The Grand Tour – aka Amazon does Top Gear – is back with a new trio of presenters. Whether you care will largely depend on your general attitude to television. If you think its purpose is to push boundaries, entertain, inform and edify, you may as well stop reading now. If, on the other hand, you treat TV like soma, then the lightly revamped show is probably worth your consideration.
I’m in the soma category. The only job of TV, as far as I’m concerned, is to relieve me of having to make conversation with the Fawn while I’m having my supper, and then to distract me long enough for me to be able to half-digest my food so that I’m ready to have my bath and go to bed. I don’t need great art or masterclass acting or high drama – indeed I’d almost rather not because I don’t want, at this point in my day, to be excited or filled with admiration or awe. I just want to slump there gawping, and not be made so incensed – by, say, diversity casting or an implausible excess of lesbian characters – that I want to chuck things at the screen.
They must be doing something right, because I sat through three episodes without switching over to Reacher
Judged by these criteria, The Grand Tour does the job just fine. One of the presenters, Thomas Holland, suffers slightly from being Canadian; another, James Engelsman, feels a bit like the sort of person you might see drinking a pint outside a pub in Fulham wearing a rugger shirt; the third, Francis Bourgeois, comes across for the first fraction of a second as being slightly special needs. But they must be doing something right, because I sat through three whole episodes without at any stage feeling the urge to switch over to Reacher instead.
Anticipating the viewer’s initial reservations, the series begins with the trio rolling up to a celebrated Oxfordshire pub to receive the blessing of the Pope. Yes, the pub is the Farmer’s Dog and the landlord is Jeremy Clarkson. There ensues a stilted, excruciatingly badly acted scene in which the new boys ask if they can borrow the giant Grand Tour tent, whose space Clarkson is now using to sell his high-end sausages. Clarkson says a regretful no and off the boys go, job done: we have now been told we have permission to like the show and give the arriviste whippersnappers a sympathetic hearing.
On the downside, they are not Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. But on the upside – should you care about such things, which I don’t particularly, but some viewers will – they do seem to know at least as much about motor cars. Holland can drive like a proper racing driver; Engelsman is confident in his use of words like ‘torque’; Bourgeois – real name Luke Nicolson – knows enough about mechanics to have been given a job at Rolls-Royce, where he’d still likely be working today if his social media career hadn’t exploded and turned him into an accidental celebrity.
Bourgeois is the star of the trio, with the most natural charm and the weirdest hinterland. At school he was bullied for being a trainspotter. This defect he subsequently turned to his advantage during ‘Covid’ by making amusing, self-parodic video shorts of himself drooling over such joys as a GB Class 73/9 locomotive at Brighton station. Some went viral and he became an internet sensation, sought out by people like Joe Jonas – an American rock star then married to Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones – and an unlikely model for Gucci and Paul Smith. This is how the entertainment industry likes to recruit new talent nowadays: with ready-made, multimillion strong audiences they have already gathered through their own efforts.
He’s a dark horse is Bourgeois. You initially think he’s mainly there to play the cute, nerdy milksop to his two more manly and bearded co-presenters. But then you see a sequence like the one where they go to Malaysia and attempt the popular local motorsport of drifting. This involves negotiating very tight bends, but instead of steering through them you have to allow your back end to slide round without hitting anything. Bourgeois – spoiler! – makes a much better hash of it than the two professional drivers.
One of the presenters suffers slightly from being Canadian
The format, sensibly, has been left largely unaltered. The boys are shown somewhere scenic in England, e.g. James May’s pub, pretending to think up a new madcap wheeze. How much second-hand classic-sports-car would £5,000 buy you? Wouldn’t it be just crazy if we tried to race three Kei cars (tiny, underpowered vehicles unique to the Japanese domestic market) up 14,000ft Pikes Peak in Colorado? Let’s race the world’s three most overpowered American production cars against some fighter jets… And off they head to parts foreign.
I think it will improve once they’ve tweaked their banter a bit, which will come when they get to know one another and feel more comfortable expressing their personalities (presuming they all have personalities). Certainly, if The Grand Tour were a car I’d just bought as a runaround I wouldn’t be taking it back to the dealer. It’s not a Ferrari Testarossa but I wasn’t expecting one.
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