M any factual television shows have in recent years sought to emulate the success of Top Gear by co-opting its format: fill a studio with grinning members of the general public, make the presenters stand up and walk about, bring on some celebrities, cue to an outdoors shoot with silly pranks. Ensure a general atmosphere of merriment and levity that assures viewers the subject matter isn’t being taken too seriously. Bingo. Witness the format in action with Bang Goes The Theory, Stargazing, last year’s excruciating Wimbledon 2Day and Springwatch 2016 on BBC2 this week. Now, the latest programme to succumb to this trend is Top Gear itself.

That’s what Top Gear without Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond feels like: an imitation of itself, a poor photocopy. The theme tune was there, as was the gormless audience, the Stig, the celebrities and the hijinks. Yet it was all change with the presenters – relentlessly upbeat Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc, who finds Britain strange, which I suspect is going to be the running gag. Sure, both stood up and walked about. Then they drove up a hill. But where was the chemistry, the fun and the offensive innuendo of their predecessors? I suppose this is what it feels like when a friend has a sex change: he or she is simultaneously the same person but not the same person anymore. The postmodernist philosopher and avid TV viewer Jean Baudrillard would have been fascinated by the simulacrum presented to us on Sunday night.

The hyperactive Chris Evans was in his element in TFI Friday, when the viewing public at home was mostly pre-loading booze for a night-out. His whooping and hollering are suited, too, to morning radio when people seek a rude awakening. But his loud, ceaseless joviality on Top Gear is wholly unsuited to languid, melancholic Sunday nights, especially in a spot where the viewers have come to expect the laconic deadpan and irreverence of Clarkson and the rest.

As its loyal viewers recognised years ago, Top Gear in its 21st century incarnation was never principally about cars. It represented a quiet insurrection against the sanitisation and conformity of our culture, one that had become risk-averse, afraid to be offensive, or to say the wrong thing in public. Jeremy Clarkson’s ostensibly xenophobic, homophobic and misogynist humour belongs not to the tradition of old-school, stand-up comedy of the 1970s, which alternative comedy and political correctness subsequently dictated was wrong. Rather, Clarkson belongs to that Viz comic strain of humour, of saying things deliberately to provoke and ridicule an establishment that decides what is acceptable to laugh at. No wonder the BBC ached for years to be rid of him.

It’s early days with this new Top Gear, of course, and all new programmes have teething problems, but I don’t believe matters will improve. Evans has said he wants none of the childish, politically incorrect humour in the show. In other words, Top Gear is to become chummy, inclusive and bland.