SO THE monsters of schlock have now zeroed their crosshairs on the Morris Marina. Not content with the mere mechanical rape of a Maserati Merak, Dino 308GT4 and a Lamborghini Uracco, the gleeful destruction of three Alfa Romeos, a Triumph Dolomite Sprint, Rover SD1, BL Princess, Jaguar XJ40, XJ-S and a Vanden Plas 1500, Top Gear's towering demigods of car telly have now decided to wreak their ill-informed wrath upon the Marina – all in the name of prime-time entertainment.

   What can we do about it? Not a damn thing. As the Morris Marina Owners’ Club is discovering, the more you complain, the more Marinas they destroy. Like ‘Just William’, the more you plea, the more they act to the contrary. Dozens could die.

   Performance types who suckle thirstily from Top Gear’s hairy teat, suggest on their e-haunts that the Marina vendor shouldn’t have sold the 1800 Super to the show in the first place. Meanwhile the vendor is claiming that the producers bought the car on the QT without revealing their identity – if this is true, then I reckon somone has been a bit underhanded.

   If the grey matter is firing on all four cylinders, only a W113 Pagoda SL, a TR6 and Frogeye Sprite hillclimber have survived this televisual phenomenon. Generally, if it’s old and it appears on 'Top Gear' then it will get trashed – if they’re happy to bend the rear axle on Jaguar’s Le Mans winning C-type, then crashing and burning a Marina won’t present any qualms to these heathens. Just as long as it earns a slow jeer from all those go-faster young professional Rosses and pot-bellied middle management Martins in the studio audience, that’s all that’s important.

   The pointless destruction of old stuff is something which I can’t bear; whether it be greedy developers flattening Victorian buildings or an insurance company using a runaway Volvo to sideswipe a nice Austin Apache. I find it all so deeply troubling that to this day, certain episodes of 'The Sweeney' and the proper version of 'The Italian Job' still make my soul squirm. Some kids used to dive behind the sofa when watching Tom Baker battling the Daleks, but I did it during 'The Professionals'; all it took was the sound of screeching tyres and if I could see an old Jag, Landcrab or P6 in the vicinity, then that was my cue to run.

   Destroying old cars is wrong; if a car has survived for this long then surely it deserves to live in peace. Contrary to ill-informed modern revisionists, we know that the Marina wasn’t a terrible car when it was new. It was only planned as a stop-gap model until it was replaced in the mid Seventies, but of course this didn’t happen and instead the Marina was left to soldier on until the Eighties. It’s not the car’s fault, it was the fault of rubbish management, terrible industrial relations and successive crap governments. That is why Marinas should be preserved, to remind people how bad governments can ruin things. Destroy the old cars from the past and you help to erase the lessons we can learn from them.

Words Simon Charlesworth

   It is of course pointless putting forth the Marina’s case or for that matter, the appeal of any retro motor to people who don’t get the old school movement. The braying shuffling mass in the ‘Top Gear’ studio cares not for our cars because they are deemed slow, cannot take the Hammerhead as if on invisible rails and their interiors are not made from soft-touch grey plastics and are devoid of alcantara. To these people with their stainless steel watches and an obsessively polished Audi RS4 on their driveway, they will not and can not see the appeal of something unusual, old and slightly rusty which costs less than their prestige car’s factory carpet floormats.

   Chose, modify and transform wisely and you and I both know that we can have a car which beats anything on their Cool Wall in the race for real effortless chic. What’s cool about blowing £100k on an Aston Martin? Nothing Grandad, it just makes you look like an out-of-touch Tommy Try-hard.

   That is why I’m gladly a retroholic – because my boots are covered in oil and grease, not Ferrari-branded suede and Nomex; and my fingernails aren’t manicured, they are proud of their griminess. Our retro world is so different from their performance scene of yaw sensors, driving gloves and bullshit that it’s almost anti motoring establishment. To them it’s practically anarchic, up-ending their precious value systems and then rubbing their faces in it. Retro really is something they cannot comprehend.

   It’s just a shame that they’re not willing to let us peacefully co-exist and stop wrecking our cars, because sooner or later things will get out of hand. Someone with a short-temper and a conviction that Graham Greene's ‘The Destructors’ spoke to them will snap and wreak their terrible revenge on something shiny and expensive.

   It won’t be me though, because I know that I’m not like that. I like cars too much and I’d sooner fix them than destroy them.