The new series of The Grand Tour marks the end of an era. Amazon has recommissioned the show, but only as a series of travelogue specials. This means that the new series, which starts this Friday, will be the last to have a studio audience.
And, well, good. The studio audience has been an integral part of Jeremy Clarkson’s, Richard Hammond’s and James May’s brand ever since Top Gear reemerged from the wilderness in 2002. It offered the viewer the clearest possible indication of who the show was pitched at; stumpy middle-aged men who only wore clothing that had the Porsche logo embroidered on to it, plus three attractive young women who were always pushed to the front to make the whole thing look less like a ridiculous sausage factory.
The Top Gear (and Grand Tour) studio audience was always so uniformly, hilariously specific. Their on-camera placement was weird, with everyone idly standing around staring at the back of Clarkson’s head like a listless zombie plague. Their noises were weird; the only sound they ever collectively summoned was the “Weeey” noise that people in crap pubs make whenever someone accidentally smashes a glass. Their idea of crowd participation was always weird, with every member living for the moment when they could self-consciously shout out “I like Vauxhall Mokkas!” from the back of the room so that Clarkson could point at them and call them a fat vegan homosexual.
The only books they ever bought were ones where Clarkson got to pull an imperceptibly different bewildered face on the cover. The only music they listened to was Phil Collins-era Genesis. They only referred to their wives, all of them, as “the wife”. And soon they’ll be gone. And I am thrilled.
Because all the worst bits of any Clarkson, Hammond and May shows always happened in the studio. The celebrity interviews that seemed to drag on for several thousand eternities. The “news” segments that quickly congealed into a stale performance of someone using a picture of a car as a launchpad for a rant about foreigners and millennials. The bit where they blew up a dummy every week. “Conversation Street”, for the love of all that’s holy. Every one of these segments became repetitive and joyless, and it’s why I – for one – started to drift away from the shows.
Cutting loose and hitting the road is exactly what The Grand Tour should do. The road trips are the only thing about these programmes that are actually any fun. Liberated from the droning hive mind of the studio audience, the hosts get to stretch themselves. They automatically become less performative, even embracing the occasional moment of reflection. And the settings are beautiful, too. There’s an argument that the Clarkson, Hammond and May road trips are the best travelogues being made anywhere in the world at the moment.
The studio audience was a relatively recent invention anyway. Top Gear managed perfectly well for 24 years without one, back when it was a painfully dry magazine show presented by cut-glass stick-in-the-muds so invested in the idea of exploring the practical implications of boot capacity that it was like watching the Open University on wheels, so I’m sure The Grand Tour will manage without one as well.
Besides, the studio audience still has a place to go, and that’s on the BBC’s continued experiments with prolonging the life of Top Gear. Its newest incarnation – the third since Clarkson, Hammond and May left – sounds as if it’s going to cater exclusively to a blokey, whooping studio audience. It will be presented by Andrew Flintoff and Paddy McGuinness, for God’s sake, the pair of them adrift on an undulating sea of Jacamo and Lynx. If people still want to go “Weeey” at a picture of a Volvo, this will be their most obvious outlet.
Meanwhile, The Grand Tour has moved on. I’m actually excited to watch all the travelogue specials. Much, much more than anything they will produce in this final studio-bound series, in fact.
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