Sweet birds of youth

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

Many words have, over the decades, been expended on the involvement of English (and Scottish) clubs in European football. I’m neither an archivist or an inveterate Statto, so I won’t bore you with fancy-pants recollections of the giants of the game, past and present, and their exploits (although into that category you still must include Nottingham Forest and Leeds United, even if they’ve lost their way, domestically, since). European football nights have changed, somewhat, in the Champions League era, with its TV rights-hiked, inflationary stadium ticket racketeering, but I think to childhood TV broadcasts featuring the likes of Borussia Mönchengladbach and a Brian Moore TV commentary coming over a telephone line. It was rather exotic, wasn’t it? Players you’d never heard of and probably would never again, scoring wonder goals. Now, you see them once, and expect to see them again within the next transfer window at your own club. These were the days when “the Continent” seemed mystical: you could get away with subtle xenophobia about players with ‘amusing’ names in much the same way as Stuart Hall did during the Jeux Sans Frontières international stages of It’s A Knockout.

Having lived in continental Europe for the better part of two decades, travelling throughout for work and pleasure, some of the exoticism of foreign football has dissipated. Last night, however, I received a sharp reminder that such mystique still existed, when Chelsea entertained Bayern Munich at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea’s European history, in my conscious lifetime, has been something of a Curate’s Egg. For example, there was that Cup Winners Cup run in 1995, which took us to Club Brugge on a night when Glenn Hoddle was in charge and played David Rocastle up front on his own to no discernible impact. It was my first and only European away fixture experience, too and, now I think of it, it was quite surreal: dawn departure from the Fulham Road in what looked like a D-Day column of numbered buses (“Orange 5, Orange 5, Orange 5!!!”, we taunted Purple 7 at a convenience stop), being marched past overly aggressive Belgian riot police, their horses and their dogs, before heading back down the E40 to Calais and a return roughly 24 hours after we departed, suitably chastened by having lost to the single Gert Verheyen goal. Since then, Chelsea have motored through numerous managers of eclectic European origin, and have established themselves - questionably, in some people’s minds - as one of the European elite. Well, we did win it in 2012, in Munich, which I watched from my local pub in Paris. One of the best nights of my life. Period. Last night, Chelsea suspended that status as Bayern took revenge on 2012 and were punished 3-0 on home turf, leaving them without Jorginho and the red carded Marcus Alonso for the return leg. It’s unlikely that there will be a further round for the Blues, even if miracles have happened before.

Perhaps unusually, I’m quite sanguine about it. Head coach Frank Lampard might, as is his duty, be fuming (“They outclassed us in pretty much every department, so it was quite sobering,” he said afterwards), but Chelsea fans should be philosophical. Bayern were, frankly, scintillating, as they were in their 7-2 demolition of Spurs last Autumn. Chelsea are a work in progress. That’s not an excuse, but when you’re comprised of still-developing youngsters and veterans over 30 eying last payday-ahoy opportunities elsewhere, you don’t have to look too far for reasons. It’s just one of those things. Learn from it and move on. God knows what the reverse fixture will be like next month in Bavaria, but I sincerely hope that Bayern don’t take their foot off the pedal, even if the other foot is currently on the windpipe of my beloved football club. Sometimes you just want to see European class, even at your own expense. As I blogged on Sunday, Chelsea weren’t meant to get higher than the bottom half of the Premier League’s top ten this season, so as long as they remain focused on staying in next season’s European places, it will only serve their youngsters’ progress well.

That, still, won’t prevent the boo boys from having their say. The “#LampardOut” tweets are depressingly predictable, even if they come from a myopic minority. Some have even suggested that the club should never have discarded Maurizio Sarri, God help us (though in mitigation he did win a European trophy in his single season at Chelsea). Few football fans are suitably patient when it comes to their beloved clubs. Win handsomely one week and the insistence is that a consecutive win will follow. When it doesn’t, the grumbling breaks out. I’ve seen that this season at Chelsea. After that opening day disaster against Manchester United, things started to look up, and youngsters like Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Christian Pulicic and Fikayo Tomori were giving our jaded eyes hope that, maybe, this wouldn’t be a fallow season, after all. But that was delusional. These talented players have tremendous potential (and great prospect for the national side), but to expect them to just step into gear in their debut seasons in the Premier League is asking a lot. Even more so, in their European debuts. That’s not an excuse, just a statement of reality. What Frank Lampard and his coaching staff have to ensure, however, is that it doesn’t become an excuse for them, either. Lampard might be a club legend, rightly revered, even more so than his ‘Captain, Leader, Legend’ teammate John Terry, but that still doesn’t immunise him from Roman Abramovich’s all-seeing eye. Just look at the treatment of the late, great Ray Wilkins.

