The Grand Tour

James May: Mozambique Special ‘a genuine experiment’

This week’s episode of The Grand Tour will be a Mozambique mini-special which will see Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May attempt to end world hunger with an incredible journey across the country.

James May says the boys genuinely tried their best to achieve something in this special and revealed a few more details about the upcoming episode.

Photo: Amazon Prime Video

What can you tell us about the Mozambique Special?

“Mozambique is a very beautiful country, I mean really stunning. Some bits look like England, some bits look like Austria, it seems to have all the other countries in the world in it, in terms of scenery and full of extremely hospitable people. Our mission was to try and, I mean, to say end world hunger would be overstating it, but we are attempting to resolve an old crisis, which is, you can get plenty of food if you live near the sea, because it’s full of fish, fish are abundant and they’re very good at fishing and they have fantastic fish markets and so on. But, you go just 100 miles inland and nobody eats fish, people have to survive on grain mainly because there is no easy way of getting the fish from the edge of the country inland.”

“So, we’ve attempted to do that, we’ve attempted to find a car based solution with varying degrees of success. To a certain extent, the programme is also slightly taking the mickey out of charitable things done on certain TV channels where well-known celebrities turn up somewhere very poor and say, look, isn’t this terrible and have a cry and then fly home again, first class.”

Photo: Amazon Prime Video

It sounds as if you were trying to do something for good?

“The Mozambique film is a genuine experiment. What we’re actually doing is not played for laughs, it’s a genuine attempt. In essence, if we were something like a charity, we would say we were raising awareness of the issue, because it is an issue I’m sure, and it’s actually not as easy to resolve as you might think, which is why nobody’s done it yet, and certainly not us.”

Photo: Amazon Prime Video

Can you take us through what, to you, are some of the funniest moments when you look back at the last year or so?

“Oh funniest moments. I mean, it’s quite a funny job making The Grand Tour, because if we didn’t find it funny, we wouldn’t be able to do it really, it would feel incredibly tragic for people our age, but I had quite a funny moment believing I’d lost my brakes going down a very slippery, very steep slope in an old Jaguar. I hadn’t actually, the warning lights had come on, but actually they worked, but it made no difference unfortunately, because we were going down a very steep, very icy incline. But it was quite funny at the time, especially for the other two.”

“Then Richard Hammond falling off his motorcycle [whilst filming in Mozambique] is actually quite funny. I didn’t see most of it, because I wasn’t close enough to him, but I’ve watched it on the film afterwards and I slightly regret missing seeing it live. It’s a bit like having not been at the 1966 World Cup and only watching it on a blurry black and white telly.”

Photo: Amazon Prime Video

The Grand Tour Mozambique Special ‘Feed the World’ will be available Friday 16th February 2018 on Amazon Prime Video.

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