A Breakup Letter to Jeremy Clarkson
By: Toshit Panigrahi
Tags: Jeremy Clarkson, The Grand Tour, TV Shows, Letters, Top Gear

A Breakup Letter to Jeremy Clarkson

At the end of season three, a teary-eyed Jeremy Clarkson announced that The Grand Tour as we knew it would be ending; the show would only release long-form specials with no tent and no live audience. This sounded like a really bad decision, a result borne out of really botched viewer research done by an MBA at Amazon or some market research consultancy.

Honestly, I tried to be optimistic about this. The first special, Seamen, was a let down a year ago and now A Massive Hunt was just as disappointing. The Grand Tour is not just nearing the end — it has already ended; the soul has left the show.

Dear Jeremy Clarkson,

This relationship is over. It isn’t me, it is you for sure. I tried to be faithful, I tried to support you unconditionally over the last few years. But it has been one sided, I have not gotten anything in return. I don’t know how much more of this I can endure. I introduced you to my parents many years ago and they warned me you were no good. I should have listened to them. I am changing my passwords… you don’t know them but I am changing them anyways as part of this cleanse.

You will have to continue this journey with your child, The Grand Tour, without me. Especially after the last two turds that it dropped in my living room.

Growing up, I wanted to be successful enough that I had a shot at being a Star in a Reasonably Priced Car sitting across from you. That was my heuristic for determining if I “had made it.” I possibly cannot overstate the impact you, May and Hammond had on me. I’m not unique in feeling this, you have bigger fans than me out there. I want you to know that this letter comes from a good place.

Season 1 of The Grand Tour was great, but I’m not sure how much of it was just the joy of seeing the three of you on screen again. Season 2 was passable, and Season 3 was abysmal. The three of you never managed to hit your stride, and got stuck in some weird uncanny valley. I don’t mean that The Grand Tour tried to be too much like Top Gear — I mean this more fundamentally. You just failed to be authentic.

Sometimes, the writing was the issue.

Take Richard Hammond, for example. Watching Grand Tour Hammond is like suffering through a bad actor trying to impersonate the peppy Hammond we knew and loved. How did you even manage that? It’s eerie. His dialogues are predictable, forced and sometimes cringey.

Grand Tour James May is just a prop. If you replaced him with a cardboard cutout in Conversation Street, I’m not sure anyone would even notice. He has had almost no memorable lines in The Grand Tour, and his only identity is some contrived enmity with you, Clarkson. I can only believe that James May yelling, “CLARKSON!” must have tested well with focus groups that the MBA’s ran, so the producers threw that in every episode with reckless abandon. (To be fair, he really shined in the historical bits about the Ford GT and astronaut cars. But when he had to interact with you and Hammond, it was painful.)

And Clarkson, you talk A LOT. That in itself is not a problem, it’s who you are and your open book nature is a plus. Top Gear made it work. But the problem is your “this-is-my-show” delivery in The Grand Tour. You drive every Conversation Street, you deliver almost every punch line, and you cut off your partners to do it.

A lot of this could have been overlooked had it not been for the deeper culture issue that has plagued The Grand Tour.

Right from the beginning, there was an infatuation with sticking a middle finger to the BBC and it perhaps worked for Season 1. Rubbing in how much budget Amazon was giving Grand Tour was a very Clarkson thing to do, but it was not solid enough to hang your hat on every season — the audience moved on. Too many things were fixed by the convenience of having budget, rather than ingenuity and wit. So much money was wasted.

When reviews faltered, you fell back to many antics that were Top Gear fan favorites: car vs. public transport races, RV holidays, amphibious cars, building and selling cars at auctions, watching May filing tools, etc. It was great in theory but it was like watching a worse remake of a classic. (Again, were the MBA’s involved?)

The nail in the coffin was the decision to only do specials from Season 4 onwards. It cemented how out of touch The Grand Tour had become from the audience. Now we wait for one episode a year to be disappointed.

Clarkson, you muppet!

Did you forget why you lot won our hearts in the first place?

You were one of us, you were an everyman. All three of you were supremely ordinary, and annoyingly relatable. May’s OCD, Hammond’s height, your incessant complaining, your faults were put on display and mocked by one another. In a way, it made us comfortable with our own shortcomings. You chose your own clothes, groomed just enough to go on TV. Just look at the juxtaposition between Simon Cowell’s polish and your rough edges when he was your guest.

The three of you sat around every week and bemoaned the hypocrisies of the world, and we listened. You were literally among the people in Top Gear. You sat in the middle of the crowd, you hosted the cool wall and stood in the midst of us, despite becoming global super stars.

You let me dream that an ordinary person like me could go on to become a Star in a Reasonably Priced Car one day.

In The Grand Tour, there was promise. A globe-trotting tent, a new location every week, possibly allowing more of the world get close to our heroes. Yes, a traveling tent was an expensive proposition, but it had a Romantic charm. You were taking all that money from Amazon and coming closer to us…

But that’s not what happened was it? In Season 2 and 3 we had to settle for a tent in your yard. Once the tent stopped traveling, the disconnect came started coming into focus.

Just look at the contrast in your studios. In Top Gear, the chairs you sat in looked like they had been stolen from a thrift shop, picked up from a car in the junkyard with a “to hell with it” attitude. In The Grand Tour, furniture is carefully coordinated, meaningless props like trunks lay around to create a pretentiously rustic travel aesthetic in your backyard. It’s a setting that an Instagram influencer would take advantage of. And you sit there, not in the midst of us, but in front of us like a schoolteacher.

This is why the move to specials-only was so fatal: you withdrew from your audience what little connection you had left. We see much less from you now, the content is much less relatable, and there’s 0 interactivity left with us. What is the strategy? To hold content hostage so that when something is released we are forced to like it? It worked on me until A Massive Hunt.

Jeremy Clarkson, did you become too elite for us? Or maybe The Grand Tour is like a lottery winner that didn’t know what to do with all the money. If Top Gear was built on your ordinariness, The Grand Tour is only limping along because of star power; it’s hanging by a thread.