Every Top Gear fan remembers the little excursion that Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond took through the southeastern corridor and the very warm reception they received in rural Alabama. For those of you who haven't seen that episode or still can't grasp the concept of sarcasm, you can watch the whole thing here. The long and the short of it is the challenge ended at a backwoods gas station where a group of nearby hillbillies attacked their cars and the crew's vans with rocks, sticks and just about anything their beer stained hands could grab without the need of an opposable thumb.
Hammond wrote in his new memoir Or Is That Just Me? that fans constantly ask him if those rednecks were the genuine article or "just made up for the telly." Hammond not only insisted in an excerpt from the book printed in The Times that they were real people, but they also gave him one of the biggest scares of his life.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-08-2009 @ 9:38AM
wulfn1 said...
Lol! ya don't mess wif dem Hillbillies!
It really did look contrived. Though I imagine they managed to insult those people enough to cause them to be irritated, I get the feeling the producers encouraged them to "ad-lib" a bit.
So,... they probably were in fact "real" and "angry" but I don't think they were THAT angry...
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10-08-2009 @ 11:51AM
sid said...
With the gay stuff they had written all over each other's cars, they went looking for it. They would have gotten a reaction from someone anywhere in American, but I guess only in the deep south would they have been sent running for their lives.
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