L'icone Airstream vue d'Angleterre...

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...par un ex-journaliste de l'émission TOP GEAR, l'équivalent anglais de M6 Turbo (en version non sous-titrée, malheureusement) :

From The Sunday Times April 6, 2008


Motormouth: Steve Berry

My caravan is a cathedral of dreams

I bought an old caravan the other day. It was a bit battered at both ends and one of the windows was missing. I paid £10,000 for it. When I announced this in front of friends they looked incredulous and one lost, via his nose, the mouthful of beer he’d just imbibed.
Then I made it worse by explaining that the caravan was in so dishevelled a state and smelt so strongly of something deceased that it needed fumigating. On cleaning, it produced a pile of nasty-looking (but thankfully dead) spiders and a hairy, big-toothed critter that we couldn’t identify.
Possibly it was a possum but I can’t be sure because you don’t get too many possums in east Lancashire – which gives you a clue as to why I spent so much on a distinctly secondhand caravan.
It’s because it’s an Airstream and I’ve wanted one since I saw one on the front cover of a Ry Cooder album. If you’ve heard of Cooder (slide guitar genius and eighth greatest guitar player of all time, according to Rolling Stone magazine) then in all probability you know what I’m talking about.
The Airsteam is (and I apologise for using this overworked and pretentious phrase but in this case it really does apply) a design icon. It’s as far removed from the bog-standard, beige, British-built, Broad two-berth caravan as you can imagine. My 1967 Airstream Overlander International is a caravan in the same way that a 1957 sunburst finish Fender Stratocaster is an electric guitar. Or a 56 Chevy Bel Air coupé is a car. Or a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide is a motorbike. It is a 26ft piece of Americana, designed and built in an era of hopes and dreams when big – as in making it big in a big country – was beautiful.
Every time I look at the outside of my Airstream I half expect to see a young Cybill Shepherd leaning against the curved frame of the door smoking a cigarette wearing only a torn negligee and a look of disdain. That hasn’t happened yet, but I live in hope.
I’m restoring the Airstream for a TV show, the idea of which is to demonstrate that you can be eco-friendly and rock’n’roll at the same time. When it comes to carpentry, coachbuilding or mechanics I’m hopeless. However, because I’m a man, I firmly believe that I must have these skills located somewhere deep in my genetic code.
So at the weekend I set to and immediately learnt a couple of important things. First, an Airstream is constructed like an aircraft minus the wings and engine. It’s made of aluminium panels shaped to stretch over a lightweight spaceframe that holds the whole thing together with a marine plywood floor. They’ve been making Airstream travel trailers for more than 75 years now and an astonishing 65% of them are still in use. Now that’s what I call build quality.
Oh yes, I’ve also discovered a gift for riveting. An Airstream is held together with hundreds, possibly thousands, of rivets and every single one holding mine together needs replacing. When I’d finished I decided that, despite the fact that it had no running water, no heating and still had a couple of windows missing, I wanted to sleep in it. So I did.
I haven’t spent too many nights in conventional caravans and, every time, I’ve come away feeling like I’ve been squatting in a well-upholstered but sweaty garden shed. Opening my eyes to look up at the curved ceiling of the Airstream was like waking up in a little cathedral. An Airstream is a caravan, I know that. And I can live with that because of everything else that an Airstream represents.

Steve Berry is a former Top Gear presenter and a regular pundit on Radio 5 Live