You Can Now Watch Classic Top Gear Literally Non-Stop On YouTube

Top Gear may not be returning any time soon (if it ever does at all), but the BBC is still very much not done with the brand. In fact, its digital output of all things TG only seems to be increasing, and that’s just reached its logical conclusion because you can now quite literally watch Top Gear forever.

That’s not some Clarkson-esque hyperbole – the BBC has launched a non-stop, 24-hours-a-day livestream of segments from the show’s classic era.

It can be found on the Top Gear Classic YouTube channel, launched by the BBC last year to post clips from the Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May era, which lasted from 2003 to 2015, when it all ended in rather unfortunate fashion.

While it does seem to be a roughly 12-hour loop, it's a wide spread of clips: as we type this, it’s playing the segment from 2004’s series four where Hammond and May test the Ford C-Max and Renault Scenic by using them as minicabs.

Before that, we saw bits of the legendary Bugatti Veyron versus plane race, and before that, James driving NASA’s ultimately-abandoned modern-day moon buggy. Basically, it’s a grab-bag of random bits – some famous, others less well-remembered – from TG’s most memorable lineup.

It’s been streaming non-stop for a week now, and frankly, we’re a bit embarrassed we hadn’t come across it earlier. It looks like it’ll be limited to the Clarkson-Hammond-May era – we’ve not seen anything from later iterations of the show (or indeed its original, much more consumer-focused 1977 to 2001 form), and the channel’s other uploads are all of the best-loved era, too.

It’s not the only way of accessing classic TG – in the UK, at least, the BBC’s iPlayer streaming service now has every episode of the modern-day show, including the first series where May’s place in the lineup was filled instead by Jason Dawe. With this livestream, though, we at least know our working day has a new soundtrack.