Website nirvana
Posted on Sunday 30th November 2008
It will come as little surprise to many of you that my favourite show on television is Top Gear. Of course we all watch it for the motoring eye candy, but there is so much more to the show than watching Jeremy driving around in clouds of tyre smoke while laughing manically. In an era of mass-produced monotonous mediocrity, Top Gear comes as a welcome relief. It is great to watch a show whose presenters seem to genuinely enjoy the work – and why not, I know many people would give their eye teeth for that job. However the biggest appeal for me is the utter contempt shown for the modern obsession with nanny-state and political correctness.
The great tragedy though is that the BBC have never capitalised on the show’s enormous international following. The only way to see the shows is catch them when broadcast, as the seasons have never been made available for sale. If you have the time and the means then recording each episode is one option, but you would only have to miss one screening to ruin your whole collection. Otherwise the British viewer is relegated to catching re-runs on the Clarkson channel (aka Dave).
Fortunately there is an answer now. I’d like to point fellow fans in the direction of the following website:
Click on the above image to be taken to the site. There you can download the complete back catalogue of Top Gear episodes. Old seasons can be downloaded in their entirety, or you can grab favourite episodes individually. So finally someone has gone to the trouble of recording and hosting the show for our benefit.
To download you will need a BitTorrent client, such as μTorrent. To watch the files you will need a media player with built-in codecs such as VLC. Both are free, install themselves, and are easy to use.
In case you are wondering whether downloading these will have the feds breaking down your door in the middle of the night – all is OK. The files are not strictly speaking legit as the BBC lawyers can’t condone redistribution for obvious reasons, however Top Gear’s producer, And Willman, has been known to post on the site forum in support of its continued existence.
So, go grab them before the copyright-Nazis spoil the fun!
