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Focus: The blame game

Top Gear presenter Richard Hammonds 300mph crash has sparked calls for the show to be axed. His friend and colleague Jeremy Clarkson begs to differ
Richard Hammond, the Top Gear host critically injured on Wednesday in what is possibly Britains fastest car crash, has eaten cornflakes, walked, talked and recognised his co-presenter James May as a ****face.

His brain had shut down after the crash but now its rebooting. Its coming back to life.

It therefore seems likely that soon, in a matter of weeks maybe, the Hamster will be back on his feet and ready to start work. The question is: will he have a show to go back to?

As I write, swarms of bureaucratic bluebottles are nibbling away at the crash site on a York airfield, desperately trying to find some reason why Top Gear should be banished from the screens. Yes, they want to know why the accident happened and whether anything might be done to prevent such a thing from happening again.

But most of all, most of the people want to know who was to blame. On Thursday one of the team said rather menacingly: With a crash of this magnitude someones head has to roll . . .

Meanwhile, The Guardian and certain parts of the BBC are saying that theres no way back for Top Gear now. Theyve dredged up all the alleged misdemeanours in the past, said the crash was the final straw and are now saying the programme will have to be scrapped or dramatically neutered.

So even though the crash failed to kill Hammond, the forces are massing to destroy the show that made his name.

I first heard of the accident as I was doing a rather pedestrian 175mph in an Aston Martin round the programmes test track in Surrey. The producer, Andy Wilman, called from the central London edit suite to say that Hammond had had what he called a big one.

But there was no sense of urgency. Yes, on his previous run hed reached a speed of 315mph and there was every chance hed been doing a similar speed when the accident began. And yes, hed rolled over several times before coming to rest upside down with his helmet full of soil and his head buried in the earth. Whats more, he had been unconscious when the paramedics arrived.

But hed come round, insisted that he should do a piece to camera and had even had a fight with the air ambulance crew who thought that on balance itd be better if he got on the stretcher to go to hospital in Leeds. Richards like that. He spends most of his spare time fighting.

I was therefore not even slightly worried. Nor was I embarrassed that just 40 minutes earlier Id called his mobile phone and left a message saying: As I havent heard from you, I can only presume youre dead.

Hed hear it in the helicopter and call me back to say he had just driven 100mph faster than Id ever managed. Were a bit competitive like that, Hammond and I.

I therefore toddled up to London, and met friends for dinner in the Wolseley. But as I sat down to a delicious plate of oysters, Richard Hammonds brain was starting to swell.

He may not have broken a bone, or sustained even so much as a graze in the crash, but while rolling over its likely hed been subjected to mountainous G forces. His brain would have weighed something in the order of 70 stone, and it was being tossed about inside his skull at 300 revs per minute. And all the while his head was being bashed endlessly into the bars of the cars protective roll cage.

Imagine being in a washing machine on its final cycle, while being attacked by 30 burly men with pile drivers.

The problem when your brain starts to swell is that it cant grow outwards because of the skull, so it has to go down; into the spinal column. If that had happened to Richard, at best, hed have become a drooling vegetable.

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As I left the restaurant I had another call from Wilman, who was caning his Golf GTI up the M1. The doctors say hes critical, he said.

I couldnt sleep. Hammond is an irritating little mutant, consumed by a need to be on every single television programme on every single channel on every single day something he damn nearly achieved last year with the 5 OClock Show, Should I Worry About Sausages, his Search for the Holy Grail, Petrolheads, Top Gear, Crufts, Brainiac, and God knows what else.

However, I like him enormously. He has a phenomenally fast wit and a wonderful turn of phrase. He came with his wife Mindy and his two children Izzy and Willow to stay at our holiday cottage this summer and I saw another side to him. A happy side. A man whod just learnt that actually the cure for being 5ft 6in is not to be on television all the time.

It turned out that hes an accomplished musician, a fine horseman, that hes pretty well read and that he can paint. I have one of his pictures and in a local pub it would fetch, ooh, at least £6.99.

SO what was this sane, funny family man doing in a 370mph jet car?

