4 hours ago
11
Have you heard the news? It’s all change at The Grand Tour. New hosts! New production team! New horizons! Think of everything they could accomplish with a fresh start like this.
Actually, don’t think too hard, because the very first thing the new hosts do is visit Diddly Squat Farm to genuflect before Jeremy Clarkson. After some extremely timid banter, Clarkson turns to the camera and all but pleads with viewers not to be scared of change.
It’s a weird way to announce a new vision for the show, but perhaps a sensible one. Viewers watched The Grand Tour (and Top Gear before it) largely because of Clarkson’s personality cult, so getting his nod of approval certainly helps smooth the transition. This sort of confident handover would have been impossible on Top Gear, not least because Clarkson had been fired for punching a producer, but maybe it would have prevented his successors from juddering as badly as they did.
Filling the boots of Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May is no mean feat, but commendably Amazon has not opted for a flashy Matt LeBlanc-style personality hire. Instead, the three new hosts are relatively unknown. Two of them are Thomas Holland (Canadian, bearded) and James Engelsman (British, posh) from the YouTube channel Throttle House, and the other one is Francis Bourgeois from yelping about trains on TikTok.
In their first episode, the hosts (without a live studio audience) pull off a classic Grand Tour set piece. Each of them gets a supercar – a Mustang, a Corvette and a Hennessey – and tears around California in it. They race each other. They get Jenson Button to race them on their behalf. They race a bunch of jet planes, just for the hell of it. If you’ve ever fallen asleep during a Hairy Bikers repeat on Dave and woken up in the middle of an old Top Gear episode, you will be immediately familiar with the format.
But what differentiates it is the new hosting team. For now, the trio makes for a decent, if slightly anonymous, presence. Obviously this is the biggest difference. In Clarkson’s pomp a Canadian host would have feared for his life, dreading the barrage of blokey banter about how much he must enjoy having sexual intercourse with various types of moose. Here, everyone seems quite meek and pleasant, and without any obvious dynamic.
Again, this is probably the right way to do it. The returned Grand Tour feels deliberately low stakes, as if all involved have realised that the best way to grow an audience is to simply let the show develop at its own pace. At some point – maybe in a few episodes, or maybe a couple of years from now – a rhythm will kick in, and the hosts will be familiar enough with each other to allow for a natural rapport to build.
Still, there are signs of hope. During a visit to an expensive private racetrack, there is a moment where the hosts joke about what it must be like to be billionaires. At this point Holland gleefully stage-whispers “I don’t pay my taxes”, which, given that this is an Amazon show, seems almost revolutionarily provocative. Perhaps, just perhaps, this is a hint that we’ll see a bit of the old hand-biting that gave Top Gear such frisson.
The bigger issue, though, is whether we need a Grand Tour at all. Top Gear began as a dry little motoring magazine show in 1977, and it chugged along to dwindling interest for 24 years before it was finally put out of its misery. Clarkson revitalised the show by rebuilding it from scratch in 2002. But that was – you guessed it – 24 years ago. You will have seen how palpably unexcited everyone was when the BBC recently announced that it was bringing Top Gear out of storage for the umpteeth time. Maybe that should have been a sign.
We have almost certainly seen every variation of all the road trips and dumb stunts and skiddy laps this format will allow at this point. The grooves are now so well worn that you instinctively know every single thing that is going to happen, beat for beat, in any given episode. I have a lot of time for these new hosts – particularly Bourgeois, who might just qualify as the most enthusiastic enthusiast currently working on planet Earth – but it’s doing none of them any favours to work over old ground like this.
Maybe this is them playing it safe. Perhaps the first episode is pandering to the old Clarkson diehards so as not to spook them, before it sets about tearing up the blueprint and making something more distinct. We can but hope this happens, because on the current evidence it’s hard for the Grand Tour to justify its own existence.
The Grand Tour is on Prime Video now.
