometimes gets picked on more than the other two but in the end they all pick on each other. -Jeremy Clarkson: is the lead host that usually starts every episode by himself or with James and Richard. He is always doing the celebrity guest interviews and lap times he is the one who usually tests the cars and is over most of the challenges that thy get. He is probably the funniest out of the three hosts in most opinions and has a very blunt opinionated way of saying things. -The Stig: the stig is the teams racecar driver who does all of the lap times and many of the more dangerous stunts that they have he is always named with very extreme situations about himself or the world. And we never know who the stig is, it is always a secret to the world. Artifacts: Meaning to artifacts such as objects, events, discourses, and to people as understood in relation to particular figured worlds. Most of the artifacts are used in a variety of ways depending on for example the type of vehicle that is being used. The first artifact is. -Cars: it might seem obvious that cars are the main artifacts in the show because in every single episode there are different types of cars and vehicles that they use. In almost every episode there is a special guest, which gets to do a lap on the teams track and see where they stand against all the other celebrities that have been on the show. In every episode they are ether testing out limits of different cars or testing the cars against one another. Each vehicle can be a different artifact depending on its type shape and purpose. -Stage in the studio: in this instance that stage is where the three hosts talk about the news or the challenges that are waiting and in most episodes it is where the special guests sit and discuss something about them and they also get to compare the lap times against the time they have done. Discourse Communities:- A discourse community is a group of communicators with a common goal or interest that adopts certain preferred ways of participating in public discussion. -The public audience: there are several different types of audiences who watch this show some that love cars some that just like to watch a funny good TV show and those that want to get some knowledge about some cars and the limits and boundaries that each of the cars have. -The workers involved with the show: there are many different types of people that are involved with the show. Some of these people are the people who have worked with top gear and are who work for top gear depending on that they are apart of.

La Bree 3 Observation one: 8:00pm-9:00pm (not actual episode time) 8:00pm: Jeremy and Richard start their intro in a town called Resolute in northern Canada in the artic circle. They start by telling us that they are here to have a race four hundred miles to the North Pole. Richard will by racing the traditional way by husky dogs, sled, and skis while Jeremy and James will be racing in a truck. 8:02: The reason why no one has ever tried to drive a truck to the North Pole is because you would encounter ice boulders, polar bears, temperatures that would freeze the gas in the tank and the possibility of thin ice or open water where you would fall into and could possibly end your life. At this time Richard meets his team of ten husky dogs and driving them will be Matty McNair one of the worlds leading sled dog explorers and racers. Richard also gets peed on by one of the dogs. Now it is on to Jeremy and James truck, which is a Toyota Hilux that has had some modifications the biggest change apart from the gun, is the enormous tires that are hand made and cost two and a half thousand pounds each (4077.25 in dollars). They also had to move the front suspension forward otherwise you wouldnt be able to open the door. It also has heavy-duty suspension and by Jeremys request two front spotlights which wont be needed because its still daylight at 11:30pm and thats as dark as it gets which means its not going to be dark at all. The truck has a marine navigation system and an extra large gas tank, which consists of a freeze resistant mixture of diesel and avgas. 8:05: Here they talk about before being able to do this challenge they had to go to a cold weather training camp earlier in the year in the Austrian Alps where they learned to ski and then taught how to put up a tent in cold windy conditions which if they lost the tent then they could possibly freeze to death because of the cold and wind. They were then told about the conditions and seriousness of the threat to their lives on this race and showed what would happen to them if they were in polar water for just a few seconds with the threat of losing parts of their body do to frostbite. Three minutes of your hand being in the water and you could lose your hand. If the truck fell in with them wet and all their equipment wet then they could possibly survive for a few hours if no there is no wind. 8:11: they now set off on their journey to the North Pole. Driving farther than any car has gone before driving over a frozen ocean. 8:15: Jeremy and James decide to have a gin and tonic since there are no drinking and driving laws in the ocean. And they are eating and snacking in the truck while Richard is skiing along side the sled which their target was to be going 5 to 6 miles an hour but on the first day they hadnt done anything close to that and they had only done 36 miles so far in a 10 hour time. Jeremy has made a bumper dumper as he calls it which is a fitted toilet seat attached to the trailer hitch on the back of the truck for them to use the bathroom in a more civilized manner compared to just going out a ways and taking a squat. Which he then begins to try it out while James stands guard with a shotgun incase of polar bears. While Richard has the huskys going to the bathroom on the ropes he asks Matty how many times a day the dogs go to the bathroom she tells him two a day and he thinks it is more than that.

