Jeremy Clarkson had a rather simple yet effective response to the rigmarole that would have ensued if The Grand Tour team had proceeded with their original plans for the show’s finale.
Earlier this month, Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May bid farewell to fans after 22 years together on-screen as they embarked on one final road trip across Zimbabwe before venturing to Kubu Island in Botswana.
In The Grand Tour: One for the Road, the trio left fans in tears as they decided to end their tenure with a farewell from Botswana’s Kubu Island – the same location where they filmed their first BBC Top Gear special 17 years earlier.
Rather than a gushing and elaborate final goodbye, Clarkson, Hammond, and May simply shook hands – a subdued ending Clarkson recently explained the reasons behind.
However, One for the Road’s final scenes almost looked very different as initial plans had the presenting trio heading for the USA to film their finale.
But it turned out Clarkson and the team weren’t too pleased with the complications that would arise if they were to try and pull this particular feat off.
The Grand Tour script editor Richard Porter explained all, including Clarkson’s ultimate rebuttal of the plans, during a recent podcast appearance.
“That last show wasn’t going to be what it turned out to be,” he confessed on a recent episode of WAYMOE SpotCast. “Originally it was gonna be something else and we spent a lot of time arguing about what it was going to be.”
He delved further: “The original thing was gonna be a sort of, ‘Goodbye to the internal combustion engine’, we were gonna go to America – I think I can say this now because it’s all over so I’m not giving anything away…
“We were gonna do this massive farewell to the engine. Go to the US, buy some real mega-mileage cars, and do a little bit of a road trip more like that French special we did.
“The hero cars would be used to go between interesting places to do stuff with interesting cars and do this farewell to the engine,” he continued but admitted the team “tied ourselves in knots with it” when it came to ironing out specifics.
But that wasn’t the only reason for abandoning the plans as Porter explained: “It was also James May going, ‘Well, technically the internal combustion engine is still going to be around for a long time after we’re all dead’, and we were like, ‘Well, yeah that’s true, James, but you won’t be able to buy a brand new one in this country within our lifetime’.”
Turning his attention to finally arriving at the decision to axe the plans, Porter revealed Clarkson’s rather damning verdict: “So yeah, the last Grand Tour was gonna be this big American salute to the engine and they had this, kind of, grand plan.
“One of our producer’s grand plans was to do this final shot of all these amazing cars coming across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and they’d all stop. I mean, whether we could get that bridge closed… no one had really looked into this, we assumed that maybe with the right amount of money, we could.
“So they’d all come to a stop on this bridge and the drone shot would just go up and up and up and up forever.
“But we just started to tie ourselves in knots and it was Jeremy who went, ‘Let’s not do that at all then’. There were a lot of meetings.”
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While the ending may not have been what producers and the team originally envisaged, it has certainly gone down well with fans.
Several have branded Hammond, May, and Clarkson’s final scenes as “perfect” given the nature of the trio’s on-screen bond for the past two decades.
However, there were still some complaints over the finale, mainly to do with Clarkson’s blistering take on electric vehicles and how they played a part in his decision to end his time on the show.
But Clarkson hit back at the backlash earlier this week, emphasising how his stance on EVs was merely his opinion and shouldn’t be construed so seriously.
