There’s a disclaimer early in Amazon’s The Grand Tour: A Scandi Flick that the viewer is about to land “on planet nerd.” The challenge that the three hosts have set themselves is to drive across Arctic Scandinavia to figure out the best early 2000s all-wheel drive rally car. As Richard Hammond explains, there have been 212 different versions of the car that he has chosen (of which his is a 2003 Subaru Impreza WRX STi V-Limited Edition, if you must know), and every one of those 212 models has its own vocal, pedantic, Very Online champions. It would be easy for this challenge to devolve into rivet counting.
But the rivet counting is, as always, a facade for Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson, and James May’s latest car-centric, gag-heavy expedition through one of the world’s quasi-wildernesses.
Just like you can watch the latest Bond film even if you can’t tell an Aston Martin from a dry martini, The Grand Tour specials are designed for a general audience — or at least a general audience of men who like things that go vroom, boom, and crash. This is a special that I could (and probably will) rewatch with my father. That said, market research says some 40% of the show’s viewers are female. And, wow, are there a lot of viewers: The 2013 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records listed Top Gear as the most-watched factual TV program in the world, with around 350 million viewers in almost every country tuning into each episode. That’s more than the Super Bowl. When they relaunched as The Grand Tour on Amazon in 2016, the company announced that it was the “biggest show premiere ever on Amazon Prime Video.”
After 20 years of making this kind of show, the boys from Top Gear / The Grand Tour stick to the formula, but it’s a formula that works. Director Howard Hawks once said the recipe for a great film was three good scenes and no bad ones. The Top Gear / Grand Tour recipe is something like three great hosts, two good running gags, one real crash, and no bad scenery.
It also apparently cannot be replicated. Since 2015, when Clarkson, Hammond, and May’s 21-season run on Top Gear came to an end after Clarkson punched a producer, the BBC has tried a combination of 12 different hosts to replace them, including Matt LeBlanc of Friends and, for the past three years, a former professional cricket player.
I have tried to watch many of these variations but inevitably find them insufferable. While the show could be dismissed as three mad lads in cars, the reason the original trio worked always had more to do with brains than they are given credit for. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the best of the new Top Gear hosts, Chris Harris, shares the same profession as Clarkson and May: automotive journalist. It’s harder than it looks to take a car around a corner sideways at 100 mph while saying something not only insightful but witty about the situation — try watching a YouTube drifting video to see what I mean — but it helps to have written about it week in and week out for decades.
Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that Clarkson and May have had the most interesting solo projects of the trio. If you want a show that very much does not follow a formula, Clarkson’s Farm, also on Amazon, includes an episode where our host acts as a midwife to dozens of lambs that I would advise against rewatching with your father. Despite the Guardian’s TV critic claiming that the show displayed a “total contempt for farming,” Clarkson’s Farm won a British Farming Award for supporting British agriculture alongside more down-to-Earth categories such as “Beef Innovator of the Year.” You decide who has contempt for whom.
By contrast, Hammond’s 2019 Amazon solo project, The Great Escapists with Mythbusters alumnus Tory Belleci, fails for the same reason that many critics and fans have gotten tired of the Grand Tour schtick: pre-scripted, “fake” scenes.
A Scandi Flick has many of these, but only one that I found truly grating. The CGI “fire” coming out of Clarkson’s Audi just doesn’t look good. The rest of the jokes worked for me. Moreover, one very real accident early in the film is why they try to stage as much as they can. A bit like professional wrestling, you can only “fake” so much turnbuckle jumping before even hitting padded canvas takes its toll.
That toll is apparently at least part of why they ended The Grand Tour as a regular annual program in 2019 and now only release one or two longer specials a year. Hammond, in particular, has had two near-fatal crashes during filming, most recently in 2017, when he crashed a million-dollar electric supercar during a Swiss hill climb race; the car then burst into flames, and he had to be helicoptered to the nearest hospital. His 2006 crash at 288 mph in a jet-propelled dragster put him in a coma for two weeks and caused brain damage severe enough that he continues to suffer significant memory problems.
Which, perhaps oddly, brings me back to the cars. The fact that the hosts I’ve watched and enjoyed since I was a teenager are getting older and stepping toward retirement is sad but inevitable. As their collective paunch has grown, so, admittedly, has mine. And I can’t feel too bad for Clarkson, given his frequent social media posts about yachting in the Mediterranean. But why in 2022 are they looking at cars from 2003 and 2005?
The sadder answer is that the reason the show can’t go on forever is not the decline of man, but the decline of the car. None of the three legendary rally manufacturers shown in the film (Audi, Mitsubishi, and Subaru) even make road-going rally cars anymore. Of the three cars competing in the 2022 World Rally Championship, none are available in the United States. The future is an electric crossover SUV, and for those of us who love the rumble of a V-8, the future is boring and ugly.
“A microwave can soften a potato faster than an Aga but the end result is not even remotely satisfying,” Clarkson wrote last year in The Times of London about a Tesla something-or-other challenging his Lamborghini Huracan at a red light, a race he declined and probably would have lost, given the incredible acceleration available to even basic electric engines. “Speed is wonderful, let’s be in no doubt about that. But it needs to be accompanied by something else as well. Dinosaur noises. Sounds that vibrate your limbic system. So you have a sense that you’re doing something exciting.”
By 2035, something exciting will be illegal to sell in the state of California. The internal combustion engine will live on in Toyota Camrys and other prole cars for the foreseeable future, while electric vehicles conquer the Earth. But the dinosaur noises and the dinosaurs that enjoy them are going extinct.
Andrew Bernard is the Washington correspondent for The Algemeiner.
