Jeremy Clarkson has explained why he has ended his partnership with Richard Hammond and James May.
The trio first started working together on BBC’s Top Gear in 2002 and moved over to Amazon for Prime Video series The Grand Tour, which premiered in 2016.
However, a forthcoming special of the car show, titled One for the Road, will serve as a swansong for the trio’s onscreen partnership – and Clarkson, who is currently enjoying the biggest success of his career with Clarkson’s Farm, has reflected on why he decided to cut professional ties with both Hammond and May.
‘After 36 years of talking about cars on television, I’m packing it in, because I’m too old and fat to get into the cars that I like and not interested in driving those I don’t,” he said in a new interview with The Sunday Times.
“What this means of course is that my 22-year partnership with James May and Richard Hammond is now over. You can see our final road trip together on Amazon Prime very soon. It’s emotional.”
Clarkson said the trio had “thought long and hard about how we should end our 22-year partnership, but in the end we just went to the end of the alphabet” and selected Zimbabwe as a place to set the special.
“There was another reason why we chose Zimbabwe, though,” he continued, revealing: “We would drive across it from east to west, as usual, but then we could cross the border and finish up where we began all those years ago: the Makgadikgadi salt pans in Botswana.”
Clarkson said it “makes the three of us happy” that their working relationship did not disintegrate “in a blizzard of outrage and tabloid headlines”, but was “landed safely and gently”.
“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 The Grand Tour 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. S*** our lungs out together, laughed our arses off together. 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, so that Andy [Wilman, producer] had his 1,200 hours of material to sift through.
Earlier this year, it was reported that Clarkson, Hammond and May had dissolved their production company, declaring solvency and appointing a liquidator to “wind up” their business.
The final Grand Tour episode will air on Prime Video on 13 September.
