Camp like Clarkson – The Top Gear Edition

With the news that Top Gear is moving to Amazon, Jeremy Clarkson and his fellow hosts are back in the limelight once again.

Whilst we at Wynnchester aren’t so used to hitting the headlines (or Top Gear Producers, or Piers Morgan for that matter), we do often get requests for our gear to be featured in films and on TV shows.

You may, for instance, have caught a glimpse of Tom Cruise dragging one of our popular canvas duffle bags across the desert in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.

Given our gear is rugged enough for Ethan Hunt, Clarkson clearly felt he had to give it a go. After all, he’s not impartial to blowing up the odd vehicle, himself.

So, it perhaps shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise when we received a request from the BBC to borrow some of our Wynnchester gear for the filming of their Top Gear Australia programme.

As you may be aware, our Adventurer bedroll was modelled in part on the traditional Australian swag. So it was fitting that the Top Gear team would be sleeping in our heritage-based model whilst in the Australian outback.

During the show one of the challenges was for Clarkson, Hammond and May to go cattle wrangling in Australia’s Northern Territory.

This took place on a cattle farm stretching over more than 3 million acres.

Clarkson joked that:

“The farmer said he would try to make it easier by putting all the cattle in one paddock. I told him that’s very kind of you, how big is the paddock? He said 39,000 acres… When you’re looking for 4,000 cows they could have been in Southampton and we could have been in Banbury!”

Given the scope of this challenge, the team were forced to stay on the cattle farm overnight.

Certainly one of the bonuses of using a bedroll is the speed and ease of setting up camp. Simply unroll the swag, lay it on the ground in your position of choice and sit inside.

The rumour is that, after the challenge was complete, the three super cars that Clarkson and co were driving were ruined.

In fact, the Bentley used reportedly needed work amounting to half of its on the road value, including a full paint respray.

However, a Bentley spokesman noted:

“The rectification work required was indeed cosmetic, to repair paint chips and scratches. This is unsurprising and acceptable after hundreds of miles on unsealed roads in the Northern Territory. Mechanically, the car was fine.”

We’d like to think that our bedrolls proved equally as rugged.

The Bentley reportedly required a full respray after Clarkson had finished with it (thesupercarkids.com).

You can watch the episode on BBC iPlayer.