Richard Hammond says he ‘never thought’ his work with Clarkson and May would go on ‘as long as it has’

Richard Hammond has admitted that he “never thought” he’d be making television with his The Grand Tour co-stars Jeremy Clarkson and James May for as long as 22 years.

The presenting trio made their first series of motoring show Top Gear for the BBC in 2002, and they have become famous for their bantering rapport over the past two decades.

In 2015, after Clarkson assaulted a Top Gear producer while filming, the BBC elected not to renew Clarkson’s contract.

That year, Clarkson, his co-presenters and producer Andy Wilman formed the production company W Chump & Sons to produce The Grand Tour for Amazon Prime Video, and the show has continued on that platform ever since. The BBC, meanwhile, continued airing Top Gear with a raft of different presenters.

Speaking in a new trailer for the last ever episode of The Grand Tour, which will air on 13 September, Hammond said: “I never thought that what we do together would go on as it has.”

The teaser trailer for the special episode, titled One For the Road, sees the trio gallivanting around Zimbabwe, with Bonnie Tyler’s emotional 1983 ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” playing in the background.

It also shows Clarkson, who usually makes life as difficult as possible for his co-stars, appearing to soften. “Shall we change the habit of a lifetime, and help him?” Clarkson asks May, after Hammond encounters problems with his dream car, a Ford Capri 3-litre.

Clarkson, who is currently enjoying the biggest success of his career with Clarkson’s Farm, recently reflected on why he decided to cut professional ties with both Hammond and May.

“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.

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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”.

He added: “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] had his 1,200 hours of material to sift through.”

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

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