For those of you not already in the loop, The Grand Tour is the career relaunch for Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.
Given a reported £8 million budget and a brief to blow BBC’s Top Gear out of the water, the show is potentially the most anticipated offering from Amazon’s winter lineup and has already got a lot of people on the interwebs jumping for joy and claiming they will happily front the subscription fee just for this one show.
Personally, one of my earliest memories is sitting on a very lurid 90s rug in my parents’ living room watching what I like to call ‘original’ Top Gear, with Tiff Needell and Quentin Wilson both backing up the slightly more well spoken Clarkson in their sideways, yet informative, motoring show.
When they brought back Top Gear in 2002, the show slowly reinvented itself until all anyone could talk about was what kind of scrape the daft, aging trio of Clarkson, Hammond and eventually James May (after a used car boffin called Jason Dawe was relieved after the first series) were going to get themselves into next. It was like watching Grumpy Old Men with an octane rating.
Of course, there were a few politically incorrect mishaps along the way, a few Mexican embassies rattled, a couple of anti-establishmentarian comments regarding the bus lane on the M4, but on the whole we went from a pokey motoring show to the BBC’s biggest franchise.
This new show, with its massive budget and globe trotting backdrop is bound to recoup some of the millions of pounds of faith Amazon have placed in the ambitious but rubbish trio. It looks simply incredible in the most chaotic and ridiculous kind of way. AND THEY HAVE A TANK IN THE TEASER VIDEO?!
The parts with the cars in should be brilliant, putting Chris Evans’ woeful attempts at motoring journalism to shame with informative yet entertaining coverage of some of the world’s most exotic four wheeled lunatics.
I’ve often thought that these three have been able to create comedy that somehow crosses the boundaries between the shock factor of ‘Jackass’ and the classic British sitcom humour of ‘Men Behaving Badly’ and provides an outlet for the 21st century bloke to talk about cars again, and so we can laugh at ‘big end’ jokes.
The Grand Tour starts on November 18