GUILTY SECRET: TOP GEAR

My name is Sarah. I recycle my newspapers, compost my leftover veg, and regularly threaten to vote Green every election if Labour don’t buck their ideas up. I have never passed my driving test and either walk or use public transport to get around London. I have even investigated installing a solar panel in my garden.

I love Top Gear.

Why? It's all about men driving cars around race tracks or around leafy Surrey lanes. Or men cooing over useless sports vehicles that come equipped with a personalised micro-climate, the equivalent of 15 stampeding elephants for an engine, and seats made from the skin of unborn baby marmosets. Then they argue about which is the most expensive, and consequently, the most useless.

The Tall Old One (Jeremy Clarkson) regularly challenges the Other Two - Richard Hammond (short but cute in a crazed hamster kind of way), and James May (I'd say he was dressed by his wife but it says here he’s single…)- to travel to, say, Oslo using public transport while he drives overland from Guildford in a 60 squillion pound Mercedes supercar.

Jeremy wins – usually because the other two can’t read a bus timetable or think that flogging the guts out of a powerboat in inclement weather is a good idea. Mind you, I have never seen a face as green as Hammond's as he leaned over the side of the boat and was sick at 70 knots. That’s an awful lot of slightly pissed-off herring.

Given that the Other Two’s strategy was so daft, Clarko could probably have won it in a 15-year-old Volvo and used the money saved to pay off the national debt of Burkina Faso or something.

But that’s not really the point.

The point is that this team knows that what they do is wasteful, profligate and irresponsible, and they quite sincerely don’t care. A proper motoring programme, as Top Gear used to be, discusses sensible family cars, fuel efficiency, safety features and so on, while driving gently around Surrey lanes to demonstrate the car’s handling. That’s what the manufacturers like to see. You’re asleep already, aren’t you? I'ts not that they ignore the family car, but they get their mums to do all that stuff.

By appealing to our inner petrolhead, Top Gear has hit on a winner. Take three scruffy presenters old enough to know better, who know even Kofi Annan would probably give up saving the world to spend the rest of his days playing tiddlywinks with old Volvos; a bunch of cars that nobody could ever afford even if they auctioned their entire family on eBay; a minor celebrity racing a family car; ban being sensible, and there you have it. Perfect Sunday veg-out TV.

And our 2001 Polo doesn’t even make it into the Seriously Uncool list.