Those of us who like Top Gear will probably remember their American special. For those that don’t, the TG guys went to the US, bought one second hand car each and travelled from Florida to Louisiana. On the way they got into a scuffle with the locals (here is a clip of the relevant segment: http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/videos/index.shtml?cat=more_challenges&id=72 ) after painting silly slogans on their cars (of the likes of “Country and Western is rubbish”).
I remember that there was a bit of noise afterwards - some complaining that it was staged, others (many more) saying that it was a faithful portrait of people in that area, and so on. What I’d like to know is if there ever was any kind of follow up: did anyone ever find out if the thing was staged, for example? Or follow their route and interview the people they pissed off?
I thought the caravan weekend was acknowledged as a obvious joke at the start (as opposed to the caravan races, or the caravan jumps, or caravan conkers, or whatever anti-caravan scheme they come up with on a given episode), although details like paying the fire brigade 1000 GBP in advance may have come up later.
I do know they stress the various races (e.g. car vs. Japanese railroads, car vs. Airplane from Italy, car vs. train to Monte Carlo) are real, and they don’t really know how things will turn out (although they are designed to be as close as possible, which is probably why Hammond & May had to first walk miles to the Bus Station in the Eurotrain challenge), but they then go back and refilm various fill-in scenes later on (so Clarkson may very well NOT be in that Buggatii during distance shots…)