We all knew, or perhaps hoped, it would come to this.
Richard Hammond even joked about it on their “farewell” program — “We don’t have to end up in the same old folks’ home, do we?”
Our three blokey blokes, those loveable petrolheads from “Top Gear” and “The Grand Tour,” finish their run of pricey car porn, play-racing and wild motoring — car trips, motorcycle quests, boat passages, bridge building — “adventures” in a British home for OAPs, aka “Old Age Pensioners.”
It’s “2040,” is the premise, and they’re now in this nursing home — forgetful, wizened, gray and paunchier than ever — to replay the Amazon version of their “greatest hits.”
“The Grand(ish) Tour” is a clip show farewell to the Amazon series that was itself a curtain call to their nearly two decades of BBC motoring mayhem on “Top Gear.”
Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond have grown old and plump (ish, in Hammond and May’s cases) before our eyes in two and a half decades of TV car reviewing, racing, testing, questing and stunting.
Now, under the pretext of Amazon’s “teeny tiny print” in their contract, they’re back after wrapping up their series with a sentimental, romantic and fond farewell, to sum up the GT years with a trio of “greatest hits” clips programs — scary moments, funny failures and a lot of Clarkson’s John Bull blustering and carbon consuming myopia.
“The Grand Tour” started with an over-the-top “Drive Tribe” celebration of their new endeavor, after Clarkson haf one too many run-ins with the BBC and got himself fired. They roared in on their chariots of choice to a desert rendezvous with their gear head, petrol head, rat rodder, bikers and fellow travelers fans, serenaded by The Hot House Flowers covering “I Can See Clearly Now the Rain is Gone.”
Considering the tantrums and international incidents these Brit jingoists caused at the BBC, that was the height of irony, and not just a peak moment that Clarkson now admits their follow-up series would never top.
The gimmick of these clip shows — three are planned, we’re told — is that they’re all retired together in a home somewhere in Blighty, with a certain unnamed racing driver glimpsed in the background in a nearly magnanimous moment where Clarkson admits to being taught to drive fast, drift, etc.
As on the series, Clarkson holds forth and the clips burnish his cultivated image of a driver’s driver, a heedless “More POWER” speed demon and a car nut with little understanding of how to fix even the older, simpler beaters the lads drove across Africa, South America and all points in between.
They note the big misstep they took early in their last series, a giddy action pic bit of business driving and shooting through fake terrorists with a fake Queen E. (“Did you come far?”) in the backseat.
“Nobody wants to see us having fun,” was the revelation that widely-panned outing told them. If was the comical “suffering” and moments of terror — Hammond crashing, time and again, and peeing himself on a boat trip across the China Sea, May getting punk rear-ended as a running gag, Clarkson bullheadedly blundering through this bit of road or that section of track.
Pieced together, and taken in tandem with the still-bingeable BBC “Top Gear” archives available on several free streaming services, a new question about their group dynamic emerges.
“Playing their roles” or not, why did Hammond and May never rebel against Clarkson’s scenery-chewing, blustering dominance?
Yes, Clarkson and Andy Wilman conceived the re-imagining of the original show (which dates from @1979) and its gimmicks, merely adapting them to Amazon when they crossed over. Yes, that show’s entertainment-meets-supercars conceit made them all rich and famous.
But the show didn’t really work until they found those magic second and third legs of the stool. May and Hammond became just as important and a lot more watchable as the series progressed — Captain Slow and Wee Richie Crashes-a-Lot landing laughs, extolling the virtues of their choices of rides on these assorted “tours” and epic drives.
“Top Gear” has foundered since these three left because recapturing that trio’s chemistry has proven impossible.
But what’s obvious watching the “GT” clips, the old “Top Gears” and now this show is that Hammond and May are still pitched as Clarkson’s inferiors and willing to play along as his stooges, with the permitted insults they’re allowed to throw his way.
Why?
They started calling themselves dinosaurs long ago, and that finally seems to fit as the three play-act out a “forced” series of reminiscences. With gas prices skyrocketing and the planet literally cooking, it all seems a tad more heedless and foolish than it did back then when they first started their high octane hijinks.
I’ve enjoyed most of the shows, almost all of the road trips and even “Clarkson’s Farm,” which is an amusing follow-up for the most restless, wreckless and headstrong of the three to try. I even took May’s advice and bought a vintage Triumph TR-6 to restore.
May is still the one you’d most like to have a conversation with and the handiest to have along on a classic car ride, Hammond the most likeable TV-friendly “presenter” of the lot and best potential drinking buddy.
And Clarkson? He’s aged into the ultra conservative, entitled, self-unaware geezer many of those early “Top Gear” episodes promised, full of blustered opinions, not necessarily adept at defending them, quick with the insult and determined to limit those directed at him that make it on television.
I stumbled back across the most revealing aside involving him just as “Top Gear” was on the rise, an early pre-global-phenomenon “Top Gear” episode where Guns-N-Roses guitarist Slash was the hapless “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car” guest, forced to drive a manual econobox with the steering and gear shift on “the wrong side” around their track.
This was when the show was lucky to get other (obscure to the rest of the world) BBC presenters and radio hosts on as “celebrity” guests, and this guitarist — on tour and willing to come in to give the plucky little show a taste of international celebrity. He even covered the Allman Brothers tune “Jessica,” (“Top Gear’s” theme song long before Clarkson finished his first carton of ciggies) for the closing credits.
Over that closing music, Clarkson insecurely insults Slash’s driving as opposed to his guitar playing as an aside to his “mates.” Producer Wilman chose to put that churlish quip in the show.
That outed them both as pricks-of-a-feather, plainly meant for each other, a ride-or-die pair who lied to the BBC about Clarkson’s Falklands War license plate stunt during the infamous Argentina to Tierra del Fuego road trip, the “real” reason the BBC was looking for an excuse to fire him.
Clarkson’s perfected “watch this John Bull in a china shop fail,” his version of villain watching (a British Kardashian, he is). And his Gentleman Farmer fantasy is fun, even if you don’t buy the proposition that being backed by one of the world’s wealthiest companies and his own celebrity, that he could ever “fail.” Maybe he’ll figure out the error of climate change denial ways and repent.
May’s post “Grand Tour” shows have been entirely too pedantic and narrowly British in their focus — even the travelogues. I haven’t seen much of Hammond’s attempts at finding a fresh hit.
“The Grand Tour” gave them all a fun if repetitive few-years-long send-off. “Grand(ish) Tour” reminds us that there were highlights, and almost as much filler as the BBC shows, and a dire accident or two as well.
In or out of Ammonia Lodge rest home, Charging my HEARING aids” or not, the fans have gotten old with them, so there’s something to be said for the sentimentality of one last round of “Clarkson, you pillock” and the like.
But a clip show is still a clip show, and unless one or two of the three cares to go all George Takei on their egomaniac Captain Kirk, it’s hard to see much point to this, unless there really is “fine print” or somebody needs the money.
Rating: TV-MA, profanity
Cast: Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.
Credits: Created by Andy Wilmon and Jeremy Clarkson. An Amazon Prime release.
Running time: 3 (presumably) episodes @80 minutes each.
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