random RPF-ish thoughts

[kindkit]

Brought to you mostly by this evening's viewing of Top Gear (from 2005) and Good News Week (from 1998).



1) Having watched the TG episode where the guys get their mums to test drive cars, I now want fic about James and his mum. A nice little character-driven vignette where they drink tea and talk about James's incredibly obvious crush on Richard Hammond life. Or, alternatively, Clarkson's own cracktastic AU in which James's mum is actually the Stig.

2) One of the many pleasures of watching GNW is seeing Paul McDermott get more and more camp as the series continues. Although I'm not sure if camp is exactly the right word--it's close, but I think of camp as being a bit more narrow, somehow. A bit more codified? Whereas Paul is always breaking codes and conventions, and in some ways he comes across as most feminine when he's at his most outrageously hypermasculine (like yelling insults and occasionally threats at the audience).

3) Top Gear crossovers I want:

a) The one where the guys go to Australia for a challenge of some kind (*resolutely ignores the existence of the Australian version of TG*) and one of them is lured into appearing on GNW afterwards. It would be a radically different story depending on who the guest was: Paul and James would bond over some obscure thing they both adore, Paul and Richard would flirt throughout the show but have nothing to say to each other afterwards, and Paul and Jeremy . . . that might end in a stabbing, or at least a shouty drunken argument about British colonialism, the class system, and whether people who don't drive should be allowed to vote.

b) The one where, during the prep for the polar special, Richard's trainer in dogsledding technique is a nice, helpful RCMP corporal called Fraser. And eventually Fraser invites Richard to his house, where Richard meets Fraser's partner Ray Kowalski and there's some tentative conversation about how to bring oneself to defy convention and admit to being in love with one's (male) best friend, and the inestimable value of long trips across the frozen north for clearing the mind, enhancing the emotions, and thus making such admissions possible.

c) The one where the Doctor (Eight, I think, if only for the haircut jokes) picks up James May (er, not that way . . . probably) and they travel through time and space tinkering with things, and James gets to keep a sonic screwdriver as a memento, although the Doctor disables several hundred of the settings first.

4) And a final observation, gleaned not from TG but from the episode of Oz and James's Big Gay Wine Adventure where James stomps grapes--James has pretty feet. They're slender and well-shaped and I utterly deny having a foot fetish, but there's something charming about bare feet, especially when said feet belong to someone who's a bit buttoned-up and reserved. I felt the same way about Paul McDermott's bare feet in one of the GNW video blogs, and even more so when he said that being able to go barefoot was his favorite thing about Australia.