The Grand Tour presenters, from left, James May, Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson. Photo / Supplied
The Grand Tour presenters, from left, James May, Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson. Photo / Supplied
The way Jeremy Clarkson tells it, The Grand Tour, the new high-testosterone supercar show he's hosting with Richard Hammond and James May, has all the ingredients that made Top Gear a world-wide success.
"It is full of middle-aged men falling over with the occasional car sticking its nose into the frame," he says.
For legal reasons, they are being careful not to actually copy any Top Gear features, but Clarkson says the constant will be Hammond and May, "whom I hate".
The Grand Tour
He adds: "But that is really what is at the core of The Grand Tour; our relentless and unending need to belittle and humiliate one another."
The new show is launched next week via Amazon's online Prime Video service. Top Gear fans mourned when Clarkson was fired by the BBC after punching a producer following an argument over a cold buffet, and although May and Hammond were not involved in the fracas, they also left the show.
Their new roost has the biggest budget ever for a streaming internet TV series. So how have the trio, with their obsession for supercars, spent all that money?
With the help of the show's producer, Andy Wilman, Mail TV critic Christopher Stevens crunches the numbers . . .
£160 million Total sum Amazon is reported to have paid for 36 episodes of The Grand Tour across three years. That's nearly £4.5 million a show, about 10 times more than the cost of a Top Gear episode.
Jeremy Clarkson receives £10 million for The Grand Tour. Photo / AP
£10 million Clarkson's reported annual salary, making him Britain's highest paid TV star. That works out at about £833,000 an episode.
At the BBC, he was said to be paid £1.5 million a year.
His replacement on Top Gear, Matt LeBlanc, is likely to be paid £2 million a year by the BBC, as lead host of the next series - a considerable increase on the £500,000 the former Friends star earned for his work on this summer's shows, co-starring with Chris Evans, who has now stepped down.
£7.2 million Reported annual salary for each of the co-presenters Hammond and May, which works out at £600,000 an episode - a distinct improvement on the £500,000 a year they were each said to earn on Top Gear.
The trio on the set of The Grand Tour. Photo / Supplied
£20 million Value of the cars in the six-minute opening sequence of the first episode, which features 150 custom cars and six jet planes, as well as acrobats and stilt-walkers. The cars include a Bugatti Veyron (£1.4 million) and a Rolls-Royce Phantom (£750,000).
The entire Mad Max-style segment, filmed in the Californian desert with 2,000 extras, cost a flabbergasting £2.5 million to make.
That's the top speed of the three hypercars in a race-off in Portugal - the £1,150,000 Ferrari LaFerrari driven by May, Hammond's £712,000 Porsche 918 Spyder and Clarkson's £866,000 McLaren P1 are among the fastest cars on the planet.
Grand Tour producer Andy Wilman, who had worked on Top Gear with old schoolchum Jeremy Clarkson since 2002, says: "Making that film was a joy. It was the first thing we'd done since leaving the BBC, and it has a real attitude.
"It hits you in the face like hearing a Clash album for the first time. It doesn't matter whether you like cars or not, that film just has such a chemistry. There's a massive air of refreshment, we're all going at it like crazy.
"Partly, it's because everyone was rested, and it's because we were fresher than we had been for 15 years, getting back to a time when we were left alone to make the show the way we wanted.
"We had that at the BBC in the beginning, but as the show became more successful, Broadcasting House got more involved in the everyday running. By the end, it had become a treadmill. Amazon have given us no notes, no directions, they've just given us a platform to make and broadcast a show. That's lovely.
"The timetable has been horrendously tight, but we handled it because we've suddenly got so much more vim and vigour. Those three are banging off the walls like kids on sugar."
£200,000 Cost of destroying 20 G-Wiz electric cars in a gigantic game of Battleships. The 20 cars were used as missiles. "That's the Christmas show," says Wilman, "and we wanted to give the traditional board-game market a boost. So we used cars as torpedoes. It was gratuitously big-budget, I admit."
£3.2 million Total salaries for 80 crew, who flew a combined distance of 5.1 million miles (at an estimated cost of more than £750,000), taking the production to 15 countries and staying in a total of 1,500 hotel rooms - spending £270,000 on bed and breakfast alone.
The first show is based in California, for the second episode they are in Johannesburg, and the next two are in Britain, including one in the seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire.
After that, it's Holland, and Finland for Christmas, before they go to Namibia for an African special. That one rang alarm bells in the legal department: the new show has to be demonstrably different from the old Top Gear, for contractual reasons, and in 2010 the team had shot one of their most celebrated specials in Botswana.
That episode had featured some of the most beautiful landscape on earth, and naturally the three presenters commented on it. This time, they were asked by wary lawyers not to do that. "So they stood and looked across the Skeleton Coast in Namibia at sunset," says Wilman, "and went, 'What a rubbish view!'"
Editing is not yet completed on the final shows, but they go to Germany, then Nashville, Tennessee, and Scotland, before finishing in the United Arab Emirates.
On set for The Grand Tour. Photo / Supplied
£1350 Price of 6000 rounds of automatic rifle ammunition fired in a madcap remake of the Tom Cruise movie Edge Of Tomorrow, filmed at a Middle Eastern special forces training centre in Jordan.
"We're constantly aware of our previous form, our legacy," says Wilman. "We have to plan things, we can't always just let them happen, even though my favourite moments are often the spontaneous ones.
"So with our tongues well and truly in our cheeks, we set about reinventing this action movie, where life is like a video game: if you die, you go back to the beginning. Our version is, ummm . . . a pastiche!"
350 people The size of the on-set audience in a marquee set up in different places for each show, compared with the 900 who used to fill Top Gear's studio - an aerodrome at Dunsfold, Surrey - for each edition.
The scaled-down production is a matter of sheer logistics: it's hard enough to transport a marquee big enough to display the cars and set it up in a dozen countries, never mind cramming in almost a thousand fans.
The smaller audience changes the dynamic of the show. The old Top Gear used to have the feel almost of a stadium rock event. The Grand Tour promises to be more intimate.
"Because the tent is much smaller, it alters the dynamic immediately," says Wilman. "There's a different atmosphere, an interaction that creates energy, with the audience really filling the space."
A bigger difference is the loss of the aerodrome's racetrack, on a converted runway, and its tame racing driver, the Stig. Forced to leave Dunsfold behind, the team also had to abandon the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car feature, where celebrities raced to beat each other's lap records.
Wilman insists this gave them "a boot up the backside", spurring them to come up with new challenges.
Some of these are outlandish. In Barbados, the presenters build an underwater reef from wrecked cars bought for next to nothing at a breaker's yard.