Taking last night’s Round-of-16 first leg tie into account, Lampard’s job is and shouldn’t be at risk. Genuinely, Chelsea have a golden opportunity to learn from the experience without recourse. Rarely does that happen in football, even rarer at Chelsea, but if Abramovich and his directors have any amount of common sense, they will treat this season in the correct context. Yes, the loss of Eden Hazard has been painful; yes, the FIFA transfer ban has been significantly restricting; yes, the need to draw on Academy players has been both challenge and opportunity. These aren’t excuses but unavoidable points of mitigation. Losing 3-0 at home to this Bayern Munich is nothing to be ashamed of, even if the goals came in a negative sequence that began with Jorginho’s needless booking. Chelsea had actually played quite well before that point, even if there were early signs of Bayern’s ruthlessness, and the class of Robert Lewandowski and the forgotten capabilities of former Arsenal player Serge Gnabry. It would, though, be remiss to just dismiss the defeat as a combination of unavoidable factors. Alonso - redeemed against Spurs on Saturday - let himself down with two equally avoidable bookings, while Jorginho’s discipline let him down by mouthing off to the French referee to receive a next-match suspension. Stupid. Abraham and Mount both showed their inexperience with wasted chances late on that could have restored some pride had they been properly converted, while Barkley’s inability to complete passes cost dearly. Things to work on? Of course. Things that might improve in the next leg? Unlikely. That’s just where Chelsea are. Like the marathon runner running out of puff, sometimes you can only give so much. These Chelsea youngsters, in particular, still have a lot to give, and in seasons to come will do so. For now, they are where they are. Playing Bayern Munich - already being talked up as European champions-elect - will only serve them well.

Dizzy in the head

Picture: 20th Century Fox

Life, eh? Waking up last Friday morning, I was contemplating a sombre day ahead, taking my mother to the funeral of a neighbour who’d died just a few months shy of her 100th birthday. It was a contrast to the previous evening when I received potentially good news on the employment front (details soon!), but as I affixed my black tie, adjusted my black raincoat and tightened the laces of my jet black shoes, I found myself ‘getting in to part’.

By early afternoon, however, I was wobbling about at the wake, unable to walk straight or even drive my mum home. The obvious conclusion here - and, no doubt, the observation of fellow mourners - was that I was ‘the one’ who always goes a bit too far on the free booze at these affairs and was making a tit of himself.

With my girlfriend, who just happened to be on half term school holiday (she’s a teacher), able to pick us up, I returned home and, after a brief stop to make a colourful and quite loud call on the great white telephone, went to bed. And stayed there. Out cold. For several hours. Even managed to miss my other half go off to the O2 with her daughter to see The 1975, a gig I’d been looking forward to myself. Worse was to come on Saturday morning when it was clear I wasn’t well enough to go to Stamford Bridge for Chelsea’s encounter with Spurs, a fixture I never miss and have even flown halfway around the world to attend in the past. I ended up watching from the sofa through the one eye that could maintain focus (and still did better than VAR...) thanks to whatever had rendered me not only vertiginous but also boss-eyed. What a state.

So, Monday morning (let’s write off Sunday as a day of exclusively pyjama-clad telly watching via the Cyclops eye). Uber to the rescue to take me the 0.4 miles to the doctor’s surgery I only joined two weeks ago. Paging Mr. H.P. Chondriac! I joke, but I had an over-dependence on the medical profession once before: 14 years ago, when I lived in the Netherlands, I was diagnosed with a condition that made me paranoid. Not in the strictest, psychological sense, but to the extent that the slightest heartbeat louder than it should have been, cough that felt richer than normal, or blurred vision (i.e. just waking up), had me down the local quack faster than you could say “Call the midwife”. Thus, I’ve been wary since of tugging any Sawbones’ chain since for fear of unnecessarily declaring the sky to be falling.

