After fears regarding health and safety, Top Gear has pulled out of the Italian Job. The BBC TV show was originally going to film a challenge that marked the cliff-hanger climax of the film.
In the epic climax of the original 1969 film, the thieves’ coach almost drives over the edge of a cliff, ending up teetering precariously over the edge of the cliff with their chest of gold in one side of the bus and them in the other. Charlie Croker, played by Sir Michael Caine then says ‘Hang on a minute lads; I’ve got a great idea.
As it turned out, this great idea was never discovered and the audience were left not knowing whether it worked or not.
In October last year the Royal Society of Chemistry asked a group of experts to try to work out a method to take the gold within half an hour without the use of a helicopter and prove it by mathematics. It was an IT manager from Surrey who finally beat the other candidates to find a solution to safely remove over three tonnes of gold.
The presenter of Top Gear then contacted the RSC saying that they wanted to film the scenario.
In the first place, four windows would be broken, two of the large, central ones smashed outwards and two smaller ones just above the front axles smashed inwards. After this, a man would be lowered into one of the smaller windows to let down the inflated forward tires which were acting like springs, making the bus rock precariously on the edge of the cliff.
Once this was done, the nearly full fuel tank would then have to be empty and once all this was achieved, the ten gang members trapped on the bus would then be able to get off it and further weigh the bus down with rocks.
Unfortunately, however, Top Gear decided to pull out due to health and safety concerns. It was the stated to the Daily Telegraph that the programme had looked into the costs and the health and safety issues and said that it would be too expensive to make the bus safe enough to film the scene.
Although the Top Gear team is known for taking risks and experienced too, they decided that this was going to be a step too far.
The BBC stated that it was very disappointed since it would have been very popular to recreate the scene from one of the most popular car movies of all time and that it would have helped to promote chemistry. However, they defended themselves by saying that the decision was the right one and that they would be better off spending their finite budget on other more important things.
Last week, the BBC ordered Top Gear to use fewer expensive supercars and allocate more screen time to cheaper and smaller models. Proposals to feature Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini have been abandoned and older classics like the Lanchester and Citroen Ami 8 are to be put in their place.
