50 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Just doing my bit for
the entente cordiale
Driving
T
elevision needs feeding
constantly. And in the darkest
days of the pandemic, when
everyone was at home gorging on
box sets, the whole industry
became like a labrador puppy that
had somehow been crossed with
a T. rex. Its appetite for new stuff
became voracious.
As a result, the people who
make the actual shows were
ordered by the bosses to come
out from under their kitchen
tables and go into the world to
make literally anything. A girl
who’s good at chess? We’ll have
that. Some Koreans who wear
peephole bras on their faces and
everyone gets shot? Yup, that too.
An old man who can’t farm
farming? Perfect.
I know of one crew who flew to
Australia to film a well-known
Aussie actor going though his
fitness regime. They dutifully lived
a solitary life in their hotel rooms,With Anglo-French relations under stress,Jeremy Clarkson explains
why he’s putting Gallic cars through the wringer on The Grand Tour
doing whatever it is men do in
these circumstances, until finally
shooting could begin. And on day
one the well-known Aussie chap
hurt his foot. So they had to come
back to the UK until he was better.
And then they flew back out to
Sydney, where they spent another
ten days in their hermetically
sealed rooms, watching
pornography from 2005 because
they’d consumed everything
made since then on their first visit.
And nothing new had been
produced in the meantime.
The Grand Tour was in a similar
pickle. Just because we couldn’t do
any actual grand touring was no
excuse. The viewing audience was
stuck at home starved of things to
watch, so we had to get out there
and make something. It wasn’t
officially listed as “key work” but,
actually, it was.
So we had a meeting. And
quickly it became apparent thatforeign travel simply wasn’t going
to be possible. Our budgets are
generous, but we can’t keep a
crew of 50 in a hotel for ten days
when they’re not producing
anything. Apart from, you
know ... that. Which meant we
had to film in the UK.
The result has been named by
Amazon as Carnage A Trois, which
is a clever play on words but it’s
not the working title of the show I
came up with. Which was “What’s
the Matter with the French?”
I didn’t know back then that
when the programme finally came
out we’d be in a full-scale
diplomatic bust-up with Johnny
Frog over scallops and submarines
and migrants. That’s just a
coincidence, like H982 FKL. But
we’ll roll with it.
The actual reason for deciding
to have a look at the French is that
in all my motoring life I’ve owned
cars made in Britain, America,CONTACT US
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