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Amazon paid £160m for The Grand Tour – does Jeff Bezos have buyer’s remorse?

Grand Tour hosts Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson and James May - Amazon
Grand Tour hosts Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson and James May - Amazon

The trailer for the latest Grand Tour special, A Massive Hunt, brings with it a strange and not entirely agreeable sensation of déjà vu. It’s 2020. Politically, socially, sartorially, emotionally the world has changed beyond recognition. TikTok exists. And yet somehow so does the Grand Tour and, oh look, it’s still sending its swashbuckling TV “dads” on zany adventures in exotic climes. Cars will be crashed, japes will be had, innuendos will be shoved down your exhaust pipe.

The biggest surprise of all is obviously that Amazon hasn’t already cancelled the Grand Tour. I was sure it had. In fact, I have a specific memory – obviously a hallucination – of Jeff Bezos thanking Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond for their time and commissioning 15 more seasons of The Boys instead.

But no… the Grand Tourers are still Grand Touring. The original series, it is true, has long ago packed up its tent and departed the Cotswolds. Yet a full year after the first in what was supposed to be a regular run of specials, Seamen, comes another expensive one-off. One shot in eye-watering HD, and featuring these three ghosts of Top Gear past once again getting their cars gummed up in the jungle.

A Massive Hunt, which arrives on Amazon Prime on December 18, was actually filmed more than 12 months ago. Nonetheless, in its algorithm-driven wisdom – and after an entire year of lockdown – Amazon has seen fit to release it only now. Did they think it would improve with age?

Even from the promo you can see that Clarkson’s brand of chummy faffing about has fallen desperately out of synch. Hating cyclists, wearing your jeans hitched to your chin, punching producers – these trademarks were already on the wane when Clarkson was sacked from TG five and a half years ago. Today it feels like TV from another planet. A very old planet, where mullets are still a thing and people use phrases such as “hot hatchbacks” without irony.

And then there’s A Massive Hunt’s hugely forced “treasure hunt” premise. It is no longer enough for Clarkson – remember when we used to call him “Jezza” –  and chums to get by on their last drinks banter. In 2020, with Amazon calling the shots and paying the bills (and not pulling the plug quite yet), the Grand Tour needs a Grand Concept.

And so they’re on Reunion Island and Madagascar in search of ancient pirate treasure. It’s hard to tell from the trailer to what degree this meaningfully changes the “chemistry” between the leads. They will presumably still be successful and wealthy grown men acting as if they’re 15 and a bit dim.

What the trailer does achieve is give Amazon an excuse to blare the Seeker by The Who – the most Jeremy Clarkson band of all the time – whilst showing us Richard Hammond zipping around in a 4x4 with a skull and crossbones flag affixed. It couldn't be any more fuddy duddy if it whipped out a flask of tea or booked a holiday on a cruise liner.

The footage is admittedly lavish and action packed. And Amazon is still obviously pouring cash into the Expanded Clarkson-verse. It has also stayed sufficiently loyal to the trio to give each their own stand-alone vehicles. James May has done Oh Cook and Our Man In Japan. Hammond is making a “science-based survival show” set on a desert island (what?). And Clarkson has in the works the reality series I Bought The Farm, in which he attempts to run a 400 hectare farm in Oxfordshire. Sounds like the Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey of the bunch. 

Clarkson, Hammond and May in the Grand Tour tent - amazon
Clarkson, Hammond and May in the Grand Tour tent - amazon

Still, how different it all felt a mere four years ago when The Grand Tour charged out of the blocks with the first of three seasons that Amazon was bankrolling to the tune of £160 million. The hype was louder than a thousand Reliant Robins honking at once. This was inevitable given the calumny around Clarkson’s departure from the BBC. His Top Gear reign had ended disgracefully via an altercation with a producer over a non-existent hot meal.

Booted out of the Beeb, he brought with him TG producer Andy Wilman and wingmen May and Hammond. Yet, instead of the obvious route of fetching up at ITV or Channel 4 they took the megabucks option and signed with Amazon. And then, in  November 2016, they roared back onto our screens.

At that point money was not an issue. Or perhaps it was, in the sense that they couldn't spend it fast enough. The opening four and half minutes of the Grand Tour's first episode are estimated to have cost $2.5 million. That made it the most expensive sequence in television history (you’d have got a job-lot of Game of Thrones battles for that price).

The set-piece began with a miserable-looking Clarkson exiting a grey office in London. No BBC signs were affixed but they didn’t need to be. Soon he, May and Hammond, were zooming across the southern California desert in Ford Mustangs at the head of a Mad Max-style flotilla of tricked-out autos.

A crowd of thousands awaited them at a stage while overhead the Breitling Jet Team executed a flyover. Back at the (real) BBC, executives were still reeling from Chris Evans’s disastrous first and only season hosting Top Gear. Contrasted with the high-definition visual wallop of the Grand Tour, there was little doubt as to which side victory had gone.

The budget-busting first episode of The Grand Tour
The budget-busting first episode of The Grand Tour

Fast forward to 2020 and the road-map is very different. The new Top Gear, with Andrew Flintoff and Paddy McGuinness sitting up front, has ushered in a kinder and gentler era of car-based television, where man-hugs are encouraged and laughing at minorities verboten.

More worryingly for Clarkson and the gang, Amazon has pivoted away from smash-and-grab telly featuring mega motors and boorish Brits. Instead its focus is lavish post-Game of Thrones escapism, such as a $2.5 billion Lord of the Rings sequel, and the aforementioned The Boys, a vicious satire of Marvel superhero culture.

Clarkson and the gang are adamant that no, they haven’t been cancelled. Streaming services are shy about viewership figures. However, it is understood the Grand Tour scores highly in attracting new subscribers. Figures published by Reuters showed the Grand Tour season one pulling in 1.5 million “first streams” – that is, users who watched it ahead of any other show upon signing up to Amazon Prime.

This placed it top of the leaderboard, though it is worth considering that this was in 2016, when the number two slot was occupied by thoroughly obscure Giovanni Ribisi outing Sneaky Pete. Even by season two, it was evident that Amazon was squeezing the brakes on the GT. The original globe-trotting mobile tent had been replaced with a cheaper semi-permanent studio in the Cotswolds. The sky – or at least Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s cheque book – was no longer the limit. 

At just 90 minutes, A Massive Hunt is sure not to outstay its welcome. And it will no doubt feature Clarkson, Hammond and May doing what they do best: bantering, breezing about, pretending to run their cars off the road. And another special has been commissioned – to be filmed in Scotland owing to Covid.

Yet all of the above feels like exhaust fumes compared to the uproarious fashion with which the Grand Tour announced itself in 2016. Meanwhile Amazon is staking its future on hobbits and superheroes. Against that backdrop, Clarkson will surely wonder for how much longer the House of Bezos will be a safe space for dad jeans and Greta Thunberg deniers.

Has the Grand Tour gone downhill? Or are Clarkson, Hammond and May as good as ever? Tell us in the comments section below