La Bree 4 8:19: Jeremy and James have reached the inhabited island of Bathurst Island and were now going even faster while Richard was now over fifty miles behind them. But Matty had come up with a plan they are going to let the dogs sleep for three hours and then wake them up and then run at night where it is cooler for the dogs and they love it and prefer it to be colder because they can run faster and harder. So in the early hours of the morning where the temperatures had dropped to minus thirty-five they woke the dogs and began to run. When suddenly they had to stop because they saw a polar bear, which was still far away but was blocking Richard and Mattys path. 8:21: Jeremy and James now also have run into a polar bear and its two cubs and they now have crossed the Island. Richard is now trying to sleep but is having a hard time because his body clock is broken and is confused whether or not its day or night because he has been on the skis all day and night. Jeremy decides to test out what Richard was complaining about so he got on his skies and hooked them up to the truck as James drove him around. While playing around making fun of Richard James gets the truck stuck in the ice. One of the trucks tires is almost in the water and they have to get another truck to pull them out of the hole. But now for the first time they were in trouble and they were warned to continue but to stay away from the coasts but is hard for them to do on the narrow rout where the ice is now getting very thin and dangerous. They were now getting scared because the nearest hospital is over 1500 miles away and the nearest rescue helicopter was even farther than that. 8:27: both teams were now trying to get a few ours of sleep and making something to drink. Jeremy and James have now reached it to what they had been warned about, a massive boulder field with smashed up blocks of ice some the sizes of houses. Since they were ninety miles ahead oh Richard they then decided to slowly work there way through it. They then start to get stuck multiple times because they cannot drive over any of the boulders and then all around the boulders is powder snow up to fifteen feet deep. It was also a huge maze where they spent hours trying to navigate a way through it. And then the truck gets stuck in-between to sold chunks of ice and the other two trucks are miles away and they are stuck as well so they have to figure a way to get the truck out. It took them three hours to get the out. By the time the set up camp they had spent almost twenty hours in the boulder field so far and they were only one mile closer to the North Pole. 8:33: Richard and Matty have cleared the Bathurst Island but the stress, cold and fatigue really started to hit Richard and he had to count dog lines that attach to the carabineer that attaches them to the sled where they then take them off untangle them and then put them back on there were ten cause there are ten dogs and it took him three attempts to count to ten. After Jeremy and James wake up from camp they immediately start to continue the race because they had to get out of the boulder field because they had a limited supply of food and gas and if they run out there is no way to get rescued in there. In eight hours they had made it nowhere and they then got stuck and turned the cameras off for a little break. Richard and Matty had now made it to the thin ice where Jeremy and James had gotten stuck and they were having no problems because Matty had unleashed here secret weapon she skies with a kite that pulls here along which motivates the dogs and makes the sled lighter. 8:36: After two days in the boulder field Jeremys patience had snapped and he started driving like crazy pushing his way through everything until they broke something underneath the truck and it turns out they had nocked the gas tank off and were now

La Bree 5 loosing fuel. They were able to get most of the gas from one tank to the other but the tank that had fell had bent up one of the shock absorbers and they now have only one full tank of gas left. The crash had also ripped a tire from its rim so the guys that were there to help pumped up the tire with liter fuel and lit it on fire, which pumped the tire back on. In the two days that they been stuck in the boulder field Richard had now made it to the boulder field as well. Jeremy And James then had to put the tent up and it was minus 42 degrees and there tempers are starting to really get to one another. Richardss team was also having some problems with the dogs fighting each other to where Matty had to get involved and show them who is boss, they mean the world to her but they are not domestic pets they are pack animals and they sometimes need a reminder of who is in charge. And they were now out of the boulder field While Jeremy and James were about to start there third day in the boulder field and then they finally made it out. 8:42: Jeremy and James are now seventy-five miles from the Pole. They then decided to sleep for an hour and a half and they then took down the tent for the last time. On the drive they then suddenly found a plane that had crashed. Richard and Matty had ran for fifteen hours but even doing that they knew they were going to loose because Jeremy and James were now only ten miles away from the pole. But then they ran into another problem a boulder field again which would give Richard and Matty a chance to catch back up.it took Jeremy and James three hours to do a mile and then the car got stuck on a piece of ice that they then had to try and cut with a chainsaw to get out. When they finally got out they were almost out of gas and decided to go as fast as they could to get to the pole. They finally made it to the pole and were now waiting for Richard and Matty to get there. And this is how the show ends.

