Top Gear pulls out of Italian Job stunt

TOP GEAR has pulled out of a daredevil stunt that would have re-enacted the final scene of The Italian Job, saying the cost would have been “massively prohibitive”.

The scene sees robbers stuck at one end of a coach with their gold precariously balanced at another.

Top Gear’s James May visited the Royal Society of Chemistry after saying the show wanted to re-enact the film’s cliff-hanging ending following a competition by the society to solve the puzzle of saving the gold and the robbery team’s lives.

But a spokeswoman for the BBC show explained: “We thought it would be brilliant to recreate the Italian Job scene, so we were disappointed when, having spent a lot of time researching all the options thoroughly with the Royal Society of Chemistry, we found that the cost of the stunt was massively prohibitive for one short film in one programme.

“We’ve got a set budget and we think we can make that money go further elsewhere.”

The Society said the bus was to be hung from the lip of a British Midlands quarry and it had found volunteers of men and women from within its own ranks.

A statement from the Society said: “Our volunteer chemists were happy to board the bus in order to push the frontiers of human knowledge.

“We are shocked that a team of self-proclaimed petrol-heads retreated from a great opportunity to celebrate the most important British car film ever made.”