Jodie Kidd is a TV presenter, race car driver and model who is also generally considered to be a very lovely person. Everything one would need, then, to be a new Top Gear presenter after the previous incarnation imploded. But in a new interview with the Telegraph, she says there were “conversations,” but she was the one who turned it down.
I mean, she really did seem like a shoe-in. She already hosts Channel 5’s The Classic Car Show, and British people love giving other people who already present television shows more television shows to present. While confirmed new Top Gear host Chris Evans is still, however looking for some presenting companionship, Kidd confirmed that she is out:
“I made the decision very recently,” says the 36-year-old. “Everyone every day has been asking me, am I doing it? Am I doing it? I am not, okay. But I feel greatly honoured that people think I could possibly be good enough to fill those shoes, especially as a woman.”
The reasoning’s actually pretty simple. Jeremy Clarkson has gone on the record saying that even though Top Gear put out relatively few episodes a year, each episode was such a massive production that it took over the life of everyone involved. Kidd didn’t want that to happen to her:
“If I were to accept Top Gear it would be completely all-consuming,” she says, sighing and gazing out to sea. “I love doing all the different things I am doing in my life at the moment. Top Gear is the most brilliant show on this planet but it would just take over your soul. That would be it. Through ups and downs and lefts and rights I have got to an amazing place where everything is finally balanced, and balanced for my family too.”
She doesn’t say it, but I also have a hard time believing that hosting the show right now even would be a dream job, for anyone. You’re basically signing up to be hated viciously, no matter how wonderful you are at your job, by simple virtue of the fact that you’re not someone else.
You’re like the new step-dad, but no one knows if that whole awkward period will actually ever pass.
Chris Evans has said that the very format of TG is up for re-tooling, and there could be a rotating cast of hosts. Maybe Amy MacDonald is still available?
Photo credit: Getty Images
H/t to Autoblog!
Contact the author at ballaban@jalopnik.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 0D03 F37B 4C96 021E 4292 7B12 E080 0D0B 5968 F14E