Getting the show started was also not easy. The British countryside is littered with seemingly disused airfields, but when you go to the Ministry of Defence to ask if you could maybe rent one of them, the answer’s always the same. “ ’Fraid not, old chap. We need it for parachute training/glider practice/storage etc. And besides, if Jerry needs a punch on the nose again, it wouldn’t do if we couldn’t land our kites because Richard Madeley was driving along the runway in a Suzuki Liana.”

Eventually Andy found Dunsfold in Surrey, which was close to where all the celebrities lived. It also had miles of smooth tarmac and several hangars, and it didn’t belong to the MoD. So he did the deal and we were away. Nearly. Because we needed two other presenters. Three’s the right number because two people can always gang up on the third. That way, someone was always being bullied. Screen tests gave us Richard Hammond and a chap called Jason Dawe, and there we were: ready to go.

In its heyday we were cramming upwards of 800 people into that hangar — 300 more than the council permitted. And still there was a waiting list for tickets that was 18 years long. But it didn’t start out like that. In the first season Andy was using his own money to bribe audience members to stay to the end. The TV viewing figures weren’t that great either, so it was decided that we needed a new presenter. But who? The BBC had all sorts of politically correct ideas on this, but I wanted the man with the pudding-bowl haircut who had driven the first incarnation of Top Gear into the ground. I thought his hair was funny. It still is. I don’t think he understood the show at all and I’m damn certain he never understood what it became, but sticking to my guns on James was, as it turned out, the right thing to do. One day he’ll probably say thank you.

Even with James on board things didn’t really pick up, but then one day, in September 2006, at Elvington airfield in Yorkshire, Richard started a new hobby. Going upside down while traveling at extremely high speed.

I was told about his crash as I was driving round Hammersmith roundabout, and it didn’t seem like he was too badly injured. They’d got him out of the car and he’d tried to do a piece to camera. Plucky little f***er, as always. But then one of the crew noticed his eyes weren’t really pointing in the same direction, so off to hospital he went.

I woke the next morning, turned on the TV and couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. Richard Hammond was in a critical condition. I arrived at the hospital about seven minutes later, where I met Mindy, his long-suffering but very stoic wife, James, Andy and various BBC wallahs. Richard was in a bad way. He might not live and if he did he might be a drooling vegetable.

It took six months for him to come back to work, and were there any long-term effects? Yes, if I’m honest. Two things. His memory is shot and his epic crash propelled Top Gear to the centre of the stage and then, with an almighty clang, into the orchestra pit.

People started watching in large numbers, and while many enjoyed our refusal to subscribe to what was then called political correctness, some found it irritating when we used expressions such as, for instance, “drooling vegetable”. Which meant that pretty soon Top Gear wasn’t the show that bloody nearly killed Richard Hammond. It was the show that sat in the BBC schedules like a big blue skid mark. It became a dartboard for the left. I’ll be honest with you. Richard doesn’t like being in trouble, so he hated the constant attacks. And I suspect James found some of the goings on uncomfortable as well. But I love being in trouble, so I was very happy. Andy’s the same. We went to the same school and all we learnt there is how to get into trouble, and then how to get out of it.

It came in handy. Sometimes we pleaded innocence. Sometimes we flat-out lied. And sometimes we argued that, in the big scheme of things, we hadn’t been that bad. In our minds we never were. We were just naughty schoolkids trying to annoy our lefty BBC bosses. Who, to us, were the teachers. It was fun. They’d say every week, “You can’t say that,” and we’d reply, “Er, you can, actually. We know this because we just did.” We never won a Bafta. I don’t think we were ever even nominated.

Behind the schoolboy naughtiness, though, Top Gear was a very well-made programme. As a general rule the shooting ratio for British television is 12:1. You shoot twelve hours for every hour you show. The rest ends up on the cutting room floor. With Attenborough this goes up to something like 500:1. The cameras shoot a lot of snow before the polar bear emerges. But Top Gear’s ratio was 1,200:1. As Andy used to say, “That’s how shit you three are. I have to throw away 1,199 hours of you talking drivel to find one hour where you’re not.”

The amazing thing, though, is that Andy really would watch all of the rushes. And there was a similar attention to detail with how the show was constructed. If we thought we had a funny scene, we’d put a funny visual joke in there as well. And then something weird in the back of shot. Like a picture of Peter Bowles. Maybe only one person ever spotted these things. But that was enough to make the effort worthwhile.