Patagonia Special TONITE!

[Watchcame430]

I just wish they would go back to reviewing cars although they wont due to ratings, stunning place and I thought Jezza's reason on why he likes the 928 was actually quite touching although no doubt some idiot will moan about what he said. Struck a chord with me anyway as I was in a similar situation back in July but didn't manage to make it in time.

What did he say about the 928? I didn't see the first episode. Thanks


I still can't believe they are taking us for mugs on the number plate.

 

[Watchcame430]

Agreed. Plus Argentinians know the Falklands as the Malvinas, so the "FKL" would be meaningless to most.

Silly stunt, but I bet it boosted the ratings a LOT, which was the point I guess.

As for the rest of the program; I thought it had some funny moments (SWMBO liked it) and was a serious advert for Lotus reliability! LOL! But, a well worn format, just hanging on by a thread...

I notice the CIA call it Falklands and Malvinas on their website. Surprising given we are supposed to be 'friendly countries, shoulder to shoulder' and all that stuff ...

 

[wemorgan]

What did he say about the 928? I didn't see the first episode. Thanks

Top Gear Patagonia Special - Open Thread

 

[Paddcomp]

I still can't believe they are taking us for mugs on the number plate.

On a 928 forum the car was checked as having the same registration since 1991. Also 982 isn't dissimilar to 928 which is common to have on a car of this type.

 

[wemorgan]

I think he meant - I can't believe any Argentinian looked at that number plate and made any associated to the Malvinas. "H982 FKL" Really!?

 

[Doodle]

People with an axe to grind will find a way to twist any old sh*t to suit their agenda

 

[Meldrew2]

On a 928 forum the car was checked as having the same registration since 1991. Also 982 isn't dissimilar to 928 which is common to have on a car of this type.

H1VAE probably the initials of previous owner…

.

 

[Dryce]

I notice the CIA call it Falklands and Malvinas on their website. Surprising given we are supposed to be 'friendly countries, shoulder to shoulder' and all that stuff ...

The USA government machinery gets quite antagonised by the remnants of the British Empire. That is unless (eg. Diego Garcia) it happens to be something convenient to its needs.

 

[Watchcame430]

Top Gear Patagonia Special - Open Thread

That is very touching ... See why he was a fan. I had one a few years ago and loved it.

 

[Watchcame430]

On a 928 forum the car was checked as having the same registration since 1991. Also 982 isn't dissimilar to 928 which is common to have on a car of this type.

I am sure the data is right ... I am just saying it was no coincidence that this car with that plate was selected. It was deliberate or the odds of it being a coincidence are 100s of thousands to one.

 

[BTB 500]

I am just saying it was no coincidence that this car with that plate was selected. It was deliberate or the odds of it being a coincidence are 100s of thousands to one.

Not quite sure what you're saying here. Do you mean they decided on a 928 then deliberately picked one that had a registration they thought might wind people up? Or that they somehow searched through the number plates for every cheap V8-engined car for sale in the UK till they found one they liked, which happened to be on a 928?

 

[grober]

http://rt.com/news/218371-sovereignty-dispute-argentina-aircrafts/
As I said "Out of their depth"

 

[brucemillar]

Not quite sure what you're saying here. Do you mean they decided on a 928 then deliberately picked one that had a registration they thought might wind people up? Or that they somehow searched through the number plates for every cheap V8-engined car for sale in the UK till they found one they liked, which happened to be on a 928?

Hmmm this needs resoving the Clarkson way:

Eeny Meany Miney Mo, Catch a N***** by it's toe. Oops I never meant to say that sorry. I meant to say Slope. Ooops, no I didn't, sorry. It's not like I murdered a prostitute is it. Oops I never meant to say that sorry

 

[Giantvanman]

Hmmm this needs resoving the Clarkson way:

Eeny Meany Miney Mo, Catch a N***** by it's toe. Oops I never meant to say that sorry. I meant to say Slope. Ooops, no I didn't, sorry. It's not like I murdered a prostitute is it. Oops I never meant to say that sorry

You missed out being shot in front of the family.:

 

[brucemillar]

You missed out being shot in front of the family.:

I could go on and on and on and o.............

You get the gist. If JC said the sky was blue I would be looking outside and upwards.

 

[Bellow]

Eeny Meany Miney Mo, Catch a N***** by it's toe. Oops I never meant to say that sorry. I meant to say Slope. Ooops, no I didn't, sorry. It's not like I murdered a prostitute is it. Oops I never meant to say that sorry

And the fuss that ensued! Yet, TG stage a riot and 'frame' Argentina for it and not a peep. Not how it normally works.