On this particular Monday morning, however, I thought there was no other option. Sudden dizziness in a 52 year old is not something to be taken lightly, even if my outward mood didn’t seem to have been affected by whatever lurgy I’d succumbed to. This was probably much to my girlfriend’s annoyance as I was still capable of making awful jokes with lucid judgement. I just wasn’t capable of hauling myself off the sofa all day yesterday for fear of falling over. You can see her point of view.

Anyway, to the doc’s I went this morning, to be diagnosed with BPPV - benign paroxysmal positional vertigo - a temporary condition involving the inner ear suddenly getting confused and making one dizzy and unsteady. Causes are vague, but lack of sleep or stress can be a factor. I was, he said, absolutely right to come in and get checked out. Obviously, I am mightily relieved that it was nothing more serious (Larry David-style, I’d assumed it was a stroke or the sudden onset of a brain tumour - guess that’s why GPs train for 10 years before entering practice...). It’s going to be an interesting week while it works itself out, especially convincing the neighbours that the giddy clot not leaving the house until mid-morning and then wobbling down the street like one of the Geordie Shore cast on a night out is not, as might appear, already Brahms and Liszt, but is just heading, trepidatiously, to Nero’s for a latte.

A Bridge too VAR

So, possibly the most satisfying Chelsea result at Stamford Bridge in ages, and I’m laid up on the sofa with only one eye open, vertigo sending the room spinning somewhat, and an adjacent bucket reminding me that I might be soon relieved again of what little I’ve eaten in the last 24 hours. Sorry for that image, dear readers, but that’s where I was, yesterday lunchtime. Even in my semi-delirious state (some viral thing, thanks for asking), I was still able to both appreciate the significance of Frank Lampard’s second win over his former master, but also the absolute state of Premier League football at the magic eye of VAR.

Chelsea’s players have cut frustrating figures in recent weeks. I’ve avoided blogging about it as it really should be put into the correct perspective. At the beginning of the season few would have expected Lampard, in only his second season as a manager, in charge of a team comprising youngsters unproven at this level, alongside ageing figures and those who left fans indifferent last season, to be competing at anything above mid-level in the table. Throw in the FIFA transfer ban and the phrase “expectation management” was getting bandied about a fair bit. So, to be still clinging to fourth place and Champions League qualification for next season at this stage of the campaign could be quite rightly considered ahead of plan.

Yesterday’s win over José Mourinho’s Tottenham can be considered a major chalk mark in Lampard’s embryonic managerial career, especially as two months ago he achieved the same in the reverse fixture. Perhaps, though, he was fortunate, that Spurs were without Kane and Son, and the petulant Alli has been benched in punishment for his tantrum in midweek. But Chelsea, too, were forced into their own changes due to the curse of mid-season injuries. It happens, and Lampard, at least, managed to motivate his side to go out there and do a job. I’m not going to gloat, though. Terrific goals from Giroud and Alonso - hitherto virtually unused by Lampard but, hats off, rose to the challenge yesterday - were highlights in a game dominated by both sides losing possession too often in midfield, and the match becoming frustratingly scrappy, even with my diminished vision.

That said, with one eye open and the living room spinning somewhat, I saw Giovani lo Celso’s stamp on the prone César Azpilicueta’s calf as clear as anything, and was amazed that referee Michael Oliver did nothing more about it. The commentary that followed, as a VAR check took another look at the incident, made all the right rational observations. Viewed from most angles it was hard to detect malice. But anyone who knows football knows that these things rarely just happen. And VAR should have concluded differently at the time. For Stockley Park to later admit - admit!!! - that lo Celso probably did stamp on Azpilicueta and they got the decision wrong was an astonishing admission. Especially after Chelsea had been rightly aggrieved by two dodgy VAR decisions on Monday night against Manchester United. 

