As everyone probably knows Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May were the 3 petrol heads on Top Gear from 2002 to 2015. There was a little punching incident with Clarkson (aka “the ape”) who couldn’t get some food (after a day’s filming) that led to the BBC dismissing him – the other 2 left in solidarity. As did the producer Andy Wilman.
Amazon Prime snapped them up and The Grand Tour ran from 2016-24.
In Season 1 they had a running joke around celebrity guests. As they had to be careful to not make TGT a version of TG (in case the BBC sued) they couldn’t do something too close to segments like the “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car”.
Filming the show from inside a large tent they would get the audience all excited about a guest, show them in the distance, approaching the tent…and then blow them up (or similar) so that they never made it. All the while bringing their acting A-game and pretending to be shocked at losing yet another guest to some catastrophe.
In S1 Ep4 (broadcast December 9th 2016) they had Jimmy riding around Whitby harbour (their location for that week) in a jet-ski. Wearing a suit and looking VERY James Bond.
Before he could reach the studio there was a crash with a craft (Summer Queen), a bang and a puff of smoke. He must’ve been on screen for under a minute… This video shows the stunt man filming the “crash” sequence.
The Daily Mail has a number of the photos of Jimmy (on his jet-ski) and Alamy have a lot more (although many look very similar).
It had been filmed on October 14th and there is a story here about Jimmy travelling up, by helicopter, with A.A. Gill. At the time they didn’t know that Adrian only had 2 months to live.
You can see the clip at the 3 minute point in the video below.
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