Chris Harvey
He’s also the least gaffe-prone – although it was he who characterised the average Mexican man as “a lazy, feckless, flatulent oaf with a moustache” in 2011 – and he’s being very careful when we talk about the infamous events of March last year.
The old Top Gear ended when Clarkson was suspended after a dust-up with a producer about his failure to ensure a hot steak was waiting at the end of a day’s filming. Clarkson was later sacked by the BBC, despite a million-strong petition calling for him to keep his job.
At the time, had Hammond thought this meant the end of the show? “Erm, I think it became clear fairly quickly what was going to happen,” he says.
But when it actually kicked off – after the 2014 trials of an Ofcom censure for Clarkson’s racist “slope” remark and being chased out of Argentina accused of crowing over the Falklands War – did he ever think the situation could have been mended?
“I haven’t considered it. I don’t have regrets.”
Some feel the situation unfolded because the BBC had failed to look after its most valuable commodity. Top Gear was worth more than £50million (R904-million) a year to the corporation globally. It could have had a chef ready to cook for the trio whatever they wanted.
“But they didn’t,” Hammond says, “and now we’re doing this.”
He’s even cagier on the restaffed Top Gear. May proffered an unguarded “very chuffed” about Chris Evans’s departure as host in July, but there appears to have been a three-line whip since then, and when I ask Hammond if he has any thoughts on the show, he responds: “Honest to goodness, no”.
It’s well known, however, that the BBC made a play for Hammond and May to stay on without Clarkson. Did he know from the start which side of the divorce he was on?
“No. I never felt embattled. I was going to do whatever was best and I made that very plain to everybody, and having looked at it very carefully, this was our best option. We’re better when we work together.”
The Grand Tour is a new “cars and travel” show, complete with a studio tent pitched in a new exotic location for each hour-long episode, starting in the Californian desert.
The opener features hundreds of cars, thousands of people, three celebrity guests and a new in-house test driver. It has been preceded by a shiny, expensive trailer. The opening sequence of the show alone is said to have cost £2.5-million (R45.2million).
Hammond says there is “a bit of mad speculation as to the numbers involved” in the deal with Amazon – it’s rumoured to be £160-million (R2.9-billion) but he seems quietly confident about The Grand Tour’s reception.
“We’re not going to disappoint, because we can’t,” he says.
So what can we expect? “Well, it’s no good if people come to find us and all of a sudden I’m an emeritus professor and Jeremy’s brilliant with a set of spanners, and James is breakdancing in a corner. That’s not going to work, it’s got to be us doing what we do.”
Series producer Andy Wilman (who also produced Top Gear) has said that some staples of their former show have survived. There will be a leaderboard, for instance, like the one used for “star in a reasonably priced car”, but it’s not allowed to be handwritten.
Most important, of course, will be the chemistry between the hosts. They regularly profess to hate one another, but Hammond’s book On the Edge (co-written by his wife, Mindy), about his near-fatal crash in a 300mph (483km/h) dragster in September 2006, reveals the true depth of their friendship.
“We’re not soppy but we spend a ton of time in each other’s company. The amount of times we’re asked, ‘Where do you get together after work?’ – well, there isn’t any time outside of work. The only time I’d have available outside of work would be if I slept with them.”
The other two are very identifiable types of Englishman, but Hammond has a clear sense of his own persona. “There’s a certain resilience to me, a certain pluckiness. I don’t possess their cynicism and world weariness.”
What if Amazon had said the show’s too blokey, and they needed to add a woman presenter?
Hammond suggests his wife but takes issue with the idea.
“We just don’t happen to be women. People do say, ‘Oh, you’re sexist’. Go back to the old show and find evidence of it. We weren’t. We’re not.”
I wonder if, after the crash, he is under orders from Mindy to avoid extreme stunts.
“There’s no pressure from her. She’s my best friend, we’ve been together for ever. But she and Izzy and Willow, that’s why I do the job and if I felt I was risking them growing up without me, or Mindy not having me around, or me not being with her, I wouldn’t do it.”
There will still be stunts, though, as a photograph of a soot-blackened Clarkson showed. And it remains to be seen if the trio will be avoiding controversy now that they are stepping on to a global stage.
I mention a recent US radio interview, in which Clarkson described driving a Ferrari as “like being tickled by two naked Vietnamese girls”.
Hammond rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that sounds like him. Did I correct him? Probably,” he decides, before concluding, “Yeah, but that’s where we are and that’s what we do.” — The Daily Telegraph