Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May are to make a new motoring show for Amazon’s on-demand TV service that will go head to head with BBC2’s new-look Top Gear when it begins next year.
The as-yet unnamed Amazon show, which was announced on Thursday, ended months of speculation after Clarkson was dropped by the BBC following a fracas with a producer.
It will be made by Clarkson’s long-time friend and collaborator, former Top Gear executive producer Andy Wilman and is the result of a three-year deal with Amazon, which emerged victorious in a three-way battle to sign the presenting trio with ITV and rival on-demand service Netflix.
In a swipe at his former employer, Clarkson said: “I feel like I’ve climbed out of a biplane and into a spaceship.”
Details of the contract remain confidential but the presenters can expect to earn up to twice the £1m a series Clarkson is believed to have been paid at the BBC.
The deal is a sign of the growing importance and financial muscle of internet firms in the world of broadcasting, with Amazon and Netflix, home to Kevin Spacey’s acclaimed remake of the BBC’s House of Cards, competing with traditional TV channels for viewers around the world.
May said: “We have become part of the new age of smart TV. Ironic, isn’t it?”
The show makes Clarkson and his fellow presenters unlikely stablemates of Woody Allen, who is making his first-ever TV series for Amazon. Its on-demand TV service, Amazon Prime, won acclaim for its Golden Globe-winning transgender comedy Transparent, starring Jeffrey Tambor.
And it is not the first time that Amazon has looked to the BBC – the internet firm resurrected BBC1’s period crime drama, Ripper Street, after it was axed.
Clarkson and Wilman, who were the brains behind Top Gear’s reinvention a decade ago, have spent the last month hammering out details of how the new show could work and where they would take it. A possible switch to ITV was complicated by a non-compete clause in Clarkson’s contract.
The new show will not be able to use the Top Gear name, which is owned by the BBC, and there is a morass of legal complications around which features from the BBC2 show they can take with them. Top Gear, which has 350 million viewers around the world, earns £50m a year for the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide.
Wilman, who is setting up a new production company to make the show, said there would be a “healthy rivalry” with Top Gear. “What Chris does is great entertainment shows and I’m sure he will do a good job of his type of show,” Wilman recently told the Guardian.
He said Top Gear had “done very well but we have never had an opportunity to prioritise refreshing stuff, and now we have the time and the motivation to do that. I’m happy with the rivalry. Why shouldn’t viewers have two car shows?”
Clarkson said on Twitter he was very excited and joked that Amazon were “now saying I can’t be their chief drone pilot. Apparently they want us to make a car show.”
.@AmazonVideoUK now saying I can't be their chief drone pilot. Apparently they want us to make a car show.
— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) July 30, 2015
Jay Marine, vice president of Amazon Prime Video in Europe, said Clarkson’s return would be “one of the most globally anticipated shows of 2016. Customers told us they wanted to see the team back on screen, and we are excited to make that happen,” he said.
“This is a golden age of television, a great time for TV makers and storytellers. Our approach is to give programme makers creative freedom to be innovative and make the shows they want to make. This is just the start.”
The Amazon Prime TV service is part of a wider offering from the company, that started 20 years ago as an online book shop, that includes cloud photo storage and music streaming for £79 a year. Netflix, which is exclusively video streaming, costs from £5.99 a month.
Neither company publishes viewing figures, which are likely to be a fraction of the audience for mainstream TV channels such as BBC1. But viewing habits are changing, with 3.5 billion requests for on-demand TV and radio programmes on the BBC’s iPlayer last year.
The Clarkson deal is further evidence of how Amazon and Netflix, which signed up the BBC team behind Blue Planet to make a new natural history epic called Our Planet, are moving away from their traditional bases of comedy and drama into new originated production.
Kathleen Brooks, research director at City Index, said it was Amazon’s “most populist move yet”.
“Clarkson, although controversial, is still immensely popular, and by signing him Amazon Prime could attract new subscribers around the world, which is crucial for the profitability of Amazon since it is known that Amazon Prime customers in the US spend nearly double what non-Prime customers spend each year,” she said.
“It also gives the Top Gear team the freedom from advertiser demands that is crucial for the independence of the show, which it also enjoyed at the BBC.”
Top Gear has rarely been out of the headlines since Clarkson’s bust-up with a member of the production team in March. Clarkson was dropped after an internal report found he was responsible for an “unprovoked physical and verbal attack” on Oisin Tymon.
It was the latest in a string of controversies, from Clarkson’s description of Gordon Brown as a “one-eyed Scottish idiot” at a press conference in 2009 to last year’s unbroadcast footage in which he appeared to mumble the n-word.
After failing to persuade Hammond and May to return without Clarkson, the BBC turned to Evans, presenter of the Radio 2 breakfast show, to present and executive produce the new-look Top Gear.
