The Grand Tour’s Jeremy Clarkson refuses to watch Freddie Flintoff andPaddy McGuinnesson Top Gear despite leaving the BBC series four years ago.
Clarkson fled the Beeb after aninfamous altercation over a steak with then producer Oisin Tymonbefore James May and Richard Hammond following him to Amazon Prime Video where they managed to land a reported $ 250 million three series deal .
Since then Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc have been and gone; now the mantle has been passed over to Paddy McGuinness and Freddie Flintoff, who have been hailed as beingTop Gear’s saving graceafter three panned series.
Regardless, Clarkson won’t be checking in.
‘I wish them all the very best but I don’t watch it,’ he stressed at the recent launch of The Grand Tour presents Seamen. ‘It was my baby and then it got taken away and they’ve got it now.
‘It’s like it you’ve got a baby and it’s put up for adoption you hope the baby’s brought up very well.’
Except, for Clarkson, it’s a baby he has no reason to miss.
‘We’re still doing it, we’ve still got the same crew,’ he added.
Top Gear aside, his new baby returns for a fourth run next month, although The Grand Tour is steering into a slightly different direction.Gone is the tentand instead Clarkson, Hammond and May will be playing to their strengths by setting off on a series of chaotic road trips.
‘There is no question that people prefer the specials when we whizz off and go and do something incredible, compared to the studio side of it,’ explained Clarkson. ‘The other problem we have is time. Doing 12 or 13 shows a year is phenomenally time- consuming and it was sort of wiping us out, so now we can just concentrate on the specials and make them even better than they were. ‘
Their first excursion for The Grand Tour season four heads to Vietnam and Cambodia as the boys ditch cars for boats in Cambodia and Vietnam, racing through a perilous 800 km journey across Tonlé Sap Lake and Mekong Delta.
What could go wrong? Everything, obviously – it’s The Grand Tour. But this trip was a completely new level of disaster – Clarkson, Hammond and May were very almost killed at sea during a storm which claimed four lives not far from where they were filming.
‘If people want to see three TV presenters being really hurt then this is a good place to go,’ teased the show’s head-honcho. ‘My bruises lasted weeks. My boat was full of sharp edges and I kept being hurled into those. It wasn’t much fun.
‘Very close to where we were, four fishermen died. We weren’t exaggerating, they were big seas, and it was scary. The bigger boats we tried to use to get around the problem couldn’t sail because the sea was too rough.
‘The conditions were unusually bad for that part of the world at that time of year. It didn’t look that bad when we set off. I can remember the panicky radio calls coming over my walkie-talkie. I was thinking, “It’s bad but it’s not the end-of-the-world bad”.
‘It was only when I saw the footage, particularly of James’ boat and the camera boats, that I thought “Bloody hell.” That’s the other thing of course: we can’t just think about ourselves , there were 50 / 60 crew out there on small boats that were sinking. Boats were sinking, I think Hammond may have been crying, and James was stranded.
‘I thought for once we were actually going to be rid of James May but no, he survived.’
The Grand Tour presents Seamen comes to Amazon Prime Video on December 13.
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