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By Jeremy Clarkson (Sunday Times, July 18) [Note: this article contains very mild spoilers]
In order to make the last few Grand Tour specials, I've driven a V8 beach buggy across the Namib, a Bentley Continental on the horrific roads of Madagascar and hurtled down the Mekong in a jet-propelled Vietnam war boat with two Corvette engines in the back.
For the next outing we were planning on a trip to the snowy wastelands of northern Russia. The production team laboured for months, sourcing locations, shipping the cars to the start point and getting permission to close Murmansk's main airport for the day, for the biggest stunt we'd ever attempted. But just a week before we were due to set off, Covid arrived, so we went to Scotland instead.
Now, what we normally do with a 90-minute special is choose three improbable cars and then try to get them across terrain that's wholly unsuitable. This creates jeopardy and tension. Will the Lancia get across Botswana? Will the Volvo get across the Serengeti? Will Hammond crash again?
But you can't very well do that in Scotland because it's got roads and petrol stations and everyone speaks a form of English. So if we began by saying, "Can we drive these cars all the way from Berwick-upon-Tweed to the Outer Hebrides?", everyone would just say "Yes" and turn over to watch Countryfile instead.
We needed to ask a different question and what we came up with is: in Europe, we drink American beer and wear American trousers and listen to American music, but we've never taken to their cars. Why?
When I was growing up, we'd sit down to watch the latest American cop show so we'd see Jim Rockford tearing about in his Pontiac Firebird and Starsky in his Ford Gran Torino and fat Frank Cannon in his Lincoln Continental and then we'd turn to our fathers and say, "Dad, can I have a Ford Anglia?" Why did we do that?
To work this out I bought a Lincoln Continental Mark V, as driven by Jock Ewing in Dallas, James bought a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, as driven by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, and Richard bought a boat-tail Buick Riviera, as blown up by Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout.
I don't think I've ever seen a collection of such stupid cars in one place ever before. But they were stupid in the way that a kid's fridge drawing is stupid. Or a Damien Hirst pickled shark. They were fun stupid.
My £10,000 Wedgwood blue Lincoln had button-backed velour upholstery, which was extremely squidgy, and an actual Cartier clock. It was like sitting in a Cheshire sitting room, only with extra Fablon and not much space. Incredibly, although the car is 19 feet long — three feet longer than a modern Range Rover — it has only two doors and very little room in the back. The boot's big, though. You could put Frank Cannon in there. Maybe there was an episode once where someone did.
Under the bonnet, which is longer than most European cars, and houses, there was a 6.6 litre V8 engine, which somehow managed to produce just 166 horsepower. Fast? No. That's not what you'd call this car. Or gainly. Mainly because its wheels were so far inboard, it was like looking at a hippopotamus sitting on a cake trolley.
James's Cadillac, meanwhile, looked as if they'd mined all of the world's supply of burgundy to make it. It was even more burgundy than the bedspreads you get in every American motel. And not just on the outside. Even the gear shifter was burgundy. Under the bonnet there was an 8.2 litre engine — the largest V8 ever fitted to a production car at the time — and though I never looked, I suspect that was burgundy as well. Hammond's Buick, meanwhile, was very ugly and the windscreen wipers broke, which, given this was Scotland, would prove a constant problem.
There was another, much bigger issue though. It's something you won't see on the screen because it was all happening behind the scenes. The problem of filming during a pandemic.
We couldn't, for instance, take rooms in a hotel. We had to take over the whole thing, bring in our own catering staff and eat, at tables for one, all facing in the same direction as if we were sitting an exam. Also, the bars were shut and we had to be in bed at ten.
Sometimes, when a town simply didn't have a hotel big enough for the 50 people on our crew and the staff needed to run the Covid testing programme, we had to use caravans. All of us. Which meant our slow-moving convoy was about 17 miles long. I'd like to apologise now, if I may, to the good people of Scotland who were stuck behind us. And to the man who owned the woods into which my caravan crashed on day four.