Margins being what they are in professional football, it’s easy to whinge about decisions going the wrong way, especially when things probably even out the right way as much as not. And, who knows - a red card for Maguire on Monday and the same for lo Celso yesterday might not have made the slightest bit of difference to the respective results. Red cards sometimes have little or no effect on the offending team’s ability. But, still, margins being what they are, who knows? Technology will always improve and evolve. In 1996 I was involved in the launch of the world’s first flat-panel television and it was, frankly, terrible. We still sold every single one, with record companies, advertising agencies and even Chris Evans all wanting to be first to own a TV you could hang on the wall like a painting. 24 years later, you can buy an OLED TV of unfathomable, almost unreal picture quality. It's reasonable, then, to assume that the science behind VAR will only improve, like any other technology. It’s just that currently it’s not fit for purpose. 

Yesterday was, in the words today of The Sunday Times' Jonathan Northcroft, "Another dubious day for the Video Assistant Referee." In addition to the lo Celso incident at Stamford Bridge, Manchester City's 1-0 win over Leicester at the King Power Stadium was marked by more questions over VAR's inconsistencies. Likewise in Bournemouth’s defeat at Burnley, where the south coast team's Harry Wilson appeared to have scored only for VAR to identify a debatable handball beforehand. Football has always been about referees having to make marginal calls with their own eyes. That, though, is what assistant referees, fourth and fifth officials, and eventually VAR were meant to alleviate. VAR was never meant to be a panacea, however, but in its first full season in the Premier League, there has been a tendency for it to be the default decision-making apparatus, not the man in the middle who should still be. What happened yesterday with lo Celso might aggrieve me as a Chelsea fan, but what happened later, with Stockley Park’s admission that they’d got it wrong, should aggrieve every football fan. Pundits, quite rightly, question why the referee Michael Oliver wasn’t just invited to immediately review the Azpilicueta incident on a pitchside monitor. Even that might not have resolved things to anyone’s satisfaction. At the end of the day, even if margins are so tight, and the risk to titles and the millions that can be reaped from Champions League places is so grave, we may have to accept that no technology - not even artificial intelligence - and no human eye can be guaranteed to make the right decision every time. 

A modern tragedy

Fans blame the press. The press blames social media. Social media blames the press. Everyone is blaming everyone else for Caroline Flack’s suicide. It’s an unholy mess. And, yet, at the centre of it all is a life expended prematurely and voluntarily at the age of just 40. A life that, viewed through the television camera, the paparazzo’s lens and even her own Instagram account, was full of fun, laughter and vivacity, the very traits that made her career.

While there is, inevitably, now a lot of whataboutery over what went on when the laughter stopped, you don’t, either, have to be an amateur Freud to suspect that demons lurked beneath Flack's “bubbly” exterior. Posthumous accounts now suggest that all was never perfect in her world. We shall probably never know, however, and nor should we need to or want to. A public figure who contributed to the viewing pleasure of millions is no longer with us. 

Whatever edge it was that she was pushed over on Saturday, we can’t tell. You can’t tell. Suicide might be contemplated as one of a number of solutions to whatever the predicament might be, but I can’t begin to imagine what that final, ultimate decision must have been like to take. And none of us should. All we’ll ever know about Flack’s final hours - even her final minutes - can only ever be circumstantial. We can speculate all we like about the Crown Prosecution Service’s notification of its pursuit of a trial for the alleged assault of her 27-year-old boyfriend, Lewis Burton; or of his Valentine’s Day message, sent in defiance of legal restrictions on contact between the two. We can speculate on Flack’s underlying mental health, or on what triggered the alleged incident. We can speculate, too, on whether the 'tragic clown' syndrome had struck again - an infectious personality masking deep-seated issues. The bottom line is we don’t know. 

