Jeremy Clarkson’s big Top Gear break-up leaves behind a legacy of bigotry and stunted masculinity

The former trio of Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have reportedly parted ways after more than two decades, writes Louis Chilton. Could it be that the British public have just stopped buying what they’re selling?

James May, Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson in ‘The Grand Tour' (Prime Video)

All good things must come to an end – and most bad things, too. When it was reported on Saturday that ex-Top Gear stars Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May were parting ways after 21 years as a trio, you couldn’t really describe it as “going out with a bang”. A backfiring car exhaust, at a push. No, this could more accurately be described as an anticlimax – the Top Gear bandwagon’s slow crawl to a halt after burning up the last dregs of premium unleaded.

The long and short of it is this: W Chump & Sons, the production company belonging to Clarkson, Hammond, and May, has reportedly dissolved. The Grand Tour, Prime Video’s motoring, travel, and heterosexual banter-themed series and de facto successor to Top Gear, has seemingly recorded its final episode – or at least the final one with this presenting lineup. (The last hurrah, a special in which the three of them travel to Zimbabwe, is yet to come out.) The reasons for this may not have been specified, but it doesn’t take too many deductive acrobatics to hazard a guess. For two decades, the three presenters have been peddling the same regressive, unedifying programming, dogged along the way by a procession of controversies. If the series are popular and profitable – as, for years, they undoubtedly were – this isn’t seen as a problem. But now? It just might be.

In its pomp, Top Gear was one of the BBC’s biggest success stories. From 2003 to 2015, Clarkson, Hammond and May were three of the most visible and popular presenters on British television. It is doubtless Top Gear’s massive viewership that allowed the series to weather a run of controversies – homophobic jokes; racist jokes; ableist jokes; jokes involving the use of terrible slurs; jokes about the murders of sex workers. It wasn’t until Clarkson physically assaulted a producer that he was deposed as host, with Hammond and May voluntarily following him out the door. Thus was The Grand Tour born.

Top Gear continued on BBC with a run of changing hosts, until it was finally abandoned following a near-fatal car crash involving presenter Freddie Flintoff. In truth, there was little outcry when the BBC announced the hiatus – a testament to the audience’s drastic drop-off in interest. But over on Prime Video, The Grand Tour has likewise existed in relative anonymity. The series has by all accounts pulled in solid numbers: Amazon don’t release audience figures, but a 2018 Reuters report claimed that the series had been the streamer’s most successful programme when it came to signing up new users. It is, however, expensive to produce, and seldom discussed or acknowledged in wider media. Compared to Clarkson’s other major Prime Video venture, the buzzy agricultural reality series Clarkson’s Farm, it’s totally invisible. In some ways, this is an improvement on the Top Gear of old – in the scheme of its hosts’ careers, The Grand Tour has been refreshingly scandal-lite. But the absence of outcry has left only silence, the dawning realisation that shock and provocation may have been the trio’s only currency.

It is also, maybe, a matter of diverging fortunes. Clarkson, the ruddy and reactionary frontman of the three, has always enjoyed the most independent success, as a TV presenter and noxious tabloid essayist. It is only in the past few years, however, in his transition to becoming a farmer and anchor of Clarkson’s Farm, that he has whipped this popularity into a wider sense of goodwill. For the first time in his career, Clarkson has, to some extent, won over many of his critics across the political spectrum. And – crucially, perhaps – Hammond and May have had nothing to do with that. It’s as if the three of them decided to open up their relationship, only for Clarkson to grow a little too attached to his new partner and decide that maybe this whole polyamory idea ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Neither Hammond nor May have been able to match Clarkson in their solo endeavours – think of it as Simon and two Garfunkels. Both have, however, remained steadily employed. May is probably best known for his toy-themed docuseries (James May’s Top Toys; James May’s Toy Stories) and currently hosts cooking and travel series for Prime Video. Hammond has presented series such as Brainiac and Total Wipeout. They, too, will be fine going forward, but it’s hard to see them ever regaining the sort of profiles they had in Clarkson’s forbidding shadow. Make no mistake, the decision to follow him to Prime Video was surely as much an act of self-interest as it was of loyalty.

It may be too early to declare this a win for Clarkson. In December 2022, the presenter threw his career into jeopardy with a scatological hit piece aimed at the Duchess of Sussex. Reports claimed that Amazon were seeking to cancel The Grand Tour as a result, and would be curtailing Clarkson’s Farm at the end of the already-agreed-upon four seasons. These reports have been disputed (including by Clarkson himself), and the success of the third series of Clarkson’s Farm, now the highest-performing UK original in the streamer’s history, suggests that further renewals are a very real possibility.

The break-up of the former Top Gear triumvirate is the end of an era, for sure, but not one worth mourning. Their partnership leaves behind a legacy of bigotry and stunted masculinity. If the highest praise afforded to a 21-years-in-the-making TV dynasty is that you “had good banter”, it’s a failure of ambition, as much as anything. If you do nothing to elevate the form, then it’s only a matter of time before the form will rise anyway – and swallow you up in the process.