OVER the past 22 years Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have become one of TV’s best loved trios – but there’s always been a fourth man steering their success behind the scenes.
Andy Wilman was the producer who helped reboot Top Gear in 2002 and went on to launch The Grand Tour, which releases its final episode, One For The Road, next month.
As the boys prepare to park the show, he looks back on the winning dynamic of Jeremy, Richard and James, which might not have had time to blossom in today’s cut-throat world of broadcasting.
Andy, 62, said: “You gave the three of them time to meld, so that their relationship is what it is today.
“I don’t want to sound nostalgic for that period, but it was OK to incrementally create something. Now, there’s very much a sense in TV of wanting to have everything in the first show. It’s got to be ready to go.
“How c**k-a**e we were then. I remember the day of recording in the studio when Richard turned up with a huge black eye. He went, ‘I got in a fight. I was arguing with my mate about what the best Subaru is’.
“It’s that thing of actually building on that chemistry and putting the chemistry into the show.
“Now we’ve all been together like 20 years — like a crap rock band.”
Lost in the mists of time is that fact that in 2001, the BBC had actually axed Top Gear after 24 years on our screens.
The old format of car reviews and discussions on motoring issues felt desperately tired, but Jeremy could see a way to revamp it for the 21st century.
The first person he called was Andy, not only a co-presenter on the old Top Gear but also a friend he went to school with.
Andy recalled at the Edinburgh TV Festival: “He rang me and said, ‘Meet me in the pub’. We got there and he had about 60 per cent of the ideas already written down.
“He had the idea that it was going to happen in a place and he had the idea that it was going to be a track for celebs.
“It’s got to be bold. We’ve got to smash everything. And then we’ve got no choice but to go forward.
“He’s like the arrow tip and I’m kind of behind it. Once he’s done that, I can make it work. I can make it happen.”
From there they came up with the idea of the giant studio, the star in a reasonably priced car, the celebrity chats and, of course, the anonymous test driver known as The Stig.
Then came some of their incredible stunts and pranks — with blowing up caravans always a favourite.
Now we’ve all been together like 20 years — like a crap rock band
Andy
James, who had starred on the old Top Gear, signed up in the second series, whereas Richard was there from the beginning, but only after an interview for the job which started off in disaster.
Andy recalled: “Richard said, ‘Like everything I do, I’ve f***ed it up, haven’t I?’ Then he started to tell us about his radio DJ career, where the highlight was doing Radio Cumbria’s night shift, reading out the names of lambs up for adoption.
“Well, we were in fits of laughter by then. And Jeremy was like, ‘No, we’ve got to have him, this guy with the self-deprecation. We’ll make the rest work’.”
They had no idea just how well the trio would work over the next 13 years, during which Top Gear didn’t just become one of the country’s biggest telly shows, it also became a huge export for the BBC.
But far from spelling the end of the show, the groundswell of support only proved how much of a national institution it had become — and Richard duly returned.
When he agreed to have the footage of the incident air the following year, they landed one of their biggest-ever audiences — with a staggering eight million tuning in.
The show became huge on the back of the big names they used to attract to try out the track too, including Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Rowan Atkinson, Michael Fassbender — and even John Prescott.
But the team had one standout star.
Andy said: “Our first international guest, like globally known, was Lionel Richie. We said, right, well, we better get him a motorhome because that’s what celebs have. So the production manager, tightest b*****d I’ve ever worked with, he went and got Yellow Pages out — and this thing turned up.
Our first international guest, like globally known, was Lionel Richie
Andy
“Then he’s going round doing the laps in the Suzuki Liana.
“Lionel came past us at about 70 miles an hour and the front wheel came off the car and he went ploughing through the field.
“I thought, let’s get him over to the motorhome. So we go to the motorhome and I open the door and I sort of felt the mildew come out and heard his manager go, ‘What the f**k is this?’
“Then I look around and there was one Athena poster of the Twin Towers on the wall and that was it. He was like, ‘are you trying to be funny?’
“But Lionel didn’t mind — he thought it was all really funny. He went, ‘Look, I used to tour in the early Sixties and the late Fifties with bands in the segregated South, where we were getting stoned and having bricks thrown at us. So your sh***y car and your sh***y motorhome are not a problem’.”
