Top Gear is the BBC’s biggest global brand with sales of the TV show, DVDs, books, live shows and other merchandise worth more than £50m a year.
The motoring show can lay claim to being the most popular factual television programme in the world – complete with a Guinness Book of World Records entry – watched by an audience of 350 million in 214 territories.
The show has also been remade as a local version in the US, China, Russia, France, South Korea and Australia.
As a money spinner, Top Gear outperforms the clutch of mega-brands that the BBC considers to be its international crown jewels: Doctor Who, BBC Earth and Dancing with the Stars (Strictly Come Dancing in the UK).
Up until late 2012, the Top Gear franchise was a joint venture between BBC Worldwide (50%), Jeremy Clarkson (30%) and producer Andy Wilman (20%).
The arrangement helped make Clarkson more than £30m from annual dividends of millions of pounds from the global exploitation of the brand.
While Clarkson’s presenting fee was the only expense footed for by licence fee payers, headlines about his mounting riches and the inability of the BBC to maximise returns from Top Gear made for an increasingly embarrassing situation.
In September 2012, BBC Worldwide paid Clarkson £8.4m for his 30% stake, and £5.6m for Wilman’s, and now own all of Top Gear’s intellectual property rights and consolidate all the revenues and profits from the show’s global commercialisation.