 

[Dryce]

IIt was deliberate or the odds of it being a coincidence are 100s of thousands to one.

Actually the odds are probably in favour of this happening - given that there was a 928 with that number in the first place - are actually a lot better than you realise. Moreover given the few 928s available to buy at any time then if one has that number the odds become lower.

OTOH if a programme researcher spotted the 928 and came up with the idea based on the number .....

I think the question would be at what point the 928 was chosen.

I would add - that I'm stupid enough not to see the issue with the number before it was pointed out to me - so I don't automatically think it was deilberate.

 

[Bellow]

I would add - that I'm stupid enough not to see the issue with the number before it was pointed out to me - so I don't automatically think it was deilberate.

Sh!t!!! The significance of the BE 11 END plate has just registered!
Definitely stirring it with that.

 

[grober]

CLARKSON'S ACCOUNT as it was to appear in the Sunday Times--believe it or not.
A Top Gear film shoot in the wilds of Argentina ended in a dramatic escape. Jeremy Clarkson reveals how he hid under a bed from an armed mob baying for his blood

It all started to go wrong while we were filming on a mountain in the world’s southernmost ski resort, just outside the city of Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego.

We knew Ushuaia was the port from which the General Belgrano had sailed on its doomed voyage at the start of the Falklands War and we knew that anti-British feelings still run hard and deep, here at the bottom of the world.

As a result we were on our best behaviour. We were posing for all photographs, and happily accepting requests for autographs. The sun was out. All was calm. We were even referring to the slopes as “gradients” Certainly there was no suggestion that we had walked into the middle of a war we thought had ended 32 years ago. But then came word from the bottom of the mountain. Some protesters had arrived and were keen to let everyone know they were unhappy with our visit. Our producers tried to explain that we were there to film at the ski resort and then to host a game of car football in the city. England v Argentina. The Bottom of the World Cup we were going to call it.

They were not listening. They were angry. They said that they were not violent but that a group of men from the local truckers’ trade union were on their way. And that when they arrived things would definitely turn nasty. Our local fixers advised that we stop filming immediately, leave the cars on the gradients and go to a nearby hotel.

“This is a mafia state,” said one onlooker. “Best you do as you’re told.”

So we did, but going to the hotel did not work. A gang of people were waiting there. They said they were war veterans, which seemed unlikely as most were in their twenties and thirties. Bonnets were banged. Abuse was hurled. The police arrived and immediately breathalysed Andy Wilman, our executive producer — we’re not sure why.

Richard Hammond, James May and I bravely hid under the beds in a researcher’s room while protesters went through the hotel looking for us. The car park was filling up. More were arriving. This was starting to get ugly.

Back at home, newspapers were saying I had caused the problem by arriving in this political tinderbox in a Porsche bearing the numberplate H982FKL, which if you turned the H into a 1 and transposed the K and the L, could have been seen as a reference to the 1982 Falklands War.

This, however, was untrue. The car had indeed arrived in Argentina with those plates, but two days into our journey, when we were in Chile, a Twitter user pointed out the problem so we removed them.

When we arrived in Tierra del Fuego the car had no plate at all on the front and a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers on the back. And no, it wasn’ W3WON. Which it would have been if I’d been trying to ruffle feathers.

The numberplate then wasn’t the issue. But something was causing more and more people to arrive at the hotel. Twitter was rammed with messages from locals saying they wanted blood. One said they were going to barbecue us and eat the meat.

“Burn them. Burn their cars,” said another. Mob rule was in the driving seat.

Government officials then stepped in saying we were no longer welcome in the city, that our safety could not be guaranteed and that we needed to leave Argentina immediately. Plainly they had given us permission to visit simply so they could make political capital from ejecting us when we arrived.

The problem was: how do you leave when the streets are filled with mobs with pickaxe handles, paving stones and bricks? No one had an answer to that one.

Chile is a spit away across the Beagle Channel but we weren’t allowed to cross it because Argentina says it owns the land on the other side, too. We therefore gathered up as many possessions as we could, rounded up the girls from our party and made a dash for the airport.

That night we were in Buenos Aires among sensible Argentinians who couldn’t believe what had happened. And the next morning we were back in Britain.

We felt that with us three gone the situation might calm down. It didn’t.

We had left behind 29 people; cameramen, sound recordists, fixers, locals and producers. They had to make their escape overland in a ragtag collection of hired 4x4s, trucks and the three “star” cars that they had been told to remove from the ski resort.

