Jeremy Clarkson is blaming rose wine after he piled back on more than the two stone he lost last year during lockdown.
The Grand Tour presenter ordered “500 cases of rose” when the country came to a halt in March, and spent the quarantine period “just sitting in and drinking it”.
Sounds like quite a pleasant use of the time.
A health kick in 2019 saw the motoring fanatic take up cycling and shed two stone.
As a result of his lockdown hobby, he admits: “It’s all back on - and a little bit more.”
As the second lockdown kicked in he said he would attempt to add “strategy” to his lockdown routine of “the massive drinking” of the first quarantine sessions, but couldn’t promise to cut down.
Jeremy, 60, took up cycling in 2018 during his “gap year to Indochina”, where he rode 3km every day.
He said last year he earned his daily dose of wine by getting on his bike, and shed an impressive amount of weight before filming in Madagascar for the Grand Tour special, which airs in December.
This year, due to lockdown restrictions, he has been unable to keep up the same level of cycling (the drinking wasn’t so difficult to maintain) though he has been keeping active at his Cotswolds farm, Diddly Squat.
“There’s plenty to do on the farm,” he says, which cameras have been chronicling.
“That’s what’s been keeping me busy over the past 12 months, filming the farm show.”
The Grand Tour presents: A Massive Hunt will launch Friday 18th December on Amazon Prime Video.
Trio 'snooty' at Top Gear's move to BBC 1
Grand Tour host James May says he and longstanding co-presenters Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond were “snooty” at the suggestion Top Gear should ever leave its home of BBC 2 - after the new trio of hosts boasted they’d bagged a “promotion” by being bumped to BBC 1.
James says the former presenters preferred not being on the Beeb’s main channel because they could get away with more.
“We think it’s slightly more esoteric to be on BBC 2,” he says. “The BBC is a bit like being at school.
"There’s grown ups to do the grown up stuff.
"They probably weren’t watching you quite as carefully on BBC 2 as they were on BBC 1 - BBC 1 was family, and it had to be in a safe pair of hands and it had to be inoffensive.
“Being on BBC 2 was a bit like sitting at the back in RE at school - you could quietly say ‘b******s’ and see if you could get away with it.”
Admitting the move to the more family-friendly channel “may have come up” during their tenure, he says: “We would have always been a bit snooty about that.”
