The Grand Tour
The Grand Tour begins with Jeremy Clarkson driving through rainy London listening to radio news about his fall from grace. He flies to sunny LA, gets behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang, and drives into the California desert.
Hammond and May join him on the road, also driving Mustangs. They roar into a Mad Max style Burning Man festival with a fleet of cars behind them. The Hothouse Flowers are on stage blaring out “I Can See Clearly Now” and the crowd erupts at the presenters’ arrival.
That three middle aged Brits, two of them with pot bellies and snaggle teeth, can receive a rock star reception tells you everything you need to know.
Amazon’s £160 million Grand Tour is everything the new Top Gear is not. It’s relaxed, assured, confident. There’s no underlying nervousness about whether the show will be any good – just the presenters’ knowledge they’re the best in the business at what they do and now have the budget to do whatever they want. The opening scene alone cost more than an entire episode of Top Gear.
At the heart of it are the three hosts. Unlike Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc, whose off screen animosity was well publicised, this friendship isn’t forced. These are old pals long used to working together and they slip easily into their rhythms of one-upmanship and put downs.
Clarkson doesn’t punch anyone in the face, although he does make a couple of off colour jokes: one about gypsies and the other about bestiality.
There’s no Stig. The Star in a Fast Car slot is humorously dropped following the on-screen deaths of three celebrities (Jeremy Renner, Armie Hammer and Carol Vorderman) and there’s a new racetrack, (shaped like the Ebola virus and dubbed the Eboladrome).
The hosts test three £1million hybrid hypercars, the McLaren P1, Ferrari LaFerrari (amusingly called “TheFerrari” by James May throughout) and the Porsche 918.
It’s breathtakingly cinematic and deftly done. It has chemistry and imagination. In short, it’s a triumph.
I feel sorry for Matt LeBlanc, who has a mountain to climb.