Observation two: 9:00pm-10:00pm (not actual episode time) 9:01pm: To start the show Jeremy, James, and Richard are standing on stage in their studio where Jeremy starts talking and telling a story about a time two years ago when they were contacted by a German car program that wanted to challenge them in a series of motoring types of challenges, which they beat. Well now they have received a letter from the people who make Top Gear in Australia where they want to challenge them in a series as well in a Top Gear verses Australia episode. 9:02pm: The challenges starts off by naming the cars that Top Gear will be using are the Aston Martin DBS, Jaguar XKR, Catrin superlight, Ariel atom, Bentley continental, range rover, and the list goes on and on. The Australians brought the Holden maloo pickup, the Holden commodore saloon, and that is it. They then were waiting for the Australians to arrive. The men that they were up against are Ewen Page, Steve Pizzati, and Shane Jacobson. 9:05pm: The first challenge is a 1-kilometer drag race with a commercial vehicle. The Australians chose to use the Maloo, which is a V8 with 380-horse power and in America the corvette, uses the same engine. Great Brittan chose to use the top gear didnt really bring a commercial vehicle so they had to use a transit van which Richard Hammond had to drive. Surprisingly the van wins but only because it had a jaguar engine in it with two turbo chargers in the back. Jeremy chose the next challenge, which was an old challenge that they had used against the Germans. The cars they are using is two cars stacked on top of one another where the car on the bottom has the accelerator, gears and the brakes but

La Bree 6 no steering wheel that is because the steering of the cars are done by the car on the top. The cars for the Australian team were upside down and the ones for the Top Gear team were stacked normally. The race was then off and going and they were neck in neck until the Top Gear team pulled ahead and then started to race each other which let the Australian team catch up. The top gear team in the end won the race. 9:15pm: the Top Gear team are now sitting in the studio on stage around the TV where they are talking about the news where they featured a motorcycle last week a BMW motorcycle where they had received many complaints about that they didnt give enough information about it where James then gives a very brief description of the bike and they immediately start talking about a new mini that had came out called the countryman and they discus what they like and what they dont like about the car and how it has four seats now compared to the normal two. They then start talking about another new car that is replacing Pagani zonda with a new car called the huayra, which has a carbon titanium body, which has titanium intertwined with the carbon fiber. They also show the new ford focus where 275 people a day in Brittan alone buy a ford focus which is about 12 an hour. They then talk about how someone bought a car for 12 million quid (us dollar =19,560,000) which might sound crazy but this car is a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO. In many eyes people believe this was the best car that Ferrari had ever produced. It was the ultimate racer of its decade and is extremely rare because only 36 were made and none of them were equal they each had a tiny difference on the one car they have its right door is a centimeter longer than the passenger side door, the V12 engines were also all different they were supposed to produce 295 horsepower but some were less and some were more than that. All of these cars would still do a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. Even though the top gear show has lots of money for the insurance on the cars for if anything happened to them while driving them they would not come close to having enough money to get the insurance to test drive this car. 9:22pm: Jeremy introduces the new 599 GTO and its not a racer its a 330,000-pound road car, which Jeremy gets to drive around the test track. This car is the most powerful road car that Ferrari has ever made it has 661 horsepower and the car is made out of carbon fiber and the floor is aluminum and there is no carpet it doesnt even have a radio the result of all of this is 0-60 in 3.3 seconds and tops out at a speed of 208 miles per hour and in most cars the electronics in the car are trying to be more environmentally friendly and safer but not in this car the electronics are here to make this car even faster and is learning how fast you can go around each corner and when to break and even when to accelerate out of the corners. Jeremys only problem with the car is that he feels like the car is driving him and not the other way around because of all the electronics in the car. They then handed the car to the teams racecar driver the Stig to see how fast he could drive it around their track and he drove it in a time of 1.19.8 which is not very fast compared to some of the other cars on the board.

