Top Gear - how hard can it be?

THIS week, I give you the nation's favourite tame racing driver. Some say he's a Formula Three driver and that if he reveals his identity in an autobiography, he'll be going to court.

All we (officially) know is he's called The Stig.

The nationals' ongoing fascination with Top Gear's mystery man in the white racing overalls shows not only how big the Beeb's biggest programme is in 2010, but just how far the show - something its creator claimed would be getting back to basics this year - has moved away from being the pokey motoring show I grew up with.

Like the many millions of you who watched the last series being its usual outrageous self on Sunday nights, I still think the show's rip-roaringly funny, defiantly different and, in the case of the magnificent Senna tribute piece, serious and poignant when it wants to be. But the things that made me love it in the distant old days of, oooh, the Nineties, are long gone.

In case you don't remember, Jeremy Clarkson was part of an equally entertaining triple act with smarmy used car expert Quentin Wilson and the now Fifth Gear frontman Tiff Needell, who doubled up as the closest thing they had to a tame racing driver. They were funny too, but while giving voiceovers on Vauxhalls you might have actually bought at the time.

Sure, some of the pieces were depressingly dull but one of my own favourites from 1995, where Jeremy Clarkson refused to say anything about the Vauxhall Vectra he was testing, would never happen on the current show. In a world of bizarre challenges, supercars and visits by Tom Cruise, they wouldn't have time for a Vauxhall Vectra.

The very different show you get a decade on isn't something I'd ever want Jezza, Hamster and Captain Slow to tamper with - and it'd still be just as entertaining whether you knew who the Stig was - but I reckon Auntie's created a gap for another show closer to the Top Gear I grew up with. There must be millions of people out there who want to know whether a Vauxhall Meriva is better than a Skoda Roomster. Get some talented TV presenters, stick them on BBC Four and make them say something interesting about cars each week.

The BBC are missing a trick!

UPDATE: Andy Wilman, the producer of Top Gear, has thrown his opinion into the mix...