The Grand Tour’s final special, One for the Road, is a poignant farewell to one of television’s most successful, and endearing, male friendships. And it’s not hard to understand why it might be time to say goodbye to the format that presenter Jeremy Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman invented all those years ago: they’re old now. As you get older, things get harder to do. Even at the relatively spritely age of 40 I can attest to that.
But there are more tangible concerns than the imperceptible march of biological decline, and more than a few of them were listed on Tuesday night’s Q&A, An Evening with The Grand Tour, a special event that was part press junket, part celebration of three lives well lived: as well as us journalists, most of the crowd were family and friends of the main three. Lisa Hogan, Clarkson’s long-suffering partner who has become a fan favourite on sister show Clarkson’s Farm for giving as good as she gets, was in attendance, alongside the production crew they’d worked with for years. The mood of the night was hard to pin down: sombre, but jubilant. More Irish Wake than Statey Funes.
Clarkson, by his own gleeful admission, is getting “too fat” to fit into supercars. A practical reality that will surely put the kibosh on any hopes to see him do one last lap in an Ariel Atom. More pressing, and concerning for anyone hoping to continue the format in the future (be they Amazon producers casting for a next generation of Grand Tour or BBC Studios heads surveying the smouldering wreckage of what was once Auntie’s biggest export), is the sense that Clarkson & Co have simply exhausted the list of things you can do with car, short of successfully firing one directly into space, like the infamous Tesla stunt from a few years back.
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