It doesn’t matter whether we knew Caroline Flack intimately, whether we knew her only as that giggly presenter of Love Island and The X Factor, or whether our knowledge of her came simply from images of a glamourous woman. I’m not going there myself, and I would strongly recommend no one else does, either, but I dare say coverage of her death in the tabloids, and especially the Mail’s website, is a fetid cesspit of the ignorant, illiterate trollery that could potentially have contributed to her state of mind. I only hope that those around her steered her away from it. The same with social media, a platform she regularly used as a means of connecting with her fans. But this has proven to be a double-edged sword, and even raising the role of social media in her life, especially the ending of it, sends me down the same path as all the finger-pointing at the top of this post. To that apparent Mexican Standoff, the bottom line is that everyone and no one can be blamed for Caroline Flack’s death, even if revelations of bullying and even death threats posted to her on social media will have weighed heavily.

Here, though, is the struggle point. I'm not doubting that Flack was a victim of unwarranted and unsolicited public commentary. That, sadly, is par for the course these days. In this digital age, the public eye is all-seeing, like the giant Eye of Sauron in The Lord Of The Rings. I don’t mean to be flippant by suggesting that. My point is that there is a malevolence to the delicate relationship between celebrities and the public. While, I'm sure, most of those who followed Flack on social media did so with good intentions, social media doesn't legislate for the vile, the stupid and those who simply have no empathy or sympathy for those they troll. Keyboard warriors fire off offensive tweets without any thought for where they land. The issue, though, is whether the famous will now pull back from social platforms: before Twitter and Instagram they were protected by their PR people, agents and managers. When I worked as a showbiz journalist, everything was strictly controlled. Now, a celebrity - should they choose to do so - can control what people see and know about them, and when, simply by apps they carry around on their phones. But that also means those who follow and comment on them have nothing to rein them in. Even Donald Trump seems undeterred by his own Attorney General strongly advising abstinence from Twitter all the while legal proceedings are ongoing for fear of - said politely - making his job harder.

But here I am veering down the very path we should avoid when considering Caroline Flack’s tragic death. Nothing can and would be admissible as a cause. Not even a note, should one ever be found. No one can ever be sure of exactly what was her state of mind or her decision making process at the moment she decided to take her own life. Even if she left a note, it might not even be a reflection of where she stood on the final precipice. Premature celebrity deaths affect us differently to those of people we actually knew and loved. Largely because we’re detached from them. They are mostly abstract in our lives because they exist on a screen or in our ears. I still grieve for the pop stars whose work brought (and brings still) the most pleasure to my life. People like Bowie and John Martyn. Even John Lennon and George Harrison. You can think of Jimi Hendrix or Amy Winehouse, nominally victims of their own weaknesses and taken too young through misadventure. Their legacies live longer than their often fleeting lives. Dying at 40 meant that Caroline Flack wouldn’t be admitted into the ‘27 Club’, but her life in the public eye was just as short as the Morrisons and Joplins of this world, which adds to the overwhelming sense of the tragedy of what happened at the weekend. 

I’ll admit, as I near the end of this post, that I’d never really watched anything Flack presented. I was abroad in the first few years of her TV career, and not being a fan of reality shows, didn’t watch her in Strictly or The X Factor. And I’m firmly not Love Island demographic. So why should I care? I care simply because someone whose life was rapidly born out in public, indeed, whose life was building to a tumult thanks to sudden and very public collapse in her fortunes, ended suddenly and deeply tragically on Saturday. And, full disclosure, it’s a life I only know through the very tabloid press now under scrutiny, who studiously reported on her personal and professional life. Without wishing to be cruel, she courted publicity, to a degree. I’ve been around enough celebrities to know that even when engaging the press through gritted teeth, it’s still a professional necessity, albeit a necessary evil for some. So whether I like it or not, I could be very well part of the blame now being appointed for Caroline’s death. I’m a “media type” - my background in journalism means reading newspapers I might find abhorrent as much as those I like, simply because there’s a need to be ‘across’ the news. But that doesn’t make those papers right - or, indeed, me right for reading them - when it comes to the factors that led to Caroline Flack’s death. Then again, all these circumstances that appeared to have conspired may just be that - circumstances but not necessarily contributing causes. At the end, Caroline Flack’s death may just be a horrendous, ghoulish tragedy, the blame for which could - and, perhaps, should - remain unattributable. And that, sadly, is where it should be left. There are family members, friends and colleagues who now need to grieve and, hopefully, out of the spotlight.

