This week I watched footage of great beasts roaming the plains of Zimbabwe as swelling orchestral music played. The world has changed rather dramatically since these majestic creatures first emerged, and they have come to these great plains for one final adventure. Look at them silhouetted against an African sunset, emitting their trademark barrage of semi-ironic hoots and chortles. There’s the big one who bellows, the little yoke who sits on his head, grooming him, and, of course – who can forget? – the other one.
I’m writing about Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, the trio at the core of The Grand Tour, aka Continuity Top Gear, aka Cars! Cars! Cars! and Maybe Racism! aka David Attenborough’s Magnificent Blokes.
They represent all three kinds of ageing Englishman. May is the type of ageing man who slowly fades until he is a ghost whispering to you about engines on Dave. Old Richard Hammond is a scale model of young Richard Hammond, identical to his younger self in every way except being somehow smaller and looking slightly lacquered. Look at him there, sucking a big spiral lollipop and wearing bootees. He might continue to shrink until he can perch on Clarkson’s shoulder like a cockatoo – and please God he shall. Frowny Jeremy Clarkson himself has been slowly adding furrows to his body, so now he looks like a full-body frown in a flowery shirt.
He has reason to frown. As with all contemporary nature programmes, the horrible impact of climate change is a recurring theme in this episode. While many have found their habitats and ways of life destroyed, the way climate change is affecting Clarkson, Hammond and May is that electric cars now exist and they don’t want to drive electric cars.
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Yes, I am weeping as I write this. It comes up a few times in this episode, the horror they feel at the prospect of having to drive electric cars. It is, literally, one of the reasons Clarkson gives for ending the show. I shed bitter tears, but that could be all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Top Gear was some phenomenon. Clarkson, May and Hammond relaunched the BBC’s motoring show in 2002. The pitch was, basically, “yuk-yuks in vroom-vrooms”. They pioneered expensive stunts and ironic chauvinism, and in the process they frequently tiptoed up to the edge of what was permissible at Britain’s national broadcaster.
Then, in 2015, Clarkson went too far, because he hit an Irishman for refusing to bring him hot meats. Older Britons may not know this, but by 2015 it was no longer permissible to hit an Irishman, even if he had brought you the wrong dinner. So Clarkson was fired from the BBC, and May and Hammond then left too. (Clarkson is basically their ecosystem. Think of him as a coral reef and them as gentle clownfish.)
Luckily, billionaire Amazon proprietor Jeff Bezos was passing, and the sight of these networkless millionaires dancing for pennies (programmes on commercial television) touched his gold-plated heart. He couldn’t even imagine such destitution, so he set up a millionaire sanctuary (Prime Video) and said, “Come play in my garden, Clarkson, which is paradise!”
And so Bezos scooped them up for Amazon’s The Grand Tour, which was, essentially, Top Gear, except it was now not on a public-service broadcaster but available in a huge digital supermarket, somewhere between the toilet paper and the canned spam.
Things had changed significantly. While Clarkson’s iteration of Top Gear was at the centre of a very centralised television culture, The Grand Tour began at a time when the centre could no longer hold. Everything was splintering into a dizzying array of streamers and chaotic social-media platforms filled with young people grunting and eating competitively.
While Clarkson and company seemed like delightfully naughty boys when under the aegis of Lord Reith, their centrist safari-suited buffoonery seemed almost genteel in the new media free market, where a week didn’t pass without some YouTuber touching a dead body or going full fascist.
This is a long way of saying that I did not expect The Grand Tour: One for the Road (Prime Video) to be a bittersweet elegy all about ageing, fading relevance and death. It is, on the surface, one of those Grand Tour specials in which the hosts reassert British cultural exceptionalism (Hammond’s body is literally clad in a safari suit presumably once owned by a Ken doll) and tour exotic locales at great expense (I mean, it’s called The Grand Tour).
It contains all the usual expensive high jinks: crossing Zimbabwe in malfunctioning classic cars, putting those cars on rickety boats to cross a crocodile-filled lake or on rails to ride a railway, “accidentally” sending a Volkswagen Beetle off a cliff, and smuggling silver into Botswana (because crossing borders is inherently hilarious to the type of wealthy Englishman who is accustomed to creating them).
But there is also a constant awareness, in the jokes about electric cars and censorious producers, that their time in the spotlight is over. The little mammalian creatures running around at their big dinosaur feet have evolved into MrBeast, and they can see the vibe-changing meteor crashing to Earth out of the corner of their eye. And so the customary lulz are accompanied by melancholy stares, dewy-eyed reminiscences and sombre ruminations.
“Everyone does anything in their life for the last time – but you don’t know when you’re doing it that you’re doing it for the last time,” Clarkson says glumly, intent on ruining our buzz.
“Not our first, not our last,” Hammond says of their adventure before looking to the camera, sadness in his eyes, to say: “Maybe it is.”
The show is also more than two hours long, a fact that frequently makes me think of my own mortality. Half of it is sighing. When, in the final scenes, they visit an area of Botswana they had been to many years before, the new shots are movingly intercut with footage of their younger selves, and I start to sing a few bars of Johnny Cash’s Hurt. It’s genuinely touching, in fairness.
And then Clarkson unplugs his microphone and the trio walk into the desert to die (I presume; while it probably wouldn’t have been permitted at the BBC, I can certainly imagine Bezos dealing with former employees in this manner). Anyway, there isn’t a dry eye in the house. Though, again, that might be the petrol fumes.
Nightsleeper, over on Clarkson’s former home on BBC One, adds insult to injury because it’s all about public transportation. More specifically it’s an exciting drama about a service issue with a train, a very relatable situation for most British commuters. The issue, however, is “hacking” and not asset-stripping predatory capitalism. Some baddies have taken control of the Glasgow to London train, and by the end of the first episode it’s hurtling towards London while a policeman with a secret reckons with the baddies. At least it’ll be on time, is what most viewers are thinking.
