The broadcast of the final episode of Top Gear on BBC2 this Sunday will provide closure for Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May – allowing the trio to head to a secret destination next week to hammer out the details of their new motoring programme, the show’s former executive producer has said.
“We are going to go somewhere where nobody can find us,” said Andy Wilman, Clarkson’s longtime friend and collaborator. “We will get our heads down and work out the nuts and bolts of what the new show will do and what it will look like.”
Where this reincarnation of Top Gear will find a home is still unclear, although a deal is expected within weeks. ITV and rival US on-demand services Netflix, home to Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards, and Amazon remain the frontrunners to sign Clarkson and his former colleagues.
“The truth of the matter is, we are still talking to different people,” said Wilman. “All we know is that we want to stay together and carry on making a car show. There is a will for it – the public want it, broadcasters want it – so the stars are aligning in the right way. Once this show’s gone out and we’ve got closure, we’ll crack on.”
Wilman, a friend of Clarkson since their days together at Repton school, said the negotiations were like a real-life Top Gear film. “Two days in and Jeremy is all bombastic and [thinks] he’s a brilliant businessman and he knows fuck all,” said Wilman. “I don’t think Jeremy has made a conference call yet at the right time. James [May] is looking at the smaller points … It’s like a Top Gear film. It’s all very funny.”
One thing Clarkson and pals will not be able to take with them is the Top Gear name, after it was bought back by the BBC three years ago in a deal that gave the presenter – and Wilman – a multimillion-pound windfall.
“I’m not worried about that,” said Wilman, who created the show’s latest incarnation with Clarkson in 2002. “It went global because of Richard, James and Jeremy, and grew at a time when channel loyalty, schedules, all those pillars of traditional TV watching, have fallen away ... We are looking for a global platform.”
Sunday’s final 75-minute Top Gear outing was put together from films made before Clarkson’s attack on a producer that subsequently cost him his job. He returned to record a new voiceover for Sunday’s final show – unpaid and under his old contract – and Hammond and May filmed new links but without a studio audience, a process Wilman described as “very sad, absolutely awful to make”.
Such has been the spotlight on the show that its farewell episode may well be its most watched ever, beating the record 8.4 million who saw Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton’s turn as the “star in a reasonably priced car” in 2007.
Hamilton eclipsed the 8.1 million viewers who tuned in to see Richard Hammond’s return earlier that year after his near-fatal high-speed crash. It was the moment the motoring show, which until then had been steadily building its audience, went stratospheric.
The motoring show has rarely been out of the headlines since Clarkson’s “fracas” with a member of the production team in March. The BBC decided not to renew Clarkson’s contract later that month 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 around the show and the presenter, 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.
Another incident, a 2011 episode in which the presenters branded Mexicans “lazy”, “feckless” and “flatulent”, prompted a complaint from the Mexican embassy and an apology from the BBC.
“We were abysmal,” said Wilman. “It was charmless, badly delivered and shit. If you are making a show with a mental age of nine, you are going to act like a nine-year-old, and at some point you are going to lose focus.”
Successfully reinventing the show will be crucial for the BBC – along with 6 million expectant fans on BBC2, Top Gear has a record 350 million viewers around the world.
The corporation has entrusted its crown jewel – earning an estimated £50m a year for its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide – to the Radio 2 breakfast DJ, Chris Evans, who has been given the role of both presenter and executive producer for its return next year.
But Evans’s appointment as Clarkson’s successor was muddied a few days later when Clarkson claimed a senior BBC executive had approached him about a possible return to the show. Some corporation executives are understood to have wanted Clarkson back, following a suitable period away, but how it would have worked remains unclear.
Wilman, who quit the BBC a month after Clarkson’s departure, said: “I love those three letters with all my heart but I’m looking forward to a new home because sometimes it’s hard to laugh at W1A [the BBC’s satire about itself] when you are living in it.
“At the end, I had a guy sitting over my shoulder watching me edit because they didn’t trust me. We were seen as such meddlesome fools.”
Evans has indicated that the new Top Gear will have more audience participation, including open auditions for the co-presenter role and the chance for viewers to drive around the Top Gear track, never a feature under Clarkson.
“I have always been very old-fashioned, I never had any interest whatsoever in interactive,” said Wilman. “Chris will do a good job of his type of show. It will be a healthy rivalry, there will be room for both of us.”
But before that, there is Sunday’s final episode of the old Top Gear to come. Not that Wilman will be watching. He will be at an AC/DC concert.
“I’m not sure I would be watching anyway because it’s quite sad for me,” he said. “I didn’t want it to end this way. The films are good but they were never designed to carry this burden of being the last thing you’ll ever see from us on Top Gear.
“What’s quite poignant for me is they are not the most ambitious films we have ever done but by accident they happen to be very strong on camaraderie.
“Even if I was in, I would probably be watching Countryfile,” he added. “I like Countryfile.”
