Top Gear and The Grand Tour producer Andy Wilman gives his perspective on two decades of auto-motive chaos, endless quiche buffets, and a graphic warning about dodgy salad. His memoir is a deceptively simple nostalgic look at a cultural juggernaut that presented as chaos but was actually precision engineering, arriving regularly like a rusty Volvo pulling a caravan.
By Lee Russell Wilkes
Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure: Top Gear, Grand Tour and Twenty Years of Magic and Mayhem by Andy Wilman, published by Michael Joseph.
Andy Wilman – the producer of both the BBC’s Top Gear and Amazon’s The Grand Tour presents a licenced and on-brand memoir full of ‘I miss those days’ sentimentality, swearing and stories about sharing petrol station snacks with cast and crew. It’s easy to imagine the manuscript spent a lot of time with lawyers prior to release as the book contains nothing sensational. There’s no ‘The Andy Wilman Story’ TV movie coming out of this one.
Top Gear and its sequel The Grand Tour were a tabloid fever dream of populism and shameless entertainment. The presenters Clarkson, May and Hammond were worldwide celebrities. Despite its obvious cultural impact – or probably because of it and the shameful manner their TG ended – no-one involved has yet received any public honour. Wilman laughs how their irreverence meant they’d never gotten a BAFTA. Their two-fingers in the air show was welcome Sunday counterprogramming to all those turgid glorifying-the-landed-gentry costume dramas the BBC so shamelessly cranks out. The revamped Top Gear was proof the public wanted tabloid sensationalism. Fortunately, at their peak they had 350 million viewers worldwide and that brought revenue. Lots of it. The BBC liked that more.
Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson attended Repton School, in Derbyshire together. After graduation, Clarkson joined a local paper, while Wilman deliberately failed the Sainsbury’s management exam. Jeremy talked him into giving journalism a try and Wilman was later feature editor at Top Gear Magazine. By accident of course, rather than skill and hard work. Clarkson and he worked on the original Top Gear show when it was a safe – if dull – regional programme based in Pebble Mill, Birmingham. Clarkson recruited his old friend when he pitched his new vision for the show.
The best of his how-it-all-began stories tells how Hammond got his presenter’s job. After a truly awful camera test, Richard went into a long self-pitying rant about always pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. He explained how the highlight of his radio career had been his on air reading of a list of farm animals for sale. By the time he’d finished, cast and crew were laughing uproariously. Thus, did fate turn.
Running his finger up and down Cameron Diaz’s nose as the cast and crew looked on in envy seemed Wilman’s high point. The low point was being asked to stop quietly singing a Who song by the man next to him. That man was the band’s lead singer Roger Daltrey – he even pointed out Wilman had gotten the lyrics wrong.
After Clarkson was let go by the BBC, they all signed on for version 2.0 – The Grand Tour – on Amazon Prime. Their opening film of Clarkson leaving a wet dreary London to drive a muscle car in the desert outside of Los Angeles is a masterpiece of audience manipulation – dull colours, slow sad music that builds to a brilliantly edited colourful climax. It cost 2 million pounds. Wiman says he even got a good luck email from Jeff Bezos.
Wilman describes awkward pitch meetings with bemused studio executives. Yet, once they saw the speed with which the crews moved and the quality they produced, all went smoothly. Clearly these boys knew a thing or two about making a first-class show. They produced 32 shows with relative ease. The streamer wanted 22 more but settled for what became the travel specials.
Their collective mastery of the genre they created grows more obvious when he notes they had no trouble luring old Top Gear colleagues to join them at Amazon. Loyalty, perhaps. But presumably freelancers go where the money is. During their life-threatening dash through the night avoiding violent mobs in Argentina, one of the crew was filming on his phone. Casual? No. Solid professional instinct? Yes. Reducing grown men to tears – as these films did – is not casual happenstance. Ask everyone that’s tried to copy them.
Wilman’s book underplays the team’s obvious media savvy intelligence and mastery of the medium. Who cares if the whole edifice of wacky laddish spontaneity was scripted and contrived. They sold it well enough. One can love the magician while knowing it’s all smoke and mirrors. You get the impression that’s what Wilman’s book is – a book-length retrospective playing to their brand.
His book isn’t one more chance to revisit old friends because they were never your old friends to begin with, that illusion was the show’s tabloid register. No. It’s saying goodbye to some slick, manipulative and brilliantly conceived entertainment rooted in the monoculture public service ethos of 20th Century broadcasting. What else should we have expected from a couple of old boys who worked at the heart of the BBC?
Lee Russell Wilkes 