by Gwen Russell
The fallout began. ‘BBC please take him back,’ tweeted his daughter Em. ‘He’s started cooking.’
James May, who witnessed the whole thing was door-stepped by 5 News and asked if he supported Jeremy. ‘In many ways no, I have said many times before the man’s a nob, but I quite like him. It’s all getting a bit ridiculous,’ came the reply. What did he understand had happened? ‘Not very much, I was blind drunk. No further comments – sorry.’
But May was being disingenuous. It was not just Jeremy’s contract that had come to an end: so had that of James and Richard Hammond. And they were walking, too, something that had become apparent almost immediately from 25 March, the day it was announced that Jeremy’s contract would not be renewed. May promptly changed his Twitter account to ‘former Top Gear presenter’. It was pretty clear what he intended to do.
‘Me and Hammond with a surrogate Jeremy is a non-starter. It has to be the three of us,’ he told The Guardian. I don’t think you could carry on with two people and put someone in as the new Jeremy because they are not going to be the new Jeremy. That would be short-sighted and I don’t think it would work. Virtually impossible.’ He was right, of course, and in a rather different situation a couple of years later, when The Great British Bake Off moved from the BBC to Channel 4, most of the presenters on that show similarly felt they could only work as a team.
Richard Hammond felt exactly the same and announced his own decision on Twitter: ‘To be clear amidst all this talk of us “quitting” or not: there’s nothing for me to “quit”. Not about to quit my mates anyway.’ Executive producer Andy Wilman, a long-term friend of Clarkson, also announced he was off and it was announced that on 28 June that year the final shows would air as a compilation hosted by Richard and James. And what to do with the Top Gear Live stage shows? They would continue under the heading of Clarkson, Hammond and May Live instead.
For all the brave face he put on it, for Clarkson this was a time of enormous upheaval. He had lost his mother, his marriage had broken up and now he had lost his show as well. And it was a crisis for the BBC, which was still being slow to grasp quite what they had lost. A high-profile search for a replacement team began with, with such unlikely names as Sue Perkins seriously up for consideration. It was a ludicrous suggestion – the BBC didn’t seem to realise that replacing a wildly popular bloke’s bloke with a right-on lesbian might not have been the most obvious move – but like so many others involved in the saga, she too received death threats. This time it was left to James May to tell the fans to put a stop to it.
Other names put forward included Dermot O’Leary, Philip Glenister and Jodie Kidd, but in the event the main presenter was announced as Chris Evans, another blokey bloke. There was some excitement when the Friends actor Matt LeBlanc was named as co-host and not a great deal of excitement at all when the rest of the line-up came through: Eddie Jordan, Chris Harris, German racing driver Sabine Schmitz and motor journalist Rory Reid.
Among reports of backstage rows, arguments and upheavals, the word was that the new show wouldn’t be a patch on the old, and it was right. Once the programme aired, the reviews were pretty awful, with most of the criticism aimed at Evans, who was certainly no new Jeremy. He and Matt didn’t seem to get on that well either, thus completely failing to supply the blokey camaraderie that had characterised the previous lot: indeed, after a somewhat ill thought-out stunt in which Matt performed ‘donuts’ near the Cenotaph, Chris issued a grovelling apology which made it clear he had nothing to do with what many people saw as being deeply disrespectful, and that it was down to Matt.
But of the two of them, Matt was far more popular and his style of presenting went down far better with the audience. After the end of the run, bowing to the inevitable, Evans resigned. There was some relief behind the scenes when Matt said he would stay on: he, Harris and Reid would become the programme’s main presenters. The old magic was gone, but something might be salvaged after all, although by this time even the BBC had started to realise that they had chucked away the jewel in the crown, a jewel that was not going to be that easy to replace. And so Top Gear went on in its new format, fans disappointed that their heroes had gone – but their heroes, by this time had started to make other plans. So just where was Jeremy going to go next?
