All good things come to an end – and most bad things too. SaturdayTop Gear Starring Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, the trio were parting ways after 21 years, and you can’t really describe it as “a breakup with a bang”. It’s a car exhaust backfiring with a strain. No, it would be more accurately described as an anti-climax – Top Gear The bandwagon slowly comes to a halt after burning the last drops of premium unleaded gasoline.
Long story short: Clarkson, Hammond and May’s production company, W Chump & Sons, has reportedly been dissolved. Grand TourPrime Video’s series about motorsports, travel and heterosexual banter, and in practice successor Top Gearhas apparently recorded its final episode — or at least its final episode with this cast of presenters. (The final hurrah, a special episode in which the three of them travel to Zimbabwe, hasn’t even come out yet.) The reasons for this may not have been stated, but it doesn’t take much inferential acrobatics to speculate. For two decades, the three presenters have been selling the same reactionary, degrading program, grappling with a series of controversies along the way. If the series is popular and profitable — as it undoubtedly was for years — this isn’t seen as a problem. But what about now? Maybe it is.
In its most glorious time, Top Gear It was one of the BBC’s greatest success stories. From 2003 to 2015, Clarkson, Hammond and May were three of the most visible and popular presenters on British television. Top Gear‘s massive audience has seen the show weather a series of controversies – homophobic jokes; racist jokes; jokes about the disabled; jokes using horrific insults; jokes about killing sex workers. Clarkson wasn’t removed from the show until he physically assaulted the producer, with Hammond and May willingly following him out the door. Grand Tour be born.
Top Gear It continued to rotate presenters at the BBC until it was finally vacated following a fatal car crash involving presenter Freddie Flintoff. In reality, there was little reaction when the BBC announced it was taking a break – evidence of the sudden drop in audience interest. But on Prime Video, Grand Tour similarly, it has existed relatively anonymously. The series has, by all accounts, achieved solid numbers: Amazon doesn’t release viewership figures, but a 2018 Reuters report claimed that the series was the streamer’s most successful program in terms of new user sign-ups. However, it is expensive to produce and is rarely discussed or acknowledged in the wider media. Compared to Clarkson’s other major Prime Video venture, the agricultural reality series has been a standout Clarkson’s Farmcompletely invisible. In some ways, it’s Top Gear in the past – in the scheme of the careers of the hosts, Grand Tour was refreshingly scandal-free. But the absence of objections only served to silence the slow realisation that shock and agitation might be the only currency of the trio.
It is also, perhaps, a matter of divergent fortunes. Clarkson, the reactionary and reactionary frontman of all three, has always had the most independent success as a TV presenter and a nasty tabloid essayist. But his transition to being a farmer and a news anchor has only come about in the last few years. Clarkson’s Farmhas translated that popularity into a broader sense of goodwill. For the first time in her career, Clarkson has, to some extent, won over many of her critics across the political spectrum. And—perhaps most importantly—it has nothing to do with Hammond and May. It’s as if the three of them decided to open up about their relationship, but Clarkson got a little too attached to her new partner and decided that maybe this polygamy idea wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Neither Hammond nor May have been able to keep up with Clarkson in their solo work — think of it as Simon and two Garfunkels. But both have remained steadily employed. May is likely to be best known for her toy-themed docuseries (James May’s Best Toys; Toy Stories by James May) and currently hosts cooking and travel series for Prime Video. Hammond has hosted the following series: Intelligent And Total Delete. They’ll be fine after this too, but it’s hard to see them regaining the profile they had in Clarkson’s frightening shadow. Make no mistake, the decision to follow her to Prime Video was as much an act of self-interest as it was of loyalty.
It may be too early to declare this a victory for Clarkson. The presenter put her career in jeopardy with a vulgar attack piece on the Duchess of Sussex in December 2022. Reports claim Amazon is trying to cancel it Grand Tour consequently and restrictive Clarkson’s Farm At the end of the already decided four seasons. These reports (including Clarkson himself) discussed and the success of the third season Clarkson’s FarmCurrently the highest-performing UK original in the broadcaster’s history, it suggests further renewals are a very real possibility.
Dissolution of the old Top Gear The triumvirate is the end of an era, certainly, but not one worth mourning. Their partnership leaves a legacy of bigotry and stunted masculinity. If the greatest compliment to a 21-year TV dynasty is “good banter”, that’s more a failure of ambition than anything else. If you do nothing to improve the form, it’s only a matter of time before it improves anyway, swallowing you in the process.