‘The Grand Tour’ awaits
With a rumoured £160-million spent on new cars and travel show ‘The Grand Tour’, Richard Hammond tells why the core trio who starred in ‘Top Gear’, had to stick together
IT’S LIKE coming out of the army, coming out of the BBC after all those years,” says Richard Hammond. The former Top Gear presenter, who until last year had been with the motoring show since 2002, is sitting in a pub in west London, taking drags on a vape cigarette and looking demob happy.
We’re here to talk about the return of 46-year-old Hammond and his fellow conflict veterans Jeremy Clarkson, 56, and James May, 53, in their new show, The Grand Tour.
The first episode of the 12-part series was released yesterday on subscription streaming service Amazon Prime Video. It is available initially just to the US, Germany, Austria and Japan, with the show scheduled to premiere in another 200 countries next month. At the time of writing, there was no indication of when it would be available in South Africa.
Before The Grand Tour could even get on the road, however, there was a battle royal with the BBC’s lawyers about what the three could and couldn’t take with them from the old Top Gear.
“The BBC owns the show,” says Hammond. “But ultimately, I own the copyright on me, I’m my own intellectual property, as are James and Jeremy. No lawyer can argue that I can’t be short any more, because I am.”
Hammond’s height was the butt of many a Top Gear joke. Does it annoy him being teased about it?
“It used to, it doesn’t now. The truth is, I’m not actually tremendously short [he’s 1.7m], the other two are bloody tall. More often in real life, I get people who are disappointed because they’re expecting this minute person to come in and this fairly normal bloke arrives.”
Do people in the pub do it because Clarkson does it? “Yeah.”
Is that not irritating? “No. We’re in the entertainment business and if people think it’s entertaining, it’s no skin off my nose, is it? My daughters [Izzy, 16, and Willow, 13] get teased for being short because they’re my daughters, obviously, but there are worse things to be called.”
Is Clarkson a bully? “No, not really,” says Hammond, before realising this isn’t quite a denial and slamming the door shut. “No. We’re all of us more complex perhaps than television can allow us to show.”
That said, Hammond is remarkably like he is on screen – the same cheeriness, the same ironic humour, and the same late-era half beard and long hair.