UK's Top Gear get pelted with rocks by rednecks.

I suppose it would depend on how hard they were trying to cause damage or injury. As far as we can tell, no one was hurt, no one was injured. For all we know, they threw a handful of stones at their fenders.

All the drama there is manufactured. From the convenient loss of video to the ominous music to the reactions of the hosts to their situation. i wouldn't be surprised if they had the Blair Witch guys directing this segment.

So it's ok to throw rocks at people's cars as long as no one gets hurt.

Got it.

They called a truck load of men to sort out what would have just taken a simple " fuck off were not giving you any fuel". It's hardly understandable behavior for what was basically a prank. The lack of sense of humor at the situation is the most disturbing thing.

Really without the loss of video it would still have been pretty shocking TV. These guys arn't actors they looked pretty fucking scared.

But who knows what that truckload of guys were doing? No one knows. Maybe they were just standing there looking tough. This video is a crass manipulation of stereotypes using schlock horror film tricks. It's all there, the wide eyed innocents, the scary rednecks, cutting away before you see anything actually happen and just letting the audience's imagination fill in the rest.

They wre already leaving so why call anyone , or throw rocks?

One of the guys Richard hammond was just returned the the show after a near fatal car crash that they though might leave him brain dead. It was a pretty big deal over here. I very much doubt the producers thought for one second that it would have this much of a reaction. I feel sorry if we are expected to live in a world that has such little sense of gravity for a situation and such little sense of humor.


I found it funny and i most certainly don't think for a minute it is a situation isolated to that part of the world. But i will not accept it as being understandable. That would take evolution back quite a few years if it did.

It's a possibility i will accept, cause we dont know and i cant argue against it without fact. But I'm not too sure they would have gone to those lengths. It was a pretty good piece of television even without that scene and they only needed to fill a half an hour gap, but they did an hour because of it

How did they antagonize ?

'Man love rulz'

'Hillary for president'

'Nascar Sucks'

'Country and western is rubbish'

It's all pretty weak really, unless I'm missing something that warranted a stoning in all that ? You've always struck me as really intelligent so i would be incredibly surprised if you did.

Did they just portray it that way ? Well maybe they did, but we don't have the evidence to the contrary so i really cant comment either way.

i grew up in a hick town, and i've had friends get beaten up just for being in the wrong place and the wrong time. i've had to leave places under exactly the same circumstances: if you're different at all, expect a gang of dim-witted rednecks to show up and threaten you with violence.

fortunately where i lived, there was also a thriving hippie community to take refuge in.

chris rock on o.j. = "black people too happy, white people too mad"

me on this video = "brittish too amused, americans too offended"

:: shrug ::

that was fucking awesome

Oh please. Anyone defending the hicks in the video need to examine this again.

It's always the most loud-mouthed, "I'm so tough" imbeciles who have the thinnest skin and would do something like violently gang up on a few people who didn't threaten or injure them at all because of some words they saw that they don't agree with. Come on. Those rednecks are the biggest thumb-sucking sissies I've ever seen. Ooooh something weird and unfamiliar LET'S HURT THEM SO IT GOES AWAY.

In my opinion, the camera crew should have ducked into the vans, pulled onto the street so they weren't on private property anymore, and all called the cops saying a group of men in a truck just pulled up and started throwing rocks at their heads which could have severely injured them and their property. Had they responded inappropriately to that, they'd have to answer to their department's poor performance once half the world saw them on Sunday.

Totally inexcusable that this "civilized" country still has people who act like cro-magnon, animalistic idiots like that. They're just as bad as the Americans who have "graduated" from violence against what offends them to suing every time anything in life doesn't go their way.

That's called a TV joke. You know.... jokes. But as they said in the video: "irony deficiency"

So they should have whined to the cops because they got exactly the reaction they were fishing for?

You're right, I'm sure they added those clanging noises in post.

As I said before, this was staged in an much as an episode of MTV's Real World is staged. They put certain ingredients in place to get a certain reaction and then edit accordingly, but it's not necessarily fake.

Likewise, yes I'm sure they were expecting some reaction from the locals but I don't think anyone expected to get stoned. And I certainly don't think they made it up.

It's a bit sad that such behavior is being defended. As I said, I've seen much worse in Europe but savagery is savagery wherever it is.

Indeed.

Funny how skeptical members of SG can be, but only when it's the outcome they want.

I think gfvella said it best here:

Nasty suspicious me suspects that a bunch of foreign TV personalities got exactly the results that they wanted.

For that matter, maybe they were out there all day, stopped at thirty gas stations, and were treated overwhelmingly well until they got bored and started actively antagonizing the woman. Who knows. All I know is I don't trust anyone on TV.

Word.
Also, the fact that this is a British TV show just makes me less empathetic with the antagonizers.*

*That is to say: not because they are British, but because they are trying to portray Americans as bible eating, cousin fucking, monsters

It's a car show dude. It's about cars.

These are not the terrorists you're looking for.

You know what? You're right. They do stereotype Americans on the show, and Americans did a damn good job of living up to that stereotype.

They got what they wanted? Yeah, sadly enough, they did.

The nearest thing to this that I've seen before was during the World Cup. A journalist drove a cheap little car, with more than its fair share of England flags, around Glasgow. He got some good humored comments, did some interviews in a pub, the pub had one of those mini flags of all nations things hanging up, with the England flag burnt off. They finished off by leaving the car parked in a rough part of town, where it got smashed up by teenagers.

They also got the full run of accusations that they were just setting people up to look bad. It would be a real surprise to find that Top Gear had used any of the cruder faking methods listed in this thread, like visiting 30 towns and not mentioned it. The BBC take a very dim view of deliberate misrepresentation.

Well they sure would like us to believe they did.
Even if the footage was completely accurate, that doesn't really change my opinion that Top Gear instigated the whole thing in order take the footage back home and gasp at "the Americans".

And I certainly don't think these guys would be getting as much support if they had decided to incite a less sympathetic group

This is very true.

This wasn't about the British mocking all Americans, this was the British mocking hicks. If an American TV crew were to come over here and 'deliberately incite' our own peasant pikey underclass, I'd laugh my fucking arse off.

i remember that, i'm sure i caught the end on tv

exactly,

you need to take it with a pinch of salt, but I've watched that episode a couple of times and to me it looks like there just getting out of there car when the women starts walking over to them

plus there not actors in the slightest, there journalists and presenters, and they genuinely look scared