The Grand Tour

Jeremy Clarkson: ‘The Grand Tour is Top Gear in witness protection’

Jeremy Clarkson has described his new Amazon Prime show The Grand Tour as being like ‘Top Gear in witness protection’, in a recent interview on CNN’s “Quest Means Business”.

“That’s what a friend of mine said the other day, a reviewer,” Clarkson said. “This show is different because it moves around the world, that’s really it. “But it’s still James May, Richard Hammond, and I. So it’s like if you have a glass of champagne and you have it in a bucket or in a glass, it’s still champagne, and that’s really what it is. It’s a different vessel, but the show is, with different elements, basically about the same.”

Clarkson and his co-hosts are on Amazon instead of the BBC because Clarkson was fired by the BBC for punching a producer, Oisin Tymon. It was the last straw for the BBC, which had weathered a number of controversies involving Clarkson, including racist and homophobic comments he made over the years. But it doesn’t sound like Clarkson is planning on reining himself in.

“The BBC always let us do what we wanted to do and Amazon is exactly the same,” he said. “It says say what you want to say, do what you want to do. We always were self-policed, and sometimes you tread on a landmine and sometimes you don’t, move on.”

But, Clarkson said, “I never want to be controversial, it just happens. I say stuff sometimes and think, ‘Oh, no.”

“I try to present a TV show in the way that I hear people talking,” Clarkson said. “Not in city centers, not at agreeable dinner parties with editors and media people, but actual people talking. There was just two doors down here … there’s some people loading trucks and truck drivers and they’ve all got hoodies, visibility jackets, and hard hats on. I was just staring at them, sitting in traffic, thinking, ‘I want to hear what they talk about when they’re out and about,’ because that’s what I would like to reflect in the show. … We’re not making the show for what we call in the UK ‘the sneering media elite,’ of which I am a part. I’m not making a show for my friends, my colleagues, I’m making a show for everyone else, and it turns out, as we’ve seen in recent events, that there’s millions and millions of them.”

It’s clear Clarkson is still not shy when it comes to speaking his mind. Asked his thoughts on President-elect Donald Trump suggesting in a tweet that UK far-right politician Nigel Farage should be named the country’s ambassador to the US, he quipped, “If he is, we’ll go back to England.”

For now, though, Clarkson is focused not on the success of this season of “The Grand Tour,” but the next one.

“You’ve still got to concentrate,” he said. “You can’t rejoice, you concentrate on the next one and next one and next one. They’ve all got to be good, otherwise no point in doing it.”

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2 comments

Bad Kitty No Milk Tonight November 28, 2016 at 4:01 am

PS they need to drop The American, and bring in The Ben Collins

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Bad Kitty No Milk Tonight November 28, 2016 at 4:00 am

Give them some time, the pilot episode had some loose spots, the staged argument with audience being one, the killing of the special guest three times was overkill, but it worked fine in the second episode. They’re learning as they go and it will only get better as they refine the process. As is its still 100 times better than the reboot Top Gear with n9w sacked Shouty McShoutface.

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