Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are bidding farewell to The Grand Tour and their two decades together in style, though filming their last ever special wasn’t without danger because they made a “pretty stupid” mistake.
The trio spoke candidly about their last ever special One For The Road —which premieres on Friday, 13 September on Prime Video— at a press event, revealing that they accidentally smuggled silver into Botswana in the process. In the episode Clarkson, Hammond and May begin their adventure in Zimbabwe and travel through Botswana to the location of their very first Top Gear special, Kubu Island, in cars they’ve always wanted.
While the experience let them reflect on 22 years working together there were still some risk involved, Clarkson revealed: “It was pretty stupid. I have to be a little bit careful because I believe the ambassador for Zimbabwe is here.
“The film you’re about to see is 50 minutes shorter than the one that will go out on Friday and one of the bits of the story that’s disappeared is that we discovered that in Zim you can buy silver for pennies, really surprisingly cheap so we decided to buy a lot of it and use it to fashion accessories for our cars.
“Then when we got to the border with Botswana, we thought ‘ohh s**t, we’ve got all this silver’.”
Hammond said that the trio were “not supposed to have it”, which is why they were quite nervous when they reached the border between Zimbabwe and Botswana.
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Clarkson went on: “So we had to get across into Botswana without anybody noticing that we’ve got quite a lot of silver about our person”, to which Hammond joked that they “carried it off with style and panache.”
Fears at the border aside, the trio reflected on their decision to end the show was because they have now “run out of things to do” after filming together for two decades. According to Clarkson they have been everywhere and seen everything they can, and because the world has “got much smaller” it felt impossible to continue.
“Years ago there was a contract renewal, and we just said ‘OK, we’ll do one more go, three years and then we’ll end it’,” Clarkson said. “Because we knew we had driven cars further and higher, and in more difficult places than anyone else and we were starting to think w’hat else can you do with a car?’ and so that had a big bearing on it.
“But the other thing, if I may just be serious for a moment, is the world has got much smaller in the last few years. I mean not that long ago we did a show where we began in Iraq and went up into eastern Turkey, where the PKK are now operating, and we dropped down into Syria and went through Homs and Al Wakrah and Palmyra, then into Jordan and then into Israel. We wouldn’t do any of that now.
“And we also did [a show where] we started in the Crimea and went up to Chernobyl through Kyiv, well we couldn’t do that. Russia, we couldn’t do that, there’s a million places…. so you’re left going: ‘It’s f***king France’. People might say ‘You did France last year’, ‘but that was Marseille, now it’s Nice’.
“So we have, we’ve run out of things to do and we’ve run out of places to go, and I was fat.”
While they’re now finished with The Grand Tour officially, Clarkson said he didn’t find it “desperately sad” because he, Hammond and May have continued to see each other since filming ended, and he’s worked with many of the same crew members.
Read more: James May: We were ‘stilted’ and ‘old-fashioned’ in the early days of Top Gear
“It was a surprising thing,” he said. “It wasn’t desperately sad when we finished because obviously I see these two whenever I want, and then I’ve continued to work with most of the film crew anyway. So it wasn’t like you were saying goodbye to anyone particularly.
“Tonight, though… you say ‘oh, I wonder if it was a bigger show than we perhaps thought it was’.”
May felt moved by the experience because of how significant his career with Hammond and Clarkson has been to his life: “It is emotional, yes, because it’s taken up a third of my life. It’s significant, I only ever held any other job down for about 12 or 14 months.
“So it is significant and all things have to come to an end and I think we ended on a bit of a high. But it’s not sad.”
The Grand Tour: One For the Road premieres on Prime Video on Friday, 13 September.