CHAPTER 17
TOP GEAR ON STEROIDS
It didn’t take long. Three of the most popular presenters on the BBC, along with their executive producer Andy Wilman, were known to be looking for a new gig. They formed a production company called W Chump and Sons (surely an ironic name, not least because the four company cars were Reliant Robin three-wheelers) and started to look around. The signs were there from the start that Top Gear would run into terrible problems without them and so it had turned out, but even before the crisis surrounding their successors, Clarkson and co. had found their new home. And given how much television had changed since the early days of Top Gear, it was fitting that their new channel would reflect this change, too.
For, of course, it wasn’t a channel, or not in the traditional sense, at least. It was Amazon Prime. For some years before the boys left the BBC, one huge change in the way people watched programmes had been the rise of streaming services, online sites which started by taking older television shows and re-screening them and, as they grew in wealth and influence, commissioning their own series. At the time of writing, this has become commonplace, with hugely successful series commissioned especially for Netflix, such as The Crown, but even in mid-2015 it was something people were getting used to. Clarkson put it in his own inimitable way: ‘I feel like I’ve climbed out of a biplane and into a spaceship.’
‘Amazon? Oh yes. I have already been there. I got bitten by a bullet ant,’ said an overexcited Richard.
‘We have become part of the new age of smart TV. Ironic, isn’t it?’ asked James.
‘They’ll give us the freedom to make the programme we want … there’s a budget to produce programmes of the quality we want and this is the future,’ said Andy Wilman in an interview with the Radio Times. It would have ‘themes people will be familiar with. I can’t tell you how good it feels to get the chance to produce something from scratch. We’re all really excited. No one telling us what we can and can’t do, just us hopefully producing great programmes. It feels really liberating.’
Much as Jeremy enjoyed his feuds, however, on this occasion he decided to forego one. He and Chris Evans were both larger-than-life characters and Jeremy was watched like a hawk to see if he would say anything disobliging about his successor. He held his peace. As rumours circulated about behind-the-scenes rows at Top Gear and about power struggles between producers and presenters, all three of the boys kept out of it and concentrated on the new show. Wilman, too, claimed he was not interested in a head-to-head between the two shows: ‘The child in me probably would, but actually all the scheduling competition stuff is becoming irrelevant,’ he told Broadcast magazine. ‘People will watch programmes when they want to and not when they’re told to. This is very much the future of how we’ll watch TV.’
There were only a few moments when Jeremy let rip and then it seemed to be as much on the back of personal hurt as anything else: ‘I was having a tricky year, and I was quite stressy,’ he said in an interview on the BBC with Jonathan Ross, referring to the run-up to leaving. ‘It was really hard. It was getting harder and harder to do that show, because it was getting bigger and bigger all the time. The problems were getting bigger and bigger, the lack of support was appalling, home life was difficult, they were very stressy times.’ It was known that while the ‘slope-gate’ inquiry was rumbling on that Jeremy’s mother had died; no one, it seems, had let up on the questioning and even for Jeremy it had become too much.
As for the new Top Gear, he was remarkably restrained. ‘You look at the TV show, you read all the credits, you’ll see the cameraman, the sound recordist, you’ll see their names …You find me one where it says “written by”. They just cobble it together,
’ he said to the BBC. ‘Writing is everything.’
But there were issues to be aware of when it came to the new Top Gear and the new Amazon programme. There were any number of legal constraints to worry about: for a start they couldn’t use the same format and they also couldn’t use the word “gear”. But they could make a programme about cars. No one, however, was unduly concerned about what was to come. Certainly Top Gear fans, disillusioned about what had happened to their show, could hardly wait. ‘Star the smoke,’ tweeted Jeremy. ‘We have a name.’ That name turned out to be The Grand Tour, a reference to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice in which members of the British well-off would make a ‘grand tour’ throughout Europe; in this case it emerged that the show would come from different towns and countries in every episode.
‘After months of deliberation and lots of useful suggestions from the public, for which the guys are very grateful, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have decided that, because they are taking their new Amazon Prime Show around the world, it will be called The Grand Tour,’ a statement on their website read. ‘Not only will the guys travel to different locations, but for the first time ever the studio audience recordings will travel every week, all housed within a giant tent. Amazon customers will have the chance to be in the audience when tickets are released through prize draws this summer.’ They were signed up for an initial three series of twelve one-hour episodes. Interest began to rise.
