The second season of The Grand Tour is launching December 8 on Amazon Prime, and if you enjoyed last season – or anything these three have been up to over the last 15 years or so – then season two should be a doozy.
It’s the second stint in what essentially started out as a passion project for James May, Richard Hammond, and Jeremy Clarkson along with producer Andy Wilman. The Grand Tour kicked off after they parted ways with the BBC and the Top Gear series they’re so well known for. It wasn’t easy and the boys actually found themselves in some pretty unfamiliar waters in the aftermath of that divorce.
“We had to make our own production company,” said May. “It started in the corners of an office of someone we knew with some pencils and pens we stole.” At least they got the name right: W. Chump and Sons.
Now, however, they find themselves at the helm of a show that broke online viewership records when it debuted last year. On a budget, meanwhile, that May claims “isn’t as much bigger as people have said – we don’t think, ‘We’ve got all this money, let’s just blow something up.’ – but it’s more expensive to produce.”
Not that they won’t do whatever they can to make the most of what Amazon is providing them, of course.
“We like to probe the boundaries,” said Hammond. “We’re also very childish, overly ambitious, and a bit stupid.”
No kidding – what do you expect when you’re travelling to Croatia, Mozambique, Colorado, New York, Switzerland, and more? Our Canadian readers, meanwhile, will be happy to learn that they may see some of their own turf in the show as well, though the trio is being a little coy on that front. Both May and Hammond did allow us a few tasty nuggets, however:
“If I’d been (to the Area 27 race track in Oliver, BC) – in a brand new Range Rover, for example – I’d have found it to be a very nice racetrack with a very nice shape for what is essentially in the middle of nowhere,” said May. Yep, that’s about right, although the wine region in which it resides does take it a notch up from “nowhere”.
“If I’d have been there (again, to Area 27), I would have found it utterly brilliant,” said Hammond. “It’s one of the rare ones that I haven’t crashed at.” Which is a big thing for Hammond, considering what happened to him recently during the filming of season two, when he crashed the all-EV Rimac supercar in Switzerland. So, is he off EV supercars for life, then? Would he try one again if he were tossed the keys?
“Yeah. I wouldn’t drive it off a Swiss mountain again, though. That was stupid.” No kidding. That charred piece of twisted metal with wheels you see in the photo gallery? Yeah. Richard survived that.
“Unlike Hammond, I realize that cars have brake pedals,” said Clarkson. “I also know that race courses have finish lines. Hammond’s crash was two kilometres after the finish line.”
Business as usual, then. Even in person, the trio remains the ball-busting good ol’ boys that they portray on-screen; have a listen to Hammond, responding to May’s claim that he’s the smartest because he has the biggest brain: “James doesn’t have the biggest brain and if he did, it’d be made of concrete or wood.”
Or Hammond on Clarkson, after he and May wrecked his house on the show last year: “It was his house, absolutely. But there was a scheduling cock-up and he wasn’t home.”
“I’m having to live in a cottage on the corner of the property, where I have to take a shit and cook dinner at the same time,” said Clarkson. That’s almost a better result than if they’d have dropped the house on him, I’d say.
While the tight confines of his cottage may be to his chagrin, at least the show itself is now closer by; it’s been well-documented that the “tent”, which they use as a sort of a travelling HQ, is no longer. They now have a more permanent studio in the UK. It’s in the Cotswolds region, about 10 minutes away from Clarkson’s shack.
While many are saying the reason for the studio being made static is because the boys didn’t want to travel so much, that’s not entirely true. It’s actually more about the guests, according to Clarkson.
“We got celebrities back [on the show],” he said. “And to do that, you need to be in one place.” So they’ll no longer be killing celebrities in jest as they did last year; they’re actually going to be interviewed on the show this time ’round. When pressed about who’s going to be showing up, however, the trio offered no help.
“You don’t actually know (who’s coming on) until they show up,” said Clarkson. Imagine, then, how he felt when one of the first episode’s celebrity guests, David Hasselhoff – the Hoff himself – showed up at the studio gates. Wonder if he arrived in KITT?
What will really be interesting, however, is what’s going to be cut to make room for proper celebrity interviews; used to be they’d “kill” whoever off on the show – a gag that would take about 90 seconds or so – and cut to something else, after spending about thirty seconds in mock confusion as to what to do next, punctuated by May asking “So they’re not coming on, then?” Does this spell the end of their American yokel test driver, brought on to replace Top Gear’s Stig in the minds of viewers? What about a shortening of the “Conversation Street” segment, which has often been called one of the weakest segments of the show? Of course it could also be neither since the show’s stream-anywhere nature means it doesn’t actually have to fit into a predetermined time slot, and they’ll extend it if they have to. We’re all going to have to tune in to find out.
The studio is still not really the main focus of the show, however; they still travelled over 100 times for filming. How do they decide where to go, though? Sit around a table blindfolded with pints, and throw darts at a map?
Not quite.
“Andy Wilman and I have a meeting when James and Richard are on holiday,” said Clarkson. “We can’t let them make any decisions. They’d be wrong.”
Come on, Jeremy. Please be serious, if you can.
“You have to have a story,” said Clarkson. “Once you find a story, the location follows.”
That’s more like it.
So the story is lynchpin number one, but contrary to what some have been writing, the car remains lynchpin number two in every episode of The Grand Tour. I’ve seen magazines and websites complaining/commenting that it’s become more of a travelogue than a car show, but if you listen to Clarkson and the rest, the car remains the central focus. There simply wouldn’t be a show without it.
To illustrate this, Clarkson turns to one of last year’s shows where the three found themselves near – and almost in – some dangerous waters off the coast of Namibia in a trifecta of beach buggies, pinned between the South Atlantic Ocean and sand dunes as tall as mountains. It’s one adventure that had May just a little rattled.
“It was difficult to see how we were going to get out of that one,” he said.
“I wasn’t so worried about us,” said Clarkson. “I’m sure someone would’ve brought a tin of beer along and we’d all be fine.
“(The cars) are all you ever think about. You lose the cars and then you’ve wasted everybody’s time because you’ve lost the story.” Abandoning their rattletrap buggies in the Atlantic Ocean simply wasn’t an option.
It’s a rare piece of the humble from a man who, if he’s known for anything, it’s his massive larger-than-life personality that has got him in trouble more than a few times.
Here’s the thing though: just like the other two, Clarkson started out as a car journalist and essentially that’s still what they are, just on a much grander scale. Jeremy lists the Lexus LFA (people may remember him going gaga over it in his Top Gear days), Ferrari 275 GTS, and Bentley Continental in his dream garage, while Hammond continues to love muscle cars because “there’s nothing complicated about them. Just a big-ass engine and rear-wheel drive.”
Which is really kind of a good way to look at The Grand Tour in general. When you really drill down, it’s not that complex of a show but it’s an extremely entertaining one, one that manages to pull off the feat of making three blokes on a road trip look like the most exciting and ground-breaking thing on television. Or streaming video. Whatever.
Catch season two of The Grand Tour, Fridays starting December 8th on Amazon Prime Video. (Prime Video is automatically available at no additional cost to Amazon Prime members.)
