It has been said that the internet is one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, having transformed the way we live our lives from communication to business.  It allows us to book train tickets, purchase computers, and communicate with friends and family, all without having to reach across and pick up the phone.  It allows spotty teenagers to express their ill-founded opinions, it enables friendless bedroom-bound loners to socialise in multiplayer online games, and encourages us all to befriend all sorts of people to make our Facebook page look more impressive.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little too negative, but then it is the first paragraph, and it’s always good to grab your audience by the throat from the outset and say something to catch people’s attention.  It’s a well-used PR technique too, which leads me nicely onto the subject matter I’m tiptoeing around in this blog post.  The cat is out of the bag – we know who the Stig is.

The Stig is a legend.  Currently in his second incarnation, the white Stig (replacing the black Stig, who was accidentally fired off an aircraft carrier in a Top Gear series finale) is iconic, mysterious in identity, silent and emotionless, and legendary on the test track.  It came as something of a surprise, then, when I happened to be browsing the Cars and Automotive category of YouTube and found page after page of the same clip of the latest Top Gear episode, in which the identity of the Stig was revealed to be Michael Schumacher.  In utter disbelief I went straight to the source and watched the full episode on BBC iPlayer.  These are my findings.

Stiggy appeared when it was time to take a car round the Top Gear test track, in this case a Ferrari.  Not just any Ferrari though, this was a £1,000,000 supercar, of which only a handful are being made.  Not only that, the owners don’t even get to keep them in their own garage – Ferrari keeps hold of them and allows the owner to borrow them for track days.  Needless to say, the car is utterly impractical for road use, massively powerful, far too expensive for any insurance company to even consider covering, and not for the faint-hearted.  Even just watching the car go round the track was enough to boggle my mind.

And that’s where the doubt started to creep in about the driver.  Having watched Top Gear for several years, I’ve seen a fair few laps of that track with Stig at the wheel.  Driving styles are like body language, and just watching the Ferrari shoot round the track gave me the impression it was someone else driving it.  The driver clearly knew the car inside out, knew the absolute limits of the handling, knew the optimum revs to change gear, knew the braking points.  The Stig doesn’t usually get that privilege.  This driver took a slightly different approach to the racing line too; it was – dare I say it – more accurate, more clinical, more precise.  This was not the Stig I know.  There’s no denying the car was awesome, and had a driver to match, and that was confirmed in the lap time that absolutely wiped out everything that had been before.  But it wasn’t my Stig.

Then we met Stiggy himself, wandering into the studio for an interview.  This Stig had a definite swagger as he walked through the crowd, something normal Stig never had.  The body language was very different, even behind the impenetrable mask of white racing suit and helmet.  So it didn’t really come as much of a surprise when the helmet came off revealing a real person (admittedly partly because I’d already seen that clip on YouTube).  Michael dutifully acted the part and answered various Stig-related questions, but crucially revealed nothing about how he came to be the Stig or what it was like driving all those other cars around.

So, time for my theory.  Given how exotic that Ferrari is, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Italians decided they didn’t trust a masked, mysterious, unknown driver to take it round a track.  I mean, let’s face it, Stig doesn’t exactly have a reputation for treating cars lightly – he drives on the limit, trying to squeeze every last drop of speed from everything he drives.  So what’s the betting that Ferrari only let the BBC use one of their uber-expensive cars on the condition that one of their own people drove it for them?  And since Michael does actually work for Ferrari it’s likely that he would already have known that car very well from testing and suchlike, and I might even hazard a guess that the car actually belonged to Michael himself.

From a PR point of view, I wonder whether this is the latest recurring theme that they’re building into this series of Top Gear.  Remember the Dacia Sandero?  Or the web sites that Jeremy had found and wanted to share with the studio audience?  To supposedly reveal the identity of the Stig in the opening episode of a new series has got to mean something, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered.  I could understand them revealing the actual identity of the Stig in a final episode, but not the first.  If that is to be believed, what do we expect from subsequent episodes?  It would no longer be a case of getting the Stig to drive the car round the lap but getting Michael to drive it round, which takes half the fun out of it.  No, I very much suspect it to be a very cleverly-planned publicity stunt by the BBC.  And if the YouTube clips and innumerable blog posts are anything to go by, it’s worked a treat.