Of course, this was an enormous coup for Amazon Prime as well. To land this particular trio was not only a publicity coup: it almost certainly meant that Clarkson fans would be signing up for Amazon Prime, thus massively widening its subscriber base. ‘Customers told us they wanted to see the team back on screen, and we are excited to make that happen,’ said Jay Marine, vice president of Amazon Prime Video in Europe. ‘Millions of Prime members are already enjoying our ground-breaking original shows. We can’t wait to see what Jeremy, Richard, James and the team will create in what is sure to be one of the most globally anticipated shows of 2016. This is a golden age of television, a great time for TV makers and storytellers. Our approach is to give programme makers creative freedom to be innovative and make the shows they want to make. This is just the start, you should expect to see more world-leading talent and the biggest shows on Prime Video.’ There was another difference, too: according to some industry reports, the show was going to cost Amazon more than a quarter of a billion dollars. They were, ‘very, very, very expensive’, for Amazon said its CEO Jeff Bezos. ‘They’re worth a lot and they know it.’ So, stakes were high.
There would be one small difference from other new shows on the streaming channels. Most were released in box-set form, with all the episodes going on air at once. This was not quite the case with The Grand Tour: rather, the first episode was to debut on 18 November 2016 and follow-ups released weekly after that to Amazon customers in the UK, US, Germany, Australia and Japan. After December 2016 it was to be made available to an additional 195 countries. No exact figures were given but Amazon said that the show was the most watched premiere in its history and that on the same day a record number of Amazon subscriptions were sold: ‘The guys are back, doing what they do best – the chemistry between Jeremy, Richard, and James is what makes The Grand Tour so entertaining,’ said Jeff Bezos. ‘Their creativity, along with the amazing production quality and 4K HDR streaming, has Prime members responding in a big way. Kudos and congrats to the whole team.’
The show did indeed broadcast from various different parts of the globe, including Johannesburg, California, Nashville, Whitby, Lapland, Rotterdam and more. The show featured a large tent for studio segments, a test track called the Eboladrome because, according to Jeremy, it resembled the structure of the Ebola virus, and a test car driver in the shape of Mike Skinner. Running jokes included a drone being destroyed in the opening titles, the presenters’ names being regularly misspelled and a joke about killing off the celebrity guests.
But Jeremy did admit to nerves. ‘It troubles me, actually,’ he said at a press call before the series began. I lie awake at night going, “It’s just a car show”, because there’s been a lot of talk of massive budgets, and everybody is expecting the first programme to come from Jupiter, and for us all to have Iron Man suits and for it to be The Avengers. It isn’t. It’s three middle-aged men falling over.’
He need not have worried. The reviews were on the whole positive: ‘Jeremy Clarkson and co leave the BBC in their dust,’ said The Guardian. The first episode ‘resembled a Hollywood blockbuster,’ said the Daily Express, adding, ‘[The Grand Tour is] basically Top Gear on steroids.
The BBC, possibly still smarting at recent events, was not so generous. Arts editor, Will Gompertz commented, ‘There is no irony [in the opening sequence.] It feels uncomfortably hubristic’, but when the presenters were in situ, ‘Normal service has been resumed… It seemed to me that Grand Tour is a TV show that wants to be – and quite possibly should be – a movie.’ The Independent meanwhile said The Grand Tour was ‘the best of Top Gear but with a greater budget’.
They were a little more negative the following week, which featured an SAS-style training session in Jordan. It was, said the Daily Telegraph, ‘[…] a tedious action movie segment suggested that they were in danger of losing the run of themselves slightly and that Amazon’s hands-off policy towards the production had potential downsides.’ And the Radio Times also felt that ‘many of the viewers were disgruntled to say the least, branding the show as dull and not funny.’
Meanwhile it was actually Richard Hammond who managed to create the show’s first controversy, when he implied that men who eat ice cream are gay (admittedly, a somewhat bizarre conclusion). He was criticised by Stonewall, gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell and singer Olly Alexander, until it emerged that it was actually an in-joke for the Finnish audience as it referred to a controversial Finnish TV commercial.
