Finally can’t take the pee

THE GRAND TOUR: SAND JOB (Prime Video) ★★★★ FILMING in the Sahara, it seems, can do weird things to a bloke’s body.

“We’ve been here three days,” observes Richard Hammond, a few minutes into this latest Grand Tour special. “I must have drunk, what, 60 litres of water? And I haven’t peed once.”

Nor, he learns, have his pals, Jeremy Clarkson and James May.

“The sun has boiled it all out of us,” Hammond suggests.

Temperatures in Mauritania, the West African country where this gruelling desert challenge is set, can get stupidly high. It’s 46C when they arrive.

Factor in a few other snags – such as the fear of catching Ebola from the local bats (“You bleed from your eyes, your nose, all your orifices,” Clarkson warns) – and you can see why the chaps may be nervous.

But, as ever, it’s the vehicles they’re driving – souped-up sports cars, hopelessly unsuited to this task they’ve been set, to follow part of the Paris-Dakar rally route – that will suffer the most.

The electrics on Hammond’s Aston Martin go doolally. He’s forced to drive in second gear only. His electric windows take on a life of their own.

But it’s one particularly maddening sound that he can’t switch off, designed to warn him his roof’s not shut properly, that sends him over the edge.

Pulling over, Hammond gets out and starts stomping up and down on his vehicle in absolute fury, not unlike a modern-day Basil Fawlty.

“B***ARD!” he screams. “Just stop BEEPING!!!”

Which Clarkson, of course, finds hilarious. “They do say people are driven mad in the desert...” he chuckles.