One of the strangest things about fronting a mega-famous show for two decades? The age range of the fans.
“It's so weird,” says Richard Hammond. “I mean [I meet] fully grown adults that say, ‘I've been watching that show since I was a baby.’ It’s true. It’s significant for all of us.
“I remember starting 20 odd years ago working together and thinking, ‘This is great. This is finally a network show, a big job. I thought it would last a couple of seasons. I didn’t think over two decades later it would have occupied most of my working life.”
But it has. Since 2002, Hammond, now 54, has been one third of arguably the biggest trio in motorsports journalism. Along with Jeremy Clarkson and James May, the three helmed a show that, at its peak, drew in 350 million viewers a week around the world.
Between them, they’ve conquered countries, faulty cars and their fair share of scandals (mostly the work of Clarkson). And now, they’ve finished filming their final episode of The Grand Tour, the Prime Video show in which they drive a variety of vehicles across a series of inhospitable landscapes.
This time, they’re heading to Botswana – somewhere they were never allowed to film in their Top Gear days, as the BBC was banned there. And to hear Hammond tell it, it’s full circle for the team.
“This was our goodbye to the audience. This was a thank you for coming with us… so don't expect big bangs and crashes and stunts and explosions,” Hammond says. “It was [about] paring it back and getting back to the essence of it.”
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He’s being modest: there are of course still plenty of explosions as the trio drive their vintage cars across the rugged African terrain. They’re all driving cars that are important to them – Hammond’s is a Ford Capri, the first car he almost owned (his parents eventually bought him a different one).
It’s a long way from the show’s humble beginnings: in 2002, when journalist Clarkson convinced the BBC to invest some of its budget in rebooting the old motoring show Top Gear. Hammond was brought on to present in the first year, May in the second.
“I’d bumped into James a few times. I knew Jeremy from the telly. The weirdest thing for me was, at the first studio recording of the first series… I stood there,” he says. “The audience was in there with us, and the theme tune to Top Gear started.
“I thought, ‘Oh brilliant. It's Top Gear,’ and I immediately wanted to be sitting on the sitting room carpet with the box of LEGO watching the telly. And then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. I'm on it and that's Jeremy, that I used to watch on Top Gear.’ It was a really strange moment.”
The ratings quickly took off: between the trio’s camaraderie, the lad banter and the constant parade of glitzy cars, Top Gear became an early Noughties phenomenon. Hammond recalls being in Australia, in the middle of the outback “hundreds of miles from anywhere”, where they were recognised.
“One of the guys who lived in this place in the middle of the Australian Outback was the world's biggest Top Gear fan. And he was sitting there in his shack, and the whole thing turned up: us and the cars and crew and the support, the whole lot of us. He was watching, [clearly] thinking, ‘Why the hell have they turned up here?’”
The good times didn’t last. After a series of controversies involving the show the trio stepped down. Instead of Top Gear, they pivoted to The Grand Tour, which eventually stopped being a studio show and instead became a series of specials filmed across the world.
One thing that’s always stayed the same, though, is the relationship between the squabbling presenters. How much of the show is scripted? Hammond is frank. “What we can't do is go off spending all of that money and all those people's time, and hope something happens,” he says.
So there is a plan of sorts, but “inevitably, stuff does happen and that's the stuff that makes the show, and the planned bits fall away because when it happens for real it's far better.”
One example he cites is the Scottish special, where Clarkson’s caravan became unhitched from the car he was using to tow it and overtook him. Which was followed shortly after by Hammond falling off a fishing boat into a freezing Scottish loch, fully clothed.
“None of those were planned they just happened and we all know instinctively the moment that, ‘Oh hello, something’s going on here.’ Thankfully our crew are quick and skilled in it that they can always see it coming and we get the coverage... we did well to invent a format that's founded entirely upon embracing and celebrating failures. Because when things go wrong for us, that's when it goes right for the audience. It's a win-win.”
And 20 years in, have they gotten sick of each other? Apparently not.
“We’ve worked together for a very long time. There's a lovely moment that comes every show… there's a moment comes when the director calls action. And it's as though we all go into a place that we've all been in since the last one. It's as though we're all there which is jump back into it.
“It's kind of unspoken now. Each of us will know that's Jeremy's going to take that and it'll be great but if I say this it'll set it off or if I jump in and say that, that will wind James up.”
Now, they’re all bowing out: something Hammond says was always planned.
“We'd always said we wanted it to end at a moment, in a place, in a manner of our choosing,” he says. “Because it kind of took off almost beyond our control. We were just making our car show. Next thing we know it's absolutely enormous. So we couldn't really control the take off. But we could control the landing and we wanted to end it on our own terms.”
They’ve certainly done that, and the presenters are all turning to their own projects. Clarkson of course has Clarkson’s Farm, the Prime Video mega-hit – and while Hammond says he has no plans to farm himself, “we'll carry on doing stuff and we'll keep in touch, and who knows?”
