Top Gear in it's current form (studio based) started October 2002, however it has been on TV for as long as I can remember purely as a "sensible car review programme" until it was stopped in about 99ish, when it was "replaced" (so to speak) by the relatively boring Fifth Gear on Channel 5 (the only advantage of FG is Vicki Butler Henderson - who, along with Tiff Needel were on the "old-style" Top Gear).
Being a UKer, I've been watching Top Gear for longer than almost everyone else here (other than other UK members, such as DnaJ etc)
Phil,
I hope you're joking about the quality of Sky Digital/Sky+ - Sky+ records the raw stream fed to the box by the Sky Satellite - so it's as good quality as that is (and how good you think that is is your own opinion - IMO it's crap, because they've used the "Digital" part of it to cram more crappy channels into the same total bandwidth, therefore reducing the quality of most stations to sometimes less a good analog signal

) Hopefully when we move to HDTV the same won't happen!
Confused