Entertainment Swindon

Jeremy Clarkson in an interview with The Sunday Times has explained why he has ended his professional partnership with Richard Hammond and James May.

The trio first started working together on BBC’s Top Gear in 2002 before moving over to Amazon for Prime Video series The Grand Tour, which premiered in 2021.

However, the trio have decided to call it a day, hang up their car keys and end on a high. The final episode of The Grand Tour will air on the streaming service on Friday 13th September, serving as their goodbye swansong. But its not goodbye completely, the trio have for sometime had their own projects, and Clarkson is having his biggest career success with Clarkson’s Farm (also on Amazon).

Clarkson has reflected on his 22yrs with co-presenters Hammond & Mayand why he has decided to cut professional ties with them both.

“After 36 years of talking about cars on television, I’m packing it in, because I’m too old and fat to get into the cars that I like and not interested in driving those I don’t,” he said in a new interview with The Sunday Times.

“What this means of course is that my 22yr partnership with James May and Richard Hammond is now over. You can see our final road trip together on Amazon Prime very soon. It’s emotional.”

Clarkson said the trio had “thought long and hard about how we should end our 22yr partnership, but in the end we just went to the end of the alphabet” and selected Zimbabwe as a place to set the special.

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“There was another reason why we chose Zimbabwe, though,” he continued, revealing: “We would drive across it from east to west, as usual, but then we could cross the border and finish up where we began all those years ago: the Makgadikgadi salt pans in Botswana.”

Clarkson said it “makes the three of us happy” that their working relationship did not disintegrate “in a blizzard of outrage and tabloid headlines”, but was “landed safely and gently”.

“Was it sad when the director called, ‘That’s a wrap,’ for the very last time? Yes, it was. Especially as some of the crew had been with us when we were there before. People think of Top Gear and The Grand Tour as being James, Richard and me. But it isn’t. We’ve had the same crews for years. We’ve all grown up together.

“We’ve camped together. S*** our lungs out together, laughed our arses off together. These are the guys who really made those shows. They’re the ones who kept the cameras and the microphones going even when it was cold or dangerous, so that Andy [Wilman, producer] had his 1200hrs of material to sift through.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Clarkson, Hammond and May had dissolved their production company, declaring solvency and appointing a liquidator to “wind up” their business.

The final Grand Tour episode will air on Amazon Prime 13th September.