The Grand Tour was the last gasp of un-woke TV for dads

After 22 years, Clarkson and co have split up for good. This is why we’ll never see their like on our screens again

According to its executive producer, Andy Wilman, the last ever episode of The Grand Tour is “weepy and emotional”. Really? Somehow, the concept is hard to visualise. After all, we’re talking here about Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May: a presentational combo not widely renowned for their sensitivity. If asked to guess how this finale ended, I suspect that most of us would have pictured, say, Clarkson gleefully blowing up a caravan. Probably after locking May inside it.
Frankly, if anyone’s going to be weepy and emotional, it will be us, their viewers. We’re going to be bereft. Because the new episode – released today – represents the very last time we will get to see these three presenters together. Twenty-two years after May joined the other two on Top Gear (replacing the journalist Jason Dawe, who had co-hosted the reboot’s first series), they’re splitting up, for good.
And what a madly improbable ride it’s been. Initially, back in the early days of this millennium, the BBC was less than enthusiastic about Clarkson’s proposal to bring back Top Gear: a relatively staid and stuffy half-hour motoring programme that had been canned barely a year earlier. Yet, by the time Clarkson was “let go” in 2015 following an altercation with a producer, he and his two co-stars had turned it into one of the biggest global hits the BBC had ever known. 
Having amassed a combined audience of 350m people, it was, confirmed Guinness World Records, the most popular factual TV series on the planet (or, as its presenters would put it: “…in the WORLD”). And, when the BBC decided not to renew Clarkson’s contract over that unfortunate dust-up about a cold dinner, a petition to reinstate him gathered more than a million signatures. Little wonder the bosses at Amazon were so eager to show Christian forgiveness and give the sinner a second chance, by immediately offering him, and his two friends, a contract to make an eerily similar show, The Grand Tour, with an astonishing reported budget of £160m.
So how on earth did they get so popular? The key reason, I think, was their sheer originality. Ostensibly they may have been trying to jump-start a clapped-out old banger of a show. But they did it in an extraordinary new way – while serving an audience that everyone else on TV was ignoring.
If the Nineties was dominated by laddism (Loaded, Oasis, TFI Friday), in the Noughties Top Gear embodied a culture that was related, but in crucial ways different. Let’s call it daddism: a celebration of men who were just that little bit older, if not necessarily wiser or more mature. Most shows didn’t cater for that demographic: then as now, TV executives were desperate to appeal to the much younger, or the much older. 
Yet here to lead the daddist revolution were three not terribly telegenic blokes in early middle age, bantering about hatchbacks and deriding cyclists. They may have had bad shirts and even worse hair, but they plainly didn’t give two hoots, any more than their viewers did. This was TV for men who were past fretting about being trendy and cool. They just wanted to unwind, after another hard week’s suburban mortgage-paying, and have a laugh.
Being funny: that was the new Top Gear’s chief attraction, far above the actual cars. Clarkson, Hammond and May were swiftly among the BBC’s stand-out presenters – even if the main reason they stood out was that they didn’t seem very “BBC” at all. Their humour was of a kind that the BBC had either forgotten how to do, or no longer wished to: extremely male, unabashedly plain-speaking (you can tell that each of the three grew up in Yorkshire), and merrily contemptuous of metro-lib orthodoxy. No matter how many times they were reprimanded for upsetting this or that nation’s ambassador (Mexico, India, Argentina), it didn’t deter them. If anything, it encouraged them. As Clarkson himself recently put it: “We were just naughty schoolkids trying to annoy our lefty BBC bosses.”
Even so, it wasn’t just foreigners they made fun of. Mostly, it was each other. This was the secret of their chemistry as a trio: they simply reflected the way male friends communicate in real life. Which is almost entirely through in-jokes, unflattering nicknames, and a mockery that would border on bullying if it weren’t so obviously affectionate. 
Inevitably, as their fame grew, the three started getting mocked by others, as well. In 2008, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse broadcast a sketch entitled “Clarkson Island”, in which Hammond and May were depicted as nothing more than Mini-Mes of Clarkson, slavishly imitating their leader’s every tic and quirk (“…in the WORLD”). The sketch was very funny, but also a touch unfair. As well as skilled presenters in their own right, Hammond and May had distinct personae on Top Gear: the former puppyishly excitable, the latter placidly reasonable. Then again, since Clarkson is such a powerful personality, and possesses such a distinctive style of both humour and delivery, anyone who is forced to spend several months in his company every year is bound to pick up some of his verbal idiosyncrasies. 
Besides, all groups of close male friends do the same: unconsciously aping each other’s mannerisms and phrasings. So in all likelihood, the trio’s similarities actually made them seem all the more relatable to viewers. These three men, we could see, weren’t just colleagues. They were mates. 
But since their chemistry as presenters remains so successful and so rare, why stop at all? Why not career chaotically on for another 22 years, or however many their respective livers allow? 
The truth is prosaic: as they themselves admit, they’ve run out of ideas. In Clarkson’s words: “We’ve done everything you can do with a car. When we had meetings about what to do next, people just threw their arms in the air.” 
In short: they invented a format. Now they’ve exhausted it. So, however popular they may still be, they’re right to split.
1 day till we embark on the trio’s final tour – it’s been a pleasure, boys 🫡 #TheGrandTour #TGTOneForTheRoad #JeremyClarkson #RichardHammond #JamesMay pic.twitter.com/tFUbIZqszQ
Anyway, there are other projects to pursue. May has Our Man In…, his series of travel programmes. Hammond has Richard Hammond’s Workshop, in which he tinkers with old motors. The other one, meanwhile, has Clarkson’s Farm, which, as well as being sublimely entertaining, represents an unexpected departure for its host. It’s not just glorified mucking about. It’s eye-opening, impassioned – and often, come to that, genuinely “weepy and emotional”. It’s the most-watched original series on Prime Video, too – outdoing The Grand Tour. 
Normally when something of cultural significance comes to an end – be it a TV series, a band, some pioneering magazine – we stop to ponder its legacy, the influence it had, the ways in which it shaped the next generation. In the case of the Clarkson, Hammond and May line-up, however, I’m not convinced they’ll leave a legacy at all. But only because few, if any, mainstream TV executives today would dream of putting together another trio in the same mould. I mean, come on. Three white, heterosexual, middle-aged and aggressively opinionated men, who spend half their time on screen making politically incorrect jokes, and most of their time off-screen being ordered to apologise? In the age of #BeKind and inclusivity, where even period dramas must be scrupulously diverse and topical comedy is all wetly progressive, I somehow doubt it. 
This, then, is surely the end, both for this unholy trinity and the type of breezily outrageous entertainment they made together. Still, I can’t be the only viewer who would love to see Hammond and May making regular cameos on Clarkson’s Farm, rather like beloved characters from Cheers would pop up every so often on Frasier. 
Then again, I wouldn’t hold out too much hope. The next series is going to focus on Clarkson opening a country pub, just down the road from his farm. And, according to a sign by the pub’s door, the list of people who are barred includes James May. 
Poor old Captain Slow. Even when he isn’t on screen, he’s still getting picked on.
The Grand Tour: One for the Road is available now on Prime Video
4/5
3/5
4/5