I must admit that I cried during this television programme. It was excellent, heart-warming and inspirational. The original series was wonderful but this special was even better. What am I talking about? Essentially I'm talking about toys and James May. Not just any toys but real toys. The toys you had to partly make yourself, and then test, and then maybe modify or plain destroy and try again. What can realistically be done with such toys on a large scale? In the original series they made a real house out of Lego, a 23 metre bridge out of Meccano, a garden out of plasticene, a full scale Airfix Spitfire, a replica of Brooklands race track from Scalextric and a 60km model railway from Barnstaple to Bideford. The train set episode was an awesome spectacle and my personal favourite but now it has an equal in something very special.
Suppose that you used to like to play with homemade gliders, paper planes, or just about anything that flew. Somewhere deep inside there was an wondrous sense of achievement at getting your construction down to the end of the garden from an upstairs window. You could always wonder, however, how much a better achievement you could accomplish if you could only get a little bit higher for the launch. What if you could scale up your model and launch it from thousands of feet in the air? How far could you get it to go then? As always with 'Toy Stories', James the awesome man-child, starts from a lofty idealistic premise of crossing the English Channel and, after some necessary compromises, manages to get his glider to cross a twenty two mile distance.
Now, you may think this is all rather childish, and from a certain point of view I might agree but in general I don't. It's uplifting. These toys, which have been largely forgotten in the last few decades, are some of the best ever to be produced and have been upstaged only by flashing lights and plastics with no scope for creativity at all apart from some fleeting enjoyable role play. There's something infectious in the idea of building the things you're going to be playing with, or even in the fact that the building is the playing, and it so rarely happens any more. I never made a model plane, although there were many many paper planes, but I was mesmerised by the soaring glider as it made its spectacular record-breaking flight, by the palpable joy of the following helicopter pilot and crew, and by James himself and the people who helped him in the doing. Oh, and by the way, the glider made it. I won't tell you where it made it to, as that would be a spoiler, but it did make it.
The key to it all is James May, the nice one from the 'Top Gear' crew, the one you think is pretending the least. James May, the man you'd actually like to have a chat with, and the man who gets all the unfair treatment from the Top Gear 'Other Two'. James May is the key to this whole show, as he really cares about these projects. It would have been easy to make a second series and milk it a bit more with some half-hearted projects but they didn't. They waited for something they could care about and get behind, and that James specifically could talk about with the emotion he has. Everything that works in this is allowed to work by his presence. He facilitates great television, and that's why I cried as an oversized model glider soared more than twenty miles across open water at vertigo-inducing heights, and then circled as it lost height for its landing, and finally did land. Contrary to outdated thought it is manly to cry, especially after such achievement.
Well done to James and all the people who made it possible. Please don't spoil 'Toy Stories' with half-hearted future specials. Do what you've done so far and wait and see if there's something you burn to do and then do it.
O.
(Program broadcast on 23 December 2012, at 2130, on BBC Two. Long live the BBC!)
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