Richard Porter on what it's really like to work with Clarkson, Hammond and May

When Amazon released the final Grand Tour adventure featuring Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, it seemed fans of Compo, Cleggy and The Other One found the finale quite emotional and were going to miss seeing them together on TV. After 22 years of working with them, it might be surprising to learn I’m going to miss those three dickwits too.

I started on the re-invented Top Gear in 2002 when it wasn’t even the re-invented Top Gear. At that point all we had was Jeremy, his best mate and long-time producer Andy Wilman, and a vague grab-bag of half-formed ideas. We spent quite a lot of our time sitting in pubs wondering if any of it was going to work. The whole thing, if it ever got off the ground, might have been called Carmageddon but for the wise intervention of BBC2’s boss lady who thought we would be better off dusting off the recently ‘rested’ Top Gear name.

> People are angry about the Ferrari Luce’s interior, but that’s a good thing

I was there during a day of presenter screen tests when we began to worry we’d never find someone who quite hit the spot until, late in the afternoon, a little fella off Granada Men & Motors wandered into the studio and wowed us with his bright-eyed enthusiasm and, more importantly, his effortless ability to make us laugh. I was also there some months later, after a patchy first series, when an unusual chap with shaggy hair and a ruinous old Bentley shuffled into frame. Clarkson liked to claim that May joining the show for series two was him being ‘late, as usual’ though the truth was we might have had him there on series one if only the BBC hadn’t worried that he was basically the same person as Jeremy. His opinions, and indeed his entire personality, quickly proved that wasn’t the case. And once he was there, suddenly we had our show.

There are lots of things that made Clarkson, Hammond and May work on screen and allowed them to quietly worm their way into people’s living rooms back when sitting down together to watch telly at a time allotted by the broadcaster was still the norm. They were adults behaving like children; they were clever people doing stupid things; they were ambitious and adventurous, often beyond their abilities. But most of all they were funny. And that’s what I’ll miss about working with them.

For the last 20-odd years people have regularly asked me what they’re like in real life and I would answer, entirely truthfully, that they were pretty much exactly the same as you saw on the screen. Sometimes that could be exhausting and annoying, but most of the time it made them tremendous company. I can’t remember ever being in a room with them for more than five minutes and not laughing deeply from the base of my belly as Jeremy told some bombastic anecdote about making a total faux pas in a stately home, or Richard remembered that his weekend gin thirst had accidentally got him into a fight with a banister, or James recalled a whimsical tale involving someone mistakenly believing the Kellogg’s Frosties promotional character was called Terry the Lion. That’s partly what I’ll miss and what made me misty-eyed to see them winding up their stint on The Grand Tour. But, knowing that I won’t be sitting around in the office or on location with those three, I’ve realised there’s something else I’ll miss: talking cars with them.

> The most dangerous trip of my life: 5000 miles across Siberia in a Porsche

Over the years the show got flak from hardcore car fans for mucking around too much, for becoming too much about the presenters and their daft dicking about. ‘It’s not really a car show any more,’ was a common complaint. But behind the scenes, no matter what megastars they became nor how many times they got into on-screen set pieces where everything caught fire and their trousers fell down, those three never lost that in-the-blood love for cars.

Clarkson would come in fresh from reviewing something brand new for his newspaper column and want to engage in a ten-minute debate about electric power steering or by-wire braking and what was wrong with it. Hammond would be there, sliding his phone across the table to show you some ad for an old Land Rover or Saxo VTS or Opel Manta that he’d got a sudden craving to buy. May would hold court on small Italian cars or large American cars or get the giggles about why it was hard to take seriously the phrase ‘sporty Vauxhall’.

Much changed over the years we made Top Gear and The Grand Tour but, for me, the ability to sit with Clarkson, Hammond and May and just chat shit about cars was a constant. Whatever else you thought about those three and their constant knobbing about in pursuit of entertainment, I can promise you that they never stopped being people like us. And I’m really going to miss that.

This story was first featured in evo issue 327.