The BBC didn’t must sack Jeremy Clarkson from its hit automobile present Top Gear, says his former co-presenter James May.
Clarkson and May, along with Richard Hammond, have been the celebrities of the present in its hottest period when the sequence drew hundreds of thousands of viewers within the UK and abroad, audiences drawn as a lot to the camaraderie between the three males as to the dialogue of various automobiles.
That all got here to an abrupt finish in 2015 when Clarkson was fired by the BBC for assaulting a producer when his meal didn’t arrive after a day’s filming. May and Hammond stop in solidarity, and the trio have been swiftly scooped up by Amazon to look in The Grand Tour, which ran for eight years and have become one of many platform’s greatest reveals.
Reflecting on the crew’s departure from the BBC, May advised The Times of London this weekend that he believes Clarkson’s firing needn’t have occurred. He mentioned of the incident:
“I don’t truly assume our Top Gear needed to finish due to it. I feel it may have been patched up and put all the way down to a little bit of excessive stress and flightiness, to be sincere. It occurred. It’s regrettable and it’s unlucky, nevertheless it didn’t must result in the collapse of one thing very profitable…
“I mean, without being big-headed about it, we were Top Gear and we were one of the biggest TV shows in the world at the time. It was quite an intense environment and it’s not entirely surprising that it occasionally went off the rails. If we’d been AC/DC or Thin Lizzy, nobody would have been the slightest bit surprised.”
All three have gone on to entrance their very own reveals, with Clarkson’s Farm turning into a contemporary Prime Video hit for Clarkson, however May – who has a brand new sequence about explorers starting on the UK’s Channel 5 – says his time with Amazon has come to an finish:
“At one point, Amazon told me they wanted to do either really big stuff like their James Bond series or Lord of the Rings, or very small things like (May’s show) Oh Cook!, which for them was a tiny budget programme. But then they changed again and just wanted to do really big things. So, that wasn’t me. I’m not big enough or I don’t have enough viewers. Channel 5 is a nice home.”