When Clarkson, Hammond And May Got “Stranded” In Botswana — And Turned It Into Comedy Gold
Some of the funniest Clarkson, Hammond and May content was never actually filmed for television. Case in point: the time all three found themselves genuinely stuck at a luxury safari camp in Botswana, and decided the best response was an elaborate, entirely fictional survival saga played out across social media.
The trio had been in Africa filming a new Grand Tour special for Amazon Prime Video when British Airways cancelled their flight home, leaving all three “marooned,” as Clarkson put it, at their safari accommodation. Rather than simply waiting it out quietly, Clarkson and May turned the genuinely mundane inconvenience of a cancelled flight into a full, tongue-in-cheek disaster narrative.
It started innocently enough. Clarkson posted an update from what he called “day two” of their ordeal, describing “two red eyed bulbul birds helping themselves to the sugar for my morning coffee,” alongside a photo of an entirely comfortable-looking breakfast setup. But the tone escalated fast. In a follow-up post, Clarkson delivered the first casualty report: “James May didn’t make it, I’m afraid,” accompanied by a photo of a wild jackal feasting on an animal carcass, as dark and deadpan a joke as Clarkson’s ever made about one of his closest friends.
He wasn’t done. A correction soon followed: it hadn’t actually been May who met his fictional demise, it was Richard Hammond who’d been “turned into food,” a genuinely absurd escalation that turned a simple travel delay into an ongoing, collaborative bit between old friends who clearly know exactly how to wind each other up for an audience.
May, for his part, played along enthusiastically rather than simply confirming he was, in fact, alive and well. He posted his own “update,” describing the “stranded Grand Tour presenters” as having to “channel ancient foraging instincts to stay alive until lunch,” alongside a photo of, considerably less dramatically than jackal-adjacent survival, a bag of BBQ Beef Hula Hoops. Clarkson kept the bit running too, sharing a photo of himself and May in a genuinely comfortable-looking open-air lounge, insisting they’d built “a rudimentary shelter” and would “cower here until BA get their act together,” begging followers to “pray for us.”
The saga eventually reached its punchline once the trio actually made it onto a plane home. Clarkson shared a final photo of a peacefully sleeping May, captioned with one last dark joke: “Tragic news. James made a plane out of old beer cans. And then died in it.”
It’s a genuinely perfect distillation of exactly what made Clarkson, Hammond and May’s chemistry so enduring for over two decades: the ability to turn something as mundane as a cancelled flight into an elaborate, entirely voluntary comedy bit, entirely for their own and their followers’ amusement, requiring absolutely no scriptwriters, no cameras, and no actual danger whatsoever. Just three old friends, a genuinely nice safari lodge, and a shared, well-honed instinct for finding the joke in literally anything.
