Jeremy Clarkson has said he and his two fellow former Top Gear presenters have been challenged by legal restrictions, nerves and the efforts of over-zealous makeup artists before the launch of the trio’s new multi-million pound television show.
Three weeks before The Grand Tour hits Amazon Prime, Clarkson said BBC restrictions on intellectual property rights had left him worried about the format of the new motoring show.
“The Star is a Reasonably Priced car, the Cool Wall, the Stig – all that had been left behind … and replaced with other stuff,” he wrote in the Sunday Times magazine. “Would that be like the Rolling Stones suddenly appearing on stage in tweed suits and doing Abba songs?”
Filming in a static location would also present legal problems with the BBC, he claimed. So he and co-presenters Richard Hammond and James May are doing a studio recording at a different place each week from inside a huge tent, which will be packed up and relocated for each of the £4.5mn episodes in the 12-show series.
Clarkson said he had that “eureka” moment while watching an episode of True Detective in which a Baptist minister preaches in a tent. “Yes,” he exclaimed to colleagues the next day, “We’d be rootless, peripatetic, like music teachers in the 70s. Or gypsies.”
He, Hammond and May chose South Africa for their first location as it has “far and away the best audiences in the world. Crack a gag at a Friday night event in London and you get a chuckle ... But crack it in South Africa and they laugh for about a year,” he wrote, adding: “As the filming day dawned, we were all nervous.”
There were other problems, not least the fact the show is recorded in 4K ultra-high definition. “Our biggest worry, however, was the makeup girl … who turned up with a bag full of Artex and some trowels. Hammond was first in the chair and after half an hour emerged looking like he’d just arrived from Easter Island. It simply wasn’t him.”
With all the makeup on, “speech was impossible because we couldn’t move our mouths. James had breathing difficulties. I couldn’t get my head off the floor because it weighed so much. Some chisels were found and soon we began to emerge from our tombs, like skeletons unearthed at an archaeological dig.”
The trio departed the BBC’s Top Gear in March last year following Clarkson’s sacking after an altercation with a producer.
Clarkson said he had watched only two episodes of the revamped Top Gear, which was co-presented by Chris Evans, adding one observation: “It was a television programme about cars.”
On the BBC, his former employer, he wrote: “It is a 1920s operation trying to operate in the 2020s, which is tricky.”