They faced a long, bumpy and gruelling six-hour trek to the Chilean border and safety. But in the first town the locals were ready. A lorry was blocking the road and as our convoy approached, it reversed at speed towards them, forcing our guys onto the verges, which were filled with people who made it plain they wanted blood. Bricks were hurled, windscreens were smashed and two of the party were cut by flying glass. But they made it through.

And then they had a problem. The next city was Rio Grande. And the word from there was that 300 cars and thousands of locals were setting up an ambush. This turned out to be true.

The British embassies in Chile and Argentina were doing their best to get a police escort. And the nine of us who had escaped were in a hotel room in Buenos Aires working through the night to find a plane and an airfield from which they could get out because, make no mistake, lives were at stake.

Meanwhile, a chase had begun. Our guys were being herded towards the ambush. So they abandoned the star cars, which were filled with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of camera equipment — and my new hat — at the side of the road. And took off across the frozen wilderness to a remote border post where there isn’t even a road. You get into Chile by fording a river.

We had to get a tractor there to pull them across. And it had to be a fast tractor because we knew our convoy was being chased by the thugs. And you try finding a fast tractor at 2am, in the middle of nowhere. All credit to producer Al Renton that he did it.

With the batteries dying in the convoy’s satellite phone, we lost contact and for six hours had no clue whether they had been caught. Whether our friends were alive or dead. That was a long night. I still haven’t had a chance to speak to any of them but I know they were held at the Argentine border from 3am, when they arrived, until 11am. Why? To allow the thugs to catch up? Who knows? All I really care about is that they are now in Chile and safe.

Tierra del Fuego is not listed as a problem for visitors by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office but there is no question in my mind that we walked into a trap.

I know mischievous newspapers in Britain have said it was all my fault because of the numberplate. But that wasn’t even mentioned down there because the plate in question had been replaced.

No. We were English (apart from one Aussie camera guy and a Scottish doctor) and that was a good enough reason for the state government to send 29 people into a night filled with rage and flying bricks.

“Look what we’ve done,” they will say at the next elections. “Sent the English packing.”

That is true. We got our ****s kicked. But there is a glimmer of a silver lining in the whole sorry affair. The game of football would have been a good ending for our Christmas special. But we’ve been gifted something even better by the region’s politicians and their rent-a-mob cohorts.

I’d like to say “gotcha” at this point. But I won’t.

Argentinians denounce '200 years of lies'

Argentine officials and newspapers seized the opportunity of the row over Top Gear’s visit to bash the British in general and the BBC in particular. One official even used it to restate Argentina’s claim to the Falklands, writes Clare Pennington and George Arbuthnott.

Jeremy Clarkson insisted he was unaware that his Porsche’s H982 FKL numberplate could be taken as an allusion to the 1982 conflict and had it removed as soon as he was alerted by Twitter protests.

But Mariano Plecity, the regional government minister in Tierra del Fuego where the incident happened, demanded a written apology from Clarkson and the Top Gear production team, stressing the importance to the region of the Malvinas, as the Falklands are known in Argentina.

“You have to take into account that the Malvinas belong to Tierra del Fuego and the city of Ushuaia is the capital of the Malvinas,” he said. “The licence plate number on the car was a provocation and a very big offence in all of Tierra del Fuego.”

Plecity said the most important thing for the local government had been that Clarkson “leave without his life being threatened, because had he stayed longer, the response from society would have been much bigger” Clarin, the top-selling newspaper in Argentina, rejected Clarkson’s explanation that the use of the numberplate had not been deliberate.

It quoted a member of the war veterans’ association as saying the British had a long-running habit of being dishonest.

“They say that they did not want to hurt our feelings but they have been lying to us for 200 years,” said Osvaldo Hilliar.

The strength of anti-British feeling in Tierra del Fuego is illustrated by the twinning earlier this year of Rio Grande, the province’s industrial capital, with Algeciras, a Spanish city near the British territory of Gibraltar, to which Spain has long maintained a claim.

Diario Popular, a Buenos Aires newspaper, said Top Gear had a record of offending foreign countries. It claimed Clarkson had “taunted Asians” with a reference to a “slope” on a bridge in Burma, for which an apology was later made.

The Top Gear presenters also previously risked a riot by driving into redneck country in the Deep South of America with cars including a pick-up truck with the words “man-love rules OK” on it.

 

[Bellow]

No explanation for the presence of the fabricated BE....... plates from JC.
They more stumbled into a mess of their own making than were lured.