Un-official GTPlanet BBC Topgear UK ThreadTV 

  • Thread starter ExigeEvan
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A very unfortunate coincidence....

















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Not hard to imagine Clarkson doing that on purpose. It certainly matches the level of subtly attributed to some of his other recent wind-ups.

Linking the death count to the numbers on the other plates is a bit of a stretch though. They probably just pointed that out to stir up more dissent.
 
All this current "stunt" does is make me think how much longer the BBC will keep them around? When will Clarkson get his head out of his ass?
 
It will run.

What amazes me though is that 1 registration number is close, 1 registration number is near and
1 registration letter is in order. That, putting aside the fact that Argies reefer to them as "Malvinas" instead of Falklands, the FKL might have been intentional, but the rest is just ... bs.
 
Hope they air the episode.

Argentina clearly looking for something in that which didn't mean anything. Although if Jeremy did have a say on the plate and it wasnot the crew member who bought it like it then he's a gonner.
 
I'm sure it was on purpose, they always do number plate windup's and other subtle wordplay. Like this on Clarkson's Jensen... :ouch:

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They would have gone out of their way to find one with the plate FKL, why not choose any other used Porsche on earth!?
 
First time they get pelted with stones for real, they did have practice with the scripted one in America.
 
It's an odd issue, a point of national pride/political grandstanding more than practicality for Argentina to want the Falklands/Maldives. The war was cooked up by the military dictatorship of the time just to distract people from the poor economy. So if all that is over FLK on a license plate, it just makes me sad for those who got so upset about it, I know most Argentinians are better educated than that, but these guys get to make world news by being belligerent radicals.

I'm sure the BBC isn't going to come down against Clarkson or Wilman.
 
Pratty lame move by some argentinians in my opinion.

If there was anymore evidence needed to prove they're grasping at straws, an argentinian goverment official said that Hammond's car had a number supposedly referencing the number of argentinian cassualties (the number of cassualties was, say, 250 and Hammond's plate was something like 260) and that May's car referenced the british cassualties (number of cassualties being, for instance, 600 and May's plate being around 640). It's like saying I'm a Nazi because a car club I'm a member of assigned me the number 088 and there's a sticker with that number on my car. In my opinion, the argentinians mad at that plate are reading what they want to read.

Top Gear have been foolish clowns that shouldn't been taken seriously in every inch of the world. Bolivia, Vietnam, most of Africa, India, Irak, etc. They freakin' crossed Vietname with a bike painted with a star spangled banner motif and a speaker blaring "Born in the USA"...and nobody tried to hurt them, if anything they showed them how wonderful a countru Vietnam is. All of them took the higher ground and just let them be, but in Argentina some fools had to ashame their country. They didn't even had the brains to come up with a way to troll back Clarkson, in case Clarkson indeed was trying to mock them. A sign saying "After Maradona and Fangio gave you such kickings...it would've been cruel not letting you win a thing" would've been epic, but no, they went full retard.

That's why us South Americans can't have nice things... :(
 
Well done Argentina in successfully making your country even more poverty ridden and irrelevant by scaring off one of the most popular TV shows in the world and the tourism income that comes with such exposure.
 
Argentina isn't poverty ridden or irrelevant, it's one of the great countries of the world. Two of my favorite authors, Borges and Cortazar, one of my favorite movie makers, Jodorowski, and one of my favorite composers, Piazzola, are all Argentine. That's why this spectacle is so sad.
 
jeffgoddin
Argentina isn't poverty ridden or irrelevant, it's one of the great countries of the world. Two of my favorite authors, Borges and Cortazar, one of my favorite movie makers, Jodorowski, and one of my favorite composers, Piazzola, are all Argentine. That's why this spectacle is so sad.
Click to expand...

Add to that one of my favorite philosophers, Jose Ingenieros, and the best driver EVUR, Juan Manuel Fangio.

It's a shame that the land of such great men just made an spectacle of itself as the one nation on Earth who couldn't take a Top Gear joke, as bad as it was (and supposing it was actually a joke and not an incident).
 
Tweets from Clarkson earlier today...

All TG crew now safely out of Argentina. I just got back to UK. Horrified to see so many newspapers have the story completely wrong

The number plate WAS a coincidence. When it was pointed out to us, we changed it. As pics in the mornings mail show

And these war veterans we upset. Mostly they were in their 20s. Do the maths

They threw us out for the political capital. Thousands chased crew to border. Someone could've been killed

This was not a jolly jape that went awry. For once, we did nothing wrong

We had planned a good ending for the show. But thanks to the government's foolishness, its now even better

My profound thanks to all the people who helped. And to the sensible Argentinians who have apologised


...All the tweets were re-tweeted and favourited several thousand times...
 
So, it was unintentional... Well, I wouldn't put it past the TG crew to run with that sort of stuff. Still, having some sense of humour about even that sort of stuff wouldn't hurt the Argentinians, would it? Pretty sure other countries would take similar stuff with a frown instead of a violent reaction.
 
Of course, silly me! Why didn't I think of asking Clarkson for confirmation! That clears everything up!

The Independent are now reporting that they may be in trouble with the DVLA for using a replacement number plate on the car :lol: Apparently the car used to have a different registration plate and they (conveniently) happened to have it handy and swapped it over after the first protests occured.

For a bunch of motoring journalists who notice every last detail about a car, it seems rather unbelievable that they wouldn't spot the potential problem with the H982 FKL plate while setting off for a road trip through Argentina... I'm totally not buying it!
 
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They could have at least admitted to changing the plate instead of lying, I imagine they'll still make a few sly jokes about it in the next series.
 
HPI check shows that the Porsche first wore H982FKL on 25th May 2001, and Top Gear bought the car on 8th August 2014.

Which means that the plate was on the car for more than thirteen years before Top Gear bought it.
 
Not very interesting though. I can think of two relatively simple explanations off the top of my head.

First, lots of people keep otherwise meaningless VRMs when they scrap their car and transfer them to new cars. It's not one you could buy from the DVLA as a cherished plate necessarily (there's rules about that - this one doesn't meet them) but it's one you could assign to a vehicle if you buy it from the vehicle it was originally registered to.

The second, and more likely, is that the Porsche was originally registered with a plate and then assigned a private/cherished plate for the first decade of its life. The private/cherished plate was removed and, for some reason (usually this same reason), the original plate could not be reassigned to it so it was given a new plate from the same year that had previously been assigned to another vehicle but had become free for the DVLA to use (again, probably because the car it was assigned to was scrapped).
 
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Clarkson is telling the truth but is also being disingenuous when he says the purchase of that number plate was a complete coincidence... the question remains, however, as to whether they are being entirely truthful about not noticing the Falklands connection before the decision was made to take the car to Argentina... somehow I doubt it.
 
By any chance, is it possible to search for particular UK number plates?
 

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