Here it is, the thing for which your dad has spent 15 months trying to figure out what Amazon Prime is and how to sign up to Amazon Prime and how to use the printer so he can file off the Amazon Prime terms and conditions and calling you in the small hours of the night asking, “Is Amazon Prime TV, or is it on the TV?” and then calling back 40 minutes later to ask, “Hold on, I think I’ve got it now: but Amazon is a website, it’s not on the telly?” and watching Dave-after-Dave repeat of Top Gear and settling down into his Big Chair with a foaming mug of that beer you got him for Christmas and now he’s ready, his body is ready: The Grand Tour lands on Friday.
Sadly there are no preview episodes available, so we’re going to have to imagine how it goes. This shouldn’t be too difficult, though. Listen, right: have you ever seen an episode of Top Gear? It’s really, really, really like that. We open – after a bombastic montage featuring Richard Hammond yelping in a £600 Jeep as he drives it into river after river and James May trying to break a land speed record on a milk truck, or something – with Jeremy Clarkson, back where he belongs, scratching his head in a sun-and-bleached-sand landscape and “talking … like this”. He skirts smirkingly around that bit of business with the producer he decked then looks off to the horizon and says, “Hang on …” at an approaching dust cloud, as if this doesn’t happen in every episode of everything he has ever recorded for the past seven or eight years, as if his life didn’t long ago turn into a series of segments inevitably interrupted by James May.
May’s here now, the one they laugh at. Hammond turned up without fanfare a few minutes ago, goatee-bearded and waistcoated, ever more resembling a haunting ventriloquist’s doll made in the likeness of John Virgo, and together he and Clarkson are laughing at May. “What?” May barks, flaunting something patently absurd – he’s in a three-wheeled car; all of his limbs are broken; he suddenly has a ponytail – and they point this out to him. In many ways, Top – sorry, The Grand Tour, is as formulaic as the worst pantomime.
The question, I suppose, is: how is Amazon Prime hoping to differentiate this show from the one that came before it? Will Clarkson somehow unbutton another rung of his shirt, until his entire chest is exposed? Will Hammond find room to pile another beaded necklace on over the thousands of beaded necklaces he is already wearing? Will James May, forbidden from being declared “Captain Slow” by a 10-year trademark claim the BBC took out on the name to print on a series of mugs, instead be referred to as “The Pondering Man”? And, most crucially, will they actually talk about cars?
It was long ago that Top Gear (Top Gear Mk I, rather than the Mk II “Chris Evans spending six weeks corpsing in front of a studio audience who really wished their turn on the ticket lottery came up two summers before it did” version – actual Top Gear Mk 1, with Tiff Needell and Quentin Willson, is non-canon) edged all the way over to the banter side of the cars/banter spectrum. But still, those moments endured: Jeremy Clarkson padding up to a supercar like he was about to impregnate it, climbing into the passenger seat, firing the engine up and shuddering climactically. Is The Grand Tour just weird porn for dads? We’ll have to wait for the episodes to drop for confirmation of that. But yes. Definitely yes.
