The Grand Tour, season three, episode 1 review: Clarkson and co crack post-Top Gear spin with genuine zing

It obviously didn’t honk the horn about it, but just before Christmas Amazon Prime essentially scrapped The Grand Tour as it exists in its present incarnation. From next year, the series will live on in the form of one-off features along the lines of the old Top Gear specials Clarkson used to enjoy before his slap unhappy run-in with a BBC producer.

Fans may be of the opinion that Amazon is shaking up the formula just as Petrolhead Prime Jeremy Clarkson and autobot underlings James May and Richard Hammond have finally worked out their show’s inner tunings. Bouncing between a travelogue in Detroit and lashings of larks back at the regular Cotswolds studio tent, the first episode of the new season is frothy and free-wheeling – as agreeably immature as Top Gear in its glory days. It’s also far more comfortable in its skin than previous Grand Tours. A code, it feels, has been cracked.

Plenty of tyres are scorched but no wheels reinvented as the trio visit a once-magnificent Michigan cinema repurposed as a multi-storey carpark. There they vie to see who can make the most noise pulling boy-racer donuts. Later it’s off to an abandoned Cadillac factory, where a race course is marked out using effigies of Detroit’s best-known rock stars (Iggy Pop, Sonny Bono, etc – though clearly no one at the Grand Tour has heard of Jack White).

The jibes, jabs and affectionate putdowns are obviously scripted to death. But they nonetheless crackle with genuine zing. Such effortlessness continues to be in painful contrast to the coughing engine noises emanating from the BBC which, four years after his departure, still hasn’t worked out how to fill the Clarkson-shaped void in its schedules.

Freddie Flintoff and Paddy McGuinness become the latest to take up the Top Gear mantle later this year. Yet regardless of how they fare, it is unthinkable they will immediately achieve the heights of blokie camaraderie Clarkson and his cohorts reach here.

Zipping around Detroit in three muscle cars – one of which is obviously named “the Exorcist” – they’re in their low-brow element. Along the way Clarkson fulfils his contractual duty to say something “controversial” (i.e. not really) by scorning Detroit’s attempt to reinvent itself as a trendy eco-haven. “It’s just all hipsters with dogs and bicycles,” he chunders.

Back in the studio, there is some light ruminating about the decline of the American automobile industry (winning the Second World War made the US susceptible, three decades later, to affordable Japanese imports is the logic). It is this component of the show that is for the chop as the presenters’s original ￡160 million deal with Amazon runs its course – a shame as it serves as a break from all of the revving motors and lustful gawping at bonnets that accounts for much of the location stuff.

Already culled is the guest slot, sent to the waste compactor after Amazon Prime number crunchers discovered non-UK viewers were fast-forwarding because they’d never heard of any of the celebs.

Clarkson has fun revealing the guest chinwags are off the menu. He wonders whether the audience would rather cut back to Detroit for one final drag race or to welcome Adrian Chiles and “Howard from Halifax” in order to “find the fastest person you don’t hear from any more”. On command, the crowd gives the correct answer.

Devotees of innovative and challenging television will have long since nodded off/ lost the will to carry on/ chucked a cold plate supper at the television. The Grand Tour really is just another spin around a track we’ve already visited many, many times. Signed-up Clarkson cultists will, however, be both cheered that the crew have finally bedded down in their post-Top Gear incarnation and also perhaps slightly aghast that, just as everything is running smoothly, Amazon is preparing to chuck a spanner in the works.

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