Cheap car insurance and Top Gear - yes there is a connection - honestly

I've just caught up on a bit of really interesting Top Gear motoring news via their website. I regularly go to the TG site as part of my research for the cheap car insurance company that I work for. The Top Gear idea of news is usually quite irreverent, but occasionally they come up with a good feature – oh, yes like the time Jeremy Clarkson drove through a brick wall, and gave himself a bad case of whiplash – that was extremely informative for the driving population out there, not to mention hilarious in a sadistic kind of way. I actually wrote about it as part of a warning message to would be young motorists who drive like they would like to go through a brick wall at any moment.

You see, Top Gear is a guilty pleasure of mine as it seems to promote all the things I am passionately against; it shows three grown men behaving like school boys, driving round in ludicrously priced, over powered cars, usually in a fairly dangerous manner. They bandy about names like Koenigsegg and Bugatti Veyron without a moment's thought about how Joe Bloggs would get a cheap car insurance deal for one of those vehicles or whether or not parking one in your local high street would be a sensible idea.

They carry out stupid stunts in cars, trucks and tractors and offer up half-baked advice about driving technique. They regularly offend people, apparently promote speeding, seemingly want to destroy the planet with the overuse of environmentally crucifying petrol engines, and yet…I love Top Gear.

It's one of those rare programmes that brings my whole family together of an evening. Viewed on the big telly in the front room with the surround sound booming the cars look and sound great; something the tiny TV in my son's room just cannot manage, so he ventures down to be with the olds. In truth, Top Gear's timing on a Sunday is a little too late for my daughter, but she snuggles up to me on the sofa in her pyjamas, all scrubbed and clean and she looks at me with her big blue eyes and says, "Can I just watch Clarkson crash his 55 tonne truck?"

Well, what's a mother supposed to say?

So, there we all are, the nuclear family gathered round the televisual equipment for some good old-fashioned entertainment, meanwhile, here's the reality check. We know that for most mere mortals out there the cars paraded in front of us are so far out of reach they might as well be on Mars, but for 60 minutes a week we can all dream, because Top Gear brings them into our living room.

I have to say that when Clarkson is fawning over some sports marque that does 0-60 in a millisecond and has so much torque it could wipe Pluto from the solar system with one dip of the accelerator, I tend to go and fold some washing, but when they race a car with a jet plane or drive horrendously impractical supercars around Paris, I laugh like an idiot, and as Clarkson always beats May and Hammond to whichever destination they are trying to get to I always hope that the train, boat or plane boys will, just for once, beat his smug behind into submission.

As we watch those motoring monsters (I'm talking about the cars not the presenters) careering round the tracks, my partner sees money that could be spent improving the house, I see a frightful car insurance bill that could never be cheap no matter how many quotes you searched through, my daughter sees ‘loud thing; four wheels', and my son sees, precision engineering, beauty, speed, excitement, the need for a good job, oh my God I better go and do my homework, and do well in my exams. And I sit back in the knowledge that we are all catered for as we laugh at James May going very slow and the star in a reasonably priced car making a complete idiot of themselves. Top Gear – I hate it.