WCXX

The target audience for Top Gear is the kind of man who would think seriously about buying a "hot hatch", like a Peugeot 208 GTI, a Ford Fiesta ST, or a Renault something (it was yellow). The segment that pitted these three cars against each other in a test was the only segment that elicited an unsarcastic response from Clarkson, who waxed lyrical about how the Fiesta was a classic car in the making, and about how we will remember it in future generations like we now remember the Sierra Cosworth and the RS 2000.

The target audience for Top Gear is the kind of man who found that soliloquy both authentic and informative.

But even if I were the target market for Top Gear, I wonder if I would find it a compelling watch from start to finish. It's anchored from a studio, with a live audience. They have to stand around, a bit like the Top of the Pops audience, but without the dancing to stop them looking quite so awkward.

The studio echoes, which means that the chatty bit in the middle – with Clarkson making rather obvious jokes about the introduction of pubs at motorway services, and James May rather obviously taking the mickey out of Hammond for living in the country – was, with the darkened studio audience hopping invisibly from foot to foot, just excruciating.

And the pace of the programme – well, it seemed to me like a magazine programme from a different era. (Which I suppose, in a way, it is – this was the first episode of series 20.) There was a race between Clarkson and May up the New Zealand coast, which took up maybe 20 minutes or more (of footage which all looked much the same to me, but then I'm not the target audience). There was the interminable 'Star in a Reasonably Priced Car', which surely must have had some hysterical underlying joke to be worth so much airtime – but I failed to see the punchline.

This is an incredibly popular programme. There must, clearly, be a pivotal bit of male philosophy that I'm failing to understand. I think Hammond summed it up best, when he was driving the Renault whatever-it-was. He criticised the flappy gearbox – the gearbox! – saying that "changing gear is a vital form of self-expression". Maybe his tongue was in his cheek, I couldn't tell. But changing gear is not a vital form of self-expression. It really isn't. And with that, I'm switching back over to TLC.

Follow Telegraph TV & Radio on Twitter