Just like the late, great Richard Whiteley (yes, one of my broadcasting idols - how did you guess?) I'm about to present you with a conundrum. There will be no countdown.
As you may have noticed on this site, we answer a lot of questions sent into us by you, the reader. It's an enjoyable part of the job, always interesting and hopefully helpful, but it does rather bring up constant, nagging doubt in the back of my mind. One that's related to the just-mentioned conundrum, which is this: what car should you buy?
It's a staggeringly hard question to answer because there is only one answer now and it's one I'm unhappy to give - I don't know. I mean, I really, really don't know. Part of this is down to my increasing age (I'm getting old and doddery, turning slowly into Grandpa Simpson), but more than that it's down to the increasing fracturing of the car market.
Take the car I'm testing this week, the BMW 4 Series Gran Coupé. The 4 Series is of course the coupé version of the always-lovely 3 Series Saloon and was in previous guises simply called 3 Series Coupé. In even more previous guises it was just called 3 Series - back before the marketing department worked out that you could charge more for a car called Coupé. And back before they worked out that giving it an even number and aligning it with the bigger, ritzier 6 Series meant they could charge more again for it.
Anyway, the upshot is that the 3 Series Coupé is now a 4 Series. Then there's the 4 Series Gran Coupé, which, like the bigger 6 Series Gran Coupé, comes with four doors. Yes, it's a four-door spinoff of a two-door spin-off of a four-door saloon that was, in times past, sold as a two-door saloon. Someone pass me the Nurofen.
The 4 Series Gran Coupé is hardly the worst offender, even if it is very, very difficult to see precisely where it fits in the market. After all, if you want a more practical coupé, why not just buy the saloon? I mean, the standard 3 Series is hardly any less handsome, hardly any less enjoyable to drive (if indeed at all) and much, much cheaper. The 418d Gran Coupé Luxury that I'm driving (dodgy underground car park photo enclosed) clocks in at a whopping €59k - the guts of €20k more expensive than a 318d.
And this is emblematic of the whole problem. Back in the dark ages, hundreds of years ago, before even Dickie Rock was born, when I first became a motoring journalist, handing out car advice was simple. If you wanted a small car, you bought a small Fiat (inevitably the best). If you wanted a larger hatchback you bought a Golf or Focus. A saloon? A Mondeo or, if you fancied something posher, a Passat. Something properly posh? 3 Series Plutocratic? S-Class. Want to go off-road? Get a Defender. Got lots of kids? Espace. Won the Lotto? Ferrari. And so to lunch...
Now though? Ruddy hell, the whole thing's a mess. Because car companies worked out that all their expensive oily bits could be shared between a maelstrom of different cars, without incurring billions in extra development costs, the number of models and types proliferated at a frightening pace. I can, honestly, remember when Mercedes-Benz had a six-car line-up and we thought that was extravagant. I remember, and I swear I'm not making this up, when Skoda sold only one model - the Favorit.
And it has thus become almost impossible to hand out good car-buying advice. The choice has become so varied and complicated that any answer I can give would be more or less pointless. I can tell you which car is good and which is bad (other opinions are available - wrong, but available), but I can't tell you anymore if you're going to like them or not. Once, you could size up a person to fit a car in the manner of an experienced and expert tailor - you could just tell who would slot in nicely. Now though I sit here, bewildered. If you ask me what car you should buy I will respond not with an answer but with a series of questions to try and narrow down your requirements to a fine pitch. Which makes dinner table conversations a bit awkward.
Thankfully, car makers seem to be cottoning on to the fact that all these needless extra models (and they are often needless, dictated more by fashion than by solid engineering principles) are just confusing everyone and a confused customer is a customer who becomes reluctant to put their hands in their pockets. MINI has started the ball rolling by saying that it's actually going to reduce its model range, culling some slow-selling variants. It's only two cars out of a seven-car line-up but it's a start.
Hopefully, car makers will start to realise that confusion helps no-one. Least of all motoring journalists...
Further reading:
First drive of the BMW 4 Series Gran Coupé from the international launch