Video of the Week

All of our recent weekly videos have been of the more educational and historic nature, but now for something completely different. This week’s VotW (Video of the Week) is a review from a few years ago of the Aston Martin DBS by the fine folks at Top Gear. Don’t know Top Gear? You call yourself a British car fan? If you don’t know them yet, you will after watching this video. Oh, and we of course mean the UK version produced by the BBC, not the rather lame US version. In this review from the BBC series, Jeremy Clarkson test drives the flashy Aston Martin DBS in his unmistakable style, before Top Gear’s tame racing driver, the Stig, takes it out for a spin round the track. And as with all Top Gear segments, be careful about watching this at work. […]

The week we have a video documentary which traces the rise and fall of a great British brand that is largely unknown in the US, Rover. And no, we don’t mean Range Rover. Well, not totally. In the days when Britain’s car industry was the envy of the world, Rover epitomized everything to which the driver of taste aspired, but in 2005 it reached the end of the road. The film explores how Rover cars went from defining their eras to becoming victims of their times, telling the story behind the key models to the controversial joint ventures with Japanese and Indian manufacturers in later years.

Our video this week is entitled, “Morgan Motor Company: The Most Honest Car Factory in the World”. As you might guess, the video focuses on the Morgan Motor Company in Malvern, England where happy designers, craftsmen and women lovingly create cars for enthusiasts by hand every day. Perhaps this brief history of the Morgan car is best summed up by its inventor, H.F.S. Morgan, who said of his life’s work shortly before he died in 1959, “looking back through the years, seeing both the errors and the triumphs in their correct perspective, I feel I have enjoyed it all. The motor trade has been, so far as I’m concerned, a most interesting business.” Peter Morgan maintained the passion and today, the Morgan Motor Company enjoys continued success, with inspired new designs under the direction of Charles Morgan.

We are starting a new feature this week. We have always put a nice little YouTube video over there in the sidebar for your enjoyment, but a lot of folks either didn’t realize it was there, didn’t realize they could blow it up to a larger size to watch, or just generally ignored it because … well, I don’t know. Maybe they thought it was an advertisement or something. Anyway, from now one we are going to feature the video in a post each time we change it, and this should be every week. Hopefully every Wednesday. Why Wednesday? Because it is a pretty boring day in general and we could all use a little something to brighten it up. Maybe a nice little video about some aspect of the British car fascination will do this. Hopefully it will give […]

There’s an official-looking horizontal line about 3ft off the ground as you enter the new exhibition at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu. The notice alongside says: YOU MUST BE THIS TALL (to be bigger than Richard Hammond). And that sets the tone for the World Of Top Gear section that opened last week, coinciding with the start of a new series of Top Gear today (June 21st). The motoring programme has a huge following in 80 countries but this will be the only place in the world where you can see some of the vehicles that featured in Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May’s best-known stunts. Cars such as the Reliant Robin Space Shuttle, Suzuki Swift that played ice-hockey and Toyota Hilux driven to the North Pole are almost TV stars in their own right and are expected […]

What’s this, more British anthropomorphisation of mechanical objects, a la Thomas the Tank Engine and Tiny Robots? What’s with the fetish for talking metal? Must be a boarding school thing. Roary, the Racing Car focuses on Roary, a small, cheeky, zippy, red racing car, and all his friends at the race track. I suppose it was entertaining, in a Boy’s Own sort of way. There’s a lot of color and movement, competition, going fast and stuff but where are the princesses, the mermaids, the fairies? Entertaining? Yeah, if you’re a boy.