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.
The brilliance of the episode lies in its tonal juggling act. One moment, you are weeping with laughter as James May’s BMW bursts into flames for the third time, forcing him to extinguish it with a bottle of water and sheer resignation. The next, you are genuinely nervous as the trio, dressed in cheap velvet robes they bought from a market, are stopped by armed police while trying to find a Nativity scene.
The ending is what elevates this special from "great" to "legendary." After hundreds of miles of breakdowns, fistfights over rooms, and near-misses with local militias, the three arrive in Bethlehem. But the hotel is full. As snow begins to fall on Christmas Eve—a meteorological miracle in the Middle East—they are turned away.
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.
On paper, it was a disaster waiting to happen. In practice, it became the most genuinely tense and moving journey the show ever filmed.
It remains the definitive Top Gear special because it understood that the best journeys aren’t about the cars. They are about the men inside them, trying to find a little bit of peace—and a working fuel pump—at the end of the world.
Unlike the larks of Botswana or the slapstick of the Vietnam boat trip, the Middle East Special carried real weight. This was 2009, and the crew drove through Syria, Jordan, and into the West Bank. They weren't just fixing broken suspension; they were navigating checkpoints, driving past minefields (literally—Hammond found one), and dealing with the simmering heat of both the sun and local border guards.
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).