Top Gear Christmas Special (BBC2): Good news. No need for the traditional traipse to a panto this year, writes Ben Bentley.

Last night’s Top Gear Christmas special put paid to that. Because, with Clarkson as Widow Twanky, May as Wishee Washee and the Hamster as, well, a little hamster, here was the season’s new pantomime.

Of course, it was all David Cameron’s fault. A few months back the Prime Minister said Britain must become a favoured trading partner of India, a former UK colony with a population of 1.2 billion people.

Now, Top Gear likes the sound of a leather driver’s gauntlet being thrown down and the Three Unwise Men, led evangelically by a bloke whose initials just happen to be JC, reckoned they could solve Britain’s balance-of-trade deficit with a mission to fly the flag for UK plc.

So they drove across India, drumming up interest in British goods, advertising British skills, British know-how, and general British, er, Britishness.

But could they really make a billion Indians think, “No, we won’t buy mayonnaise from Belgium, but Kendal Mint Cake from some kagoul-wearing tree-huggers from the Lake District”?

The team certainly flew the flag in terms of British motors. JC stretched his legs in a 1995 Jaguar XJS, modified with flock wallpaper and a working loo, the Hamster took the wheel of a Mini Cooper and May went for ‘luxury’ in a clapped-out 1976 Rolls Royce.

And so the boys raced a train delivering hot lunches to workers in Bombay. And lost.

They attempted to fit an advertising banner to the side of a train, but when the carriages split and ripped the banner in two, instead of it saying ‘British IT for your company’ it read ‘s*** for your company’.

So again, they lost.

Then there was a trade fair where Clarkson tried to bridge the trade deficit by promoting a Corby trouser press and some Angel Delight served on a digestive biscuit. They lost. Again.

And during a road trip up the Himalayas, the team challenged a group of Indian locals to a game of cricket using beer cans fired from the exhaust pipe of the Jag. And yes, you’ve guessed it. . . they lost.

In fact, losing started to look like Britain’s biggest export. But perhaps here were the beginnings of new Anglo-Indian relations.

As always last night’s dose was as irreverent as a vicar in a crack den. And although crudely funny, really it’s hard to argue against the undeniable truth-drug that is laughter.

Whatever you think of Top Gear, why it works is because TG is not a car show, but essentially a sitcom. A comedy where the situation, more often than not, just so happens to be the inside of a Mini Metro.

It is less of a Haynes motor manual and more of a Dennis the Menace annual.

However, the idea that a portly bloke who seemingly hates cyclists, prostitutes and public sector workers, along with an old hippy and a hamster that once upset the whole of Mexico, could represent Britain at anything, particularly in today’s fragile state of global relations, is frankly enough to put your bowels on high alert.

It’s rather like trusting Rab C Nesbitt’s family to run the Foreign Office.

But actually in the end I think the chaps did as good a job of representing British trade interests as anyone.

If, that is, the very thing that you manufacture is defeat and the ability to laugh in the face of it.

Such buffoonery has ‘Made in Britain’ written right through it and is one of our last great trading chips. Indeed, perhaps bridging the trade deficit would helped by exporting more Great British panto to India. Oh yes it would . . .