The Top Gear team still have some unfinished business with Ben Collins, it seems, judging by Christian O’Connell’s chat with James May on his Absolute Radio Breakfast Show his morning.
Collins, named as the Stig after publishers HarperCollins won a court battle to publish his autobiography, is unlikely to return to Top Gear and needs to return his BBC property.
Discussing filming ideas for the new series, May said “driving round to the Stig’s house and nailing his head to the table was one of them. Going and getting our overalls back because they’re not his, they’re ours. We only lent them to him, and that helmet.”
May said the reveal was ”a shame”. “The whole point of being the Stig is that you are nobody. The Stig is a character. It has to have a person in the suit, obviously, and its always the same person, always has been because that way we get consistency.
“And Stig is anonymous because its good fun. It’s a testing device, the Stig, and it protects it from corruption if nobody knows who it is, that’s the really good thing about it.”
The Stig is replaceable though. “Yeah, but we can get another one. There may be many more Stigs in many more galaxies. You see, the world is full of interesting myths about the Stig. There was a previous Stig, there was black overall Stig, who had to be ‘dealt with’ ”. eh?
Andy Wilman, all-powerful Top Gear producer, apparently “took care” of the black overall Stig. “And then we got white overall Stig, who will now be ‘dealt with’. Mr Wilman, yeah, who’s a terrifying spectacle. He actually looks like a bag of laundry. He’s hardly going to deny it… Have you seen him? He got taken away with the recycling once, we had to go and get him out the back of the lorry.”
The next series of Top Gear begins filming next week. A decision on whether The Stig will be axed altogether is expected in the next two months but is unlikely to be announced before the series screens in December.
Here’s May joshing with O’Connell this morning…
