Going the distance
The stars, not the cars, made Top Gear and The Grand Tour fly
- Caroline Frost
Add The Grand Tour: One for the Road to your watchlist
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One for the Road: a perfect title for the episode of Amazon Prime’s The Grand Tour that its stars have declared will be their very final outing, a decision that – bar an unlikely Gallagher-esque reunion in 2039 – brings to an end one of television’s most successful enterprises. After 22 years, hundreds of hours of shared screen time and thousands of miles on the road, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May are loading up the sat nav for separate destinations.
Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond in The Grand Tour. Prime Video
This ultimate tour – an odyssey from one side of Zimbabwe to the other, plus a sentimental postscript return to Botswana, the location of one of their first big trips – offers us a greatest hits compilation of everything that engages their millions of fans worldwide. It’s all there: May’s nerdy knowledge, Hammond’s tireless enthusiasm, Clarkson’s mock-outrage, unexpected perils (by the viewer at least). The trio once again set off in three improbable cars before at least one, inevitably, breaks down, and they must somehow get across a lake, along a disused railway track – one of them in reverse, “the disorientated express” – and finally across glorious Victoria Falls. Nothing new, but the formula still ain’t broke and serves as testament to the enduring appeal of three middle-aged men in ill-fitting jeans (or, if you’re Hammond, a Roger Moore safari suit) simply shooting the breeze wherever they happen to rock up.
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They’ve gone out very much as they came in, back in 2003, when the trio first teamed up on Top Gear, May recruited to join the other two for the second series of the revamped show, with instantly effortless on-screen chemistry. This was matched by real-life solidarity in 2015, when Clarkson was sacked from Top Gear following his steak-based altercation with a producer, and his co-presenters deciding they were off, too. As with so many other debacles and headlines ignited by their stablemate, May and Hammond’s frank comments at the time revealed their feelings: “He’s an idiot, but our idiot.”
Sure enough, all three were soon installed in a new home, with the same old schtick. Nobody has ever pretended that The Grand Tour – initially with a live audience inside an inexplicable tent, the antics, the increasingly ambitious expeditions – has been anything but Top Gear on
a bigger budget, and their patrons Amazon have been rewarded by the show delighting millions more of the “heterosexual men beyond sport” viewing audience, as a TV producer described it to me, a group notoriously hard for commissioners to reach.
Jeremy Clarkson and James May in The Grand Tour: One For The Road. Lisa Birch/Prime Video
That challenge is evident in other shows attempting to tread the same path, not least the more recent iterations of Top Gear. Even before Freddie Flintoff’s terrible accident in 2022, the show was an ersatz version of earlier days. Ironically, one of its presenters, Matt LeBlanc, previously enjoyed God-given screen chemistry as one of the cast of Friends, so he would surely have sensed when his new coterie were trying too hard. A League
of Their Own is far less charming, while Never Mind the Buzzcocks regulars mock the guests rather than themselves. Would I Lie to You?’s Lee Mack, David Mitchell and Rob Brydon are probably the nearest we have to this particular telly alchemy.
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What makes it work? First: genuine rapport. At a time when too many tragic statistics testify to an era of male loneliness, it remains a delight to see three men revel in each other’s company. Second: authentic interest and knowledge for their subject. While so many celebs are shoehorned into fronting random documentaries, this lot began as car enthusiasts and turned into peerless broadcasters. Food for thought for TV bosses with commissioning clout, but that’s for another column. For now we must simply wave this trio off in their improbable, likely-to-break-down vehicles, knowing all the while it was never really about the cars.
Authors
Caroline Frost
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