It’s over. It’s all over. After 22 years of watching Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May cock about in cars for our entertainment from Top Gear in 2002 right up to The Grand Tour’s finale today, One For The Road brings an end to the most popular trio on television.
I’ve been watching the three since the very beginning; I was just 13 years old when I sat down on a Sunday evening before school and my mum had Top Gear on (no idea why) and I’ve stuck with them through thick and thin, but today there was just one problem with The Grand Tour’s final episode.
For those of a certain age, Clarkson era Top Gear (2002-2015) and The Grand Tour which followed on Amazon Prime has been not just a fun car show, but the backdrop - a best friend - our whole lives.
That 22 years is longer than I was in education, longer than I’ve been an adult and longer than I have left before I’ll be able to draw from my workplace pension. When my dad died, I couldn't do anything else other than watch Top Gear in bed all day. These three were always there, no matter what ups and downs were happening in my life.
It’s not just familiarity that made the trio so great though, they stuck around because they had that special something, that watchable chemistry that always shone through, during the good ideas and the bad.
They took classic cars over the salt flats of Botswana. They raced a boat, car and bike across London (and the car of course, always won), they drove in a real 24 hour race and didn’t come last, Clarkson gave us The Stig, Clarkson’s Nurburgring time was beaten by a girl in a van (RIP Sabine), they made amphibious cars, then sank them, Hammond crashed and almost died, they relaunched a big budget Amazon show, they blew up Jeremy’s house, Hammond crashed and almost died.
There’s too many standout moments, but one of my earliest memories of Top Gear is when they tried to destroy the Toyota Hilux, with hilariously escalating ferocity. Jeremy drove it into a wall, then a tree. Then they drove it into a caravan, hit it with a wrecking ball and set it on fire.
When none of that worked, the trio parked it on a beach in Burnham-on-Sea and let the tide claim it. When it still started, they tied it to tower block and demolished it - and still the car drove off. Nothing could kill it, and it went down in legend heralded as a hero.
Much like this trio. The world changed a lot in 22 years, and the kind of jokes they used to catch headlines for might have got them ‘cancelled’ in today’s era long before Jeremy socked a producer.
But despite drinking while driving over the ice of the Arctic, the ‘there’s a slope on it’ bridge gaffe, or being chased by angry Argentinians because of the Falklands number plate on screen, or even Clarkson’s Meghan Markle column off screen, still the three soldiered on, unfazed by the wrecking balls hitting them from all sides.
In the end, Amazon gave them the chance to do what the BBC didn't: end things on their own terms.
The only problem is, it was of its time, a time where three blokes mucking about on BBC2 could captivate the entire nation every Sunday at 8pm without fear of a 'woke' hashtag going viral either. It’s golden era TV from three legends, the likes of which we’ll never see again.