Observation three: 10:00pm-11:00Pm (not actual episode time) 10:01pm: The show starts out with Jeremy center stage describing what the producers had them do all three hosts had been given 2000 pounds to spend on a convertible fourseated car and then they said that they had to take the cars that they had bought down to the Top Gear test track where they will be given a number of challenges to do. Richard

La Bree 7 had bought a 1987 BMW 325i which only cost 1600 pounds, Jeremy then shows up driving the same car but he got a 1988 and for 1950 pounds, and lastly James showed up in the exact same car but its a 1989 and costs 1900 pounds for it. Since they had all bought the same car they decided to make up some of there own challenges when they realize Richardss car wont start so Jeremy and James decided to leave Richard and have a race to see who could get from zero to a hundred and then back down to zero the fastest to test the cars power and brakes James won the race by a big difference. 10:08Pm: They then had there cars forensically tested to see where they had came from and what had happened in there cars Jeremy didnt have much besides some vegetation and chips in his, James had some scabs and buggers and saliva on the steering wheel, and finally in Richards car they found sports take with blood on it and steering wheel again had saliva on it and lastly they had strange hair and feces found in his car. After getting the cars tested they then continued on with the challenges and the next one was to see whose car was the most resilient to thieves. They have three guys who are going to see how easy it is to break into the car and drive away. The first car they broke into was Richards car and drove off with it, the second car broke into was Jeremy and after twenty minuets of them trying to start the cars they called it a tie. 10:12pm: So far they had proven that the cars they had chosen were vey much different from one another. And they are now in the studio on stage around the table talking about the news where they start talking about speed cameras where oxfords council decided to turn off the cameras and when they said that all the groups were saying that there will be more accidents but after six months they dont know if it has caused more accidents or not because the numbers havent came in yet. Jeremy did some digging and in a three month period in 2009 when the cameras were on there were 35 accidents at speed camera sights but in the same time period came in 2010 when the speed cameras were off there was also 35 accidents and now the police have taken control of them and are wanting to turn them back on. They talk about then new Lamborghini Gallardo spider that costs 108,000 pounds with a top speed of 201 miles an hour. Then strait to the new British car the McLaren MP4.12C. 10:22pm: They then moved on to talk about the Pagani over the years and naming some of them then they get to the Pagani Zonda R the last of its kind. It looks like a racer but there are rules and regulations for those kinds of cars and this has none of them and it is also not street legal so then it comes down to just being a fun car to drive on the track because it hits 0-60 in just three seconds and the top speed over at least 230 miles per hour as Jeremy says. The car produces a crazy amount of horsepower coming out at 740 horsepower and is being used to power a car that weights less than a ford fiesta and it will go from a hundred and twenty miles an hour to a dead stop in 4.3 seconds. The huge draw back to this car is that it will cost 1,460,000 pounds (2,379,800 us dollars) and most British tracks have noise limits, which this surpasses to where you would need your own track to drive it on which would cost around 6 billion.

Interview: my interview questions are towards Richard Hammond. My questions that I am asking have been asked probably hundreds of times but my answers are of what I know buy watching the episodes and some answers by actual

La Bree 8 interviews that have been done and show through special episodes through out the series. 1-Question: what was one of the scariest events that have happened to you on the show? -Answer: On September 20th 2006, he was seriously injured when the jet car he was driving overturned while he was doing 290 miles per hour. He was cut out of the vehicle and removed and then air lifted to Hospital. Despite suffering some severe brain injuries he left intensive care and entered a private hospital within 10 days of the accident. 2-Question: what is the hardest part about what you do, and if there is any hard parts at all? -Answer: Richard says there isnt a hardest part of the job because it all comes with being a job and sure running to the North Pole is tricky but it makes for a great episode and even though its hard to do some of the challenges like going to the North Pole you got to know its hard and once you have accomplished it you will realize it was worth doing. 3-Question: is it hard to work with Jeremy Clarkson? -Answer: well yes, Im not going to say no of course. It is tremendously difficult but definitely rewarding and great fun that I can enjoy immensely. 4-Question: Do you guys ever get harsh comments coming from the manufacturers for your own harsh or negative reviews on specific cars? -Answer: They realize that it is a one of the main parts of the show that we speak our minds about the cars and we have to continue to do that and they appreciate it and if they have made a mistake or disliking aspect of a car then they know and as long as what we say is true then it is okay and fair to do. 5-Question: Top Gears relevance? -Answer: we are a product of our own experience in our own country and we are relevant most closely to this country and so the program follows that. But cars affect us all, whether or not you are an enthusiast of them does not matter you are still affected by them and there are some very similar themes across the globe with which people share with cars.