May I begin by wishing you all a very happy (and belated) new year. I certainly hope you enjoy reading Top Gear magazine over the next 12 months, because the way things are going, the programme of the same name isn't going to be making much of an appearance.

Thanks to Wimbledon, the BBC's strange obsession with covering snooker, which is like billiards for poor people, and the World Cup, which is a competition in which people on vast salaries run around a field, there simply isn't enough space left for the sort of television programme normal people might actually want to watch.

I think there will be one episode of Top Gear in 2006, on a Thursday, in August, while you're at the beach.

This might be a disappointment for the huge numbers of teenage girls that tune into to see Richard Hammond's new teeth every week, but for those who actually work on the show, it'll be nothing short of a blessed relief.

In the olden days, making Top Gear was easy. You drove round a few corners, put some suitcases in the boot of whatever you were testing, and then back at the edit, the director would cover up the gaps with lots of pounding Seventies' rock music. It took about 15 minutes.

Not any more, because the show has become a monster. You may have noticed that the credits at the end of a normal programme roll for about six seconds, whereas the ones at the end of Top Gear give the impression you've been watching Ben Hur.

So what, you may be wondering, do we all do? Well obviously, a lot of the time, we stare at Sophia and Rachel, our production co-ordinators, but then, we have to get down to it.

Take the Bugatti race from Alba to London. Obviously, someone had to find a Bugatti which was available for six days. Then someone had to get two crews out to Italy and someone else had to find a four-minute hole in Richard Hammond's diary, so he could come too.

While all this was going on, I was chained to my phone, talking to the engineer at Volkswagen who'd designed the car. And then I wrote the script. But, finally, we're all ready to go.