Why it might be time to give Top Gear another go

Picture: BBC

I’d hardly say I was a petrolhead, but there was a time when Top Gear was required bloke telly. In its classic line-up (a phrase akin to describing Genesis in terms of the Peter Gabriel era) - and some incarnations on from William Woollard’s inch-of-ankle-revealing, foot up on a bumper, explaining how camrods work - there is little doubt that the triumvirate of Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond successfully transcended oily-fingered motoring journalism to produce, until it started getting tired and predictably scripted, a genuinely entertaining and enjoyable hour of Sunday evening television. True, it relied on laddishness and barely one dimensional humour, but only the most prudish would deny that the chemistry between Clarkson, May and Hammond was real and one of those rare examples of presenters not only drawing the viewer into their world without too much self-indulgence, but also drawing the viewer into the exquisitely filmed pieces they produced.

Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman deserve the credit for that, transforming the original Thursday evening BBC2 ‘magazine’, with helpful items about sensible cars, into something by turns entertaining and aspirational. And then they ruined it. The ‘steak dinner’ incident that led to Clarkson’s departure in 2015, with May and Hammond (and Wilman) rapidly following him out the door, probably came at the right time. By then the jokes were getting old, the stunts corny, and the three-way chemistry starting to appear over-confected. Then they took the same formula to Amazon, where their The Grand Tour (managing to work the ‘TG’ initials into their new venture) felt equally as contrived, and rarely, if ever, worth the Prime Video subscription. Meanwhile, as you may recall, the BBC soldiered on, with a bloated Top Gear reboot presented by Chris Evans, with sundry others including Friends’ Matt Le Blanc and former Formula 1 boss Eddie Jordan, and then reinvented again with just Le Blanc flanked by motoring journalists Chris Harris and Rory Reid (who at least had some industry chops to draw on). And then I switched off. I’d seen it all, to be quite honest. The feature-length films to Africa, Vietnam, across the US and elsewhere in the Clarkson era were, even when veering into pubescent political incorrectness that wasn’t funny at all, brilliant television. Proper travel documentaries that just happened to have motoring as their foundation. But, towards the end of the C/C/H era, they’d run their course.

Fast forward, then, to 2020. Top Gear has not only survived further invention that rendered it of little interest, but as of its 29th series, later this year, it is being moved to BBC One. 43 years after the first edition on BBC Two (commencing a nine-episode series commissioned by the BBC’s Midlands organisation and presented by newsreader Angela Rippon and local news presenter Tom Coyne), a show that has been one of the BBC’s most biggest money and audience spinners, via overseas franchises, DVDs, branded bubble bath and all of that, is transferring to true primetime. Cynics - including yesterday’s Guardian - might conclude that this is as much to do with the BBC shoring up its audience numbers as it goes into the next round of discussions about its long-term future funded by the licence fee. It wouldn’t be the first BBC Two-BBC One transfer either: Line Of Duty, Peaky Blinders and Bake Off all made the transition to the bigger viewing potential of the ‘senior’ channel. It may, though, also be recognition of the fact that Top Gear has finally been brought back from the dead by the latest presenter line-up of comedian Paddy McGuinness, ex-cricketer Freddie Flintoff, and the aforementioned Harris. That may come as a surprise if you haven’t seen the latest series, which began in December: a comedian, an ex-cricketer and a motoring journalist doesn’t necessarily sound like the instant formula for reviving a long-standing, much loved but somewhat derided television franchise. But in the shows that I’ve seen, I’ve been warmed by the natural chemistry between the three disparate presenters. And while some of the content has been a little familiar to stunts and capers in the past (the recent race between a McLaren Speedtail and a RAF F-35 Lightning fighter jet copied verbatim the 2007 race between Hammond in a Bugatti Veyron and a RAF Typhoon), everything else has made for enjoyable Sunday evening viewing. Top Gear has zip once more. It is no longer trying too hard to be anything. No wonder it has been reaching viewing figures as high as 4.3 million (though still a way off the seven million peak the show achieved during the Clarkson era). That audience growth is crucial to the BBC One move. The new presenter line-up helped make Top Gear BBC Two’s highest-rated show in 2019, crucially placing it amongs the top four shows for 16-34-year-olds. That demographic is crucial for the BBC as it deals with the existential challenge of losing younger viewers to Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and other online platforms.