Jeremy is not usually seen as an overly sensitive person, but in an interview with The Times Magazine, he revealed that even he could be hurt by the turn of events. ‘My luck stopped suddenly,’ he said of the interval between Top Gear and The Grand Tour. Apart from the BBC episode and the death of his mother, he also had to move out of the family home in the wake of the divorce and split up from his girlfriend Phillipa Sage. According to the great man himself, he temporarily gave up drinking, had a few early nights and even started some yoga first thing in the morning. At one point matters got so dark that during a scuba-diving session in a swimming pool, he spent the best part of the day at the bottom of the pool with an oxygen tank. ‘It was so peaceful down there. Why would I want to come out?’ he asked. But it didn’t take long for the old Jeremy to come back. There was, however, more difficult news to come at the end of 2016 when his close friend Adrian Gill passed away on 10 December. Gill had revealed his terminal cancer diagnosis, or ‘the full English’ of cancer as he called it, in his Sunday Times column less than three weeks before. Jeremy was, as one might expect, devastated by the loss and wrote a moving piece in the Sunday Times a week later titled ‘O Adrian, who will make me laugh now?’.
Whatever the future for The Grand Tour, the futures of its presenters were assured. They were very rich men and never needed to work again. But Jeremy’s private life continued to fascinate: by early 2017, he had found a new girlfriend, Irish actress Lisa Hogan, ten years his junior. Lisa, who had previously been married to a millionaire playboy called Baron Bentinck, nephew of the billionaire Baron Heini von Thyssen, with whom she had three children, told The Mirror: ‘I’m very happy. He’s great.’ They were seen together in Barbados; at 6ft 2 she was still not as tall as her new beau. Lisa had once caught the eye of John Cleese and had appeared in 1997 in Fierce Creatures, a film he co-wrote, as the sea-lion keeper. She had also once been involved in a plane crash when the Lear jet she was travelling in overshot the runway at RAF Northolt and crashed into the A40. Lisa emerged unscathed and as she later pointed out, she’d been in ju
st the one crash; Jeremy had managed three.
Jeremy’s urge to annoy had not entirely evaporated, however. In early 2017 he attended a gala dinner at the Roundhouse at which the BBC’s top man Tony Hall was present: ‘Two years ago I was working for the BBC – I know the director general is sitting over there now s***ing himself, but don’t worry Tony, it’s fine,’ he said in a speech as he presented a prize in the charity auction. ‘I came on this stage to offer an auction prize and I may have said some choice words about some of the BBC management. I was then sacked. As a result of that I’ve done really well for myself and now I’m at Amazon.’ This was not actually his usual spiel: Jeremy preferred to point out that he had not been sacked. It was merely a case that his contract had not been renewed.
Lisa was in attendance that night. Did she look set to become wife number three? Only time would tell. His ex-wife Frances was also seen on holiday with a new man and also in Barbados, causing some amusement among onlookers, who pointed out that he was younger and considerably slimmer than her ex. Top Gear limped back into a second series, now fronted by Matt LeBlanc; he received a considerably better reception than Chris had, but it was clear the glory days were long gone. ‘The Top Gear format is a classic piece of portmanteau television, but it should have been parked when the BBC made the unnecessary, politically motivated and financially ruinous decision to fire Jeremy Clarkson,’ wrote GQ editor Dylan Jones. ‘Instead the producers have once again drafted in a generic celebrity and two Muggles who both look as though they have spent formative parts of their career working in local radio or children’s TV.’
In April 2017, Jeremy turned fifty-seven, but although he had not lost his power to shock, there was almost something of the grand old man about him rather than the enfant terrible now. He still had his columns in both The Sun and The Sunday Times and he seemed happier now at Amazon than he had been at the Beeb. ‘When you send Amazon a film, their television people in Los Angeles ring up and squeak with joy,’ he told Jonathan Ross. ‘What you never get at the BBC is that – ever. Because if somebody was to say, “That was a great thing that you’ve just done”, particularly if they wrote it in an email, if it turned out to be controversial and the Daily Mail went berserk, they’d be on record as having liked it, and then what would happen? It’s a terrible culture, and all of Britain suffers from it.’