Every now and then, with increasing regularity in regards to Top Gear in particular, a joke goes just a little bit too far. It's funny right up until a point where it suddenly turns very sour very quickly. Such is the case when the trio attempted a number of spoof ads for the Diesel Volkswagen Scirocco. In a send up of the original VW adverts ("This is the man who put a million on black and it came up red..."), a rather sorry looking gentleman chooses to shoot himself in the head, followed by the quip, "If only he'd waited for the new Scirocco TDI to go on sale." At 8 o'clock on a Sunday evening, such a graphic image does rather come out of nowhere, so it's not surprising that Ofcom received fifty complaints following the episode. The BBC defended the scene as a "ludicrous and obviously comic depiction" of suicide. True, but an apology to the countless people who spat their tea out in shock would have been nice.