After the Top Gear trio split from the BBC in 2015, Andy joined them to begin a new chapter.
He said: “We stayed together and then we were like, ‘We need somewhere to go’.
“Sky didn’t want us. ITV did, but we thought ‘we’ll never do it for the money [they’d offer] sort of thing’, because we were getting ‘worldwide money’ to make our show.
“So then we were like, ‘we’ve always got the Americans’. Then Netflix and Amazon were coming up and Amazon got in touch and we started talking and we liked the conversation — especially the one about money.
“It was like, ‘Make the show as legally close to Top Gear as possible’. No bones about it.
“ ‘We want an up-and-ready show to go around the world but we ain’t going to get sued for, and you four are in’. ”
Just like with Top Gear, Jeremy had ideas for the new show, one of them being staging the programme inside a giant tent.
Randomly, he had seen one used on US crime series True Detective, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, and thought they could do the same.
Andy said: “He went, ‘We’ll get a tent, we’ll put it up, we’ll travel around, it’s The Grand Tour’. And we were like, ‘It can’t just be a sh***y tent!’
Lionel came past us at about 70 miles an hour and the front wheel came off the car and he went ploughing through the field
Andy
“He went, ‘It can. Four poles, canvas’. and we were like, ‘No, you’ve got equipment and everything — sound, noise, lighting’, and he was like, ‘Oh, don’t worry about all that!’”
Andy begged Jeremy not to bring up the incredibly expensive tent idea in meetings with Prime Video, but he couldn’t resist.
Bosses at the streaming giant seemed to jump on the notion, and when it premiered in November 2016, to 195 different countries, the three hosts were under a canopy.
Andy said: “The whole thing nearly bankrupted us. It didn’t work. It wasn’t worth the money, but we set off doing it.
“But I think that’s the DNA of where we were, we kept trying things, and they went wrong, and then we’d try again, and again, until we got something right.”
The tent was eventually dispensed with by series four.
Instead, most of the action saw the trio visit a variety of crazy locations.
They journeyed to Vietnam, Madagascar, Eastern Europe, the Western Sahara, Scandinavia and, in the final episode, they end up having their farewell adventure in Zimbabwe, southern Africa.
Fans of the early Top Gear days are said to be in for a treat, as it has much of the old-school banter combined with some deeply moving moments, as the trio know they are making the motoring show for the last time.
Andy said: “It was quite a no-brainer. We were like, ‘Right, what is this last film about?’ And we were saying to the guys, ‘It is you guys saying goodbye — that’s clearly what we do with this one’.
“They wanted to go, I suppose, unplugged would be a good word. They wanted to go a bit back to 2005 or 2006.
“We’ll just go with older cars which were always a big thing for us. They give you more TV than modern new cars.
“They give you more story, they give you more laughs.
“They wanted evocative cars that they adore, and they wanted to film in Africa because that was the favourite continent we’ve ever filmed in.
“There was the sense that we wanted to end things on our own terms because, when we started with you in 2002, who thought we would go for 22 years doing this?”
The three hosts were challenged to make environmentally friendly cars, out of natural materials.
Hammond decided to created one out of plants, May went for mud and then bricks, then Clarkson went for one comprising dead animal bones and skin.
James May slammed into a wall in a Norwegian naval base during a 75mph speed test.
Fortunately he just ended up with a bleeding nose and a broken rib, but it had uncomfortable echoes of Hammond’s crash years earlier.
The trio built a Kit car – christening it John – and drove it though the mountains, bogs and rivers of Mongolia.
Journeying on the border of the Gobi desert, they struggle with the extreme weather and limited food that saw the episode called: “Survival of the Fattest.”
James tried to drive a tiny car – with a maximum speed of 40 mph – up the ramp of a giant cargo plane as it sped along the tarmac of an airport with the smell and scorching heat of the giant engines blasting his face.
And somehow he succeeded.
Jeremy Clarkson could barely squeeze in to a Formula One car – and he certainly couldn’t get out. He made the mistake on a trip to racing circuit in Poland and ended up having to get engineers to pull it apart so he could be freed again.
