The BBC didn’t need to sack Jeremy Clarkson from its hit car show Top Gear, says his former co-presenter James May.
Clarkson and May, together with Richard Hammond, were the stars of the show in its most popular era when the series drew millions of viewers in the UK and overseas, audiences drawn as much to the camaraderie between the three men as to the discussion of different vehicles.
That all came to an abrupt end in 2015 when Clarkson was fired by the BBC for assaulting a producer when his meal failed to arrive after a day’s filming. May and Hammond quit in solidarity, and the trio were swiftly scooped up by Amazon to appear in The Grand Tour, which ran for eight years and became one of the platform’s biggest shows.
Reflecting on the team’s departure from the BBC, May told The Times of London this weekend that he believes Clarkson’s firing needn’t have happened. He said of the incident:
“I don’t actually think our Top Gear had to end because of it. I think it could have been patched up and put down to a bit of high stress and flightiness, to be honest. It happened. It’s regrettable and it’s unfortunate, but it didn’t need to lead to the collapse of something very successful…
“I mean, without being big-headed about it, we were Top Gear and we were one of the biggest TV shows in the world at the time. It was quite an intense environment and it’s not entirely surprising that it occasionally went off the rails. If we’d been AC/DC or Thin Lizzy, nobody would have been the slightest bit surprised.”
All three have gone on to front their own shows, with Clarkson’s Farm becoming a fresh Prime Video hit for Clarkson, but May – who has a new series about explorers beginning on the UK’s Channel 5 – says his time with Amazon has come to an end:
“At one point, Amazon told me they wanted to do either really big stuff like their James Bond series or Lord of the Rings, or very small things like (May’s show) Oh Cook!, which for them was a tiny budget programme. But then they changed again and just wanted to do really big things. So, that wasn’t me. I’m not big enough or I don’t have enough viewers. Channel 5 is a nice home.”