James May says 'it had to end' ahead of final-ever Grand Tour with Clarkson and Hammond
After 22 years of chaos, the three will go their separate ways
The final-ever episode of The Grand Tour (TGT) airs this Friday (September 13) on Amazon’s Prime Video, bringing to an end the automotive misadventures of presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. And it’s a partnership that had to end, according to the latter.
Across eight years and five seasons of TGT, as well as 14 years prior to that on the BBC’s Top Gear, which Clarkson himself reinvented, the trio have travelled around the world to some incredible and exotic locations, bringing their own brand of four-wheeled (and, occasionally, two-wheeled or even nautical) buffoonery to the masses.
Their final escapade together takes place in Zimbabwe and is titled One For The Road, and promises to be an emotional farewell from the guys.
Right time to end it
The teaser trailer is sentimental enough, a glowing montage of the three of them set to He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother by The Hollies.
But despite the sadness both they and their fans must feel as they eventually reach the end of the journey, the trio insist that the time is right to call it a day.
May, now 61, told The Sunday Times: “Must it end? It must. We’ve exhausted our take on the subject, and we always promised ourselves that we’d land our legacy safely instead of flying it into a cliff.
“And we’re old now. I set off as a puffy-faced youth with lustrous long dark hair that seemed to be permanently tousled by a warm zephyr, believing I’d landed a gig that might last a couple of years. I parked up grey, stooped, with a bad back, looking for my glasses so I could write this down.
“I regret none of it; none of those 20-plus years of beige food and bad living. It was tremendous. Thank you for watching.”
Back to where the specials all started… in a way
In One For The Road, the three head to Zimbabwe in three cars they’ve always wanted to own — Clarkson in a Lancia Montecarlo, Hammond in a Ford Capri 3-litre and May in a Triumph Stag.
Clarkson, 64, said they picked Zimbabwe mainly because it started with a “Z” and seemed like a fitting place to end it, especially as most of their long “special” adventures over the years on both TGT and Top Gear have been in Africa — “it’s our happy place”.
But, he added, there was a more poignant reason for heading to that part of the great continent in particular: “What we liked [doing] most of all [was] buying three terrible old cars and seeing if we could drive them over gruesome terrain to somewhere idiotic.
“These were known as ‘specials’. The first, in Top Gear days, was an accident. We wanted to see if we could buy a car in America for less than it would cost to rent one.
“But the item we made, replete with a bloated dead cow on a Camaro’s roof, was so long we made it into a whole show.
“It was well received, so we then decided to do one on purpose. I’d just been on holiday to Botswana, where someone had told me that no one had ever driven across the Makgadikgadi salt pans.
“So we bought an Opel, a Lancia and a Mercedes, and did just that. This remains my favourite special.”
The culmination of 22 years of craziness
And that was what brought the team full circle, back to southern Africa, because the crew realised they could drive the cars east-to-west across Zimbabwe, before popping over the border into Botswana for a fitting final destination.
“What makes the three of us happy, though, is how we ended it,” said Clarkson.
“Most people thought, with some justification, that we were bound to fly it at 500mph, in a blizzard of outrage and tabloid headlines, into a mountainside.
“But we didn’t. We landed it safely, and gently, on the salt pans in Botswana, thus finishing up back where we began.”
Hammond, now 54, said he could never have envisaged being with the same team more than 20 years after he first successfully auditioned for Top Gear in 2002.
He said: “At the start, in 2002, we planned a different type of show to the one it eventually became. There would be no exotic supercars and no exotic locations. Fairly quickly, we learnt that people wanted to see us having fun.
“In 2007 we did our first proper, full-size special — the Botswana film. We upped the production values, and all of a sudden we realised we can make shows about cars and they can look beautiful as well, with fantastic shots of wildlife and scenery. It all just coalesced and came together.
“All of us, the whole Top Gear/ The Grand Tour lot, have been living in an intense world for as long as I can remember. It has been one of the most important things in our lives.
“You don’t say goodbye to all that lightly. Perhaps you just savour the sadness. I totally did in the final TGT episode, driving back across the desert to where we set off from in Botswana all those years ago.
“I was very fortunate to have been a part of all those adventures. I can’t claim I brought any massive talent to it. I was just happy to tag along. I’m a bloke from Birmingham who worked in local radio and trod on every luck mine I could have trodden on.”
Presenters salute behind-the-scenes crew
All three presenters paid tribute to the filming and production team behind the scenes, who have been with them through the entire 22-year Top Gear and TGT eras, and who are also now working on Clarkson’s Farm for Amazon with Jeremy.
They include producer Andy Wilman, who said the final TGT will be “quite weepy” as the team journeys to Botswana’s Kubu Island, described by Clarkson as “just about the most astonishing place I’ve ever been”.
But Wilman added that there were not fireworks and loud crash-bangs in the finale, saying that everyone involved wanted to focus on the meaning of the trip.
He explained: “It was quite a no-brainer in the office that this one was about the guys saying goodbye to each other. They wanted to go unplugged, take things back to 2005 or 2006, and leave the dynamite at home.
“Anybody who thinks they’re going to get Avengers: Endgame is going to be disappointed because it is deliberately gentle, but their camaraderie is next level. You can see that they know it’s the last time they will do this together.
“They say goodbye better than any presenters could. Because they are so close as people, they can take the piss out of their own goodbye but then be emotional as well.
“It is quite weepy. But they are an institution, part of the furniture, and it’s great that they are allowed a soppy goodbye.”
‘Will I miss Richard and James? Not really’
The final words, though, somewhat fittingly go to Clarkson, who started as a presenter on Top Gear in 1988 — meaning he has been talking about cars on-screen for 36 years now.
Of the Zimbabwe special, he said: “Was it sad when the director called ‘That’s a wrap’ for the very last time? Yes, it was.
“Especially as some of the crew had been with us when we were there before. People think of Top Gear and TGT as being James, Richard and me. But it isn’t. We’ve had the same crews for years. We’ve all grown up together. We’ve camped together.
“Casper, Ben, Russ, Kit, Marky Mark, Steve, Toby, Catweazle and a load more besides. These are the guys who really made those shows. They’re the ones who kept the cameras and the microphones going even when it was cold or dangerous.
“Richard and James: will I miss them? Not really. I can see them whenever I like.
“But what I will miss is the excitement of crawling into a city such as Harare or La Paz or Hanoi at three in the morning in a car with no headlamps, one gear and only three wheels.
“I never thought I could have a job that would let me do stuff like that. There wasn’t a job that allowed me to do stuff like that. We invented it.
“And I hope that whoever replaces us realises that while they’ll get several diseases and arrested and bashed about until they are just a walking bruise, they are the luckiest people on Earth.”
The Grand Tour: One For The Road is available on Amazon’s Prime Video from September 13, 2024.
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