Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of The Grand Tour crew have said goodbye to the franchise with the release of One for the Road.
Clarkson, along with his two co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May, has called it quits after 22 years of being the predominant voices in automotive TV journalism.
The trio worked together on BBC's Top Gear for 13 years from 2002-2015 before being ousted from the program thanks to an alleged assault by Clarkson and starting The Grand Tour (another tongue-in-cheek car-focused TV magazine) for Amazon Prime Video.
Why Is The Grand Tour Ending?
The Grand Tour ended after the release of the One for the Road special on Amazon Prime Video.
This comes after six seasons of the show on the streaming platform and a more than two-decade-long partnership between the creative forces behind it.
After 437 episodes of TV (299 of which were on their previous Top Gear series) and eight road trip-style specials working together, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May are potentially putting their time in the automotive world in the rearview, with no future car-based TV projects announced.
The recently-released One for the Road special was deemed an on-off final goodbye for fans in the lead-up to release, allowing audiences to prepare themselves for The Grand Tour's (for lack of a better term) grand finale (via Variety).
Clarkson, who both hosted and was one of the creative forces behind the Prime Video streaming series, spoke to The Times about the beloved show coming to an end.
He said that the biggest reason for ending the series was the physical demand it continued to put on him and his co-hosts. He called the show "immensely physical," pointing to some of the conditions the team had to work under, including traversing the Sahara Desert:
"[The show is] immensely physical… when you’re unfit and fat and old, which I am. If you’re Bear Grylls you go to a hotel – there aren’t any hotels in the Sahara."
Clarkson called the style of production The Grand Tour had turned into over the years a "young man's game." He added that the team had "done everything you can realistically do with a car," so it was time to bring it to an end:
"[It is] a young man’s game. We’ve done everything you can realistically do with a car, and the world has shrunk and that’s the tragedy. Years ago, we drove from Iraq into eastern Turkey into Syria, Damascus and Israel. We did the Crimea to Ukraine. You couldn’t do any of that now."
Clarkson's cohost and fellow creative on the series, James May, admitted that they wanted to "stop while [they were] still vaguely ahead" and that it was better to call their own shot and take the key out of the ignition rather than run the show into the ground like 1991 Toyota Carolla:
"I’ve always said that if it ends tomorrow, which it nearly did at one point, that I should just be grateful that I had the opportunity… But it didn’t end, it kept going. In the end, we got to the point where we said, 'No, we must stop while we’re still vaguely ahead. We mustn't keep going until we embarrass ourselves.'"
Since the beginning, along with May, Clarkson, and Hammond, has also been producer Andy Willman. Willman partnered with Clarkson back in 2001 to help relaunch the BBC's aging automotive TV magazine, Top Gear.
He would work with the trio through their run on the BBC to their transition over to Amazon Prime Video, serving as a producer on The Grand Tour right up until the end.
In the same conversation, Willman posited, "We’re lucky that we’ve been able to control our destiny," pointing to their agreement with Amazon that has allowed the team for some "kind of quality control" by only doing these feature-length specials:
"We came to an agreement with Prime Video where we’d just do the specials as we knew that the big cinematic adventures were what our fans loved… We could keep some kind of quality control in place by doing fewer things. We’re lucky that we’ve been able to control our destiny. We are now calling it a day on our own terms, and not many shows get to do that. Most of the time, you want to carry on, and you get told, 'We don’t want you anymore.'"
The format of The Grand Tour has been ever-evolving as time has gone on. While it started as a near-perfect mimic of Top Gear's studio show in which Clarkson, Hammond, and May reviewed the latest and greatest in automotive engineering, it turned into an epic test of what was possible in and out of a car.
Seeing as this new format has been so incredibly demanding on its aging hosts (as outlined by Clarkson), the only option to continue would have been to flip back towards that traditional TV magazine style, something the team does not seem interested in.
Clarkson himself has said that he is growing disinterested in the automotive world as it becomes ever more reliant on electric battery-powered vehicles.
At a screening of the One for the Road special, Clarkson addressed the audience, calling electric vehicles "shit" and saying, "We said three years ago we would do one more then end it," and that is exactly what they did (via Daily Express):
"It gets you tonight, it is the end. It didn’t at the end of filming. We said three years ago we would do one more then end it. We had driven cars higher and faster than anyone else so we did wonder what else we could do with a car. We had run out of places to go, we had run out of things to do. And I had got fat."
This will not be the last fans see or hear from Clarkson on Amazon Prime Video though, as his agriculture-based reality series, Clarkson's Farm, is still set to debut its fourth season sometime in 2025.
The Grand Tour is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
