The Grand Tour is finally ready to head onto TV screens, but I’m blaming James May’s toilet habits for the delay
AFTER a year of work, and about a million air miles, our new motoring show will soon make its debut on Amazon Prime and almost everyone I meet asks the same question: “Why the bloody hell has it taken so long?”
My standard answer is that anything involving James May is bound to take an age. This is a man who takes two hours to have a dump.
But the truth is that it took us quite a long time to actually get started in the first place.
For 12 years, Richard Hammond, James and I had worked together at the BBC which is a bit like being children, living at home.
We drove round corners while shouting, producer Andy Wilman edited it all together, and the Beeb did all the boring stuff — insurance, compliance, health and safety, staffing, and watering the plants in the office.
Happily, a friend lent us an office in Marylebone and Richard Hammond immediately appointed himself stationery manager. He bought a ruler, some highlighter pens and a batch of paper.
I sat about in a corner thinking of what we could do with the new Lamborghini and Andy Wilman sat in another corner telling me that before we could do anything at all, we’d need some cameramen, a bank account, some researchers, and all the other stuff that the Beeb used to do.
James meanwhile was on the lavatory, playing Battleships on his iPad.
Occasionally, our paymasters at Amazon would call to ask how we were getting along and Richard would tell them excitedly about the new fax machine that he’d bought — he lives in Wales and therefore hasn’t heard of email — and I’d go on and on about how I wanted to set a Ferrari on fire and crash it into an airliner.
Occasionally, our paymasters at Amazon would call to ask how we were getting along... and I’d go on and on about how I wanted to set a Ferrari on fire and crash it into an airliner
Bit by bit, we started to put the pieces together. We found a track and employed a racing driver who could set lap times in the cars we filmed there.
We got our heads round the astonishing complexities of filming in 4K. We dreamed up a name. We even managed to find an office of our own in a street called “Power Road” and we found someone to water the plants we’d bought.
And eventually, we were all ready to make our first proper film. The location was Northern France, the subject was three old Maseratis and the meeting point was St Pancras station at 7am.
Richard was there on time and so was I. But there was no James.
Then the phone rang.
It was Andy, the producer. “James fell over coming out of a restaurant last night and has broken his arm.”
Explosive... filming in Whitby for Jeremy Clarkson's new show The Grand Tour
Now on a normal show, the whole shoot would be cancelled and we’d rush round to see James with flowers and chocolate and sympathy. But this is not a normal show . . .
So Andy went on: “I’ve told him to stop being an a**e and get on the next train. He’ll be with you at 11, and he can drive the Maserati with the automatic gearbox.”
And so it began — a nine-month filming blitz that would take us to Barbados, Jordan, Namibia, Italy, Germany, California, Morocco, Tennessee, Dubai, Finland, Holland, South Africa and of course, Whitby.
The fruit of our labours will air on Friday evenings, beginning on November 18 and running for 12 weeks.
It’s been a hugely ambitious project.
And for once, I don’t think that all of it is rubbish.
ON BREAKING LAW
ONE of the biggest problems we faced with the new show was the law.
I had dreamed up Stig, the cool wall, and the idea of putting a star in a reasonably priced car but legally, all of these things belong to the BBC. And it wasn’t just the obvious stuff either.
According to our lawyers, we’d be in trouble if James said: “Oh cock”. Or if the audience in our giant travelling studio tent was seen in the back of shot, standing up, or if we said Richard Hammond was a bit on the small side.
It got worse. We were told that because, in the past, we would often pull over at a beauty spot and describe the view as lovely, we’d have to stop doing that as well. Seriously. I’d have to get out of my car in the Namib Desert which is one of the most achingly beautiful places on earth and say: “For legal reasons, that view is disgusting.”
ON COCK-UPS
AS before, there will be a Christmas special which, as you’d expect, will not be transmitted at Christmas.
We filmed it in Namibia, which meant packing was easy.
This was a desert country, in Africa, in the southern hemisphere’s early autumn. So I took three T-shirts, three pairs of jeans and that’s it.
I wasn’t alone.
Our crews, who usually have a sixth sense about temperatures and weather, had all taken shorts and vests. And . . . it was the coldest place on Earth.
There was a fog so thick, it felt like I was living in a chilled consommé, and to make matters worse we were driving beach buggies which had no windows, no roofs and, worst of all, no heaters.
I think I may have caught consumption.
ON THE BEST BITS
WE start the series with a three-car test between the McLaren P1, the Porsche 918 and the LaFerrari.
This is the holy trinity of hypercars and you haven’t seen them together on television before.
However, the highlight of the series for me is the trip we made to a special forces training base in Jordan.
Here, in a disused quarry, super army soldiers from all over the world gather every year to compete in a series of gruelling challenges to see who’s best.
And er, we thought we’d give it a go.
Car chases, fast roping out of helicopters, gun fights. We did the lot. Badly. I managed to shoot myself at one point, James May electrocuted his head and Richard Hammond got into a knife fight with a Jordanian special forces giant. Which was the shortest contest in history.
