James May explains why his TV partnership with Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond had to end.
Earlier this year, the trio, who first started working together on BBC’s Top Gear in 2002 before moving over to Amazon for Prime Video series The Grand Tour, appeared for the final time together on screen.
A Grand Tour special titled One for the Road served as a swansong for the trio’s onscreen partnership, which lasted 22 years, with Clarkson now focusing on his farm and pub business.
May has reflected on this in a new interview, stating that he isn’t “in mourning” as he thinks they “gave the format a really good thrashing and now it’s time to let a younger generation have a go”.
The presenter told The Times: “The idea was to land the car show format safely and not fly it into a cliff. We only cleared the cliff by a few feet but I think it will survive.
“I do my best to be a contemporary human being and embrace new ideas, but we were very much rooted in an Eighties and Nineties view of what motoring is about. It needs a fresh take because the subject has never been more interesting.”
Clarkson previously said that the special would be the last time he will “talk about cars on television” as he is “too old and fat to get into the cars that I like and not interested in driving those I don’t”.
The broadcaster, who also owns a farm and a country pub, 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.
He added that 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.
Clarkson continued: “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.