Maintaining those figures, with the expectation of taking them even higher, will be crucial for the Top Gear team and for BBC One management. It’s not known, yet, whether the new series will again be on a Sunday night, but scheduling will be critical. Top Gear is in a category of its own: Countryfile on a Sunday evening appeals to those (like me) in search of gentle, bucolic viewing, even with a factual base. A Sunday night drama will work differently again. So quite how three blokes - and there’s a clear emphasis here on blokes - larking around in and with cars remains to be seen where it would fit. That said, the renewed presenter chemistry is one the BBC will not want to mess with again.

Fans have generally rated the show as being “back to its best”, with the presenting line-up drawing most of this favour. Clearly it has proven to be a struggle to get it right since the golden trio left. “People often look at the past through the rose-tinted glass,” Chris Harris recently told the online newspaper Metro. “But if you go back to Top Gear 2000/2002 the chemistry wasn’t there [in the early reboot period], it took time to grow.” The editorial content, however, will also be crucial if the show is to retain its loyal fanbase, judging by some of the online backlash to the recent fighter jet rematch (“All been done before. No new ideas?”, was one remark on Twitter). McGuinness has, though, hit on why the BBC One move makes sense: "The beauty of it is that it's an entertainment show which the whole family can watch - we're not just doing straight car reviews every week,” he told BBC News. Maintaining that entertainment factor, as a factual show at heart, will be key. The show’s current executive producer, Alex Renton, has said that the show is now “less scripted” than in previous incarnations, relying more on the natural interaction between McGuinness, Flintoff and Harris. "I think it's well-known that in Matt [LeBlanc]'s day it was quite heavily scripted because of how we used to work, and now there's just the freedom,” Renton recently said. “They know each other better and the chemistry grows more and more. A huge amount of the backroom stuff is the same, we've had the same crew for years, but there's something about when Chris, Paddy and Freddie are on set together, and it just goes off."

"Top Gear might have miles on the clock,” Renton added, “but this trio has injected some va-va-voom. Their chemistry was immediate, their camaraderie warm." Be that as it may, they are still reliant on the editorial team keeping things fresh. "We like to be involved vaguely in the creative process so we know what's going on and we have some input," Harris told BBC News, "but actually, Top Gear is at its best when the producers spring something on you and we respond naturally to it. The more you know, the less realistic your reactions. So we're in that weird position of encouraging things to happen that we don't know about."

That also feeds the undoubted chemistry between the current trio of presenters. No wonder Charlotte Moore, Director of BBC Content, gushed at the announcement on Monday of the move to BBC One: "Freddie, Paddy and Chris have revitalised the hit series with their escapades and banter; and we couldn't have asked for a better response to their series so far and the impact it's had with young audiences." The challenge, now, is to keep that going whilst in the undoubted spotlight of a prime time slot on BBC One. At 43 years old, it’s time for Top Gear to grow up. A bit.

I'd love to be in Barcelona...but is it worth it?

It's more than possible that until the brouhaha surrounding the Chinese telecoms vendor Huawei blew up a couple of weeks ago, you'd never have heard of 5G. But all of a sudden, a telecommunications technology that had previously been discussed only in the trade press was front page news, albeit for political reasons rather than industrial. In the days leading up to and including the UK's controversial decision to allow Huawei to potentially supply equipment to the likes of Vodafone, Telefónica/O2, Three and EE, I'd been seething. With the news being reported in the mainstream media by mostly political correspondents, each weighing up the pros and cons from within the British body politic, as well as objections from the White House (which, we are told, led to a furious row between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump), I was constantly reading about the "UK's 5G network" [singular], despite the fact that anyone with a basic knowledge of the situation would say they should be reading about "networks", given that the 'Big Four' commercial mobile services, plus providers of private networks, would be the main actors in any ruling on who they could or couldn't buy 5G kit from.

