“It troubles me” Jeremy Clarkson admits feeling uneasy about the rumoured £160 million spent on The Grand Tour
With all the hype around the comeback of former Top Gear trio Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, it’s a little surprising to hear Jeremy compare their new series The Grand Tour to… shepherd’s pie.
“It’s like we served up cottage pie for 12 years and now it’s shepherd’s pie,” says the Sun columnist when asked how the Amazon Prime show differs from Top Gear. “So it’s different, but it’s still comfort food.”
Perhaps the huge expectations for the show – which is rumoured to have cost Amazon £160million – have forced Jeremy, 56, to play it down as he admits he’s not immune to pressure.
“It troubles me, actually,” he says. “I lay awake at night going: ‘It’s just a car show.’ There’s been quite a lot of talk about the massive budget and the huge spend.
"Everybody’s expecting the first show to come from Jupiter and for us all to have Iron Man suits, but it’s three middle-aged men falling over.”
The 12-part show sees the trio travel all over the world and each week the ‘studio’ is a tent in a different country, with views ranging from deserts to cityscapes… and the British seaside town of Whitby.
It is a brand-new show, but it’s clear that Jeremy and his petrolhead pals are back doing what they do best – making entertaining car shows.
There’s also some jaw-dropping footage.
The six-minute-long opening sequence in the first episode is bound to take your breath away whether you’re a car lover or not.
“We’ve got the McLaren P1, the Porsche 918 Spyder and the Ferrari LaFerrari together in one place – everyone’s tried to put those together and failed,” explains Jeremy. “It’s the best car film we’ve ever made. It’s very moving.”
“Some of the explosions are a bit big – we got carried away on a couple of occasions with that,” adds Richard, 46. “You think: ‘That must be CGI.’”
As well as spectacular cinematic-style sequences, we can expect more of the easy, genuinely funny banter that made Jeremy, Richard and James the most popular lads on television.
“None of us likes the word ‘banter’,” says Richard. “You could say bickering, point-scoring, petulance, childish competition. Whatever, it’s exhausting!”
Richard and James’ loyalty to Jeremy was evident when the pair followed their colleague out of the Top Gear fold after his well-publicised altercation with the show’s producer, Oisin Tymon, in March last year.
“Jeremy and Richard are deeply irritating and I’d rather be alone, obviously,” laughs James, 53. “But it’s good for television, it creates tension and friction and that allows subjects to be explored. If we all sat there agreeing with each other it would be really, really dull.”
Richard acknowledges that together the three of them have a special spark.
“We’re much more than the sum of our parts,” he says. “We’ve all individually done stuff, but what have we ever done, any of us, that’s on the scale of this? Nothing.
There isn’t anything on the scale of this. We’d be fools not to do it. Obviously I don’t enjoy it, it’s bloody horrible!”
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