You see it a lot on Top Gear but also in other shows. The driver of a car talking to either a passenger or to the camera. I’m wondering if this has ever led to a crash. Seems a tad reckless to me, especially on public roads.
Since you mention Top Gear, there was that fender-bender that Richard Hammond got into.
Although he was narrating (at least as best he could, given what he was driving), and wasn’t on a public road, it was a blown tire that led to the crash.
Ah yeah I’ve seen that footage before but that’s not really what I was talking about, for the reasons you yourself underline.
Jeremy Clarkson put the Top Gear BMW art car in a ditch while driving it to the exhibition the show had set up. I don’t know if that counts as presenting a TV show.
In “Cake boss” one of the delivery guys was driving and talking to the camera and had a crash that drove the front-right whell under the car.
In this vein, I’ve often wondered about the safety of the camera people on Intervention, having to sit there in the front seat of the car, twisting around to film the other occupants while some brain-fried, hungover addict barrels down the street looking for her dealer.
Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs has gotten various large vehicles (construction trucks, military vehicles) stuck in ruts or otherwise driven off into places where they shouldn’t be, sometimes requiring a major tow out of there. Not quite a car crash, and considering part of the point of the show is “this is tougher than you’d think,” it’s not always a bad thing.
A few Amazing Race contestants have had close calls. But trying to find your way to some obscure location, in a strange city, in a strange car, with signs in a strange language, and do it in a hurry, the cameras are probably the least of their worries.
I kinda got the impression that was somewhat intentional. Everything about that exhibit got mucked up somehow (hell, just about everything they build[sup]*[/sup] on Top Gear), too much to be a coincidence.
- I accidentally typed that as “guild”. Since we’re discussing an art car, I almost left it that way.
We had an epic ice storm in the Pacific Northwest last week, and I kept turning on the local news to see reporters driving their cars on the highways and reporting from the front seat! It was INSANE! They would turn their heads and actuallly look into the camera, instead of keeping their eyes on the road. I think they hoped to get awesome footage of car crashes in action, but it just seemed so dangerous and unncessary to me.
Heck, on many Top Gear shows they routinue smack into each’s other’s Challenge vehicle (in the earlier series it was usually Clarksom hitting James May’s parked vehicle), or things would go wrong on a trip (Richard Hammond’s Alfa Romeo slaming into James May’s as he was attempting to tow Richard Hammond’s vehicle).
Actually, on their recent India Christmas special, there was what may or may not have been a staged collision between Clarkson Jaguar and a local Delivery Truck (the truck just took off after Jeremy pulled to the side of the road). Deciding if this accident was faked or not is an exercise left to the reader…
I remember some show that had Patrick Stewart driving a NASCAR vehicle and he bumped it pretty badly on a turn, smushed one of the fenders. There was close-up footage of him, so I assume there was a cameraman in the passenger seat at the time.
While looking for video of that, I found this which is entirely unrelated but nevertheless quite entertaining.
I have seen a clip online of Lisa Lopes’ car crash in Honduras. The camera is held by the person in the passenger seat and the VH1 logo is in the corner but I don’t know what show it came from. Even though it doesn’t show the horrific results, I am not linking to it.
Paris Hilton crashed a motorcycle on a red carpet once, though I’m having a hard time finding a decent clip of it.
We had this in DC during the early stages of Snowpocalypse 2010. I turned on the TV expecting to see Numb3rs and instead got a heavy dose of local idiot reporters driving around the Beltway in a blizzard.
Reporter: Maryland state police warn that it is very dangerous out here and people should stay off the roads! The snow is coming down faster than MDOT can plow it! Be safe and stay indoors!
Note that it was about 10:45pm on a Friday, so there was no one really on the road anyway, plus we had been warned for days about what a huge, dangerous storm it was so the Beltway was completely deserted. Except for this one dumbass reporter. Oh, the irony.