Well, contrary to reports that he was put there by ratings-hungry producers, it was his idea. He wanted to know what it would be like to go really fast. And I know exactly why.

If hed been interested in flowers and vegetables since a young age, he might very well now be standing in a pair of wellingtons on Gardeners World, talking about compost. But he isnt interested in compost hes interested in speed.

When I was his age, I made a television series called Extreme Machines. Mostly, this involved being upside down, at 750mph, while vomiting. But there were quieter times like when I did the standing quarter on a snowmobile on a frozen river in Sweden in seven seconds. Or when an airboat flipped at 100mph, hurling me into an alligator-infested swamp.

However, I would not have driven the jet car. Neither would James May, who gets giddy if he runs. Thats because hes weird and Im too old and too fat and I have too many children these days to put myself voluntarily in harms way.

Hammond, however, isnt there yet. Hes only 36 so he still wants to be put in a car and drowned or electrocuted. It gets the limbic system in his brain twitching, dumping the dopamine and making him feel alive.

Some people are born with a physical need to take risks. Steve Irwin was one. Christopher Columbus was another. And Ellen MacArthur is a classic case in point too. Telling her to stop sailing round the world is as daft as telling a black person to be white, or a blind person to look where theyre going.

But of course, we have a whole industry nowadays designed to do just that. To ensure that nobody ever falls over, that nobody ever hurts themselves, that nobody ever dies. And that if someone does, then the system must have failed and a head must roll . . .

Couple this to the fact that every mountain has been scaled and every desert crossed, and it explains why theres now such a booming demand for extreme ironing and whitewater parachuting. It also explains what Hammond was doing in that jet car. Because he needs that thrill as passionately as a heroin addict needs his next fix.

How can this be a problem for anyone other than Mrs Hammond and their children? Because he crashed and tied up the emergency services? Oh come on. Are we to tell DIY enthusiasts who fall off a stepladder that no ambulance will be forthcoming because they should have called in a professional plumber? Perhaps you might argue that Hammond is setting a bad example and that kids might try to copy him. What? In their jet cars? On their airfields?

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THE good news is that as last week wore on, and the messages of goodwill to Richard and his family have poured in, The Guardian has been a bit humbled. Until now, theyve had it all their own way. Egged on by environmentalists and goaded by muddle-headed road safety experts, theyve been able to dominate the agenda, keeping the pressure on us and the BBC to tone it down.

Now, though, Im starting to feel the boot is on the other foot. For the first time, we all know that large numbers of people really love Richard and really love Top Gear.

And theres a good reason for that. They see us clowning around, driving a convertible people carrier that wed made through a safari park, trying to get some home-made amphibious cars across a reservoir in the depths of winter, or going on a caravanning holiday. None of these things has anything at all to do with speed.

But they do have something in common. Phenomenal attention to detail. The average shooting ratio for a modern television programme is about 20 to one. In other words, you shoot 20 minutes of tape for every one minute that makes it to the screen.

Top Gear works on a ratio of 250 to one. Top Gear, and Im not bragging because this part has nothing to do with me, is probably the best-made programme in the world.

And you will find that sort of attention to detail in its attitude to what Stephen Fry recently said were the two most dangerous words in the English language: health and safety.

What you see is Hammond and me rolling a Toyota pick-up truck while crossing that reservoir. What you dont see are the divers in a nearby chase boat, the van full of mats to absorb any fuels that might be spilt, the paramedics and the fire crews.

But despite all the care, and all the attention to detail, Hammond still crashed. It seems likely that the front right tyre blew out, and there is no way that this could have been foreseen. It was something that in our risk-averse society, we cant understand any more. It was an accident.

Who was to blame? Nobody.

In the last series, while attempting to build an entire car from scratch in one day, the nearly completed project fell from its stands onto the floor.

Whos fault was that? I barked.

Oh for Gods sake, hows that going to help? said Hammond.

Hes right. How can blaming someone help? We just need to make sure the little guy keeps getting better and that when he does, he can get back in a car, get back into Top Gear, and go 316mph.