Then there was the assumption that 5G could only be referred to in terms of conventional mobile functionality. Many in the telecoms industry agree that downloading Game Of Thrones in a fraction of the time you can on a 4G phone is not going to drive 5G. The bigger opportunity will be applications you'll probably never be aware of, like enabling surgeons to carry out operations remotely or making freight ports significantly more efficient. And, yes, there's always the possibility of driverless cars, although I wouldn't hold your breath for that appearing any time soon. But it's this point of what 5G will be able to do, beyond just making your mobile whizzier, that makes the whole row over Huawei more serious. And not just because of  'trust' concerns. 5G will, potentially, become an all-pervasive communications technology, one which, via a number of varieties (in other words, frequencies and wavelengths), will offer different means of access for different types of access need, including 'machine-to-machine' communications and the so-called 'Internet of Things', where devices and sensors talk to each other, speeding up everything from urban traffic to managing factories remotely from the other side of the world.

While the Huawei row rumbles on even further this weekend, a new twist to China's involvement in the development of 5G has occurred, inadvertently. Later this month Barcelona is to host an event that can actually be measured in terms of the city's annual revenue: Mobile World Congress, a gargantuan trade show for the telecoms industry, and an event on the same scale as CES, the monster techfest in Las Vegas each January. Over the last ten years, MWC has become increasingly about 5G, to such extent that the last one I attended, in 2018, was only about the fifth generation technology. Trade shows like MWC are sometimes seen by attendees and observers alike as bloated beanfeasts, wherein tens of thousands of sales people descend to schmooze. In most companies, the sales process is year-round, though contracts are still signed on stands at MWC, an arcane throwback to the days when account managers would attend their company's booths holding clipboards with blank paperwork at the ready. It's an expensive business for exhibitors - for most major vendors, MWC is their single biggest annual marketing expenditure. At Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia, employee attendance was always rigorously controlled, wisely when you consider that a major stand, plus 500 employees taking part, all staying for four or five days in hotels that clearly up their room rates for the week, adding more expense in Barcelona's tapas bars and restaurants, would run to millions.

Which brings me to yesterday's news that Ericsson, the Swedish vendor and nominally one of the three anchors of MWC (along with Huawei and Nokia), has decided to pull out of the show over concerns for the welfare of its employees and customers caused by the spread of the coronavirus. Other companies, including Korea's LG, the chip company Nvidia and China's other telecom technology vendor, ZTE, have also either pulled out of MWC altogether or announced a reduced presence, again due to concerns about the increasing coronavirus spread. These may only be a few of the 2500 exhibitors each year at MWC, but there are genuine fears that Ericsson's departure will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and that others will pullout in the coming days. Nokia could be one of them, with a spokesperson yesterday saying, somewhat inappropriately given the nature of disease, that "the situation is fluid". Like many MWC exhibitors, Nokia also has a substantial footprint in China, with that country being the supply chain base for much of the technology industry. Many Chinese nationals and expats will be travelling from China to Barcelona.

In all seriousness, however, can the major brands really afford to be absent from what is, arguably, the most important industry event this year for the telecoms industry, in the year that 5G is nominally supposed to arrive? I'm sure, too, that some companies' marketing executives are viewing a pullout, even this late in the day, as an opportunity to save money for other projects, again tapping into some of the cynicism that exists over whether these shows are worth it at all. My personal view is somewhat conflicted: MWC is an unbeatable platform for the sharing of news, views and ideas, for networking and for engaging customers and other 'stakeholders', like journalists and industry analysts. Annually, MWC gives everyone a boost. But it comes at a price. By the time everyone gets to Barcelona, they will have experienced the most intense few weeks of the new year, with many companies also having to report their annual financial results in the run up to the show. I, regularly when I attended, would get to the penultimate show day, the Wednesday, and then succumb to terminal man flu. Getting run down and then sick from all those germs travelling in to Barcelona from across the world was a constant hazard for those working at the show, and often compounded by the late nights and early starts (not complaining, but these shows are punishing). Companies are right to question whether the health risks - weighing above financial concerns by a high margin - really are worth it this year, given how the coronavirus spread seems to be getting worse, with cases now being a long way away from Wuhan where the outbreak began. The next few days could prove crucial, both for an event you've never heard of, and for a technology you probably hadn't heard of, either, until a few weeks ago.