If it ain’t broke: Same old gang... just more jazz
You do miss proprietary Top Gear totems like The Stig... BBC lawyers are bound to be watching for copyright infringement
THE GRAND TOUR, the new motoring show starring the former Top
Gear presenting team, was always going to prove spectacular. Amazon has lavished a reported £160 million on its highest-profile television venture yet and, in the longawaited first episode, every penny could be seen on screen.
A blockbuster opening sequence featured fighter jets, flame-belching cars straight out of Mad Max and an air-conditioned tented studio in the Californian desert. Later, movie star Jeremy Renner was persuaded to jump out of a plane for a blink-and-it’s-over comedy skit. Even the usually sceptical Jeremy Clarkson seemed impressed. But the real question was whether the trio of Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May had brought with them the buccaneering chemistry that was so crucial to their 12 years on Top Gear.
It was clear from the very beginning of The Grand Tour that the petrolhead prima donnas had indeed retained their grumpy-bloke charm.
It was equally obvious just how foolish the BBC had been in attempting to replace them with Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc when it rebooted Top Gear over the summer. There isn’t much to the repartee between Clarkson and chums – their chat isn’t especially witty and, often, they appear to be simply talking over one another. But they are comfortable in each other’s company – a quality that Evans and LeBlanc simply couldn’t replicate (their faux friendship was like a blind date destined to end badly). Indeed, if there was a lesson from the first instalment of the new series, which went live on Amazon’s ondemand video service at 11pm on Thursday, it was that the BBC needs Clarkson and co a lot more than they need the BBC. Amazon has lofty ambitions for The Grand Tour, of which there will be 12 episodes recorded in 2016, with another 24 to follow across the next two years. The travelling-studio concept will see Clarkson, Hammond and May trading banter with audiences around the globe, with next week’s outing shot in Johannesburg and later dispatches filmed in Lapland, Stuttgart, Dubai and the Yorkshire seaside town of Whitby.
So, game set and match to Team Jezza? Certainly if you listen to Clarkson, who stresses that he, Hammond and May – unlike Evans and LeBlanc – “are all car journalists. We have poured everything we know, everything we care about into this show.” The BBC, however, was somewhat less enthusiastic in its assessment of the programme. The debut episode, widely applauded elsewhere, was branded “uncomfortably hubristic” by Will Gompertz, the BBC’s Arts Editor, who also dismissed it as a TV show “wanting to be a movie”. It is true that The Grand Tour was not an unqualified triumph, though; you do miss such proprietary Top Gear totems as The Stig and BBC lawyers are bound to be watching for copyright infringements. The legal worries led to some entertaining teasing of the BBC, with the presenters suggesting they have a feature in which celebrities drive around a circuit with their time recorded on a scoreboard – Top Gear’s Star in a Reasonably Priced Car in all but name – before dismissing the idea.
But a piece in which Clarkson, Hammond and May raced supercars around Portugal felt like box-ticking; essentially a sleepy retread of Top Gear circa 2007. Perhaps this was merely anticlimax after the endless hype. What’s clear is that Clarkson, especially, is revelling in the latitude that his new employers have granted him and his team.
Before the introductory sequence had even wrapped, he’d blurted a carefully crafted unkind remark about “gipsies” (“We’re going to be roaming the world… Only the cars that we drive are going to be insured.”).
He has also decided the most fitting name for The Grand Tour’s bendy testtrack is the “Ebola-drome” – you can imagine how the BBC would have responded to that.
“It’s very unlikely I’m going to be fired now, because we are on the internet,” Clarkson said at one point.
Petrolheads will rejoice that the old gang has swaggered back into town.
The BBC will wonder if they did the right thing in letting their most lucrative talent walk out the door and into Amazon’s welcoming embrace.