Following their dramatic exit from Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May aren’t clear of the drama just yet. Their new show, The Grand Tour, has to avoid anything that might be considered similar to Top Gear for fear of being sued by the BBC.
Ex-Top Gear executive producer and current The Grand Tour executive producer Andy Wilman explains all of the things the new show must tiptoe around in an interview released by the Edinburgh International Television Festival.
According to Wilman, they aren’t allowed to have a handwritten leaderboard and they can’t call their news segment The News. There’s no Stig, there isn’t a Top Gear test track. They’ve had debates over whether or not James May can still say “cock.”
This year, they went to Namibia to film. The lawyers had a sit down with them and told them that because they had previously called the scenery “beautiful” on an old Top Gear episode, they now had to “watch that you don’t do that.”
So now, the cast has to say, “For legal reasons, this scenery is shit.”
We also learn that The Grand Tour’s contract with Amazon includes 12 shows a year for the next three years. “That means,” Wilman muses, “Jeremy has got to get into a low-slung car in three years’ time, and get out of it. I wanna be there just to see that. Big puddle of piss in the seat.”
You can check out the rest of the interview below.
Via Autoblog