Top Gear Specials Middle East Apr 2026

On paper, it was a disaster waiting to happen. In practice, it became the most genuinely tense and moving journey the show ever filmed.

The premise was quintessential Clarkson, Hammond, and May: to prove that modern cars had lost their rugged souls, they would drive three cheap, two-seat roadsters from the northern tip of Iraq to the birthplace of Jesus. Their chariots? A deliberately tragic trio of £3,500 convertibles: an Oxford-beige Fiat Barchetta (Clarkson), a hideously "chameleon" purple Mazda MX-5 (Hammond), and a perpetually leaking BMW Z3 (May). top gear specials middle east

Clarkson looks to the sky. "There's no room at the inn," he says. "But we've got a stable." He gestures to his oil-stained Fiat. The camera pans up to a star. It is absurd, pathetic, and deeply, strangely beautiful. On paper, it was a disaster waiting to happen

If Top Gear in its golden era was about turning car reviews into epic mythology, then the 2009 Middle East Special (full title: Top Gear: Three Wise Men Go to Bethlehem ) is the series' most unexpectedly heartfelt gospel. Their chariots

Defeated, they park their battered, leaking, smoking convertibles in a deserted car park. In a moment of quiet, unscripted magic, they realize the irony: three wise men, led by a sat-nav, only to end up sleeping in the back of a Mazda MX-5 and a Fiat Barchetta.