Top Gear as we know it has been around since 2002. As a 7 year old at the time I loved it. I didn't miss a single episode until around 2009. Since then I have fallen further and further out of love with the nation’s favourite motoring program.

The thing is, I don’t know why. I'm not sure if it’s the fault of the loud, tall one or the other two.

Clarkson is a dick. It’s obvious to anyone who lives on Earth. From racist outbreaks on air and in public, to allegedly punching and harassing his own producer. It’s hard to think of a worse role model.

James May on the other hand is intelligent and witty. In any episodes I’ve caught recently, May has been the one to make me laugh.

But mention TopGear to anyone and who’s name comes up? Clarkson’s, attached to a positive sentence or not. He’s always been the star the show. Even though James May is clearly a better person, he doesn’t bring the carnage and chaos that the public craves and Clarkson possesses.

I think this may be what put me off. The message you get from TopGear is that if you’re loud and you do ‘controversial’ things, people will like you. Yet if you don’t present yourself as a character you lose out.

Its not just in TV that we see this either. In politics there’s weird blokes like Farage and Boris Johnson. Both would not even be considered if they weren't so caricaturishly loopy.

Farage and Ukip seem to have no policy of their own, it would seem that disagreeing with everyone else’s is enough to constitute a political party. And yet in a recent pole 10% of the public said they would vote for him in the coming election.

It’s incredible. There’s Boris Johnson too. A man who finds it difficult to ride a zip wire or a bicycle like a human, yet is in control of Britain’s capital. For no foreseeable reason other than the fact that he is a ‘character’.

Its really quite scary to think that a large number of people will support someone based on how loudly they do something and not what they actually do.

But we can’t really blame them. Its not Clarkson’s fault, it’s not Farage’s fault, it’s not Boris’ fault. It’s our fault. We put them on these pedestals. If we look at TopGear again: May and Hammond rarely did anything to upstage their counterpart or stop him from being a twat, and we still watched in our millions as he persisted to go on borderline racist rants.

These people are a product of their environment, an environment that we, as viewers and voters created.