Was it good? No. Was it as bad as I was expecting? Far from it.
Matt LeBlanc can come across as lacking charisma in interviews on other TV shows so it's always been concerning how he'll perform on TG, I think he was the best thing about today's TG episode. He's a very likeable person, the Ariel is a very cool car and the location/shooting and challenge all seemed pretty decent, Matt seems to be good behind the wheel so that's good too.
I'm so anti-Chris Evans at the moment. He's just way too 'make it alllll about meeee', I'm watching ExtraGear at the moment and Rory asked simple questions that needed simple answers and he's so loud, obnoxious and in your face about it.
The Viper vs Corvette thing was just a bit crap, they never really discussed the cars much and only in ExtraGear did Rory ask Chris why he wouldn't buy a Viper, that kinda thing should really be in Topgear, no? Absolute crap. It wasn't entertaining, it was very obviously all faked, and the cars as targets and the fighter plane thing has kinda already been done before so we can't even appreciate it for its originality.
The US vs UK trip to Blackpool was rubbish. The Willys vs Defender thing was much better and it should have just been that from the start.
SIARPC? I quite like the new off road track thing, but this segment still has the same negatives as it did on the old TG.
ExtraGear seems okay, Rory is nice but has to prove himself a bit more first. They keep on showing too many in car driver camera shots, when it's the stig, we do NOT need to see that? It's not as if we can see a facial expression. It's absolutely appalling :lol: Someone needs to go sit in the naughty corner and think about how stupid they've been.
Overall rating? 5.5/10. It'll have teething issues and I can't wait for CH to get some actual airtime, but as it is, it's notttt awful. If Chris Evans doesn't calm down or if I don't learn to hate him less then I might have to resort to fast-forwarding his speech.
I thought 'this would have been much better with the original trio' on more than one occasion but that's understandable.