ON NO SWEARING
ONE of the utter joys of working with Amazon is that we get absolutely no editorial interference at all.
The only dispute we’ve had was about swearing. They say it’s OK. We say that we want a show that’s family friendly.
We’ve won.
ON HAVING A LAUGH
BIGGEST laugh. Morocco. James May was driving a no-nonsense sports car called the Zenos which came with no doors and a steering wheel that can be removed to make getting in and out a bit easier.
He came out of the hotel one morning and actually set off before he realised the wheel was still on the passenger seat.
ON MONEY
You’ve been told that Matt Damon will be a guest star (he won’t) and that Roger Daltrey and Wilko Johnson wrote the theme music (they didn’t).
And as a result, you are probably expecting this show to make Avengers Assemble look as low-rent as an episode of Cash In The Attic.
I worry about that at night because the truth is: the budget for The Grand Tour is actually not much larger than the budget we had on Top Gear.
When all is said and done, it’s just a car show.
One that’s hosted by three idiots and edited by a genius.
ON LOOKING GOOD
AS I’m sure you know, James, Richard and I are well known for our crisp fashion sense and well-groomed hair.
But it’s all gone a bit awry on the Grand Tour. We turned up to record the show in Holland with no iron or ironing board. Which meant my jacket looked like a dishcloth.
And the make-up girl we used in South Africa arrived with six gallons of thick orange paint and a trowel.
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Meanwhile, back in the real world...
JOY of joys. Autumnwatch is back on our screens, and this time it’s ethnically balanced with a range of presenters from various different backgrounds.
The stars of the show, however, are the animals which have a habit of buggering off just as the show goes live.
“Well Chris. There was a lovely badger here just a moment ago but it seems to have gone.”
Yes, to give a cow tuberculosis.
This week, they fitted a tracking device to a golden eagle and of course we were told that the bird wouldn’t mind spending the rest of its life with a gigantic electric rucksack on its back.
Yes. In the same way that shoplifters don’t mind going around with an ASBO bracelet on their ankles. This is standard Autumnwatch behaviour.
A woman was going to fly alongside some swans as they migrated from Russia to the UK. Sadly, her powered parachute was not as fast as the swans. And it had to land often to refuel which they didn’t, and on the first day, it broke down.
Do something hideous to an animal and then, to stop us writing a letter of complaint, tell us that the animal in question is perfectly happy about it.
The next night, they put a mouse in a polythene bag. Mouses like it apparently. We saw a hornet behead a bee and then we cut back, live, to a field with no deer in it.
My favourite item was about a woman, above, who was going to fly alongside some swans as they migrated from Russia to the UK. Sadly, her powered parachute was not as fast as the swans. And it had to land often to refuel which they didn’t, and on the first day, it broke down.
Which meant that as the swans arrived in Britain, she was still stuck in Siberia. Somehow, this was billed as a great success.
What will not be a success is the decision to give the eagle with the ASBO pack a name.
Viewers were invited to send in suggestions which means it’s going to end up being called Birdy McBirdface. And we’re all going to fall in love with it. And then it will die.
TOP CATS
THE RSPCA announced this week that they are currently having to adopt a staggering 4,521 stray cats every year.
Their own centres are now so full that they are having to use expensive private boarding facilities.
Private boarding? What, like Eton?
Is the RSPCA now paying for cats to learn Latin?
MANY people are starting to say that the world must switch immediately to battery power to meet all its needs.
But a long piece in the Times newspaper this week explains that this is simply not possible.
The figures quoted are alarming.
To keep the lights on in Britain for just two days, we would need to use ten times as many car and lorry batteries as there are on the entire planet.
And things are not much better if we use more advanced power sources such as the Tesla powerwall.
We’d need 3.3billion of them to meet our weekly needs and that would cost £8trillion.
The upshot, according to the author of the piece, is that we must continue to use coal and gas and oil.
Well I’m sorry but that’s just not true.
We have the technology right now to turn sea water into hydrogen. And we also have the technology to use that hydrogen to create electricity to charge up all the batteries.
It’s a process that simply turns the hydrogen back into water.
Yes, it’s complex and expensive to make hydrogen. But is it more complex and more expensive than pumping oil out of the ground in Saudi Arabia and shipping it all the way to the petrol pump at your local filling station in Cardiff?
My case rests.
NOT IN MY STOCKBROKER BELT
THE decision to give Heathrow a third runway will delight millions of air travellers, create 180,000 jobs and maintain London as a global economic hub.
On the downside, ten houses in the village of Sipson will have to be knocked down.
ANOTHER day, another theme park calamity. This time it’s Australia where four people died and four were left critically injured when a ride went wrong.
What amazes me is that the travelling fairgrounds that move from town to town in Britain never seem to have any problems.
You hurtle round and round at 2,000mph on a ride that’s anchored to a small bush and was built in a hurry by, er, travelling people, and it’s always fine. Odd.