Jeremy Clarkson Explains How He Almost Died And Much More In An Interview About The Grand Tour

The LA Times just released a video interview with The Grand Tour trio and they shared some more details about the upcoming show that’s airing on Amazon Prime starting on November 18th. Interviewer Charles Fleming sits down with the three hosts and asked some insightful questions. For those unable to watch the video below is a rough transcript:

CF: How will it be the same as and how will it be different from the previous installment of Top Gear

Clarkson: Are you an IP lawyer? It’s broadly the same, It has us three hosting it, he’s (James May) slow and lost, he’s (Richard Hammond) short, and I’m tall and bombastic, and fat.

CF: Will it have some live audience component?

Hammond: Yeah we’re taking the studio on the road, it was his (Clarkson’s) stupid idea. It sounds like a great one so we were both ‘yeah let’s do that,’ and rather than basing on one simple home, we take the tent around and meet our audience in a simple tent.

CF: You sound like Bedouins or something?

Clarkson: We are Gypsies

CF: The Guinness Book Of World Records says that you were at some point the most watched globally television show of all time

Clarkson: They said we were once the most watched factual program. Now I think we did one show in 2011 and it was wrong

Hammond: We tried to hunt down all facts and expunge them from the show

Clarkson: We have opinion and hyperbole

CF: That may save you from lawsuits

Clarkson: Hyperbole can save you from lawsuits

CF: You were almost killed in a high speed accident, and you had some sort of a crash during the filming of this show because there was a tweet of a photograph of you bloodied up.

Clarkson: You’ll see that in show two. We went to Jordan, where the King has built this truly fabulous town, mock town. With an airport, airliners, embassies, and houses… Special forces from all over the world come to compete and they have competitions. We thought it would be quite fun to give it a go. As you can imagine we got very good at special forces activities. The running was difficult. Fast strafing out of a helicopter, have you ever done that?

CF: And you broke your arm in an off the set accident. Is this all “Kids, don’t try this at home?”

Hammond: How did you do that James?

Clarkson: Yeah, how did you do that James? You came out of the restaurant after having a couple glasses of wine and had a bit of a tumble as they say of elderly people.

May: I slipped which is what everybody does, and everybody in a hospital has slipped on something and broken a bone, that was just bad luck.

Clarkson: The day before of the very first shoot, the old lady had a tumble and broke his arm, his shoulder.

CF: Why California first?

Clarkson: There is a pre tease kind of thing in the beginning of it which was going to end in Washington State but the weather wasn’t good enough for what we were trying to do, so we moved it down to California.

Hammond: We had to give it a bit of a kickoff

Clarkson: So, before the show starts, there’s this little sequence, which ended in the desert in California. And so we thought “While we’re there, let’s do the show in California.”

The day thou gavest Lord is over…. pic.twitter.com/ec84YyJ3A0

— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) September 26, 2016

Hammond: The opening is quite big and.. quite expensive

Clarkson: There’s a couple of professional people working in movies in tv even marvel at the scale we put on in the desert.

CF: There may be some destruction of motor vehicles involved?

Clarkson: We have spent about 85% of the entire budget in the first 6 minutes

CF: A McLaren P1, A Ferrari LaFerrari. What else can we expect to see with four wheels and what else can we expect to see with motorized vehicles that’s not cars at all?

Clarkson: We’ve completed all the films and as you would expect, if you know us, some of the films we’ve made are car oriented, we’re kicking off with a genuinely car focused, the McLaren P1, the Ferrari LaFerrari, and the Porsche 918. And then some of them barely have a car in them, and it’s just us three falling over. There are some people that watch us getting everything wrong and catching on fire. Some people like the cars, and it’s always quite difficult to get that balance right.

Hammond: Yeah it’s there, the cars you want is there. The triumvirate of hybrid hypercars, for the first show it has to be there. And it is a bit of statement it does say “look, if you want to watch it for the cars, they are there.”

Clarkson: One of the things we enjoy doing, we have more fun driving really terrible old cars than new fast ones. If you give us a terrible old car and put it somewhere inappropriate, that’s where we are at our happiest, is trying to do something where the viewers go “I used to have one of those, it used to barely be able to go down the street, so how do you think it’s going to go through the Himalayas or whatever…”

CF: 12 episodes, one a week. Is it too soon to talk about season 2?

Clarkson: Well we’re commissioned for it, we got to fill it up

CF: How soon do you start filming?

Clarkson: Immediately. We don’t get a time off. We do the films, all the films necessary to fill the half the show, because it’s half studio and half film. We do the films and then we do the tent stuff. As soon as the last tent sequence is finished, wherever that might be, we’ll start filming for season 2.

To catch the entire interview be sure to head over to the LA Times website for the clip. Just to repeat our usual Public Service Announcement: The only way you can watch The Grand Tour (legally) is to subscribe to Amazon Prime. If you haven’t subscribed yet you can do so by going here. If you want to watch The Grand Tour for free, there are ways to do so…

To catch all of our Grand Tour coverage please keep checking back here.

(Source: LA Times)