I know what you're thinking. Oh no, another "scripted" Grand Tour caravan stunt. But it wasn't. We'd decided not to make fun of caravans on this occasion because we've been there and done that, so imagine my surprise, while driving along in the Wedgwood blue Wilmslow lounge, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that I was being overtaken by my 'van.
Instinctively I thought I was in the middle of a very large accident, which was confusing because I was still on the road and I still had control of the steering and the brakes. Plus there was no sound of rending metal and tortured tyres, noises that normally accompany a car crash. It turned out that the towbar had simply come off and that as a result, my sleeping quarters were buried at the bottom of a bank, in a thick and impenetrable forest.
Eventually, after seven days of solid rain — I did not drive the Lincoln for even so much as a yard without the wipers on — we arrived in that bit of Scotland that can puff out its chest in any competition to find "the most beautiful place in the world". But we couldn't see any of it because everything above our shoes was in the clouds.
And then we were on Skye and then we were on a ferry to the Outer Hebrides. And when we landed on North Uist, a spookily beautiful island I'd never even heard of, we headed immediately to the nearest bar, which was full of Joanna Lumley.
Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer were there too, and so was the director from A League of Their Own, who was on a recce prior to the arrival of Jamie Redknapp. It seems that every television show, penned in by Covid, had decided that North Uist was about as "exotic" as Britain could muster and had headed there as well. There was even one scene for which we had to wait for Joanna Lumley to herd some cows across the sea before we could fire up our cameras.
The only issue that remained was that in our shorter, "unplugged" Grand Tour lockdown special, I realised that Richard Hammond had made it all the way to within sight of the finishing post without having a single accident. He went to bed every night and took his own trousers off, rather than getting a paramedic to do it for him.
It's OK though, don't worry. With seconds to go, he managed it. And it's his best accident yet, mainly because he didn't have to go off in an air ambulance.
Instead he went home on a plane we'd had to charter to keep us all safe from the bat flu. Me though? I went home in my Lincoln and I still have it today.
So why did we never buy American cars? No idea. They're hilarious.
***
The Grand Tour Presents: Lockdown is on Amazon Prime Video from July 30.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-9804515/Jeremy-Clarkson-nearly-killed-caravan-latest-adventure-Grand-Tour.html
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/15705649/jeremy-clarkson-the-grand-tour-scotland-special-deleted-scenes/
several laugh out loud moments
about not being able to sweat, and a Perfectly ordinary
shooting weekend
https://www.grandtournation.com/thegrandtour/the-grand-tour-bumped-into-top-gear-while-filming-in-scotland-along-with-others/
Seems during lockdown, every UK film crew, went filming in Scotland.
The first episode showed a match between the Dacia Duster, the Bentley Bentayga and the Aston Martin DBX. The Bentley won.
That actually looks like fun.
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/entertainment/jeremy-clarkson-amazon-grand-tour-controversy-newsupdate/
Amazon says that it's not because of Clarkson's comments about Meghan, but I have my doubts :
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/entertainment/jeremy-clarkson-axe-amazon-not-linked-newsupdate/
Which leads me to ask one question : Can't Jeremy ever shut up ?
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/entertainment/top-gear-cancelled-freddie-flintoff-accident-newsupdate/
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/entertainment/top-gear-bbc-cancelled-foreseeable-future-newsupdate/
And second : the original trio leave The Grand Tour :
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/entertainment/grand-tour-jeremy-clarkson-richard-hammond-james-may-leave-newsupdate/
Will they be replaced this time, or will the show be cancelled ? Your guess is as good as mine.
They've got a whole line-up of ex-top gear presenters to take over now no? ;-)
I'm super late to this, but "RadioTimes.com understands options for the future of the show are still being explored but nothing has been greenlit as of yet." doesn't really read as them surely walking away...
Maybe, but that certainly does :
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/entertainment/jeremy-clarkson-grand-tour-quit-newsupdate/
I don't understand why they put that on TV. Last time I was in France, everybody drove like that.