The Grand Tour’s final special, One for the Road, is a poignant farewell to one of television’s most successful, and endearing, male friendships. And it’s not hard to understand why it might be time to say goodbye to the format that presenter Jeremy Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman invented all those years ago: they’re old now. As you get older, things get harder to do. Even at the relatively spritely age of 40 I can attest to that.
But there are more tangible concerns than the imperceptible march of biological decline, and more than a few of them were listed on Tuesday night’s Q&A, An Evening with The Grand Tour, a special event that was part press junket, part celebration of three lives well lived: as well as us journalists, most of the crowd were family and friends of the main three. Lisa Hogan, Clarkson’s long-suffering partner who has become a fan favourite on sister show Clarkson’s Farm for giving as good as she gets, was in attendance, alongside the production crew they’d worked with for years. The mood of the night was hard to pin down: sombre, but jubilant. More Irish Wake than Statey Funes.
Clarkson, by his own gleeful admission, is getting “too fat” to fit into supercars. A practical reality that will surely put the kibosh on any hopes to see him do one last lap in an Ariel Atom. More pressing, and concerning for anyone hoping to continue the format in the future (be they Amazon producers casting for a next generation of Grand Tour or BBC Studios heads surveying the smouldering wreckage of what was once Auntie’s biggest export), is the sense that Clarkson & Co have simply exhausted the list of things you can do with car, short of successfully firing one directly into space, like the infamous Tesla stunt from a few years back.
And it is perhaps Tesla who should feel most aggrieved by Clarkson’s comments in the special itself, giving the final reason why his days as a motoring presenter need to end: electric cars are, frankly, rubbish.
For once, I find it hard to disagree with him. And this isn’t the sort of anti-Greenpeace rant he used to go on during Top Gear’s heyday. Indeed, environmentalism is a topic that he’s had something of a Damascene conversion on following his rebranding as a celebrity farmer. It’s a simple matter of aesthetics. Passion. Drive.
During an in-car piece to camera (something which they make look easy, but which is actually bloody hard to do as I discovered earlier this year), Clarkson comments on the characteristic engine purr of his beloved Lancia Montecarlo: “that’s a sound you younger generation won’t grow up hearing”, he laments. “I hate electric cars. They might as well be white goods”. It’s true: for all their lack of toxic emissions, BEVs are bloody horrid, sterile things. I wince every time I see a Tesla or a Polestar on the road. They look like normal cars that have been overinflated. Cartoonishly oversized to accommodate the stacks of conflict minerals needed to drive their super-silent electric motors. Of course it’s nigh on impossible for an old petrolhead to get passionate about something that is essentially a dodgem car crossed with an iPhone.
And so, Clarkson must step aside. And his comrades must step with him, as they loyally have in the past, for the motoring entertainment format as we know it is nothing without him, and everyone knows it. Following the euphoria of their incredible final outing, which is brilliant by the way, it will fall to a new generation of producers and presenters to reinvent the car magazine show, and as we’ve seen with the various disasters that followed Clarkson’s departure from Top Gear, genuine passion for the subject matter is of absolute importance if the format is ever going to succeed again.
We all know this instinctively. How many of us enjoy Bake Off, without ever having made a cake? How many of us love Bob Ross, without ever having taken up the brush? Half of the people who watch Master Chef probably microwave most of their dinners. Enthusiasm is the key driver in all of these things: it’s attractive. It’s endearing. Via this beloved trio, it made household names of the Aston Martin DB9 and the Pagani Zonda, cars which the vast majority of human beings would be lucky to get within 200ft of, let alone drive. We are a nation of Mondeo drivers, but we all have fond memories of Clarkson’s exploits in the Bugatti Veyron.
If The Grand Tour is to continue, as is apparently the plan, its presenters must be genuine car nuts. Mike Fernie, currently the main presenter of Drivetribe, would surely be a good shout. Gamer Network’s own Mike Channell – who I once worked with on Top Gear’s ill-fated gaming spin off – would be on the short list if I were those guys. An unexpected and bold choice would be Chris Harris, a fan favourite of Top Gear’s post-Clarkson era who is genuinely brilliant. Izzy Hammond, Richard’s daughter, has also proven herself capable on Drivetribe, and her passion for the subject is plain for all to see, accusations of nepotism be damned (this is Britain, the whole thing runs on nepotism, it determines who gets the special golden hat that says you’re head of state).
I’m just spitballing here. Who knows how it’ll shake out – or who with. As long as it’s not Chris Evans, whom the British public have long been gaslit into believing is a popular broadcaster despite none of us actually knowing anyone who likes him, we’ll be off to a good start. But whoever it is needs to have an infectious enthusiasm for all things motoring in the 21st century: which means giving us all reasons to love the electric car.