Top Gear: Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc launch new series – as it happened

I had a theory about New Top Gear going into it. I thought that it was missing a James May figure; someone to roll their eyes and slow things down and stop things from getting too silly. However, I was wrong. New Top Gear is ALL James May. I’d give anything for some silliness right now. Or, you know, a power cut.

I hate that this is making me miss Jeremy Clarkson.

Chris Evans cheers a car going around a corner.

Chris Evans cheers a car going through some water.

The Star in a Car track now has needless off-road sections and a tiny jump. Which, I think, makes it a little bit longer. Which, I think, is probably a bad thing.

If you like watching people you vaguely recognise from TV talking endlessly about cars you’ll never be able to afford, then this is amazing television. If you don’t, then New Top Gear is already singling itself out as a ‘Record and watch tomorrow morning, fast-forwarding through all the dull bits, in about 15 minutes’ programme.

Oh, hang on, no. It’s EXACTLY THE SAME. It’s still a ropey interview format that you’ll almost definitely skip if you watch this tomorrow on iPlayer. To be fair, there are two celebrities being interviewed this time; the classic, all-time legendary double-act of Gordon Ramsay and Jesse Eisenberg. So, again, that’s something.

It seems as if they’ve replaced Star In A Reasonably-Priced Car with a new feature called Star In A Rallycar. Which is good, because Star In A Reasonably-Priced Car was the worst part of the old incarnation of Top Gear, and the thing I disliked most about it was the relatively meagre price of the car they used.

This is so weird. It’s like a third-generation photocopy of a Top Gear Challenge film. The music is the same, the editing is the same, the entire look and feel of the whole thing is exactly the same. But it doesn’t have any jokes or stakes or knotty camaraderie or point. It’s empty calories, and now it’s finished.

“Delirium was beginning to take hold” says Chris Evans in the voiceover, after approximately two minutes of entirely event-free footage of two people driving cars on a road.