Love The Beast

Love him or hate him, Jeremy Clarkson always delivers – and so Metrodome have wisely decided to include the full and uncut version of Eric Bana's conversation with him in London. In fact, 'full and uncut' is slightly misleading, as one of the Clarkson lines that appears in the film ("You can develop a real relationship with a car, and that's just what non-car people don't get.") is conspicuously missing here – but there are certainly 22 full minutes of the Top Gear host bringing his impressively extensive knowledge of cars to bear, as well as spouting the sort of reactionary provocations that we have come to expect from him.

Accordingly, Clarkson uses the charming expression "when it all went homosexual" to characterise the time when safety regulations first started coming into motor racing; and when shown a photograph of Bana's collision in Tasmania, he declares that in Britain "hurting a tree" would be "punishable by death". The ever earnest Bana has the look of a devotee consulting his guru ("I've left wiser," he concludes), and insistently shows off photo after photo of his beloved car like an over-proud father boring everybody with the baby snaps. There is, however, something to be commended in an interviewer who palpably cares about the answers he receives.