British TV show lampoons, stereotypes the U.S. in America
Top Gear is a television show broadcast in England on BBC2. It features three men who drive and review cars, mainly high performance cars. They also inject a lot of humor into their shows. It is well produced and very funny.
Last year they filmed an episode, which just aired on February 9th, where they travel to America and drive from Florida to New Orleans. This could have been a great episode. The southerners love their cars and it would have been great to see the hosts interact with them on this shared interest.
Instead they chose to delibrately provoke and insult the people they encountered, and presented an entire show with the messsage that "America is a horrible place and the people who live there are the worst people on Earth". They always behaved in a condescending way toward everyone they encountered. They drove around with bumper stickers that read "Nascar Sucks", "Man love is OK", "I'm Bi", "Hillary for President". Now 3 of those are fine, but why provoke people with "Nascar Sucks"? Three British snobs putting down a popular sport right in the heart of the south is asking for trouble.
Their attitude right from the start was "we are so much better than these scum and we'll act accordingly". There was an incident at a gas station in Alabama where some guys were threatening them. Some say this was staged by the Top Gear producers--it could have been, I don't know. One of the hosts wrote a blog entry about it and did not allude to any fakery.
And of course a lot of Brits are posting on the Top Gear about how great it was, how "scary" Alabama is, how great it is to see the U.S. deservedly trashed, etc.
I guess I could go to London, drive around with a bumper sticker that says "Soccer is a trash sport" or "Formula 1 Sucks", act like a holier-than-thou jerk and get it on video. Then I could edit it to keep in all the angry Brits' reactions in and show it on American TV and call the people of England all kinds of fun names and talk about how awful they are.
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