Top Gear and Grand Tour would NEVER get made today – TV execs would shun ‘three middle aged men’, says Jeremy Clarkson
THE final episode of The Grand Tour doesn’t just mark the farewell of a show or the TV presenting trio of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.
The last-ever instalment of the Prime Video series — fittingly called One For The Road — is also the end of an era for a certain breed of telly programmes.
Despite the huge success of the show and its predecessor, Top Gear, Jeremy doesn’t think today’s telly execs are in a rush to make many more motoring adventures like theirs.
The 64-year-old broadcaster and Sun columnist said: “It wouldn’t get commissioned now in a million years.
“Monkey tennis would be more likely to be commissioned than this, I think.
“It would be so difficult — three middle-aged, middle-class guys, driving cars around in other countries, I think they’d probably say no.
“Fortunately, our Top Gear grew out of something else. I started in 2002, doing originally just with Hammond, and then May came along in the second season of the series.
Global phenomenon
“Then Hammond had his accident and then a lot of people started watching the show and it grew some more and then we accidentally did a special in America.
“But you couldn’t get it commissioned from the get-go now.”
The BBC’s Top Gear and then Prime Video’s Grand Tour have each become a global phenomenon and made Jeremy, James and Richard international stars.
So their screen farewell as a trio is suitably stunning, as it sees them travel across the breathtaking landscape of Zimbabwe in three of their favourite cars.
Jeremy chose a Lancia Montecarlo, James opted for a Triumph Stag and Richard picked a Ford Capri.
Unlike some of their other adventures, One for the Road focuses on the motoring rather than any stunts or sideshows.
Jeremy said: “We deliberately decided not to go over the top. No explosions, you know. We just wanted to do an unplugged ending, really. Just the three of us getting on.”
If The Grand Tour continues once they’ve hung up their driving gloves, Jeremy would like its new host to continue in a similar vein, too.
After they turned their backs on Top Gear in 2015, the show was then co-hosted by Friends actor Matt LeBlanc, DJ Chris Evans, then comedian Paddy McGuinness and Freddie Flintoff.
Meanwhile Jeremy, Richard and James went off to start The Grand Tour on Prime Video in 2016, and so began a new phenomenon which may now be getting rebooted with new presenters.
He said: “My advice to Amazon would be – and I’ve given this to them already – for heaven’s sake, do not get well known people who ‘like’ cars.
“Because when you do that show it has to be your life. No, you can’t open supermarkets.
“No, you can’t appear on another show. If you’re not actually filming, you’re thinking about what the next thing is that you’re going to film. It has to be all consuming.
“But there’s no point hiring, you know, somebody who ‘likes’ cars. Because that’s not enough. I would get three complete unknowns. Start small, like we did. They’ve got to be absolute petrolheads.
“I’ve got to be able to show them a picture of a quarter of a door mirror from any car ever made, and they’ve got to know what it is.
“I’d go to motoring journalists. James, Richard and I are all motoring journalists.
“That would be my advice if you want to continue with it, and I would hope that Amazon do continue with it.
I don’t know what I’d do if I retired, I’ve lived such an active life. I’m properly knackered.
Jeremy Clarkson
“You’ve got to have someone who does nothing but think about the show. I was completely engrossed in that show for 20 years.”
As well as presenting ITV’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Jeremy also writes his columns in The Sun and The Sunday Times.
Then there’s his other Prime Video TV hit in the form of Clarkson’s Farm, which has just dropped its third series with over ten million views in the first weekend.
So despite now parking The Grand Tour, Jeremy is far from being at a loose end and The R Word feels unthinkable right now.
He said: “I don’t know what I’d do if I retired, I’ve lived such an active life.
“I’m properly knackered. I’ve had to cancel my summer holiday this year. I was just too busy.
“But I haven’t got any hobbies. So let’s just say I retired…I don’t particularly care for gardening, I quite like reading books, but you can’t do that for 12 hours a day for 20 years. So I might as well work.”
As if that weren’t enough, Jeremy has just opened a pub, The Farmer’s Dog, close to his farm in Oxfordshire, and it’s turned out to be his biggest challenge yet.
He said: “Opening a pub, that’s proven to be much more time consuming, because it turns out I know nothing about running a pub.
“You know, on a car show, I’m pretty good at knowing that you can’t do that, that way, or that way. On the farm, I had Kaleb to tell me what to do.
“In the pub, I’ve got literally no idea what I’m doing, all of the time. So that’s a bit of a nightmare.”
In setting up the pub he encountered all sorts of surprising problems, like a lack of basic utilities to the property, or the absence of a defibrillator behind the bar.
He had to spend thousands installing a metal girder across the dining room when he decided to suspend a tractor from the ceiling.
And in the very beginning he also had to deal with the fact that the pub was once a haunt for doggers – something brought home to him when he found some underwear strewn in the undergrowth.
Jeremy said: “It was a very famous dogging site. It was gentleman usually, who stopped off there once it had gone dark to do whatever it is gentlemen in woods do at night.
Prue Leith came round the other day on the biggest motorcycle I’ve ever seen. She lives just down the road.
Jeremy Clarkson
“So I was a bit surprised to find a G-string there, because it suggested it had become more inclusive.
“Alan the Builder, who features in the show, he’s very local to there he was very aware, although he is keen to point out he never visited himself.”
Jeremy is also keen to point out that the immediate area’s former life as an illicit liaison point is now firmly in the past, adding: “I’ve got CCTV now, so I can check it up on my phone.”
Fortunately, Jeremy also enjoys some rather more sophisticated neighbours in the idyllic corner of Oscordshire where he lives with girlfriend Lisa Hogan.
As the Cotswolds is fast becoming a celebrity haunt, he often bumps into famous faces, or they drop in to see him.
Jeremy said: “Prue Leith came round the other day on the biggest motorcycle I’ve ever seen. She lives just down the road. She’s doing something with Lisa at the moment.
Best till last
“I see Amanda Holden in the pub from time to time, she lives very nearby. Simon Cowell, I saw at a party the other day, and Beckham came round once. I put a picture of him with Gerald on Instagram.
“I think he was just looking for a house in the area and he figured I’d lived there a long time. I think he’s lovely.”
However stunning his Oxfordshire surroundings are now, nothing quite prepared him for the scenery he’d encounter on his 600-mile journey across Zimbabwe’s constantly changing landscape.
He said: “One minute you’re in meadows and islands, the next you’re in Scotland. We start in the tea plantations, then you’re in a pine forest, then it’s Ireland. up on the top, it is Ireland.
“You go round the corner and, wait a minute, there’s a Jacaranda tree in Africa. I mean, we really did save the best till last.”
But despite this being an emotional end, the conclusion of the last episode only features our trio climbing on top of a rock and, with true understatement, shaking hands.
Jeremy said: “We wanted to say to the Americans: ‘By the way, we’re not American – we’re going to have no hugging and no weeping.”
- The Grand Tour: One for the Road is on Prime Video tomorrow.