FAST AND DANGEROUS: My Christmas gift to myself this year was pneumonia, which laid me up for almost a week before Christmas, as the holidays surged around the watery, antibiotics-induced bubble that settled in around me.

Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t sleep all day, so I ended up with a mug of tea under a blanket in my office, picking my way through the stacks of promo DVDs I get sent practically every day – unlabelled screeners in plain white sleeves, tucked into a press kit or a few photocopied sheets of press release.

If I were a really conscientious TV columnist – and had an Einsteinian dispensation that let me pack limitless, sleep-free hours into every day – I’d watch every one of them, but for the most part they either end up going straight into the garbage, or reside in a purgatorial pile on either side of my desk, set aside with vague intentions of making time, having aroused a shadow of interest after a cursory glance at the title and the PR bumf.

There were discs going back almost three years near the bottom of the pile, a few of them probably deserving a couple of hundred words, but let’s not start the new year off with regrets. One thing that did perk me up was a BBC advance screener for Jeremy Clarkson’s Heaven And Hell, which came out in 2007, and featured the host of the long-running auto freak show celebrating cars like the Ferrari Enzo and the Aston-Martin V8 Vantage, and bemoaning the very existence of automotive horrorshows like the Citroen 2CV and the Triumph TR7.

I’m not a car guy – I don’t even have a license – but Top Gear is the greatest car show ever made, which makes Clarkson the greatest car show host in history. Arrogant yet affable, he’s unapologetic about the palpable joy of driving a really great car really, really fast, and the show is probably the most male TV series ever made. Just tune in to BBC Canada if you’re doubtful, or catch the numerous clips on YouTube, if you’re cheap.

Which made me wonder about the fate of the U.S. version, which was announced with great fanfare by NBC early this year, with Adam Carolla in Clarkson’s shoes. A quick Google revealed that the network gave the show a pass after viewing the pilot, making the excuse that the failure of Knight Rider had given them cold feet about car shows.

The good news is that they’ve let the BBC take the show elsewhere – hopefully to a cable network that isn’t beholden to car ads, though to be frank, they should just subtitle Clarkson for the benefit of the accent-challenged and let the British show become the natural hit it should be here.