I’ll be looking out for next week’s episode of Top Gear with interest.  I’m happy to be proved wrong, of course, but I have to admit I’ll have a smug superior feeling if when I’m proved right.  You heard it first here.  At least from me, anyway.

In other news, the steam engine that featured in that episode of Top Gear totally out-shone the two road-going competitors, just by the fact that it was steam.  Glorious steam.  Roaring along at 75mph with a trail of think white smoke.  Magnificent.  Oh dear, I’m turning into my father…

Bank holidays always seem to creep up on me and take me by surprise.  I can’t quite put my finger on why, but where most people live for their days off and eagerly anticipate any excuse not to go into work, the novelty has never really hit home for me.  As such the day never really gets noticed in my diary, and it usually takes someone to remind me that it’s happening for me to realise that I don’t have to do any work that day.  Maybe it’s because I work from home.  Maybe it’s because I’m just not very observant.  Maybe it’s because I don’t do enough with bank holidays for it to be special enough to look forward to.  Maybe.

Anyway, on Monday it was a bank holiday, and since Ellie had reminded me of that fact I just about remembered not to do any work.  Which was a good thing, because we’d arranged to go round to Anne-Marie’s house to watch Takin’ over the Asylum, a BBC series from a couple of decades ago starring a very young David Tennant, set in a loony bin mental health hospital with a would-be DJ trying to get a hospital radio station up and running.  It wouldn’t work today, of course, which explains why it was never repeated, but now that’s it’s on DVD (mainly due to David’s popularity, no doubt) it’s become a quick favourite among Tennant fans.  So Anne-Marie made us invited us to watch it with her on Monday.  All of it.  All 6 episodes of it.  And it was hilarious.

It was an interesting insight into the sort of people in such mental institutes, and the complications they face every day.  Not only do the residents face their own mental struggles, but they face discrimination from ’sane’ people who treat them like children, and conflicting feelings about where ‘home’ is.  As was demonstrated so powerfully in The Shawshank Redemption, long-term confinement is something some people get used to, to the extent that being ‘released’ is a sentence in itself.  For many, their prison cell is their home, the walls that keep them in are their safe sanctuary.  Being released into the public is like being kicked out of your home, and for some it’s something they just can’t bear.

What I found particularly interesting, though, was how the audience (or maybe it was just our group of friends watcing) were able to identify more with the loonies than with the sane people, and that sometimes the line was so fine that either side could be exchanged for the other.  Mentally disturbed people have their lucid moments, just as normally balanced people have moments of insanity.  Looking at myself, and my group of friends, it could easily be argued that we all have some form of insanity, all with some level of mental misalignment somewhere.  Whether it be irrational fears, obsessions, physical ‘ticks’, multiple personalities – we have them all in some form.  At least, I know I do, and I know several others who would readily admit to it too.  But then, I guess you could say that’s what makes for balanced people – having both sides in equal measure.  Pause for thought.

I got two things out of watching Takin’ over the Asylum.  One was that David Tennant has apparently been a fantastic actor for many years, and in some ways it’s a shame we’ve not seen more of him before now.  The other thing was actually more of a challenge, inspired by Anne-Marie when she put the DVD back into the cupboard, making sure to maintain the alphabetical order in which they had been arranged.  And so, starting today, I shall be alphabetically sorting my blog posts.  Today begins with A.  My next post will begin with B.  And so on.  Not a massive revelation, granted, but it gives me something to do, and gives you something to check up on.

We’re all mad.  Yes, you too.  The only difference between us and them is that we haven’t been caught yet.