Thanks Karen. I can understand why they took the risk for the quick take off rather than the slow road journey now. It seems odd that the work was done on the aircraft at a place closer to water though.

Classic Wings reports it will be displayed at Pima and in the long term it will be restored to fly. Currently it’s sitting in New Zealand, at Tauranga docks.

http://rnzaf.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=Airshows&action=display&thread=10836

I’ll bet the producer is just posturing for the next pay round. Remember last time the three presenters wanted a pay rise they said they were quitting and the BBC panicked. This seems to me that the whole thing is a way to minimise the next rise for the BBC’s biggest stars.

For those who want to see Top Gear turned into a boring, humdrum, lifeless, soleless and humourless programme where people with no personality talk only about cars and make no jokes, than I recommend Top Gear Australia. We have just had the first episode air here tonight in NZ, in fact it’s still playing but I have switched it off because it is appaullingly boring.

I don’t know where they got the presenters but I’d guess it was in a “most annoying Aussie accent ever” competition, or a “look like a used car salesman weasel” competition, rather than anything to do with presenting a TV show. A total disappointment and waste of time. If the BBC producers want to change anything, it’s cull this crap to stop it tainting the real show’s great reputation.

It makes you really appreciate the warmth, humour and fun of Jeremy, Richard and James, who clearly show they enjoy what they do and each other’s company, as opposed to the morbid twits on the Aussie rip-off. It’s far worse than any NZ motoring show, and I thought they were bad till now.

Interesting stuff. Bumblebees are everywhere here at the moment. They’re yet another introduced species which shouldn’t be in our environment, but as far as they go I quite like them. Much better than the various wasps we also have inflicted on us from overseas travellers of olde, not to mention the rabbits, stoats, weasals, ragwort, possums, wallabies, etc. The bumblebees are really quite docile and cute and do a good job in the garden. I was stung by one once though and by geeze it hurt.

Good to hear you still have proper Pounds. Not sure why the UK girl in the NZ news report gave the money in Euros, probably because it sounded higher. Maybe she thought we can’t understand Pounds as it’s so old fashioned and Imperialistic. Who knows.

I heard of another much more bizarre species re-introduction recently where greenies of some sort in Australia have been releasing native rats they found on islands into the streets of Sydney from where they’d been irradicated. not that is flipping stupid.

Also I think people are totally forgetting how low the ratings for Top Gear were before they ramped it up into an entertaining, fun show and cut all the boring rubbish and dull presenters out of it.

Britain had a show about Motoring For The Dull, called Fifth Gear. No-one watched it because it was extremely dull, and it was rightly canned.

Top Gear, as it is right now, remains the best television programme to come out of Britain for many years, perhaps decades. It is the best British comedy, variety, fantasy, documentary and family entertainment show there is.

It’s presenters are great, with real genuinely likeable personailities and opinions that they freely share and love to defend – not the usual airhead twits or ponces that most presenters are these days.

5.5 million viewers is absolutely huge, that is about 1/12th of your country for goodness sake, How the hell can that be a small viewing figure when there are hundreds of other channels and entertainment sources to compete with. Even in the 1970’s when Britain only had three networks for the viewers to choose from 5.5 million was still a fairly healthy rating.

The show currently has spin-off shows running in the USA, Australia and goodness knows where else; it has its own magazine which seels worldwide; it has a live show which is touring the world (even to little old NZ for a second time now); it has three of the most recognisable and loved British presenters of this decade; and it has a huge worldwide audience. The show rates very well here in NZ and virtually everyone I know watches it, young or old, male or female. Even Mum watches it. I wonder if they actually bother to take into account the ratings fo the show outside the UK to the many markets they sell it to. Surely they are as important as the domestic viewer figures?

Along with River Cottage, Top Gear is about the last bastion that makes Britain look great, there’s not much else coming out of the UK these days that has such pride in itself as a country. Most we see these days tells us Britain’s a stinking pile of festering poo to live in. We used to see loads of British TV that made us want to visit and to live there and that Brits had such pride in the lifestyle. These days Top Gear seems to be the only one standing up and saying British is best – that we outside of Britain gets to see anyway.

I think they needn’t change a thing with the show, it’s superb. If the BBC is stupid enough to cull off this hugely popular show and obvious ‘cash ‘cow then they might as well cull off the BBC as a whole and be done with it. They are not producing much else worthwhile these days anyway,