Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

I was such a big fan of Minder , I had my wedding reception at a place called the Winchester. I even hired ‘Dave’ to be the barman. And then got very cross when guests called him Glynn and asked what it was like to have starred in Zulu . He’s not Corporal Allen. He’s Dave and it’s his job to get you a large VAT.

We think of Dad’s Army as a classic, and it was, but Minder was tighter. Minder was written to an even higher standard. And the characters were just perfect. I saw Patrick Malahide the other day pretending to be a hotshot CIA spy and I just kept pointing at the screen and shouting, ‘It’s Detective Sergeant Chisholm.’

It’s the same story with Dennis Waterman. He’s still about, cropping up on TV from time to time, trying to convince us he’s not an ex-boxer with a Ford Capri parked outside. But it’s all hopeless. In my mind, he’s Terry McCann. And he always will be.

It wasn’t just the characters that became etched in our minds, either. It was the props. The hat. The coat. Terry’s bomber jacket. And, of course, the cars. Because of Arthur Daley, I’ve never quite trusted anyone with a Jag. I like people with Jags. They are usually interesting, but I wouldn’t leave them alone with my silver.

In my mind, even today, and purely because of Minder , the Jag driver is always having a ‘spot of bother’ with the taxman. He’s always asking if he can crash at yours because of a ‘misunderstanding’ with the mortgage company. I like to think that most of the people in prison today for crimes such as art forgery have an XJS in a barn somewhere. Robbers have Vauxhalls. Rogues have brogues and a Jag.

That’s why the new XJ worries me, because when you step into that extraordinary cabin, you do not even catch a whiff of Arthur Daley’s ghost. There is blue lighting in the door pockets. The glove box is lined with purple velvet. And when you select Dynamic mode, the dials glow red. It’s like being in one of those bars in central London where visiting businessmen go to meet ladies.

I like it. It’s a fantastic, futuristic place to sit. But there’s no man with pointy ears in the passenger seat, and where you expect to see NCC-1701 on the steering wheel there’s a leaping cat instead. It feels strange. Like taking off a page 3 girl’s clothes and finding that underneath she’s Yootha Joyce.

The exterior is weird, too. Again, I think it’s very bold and brave of Jaguar to make it look so different from anything that’s worn its badge before. I think it’s very striking. But it’s also a bit odd. And you obviously do, too, because since this car was launched six months ago, I have not seen a single one on the road.

Last week, Bertone, the Italian styling house, showed off its designs for a new Jag, and they were right. Its car was sleek. And the new XJ? It’s many things, but sleek isn’t one of them.

Then there’s the question of interior space. Tricky one this. Because, in a Jag, you are supposed to sit low down, with your buttocks kissing the catseyes. You’re supposed to feel cocooned, too, as if you’re in an Elizabethan pub. But that won’t do these days. If Jaguar wants to capture market share from Mercedes, it must convince the chauffeurs who ferry Posh and Ant around London that their car is at least as spacious in the back as an S-class.

So once again, Jaguar has ditched tradition, ditched the beams and the horse brasses and gone for space. In the long-wheelbase version – £3,000 extra – there’s tons of it, to stretch out and watch the world slide by through the big glass roof panel while listening to the 1,200-watt stereo until your ears bleed. You even get climate control in this new car, rather than a wood-burning stove.

But will you want to be in the back? The answer’s yes, if it’s a diesel. That’s built for economy and it does a fine job. But if you have the supercharged V8, the answer is a big emphatic ‘I’d rather get in the back of Brian Blessed’.

On paper, this engine doesn’t look like it will pass muster. You get just 503 horsepower, and these days German cars use that much to operate the automatic parking brake. But you also need to look at how much the XJ weighs. Because, thanks to an all-aluminium construction, it is even lighter than Porsche’s Panamera 4.8 V8 Turbo. In a strong wind, you’d be advised to fit mooring ropes to stop it blowing away.

And you don’t just feel this lack of weight when you accelerate or when you stop or when you look at the petrol gauge. No. You feel it all the time, through the seat of your pants and, more especially, the steering. This is not like a sports car to drive. It is a sports car.

Sadly, to achieve this flickability, the suspension is a little harder than you might expect. It’s a problem that affects all Jags today. A hard ride is the only reason I don’t own an XKR. But that said, at no point would you ever call the XJ uncomfortable. Or noisy. Or nasty in any way. It is absolutely bloody brilliant.

Taken on face value, it is the only car that marries the raw driver appeal of a Maserati Quattroporte with the space and luxury of a Mercedes S-class. By rights, the centre of London should be chock-full of nothing else. But it isn’t…

There’s a very good reason for this. We don’t buy cars by the numbers. Nobody ever test drives all the models that might seem suitable.

We may pore over the options list of whatever model we’ve chosen, kidding ourselves that we really need parking sensors. But it’s all haphazard. We don’t buy with our heads or our hearts. It’s just gut instinct. That looks nice. I can afford it, just. So I’ll have it.

And that’s where the Jag falls down. It meets all the emotional challenges and the numbers stack up, too. However, the bounders and the cads want a Jag, but not a Jag with a purple glove box. And the people who do want a purple glove box don’t want to be tarred with the Arthur Daley label.

It is, then, a magnificent car. A brilliant car. But sadly, Minder means half the world won’t buy it because it’s a Jag. And the other half won’t buy it because it’s not a Jag.

On the face of it Australia is much like any other modern, developed nation. But for a number of reasons it isn’t, and chief among those reasons is the koala: you may not know this but it spends almost all of its life off its face on dope and then, whenever it feels frightened, it catches chlamydia. You do not find this sort of thing going on with any other creature in any other part of the world.

Then you have the kangaroo. The red variety can travel at 40 mph, which is fast enough to give a G-Wiz a run for its money. But no kangaroo of any sort can back up. They have no reverse gear at all. Plus, all female kangaroos are permanently pregnant.

Life is very different for the female Sydney funnel-web spider. She has to spend her whole life in the burrow and is not allowed out until she dies of old age. The males, meanwhile, like to roar around Sydney at night, swimming in people’s pools, hiding in children’s shoes and eating anyone who gets too close.

I like Australia, but almost everything you find down under is unique. The duck-billed platypus, for instance. Surely the strangest animal ever to leap from the fumes of God’s chemistry set.

On land it is four-wheel drive, but underwater it becomes front-wheel drive and uses its rear legs for steering. So it’s an amphibious fork-lift truck, with a beak.

We see the same sort of thing in sport. Elsewhere in the world, you have American football or proper football. Whereas down under there is Aussie Rules, which is strange, because from what I can gather there aren’t any rules at all. Apart from no poofters, obviously. The game itself is part soccer, part rugby and part basketball, but what sets it aside from all three is that each side consists of about 17,000 players, all of whom wear rather unattractive skin-tight vests.