Jeremy Clarkson has said that he really doesn’t care if The Grand Tour is a hit – insisting he will be “dead soon” anyway.
Clarkson said: “The stakes are lower. I’m now 56, it doesn’t really matter anymore, because I’ll be dead soon. People could say, ‘This is a terrible program and Amazon’s wasted its money,’ and I’ll go, ‘Yeah, I’ll be dead before they even notice.’ ”
Despite Clarkson’s blasé approach, Amazon have invested around £160million in the TV show based on the fact that Top Gear made the Guinness World Records as the most watched factual program in the world, airing in 212 territories to an estimated global audience of 350 million.
Asked to describe the new show, Clarkson told Newsweek: “Top Gear was like a shepherd’s pie. This is a cottage pie. It’s still comfort food, it’s still us, it still looks the same. But it’s different and people will just have to get used to the fact that the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment and The Stig have gone. We have new things instead, which, had we done them first of all – had you always had a cottage pie – people would have been perfectly happy with.”
He also insisted they would keep pushing the boundaries of what a vehicle can do, as in some of their previous stunts.
“Everybody thinks it’s a car review show—it isn’t,” he said. “What we want to do most is, ‘Did you know you could do this with a car?’ Rather than, ‘Did you know this car was like this?’
“Doing something daft with a car is much more what we want to do, and we can always be the first to do that because it’ll be our idea and nobody will have done it before.”