The Grand Tour star reflected on Jeremy Clarkson’s axing from Top Gear in 2015.
Richard Hammond has reflected on Jeremy Clarkson‘s shocking axe from Top Gear in 2015. Appearing on the High Performance podcast on Thursday (22 October), the presenter admitted that he and co-star James May “could have got there” as a two, but ultimately made the right decision to quit in solidarity with Jeremy. Asked why he’d turned down the BBC’s offer to stay on with editorial control, Jeremy told hosts Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes, “I was appreciative of what we had when we were together, all of us. I knew the audience was loyal to us; I knew we’d have had a pretty savage time going on without Jeremy, but we could have got there.
“But it only happened because we were all together; I’m not arrogant enough to think… I couldn’t have done it all on my own. So, no, we had to stick together,” he explained.
Asked what Top Gear would have ultimately lost if Jeremy had gone but Richard and James had stayed on, the TV star replied, “Some of the chaos, the lunacy.
“A lot of his ideas aren’t physically possible, and they’re not legal. So, the team had to go through them. But it had to be there. It had to have that spark of idiot genius.”
Reflecting on what he and James brought to Top Gear, Richard pointed out that it was the trio’s “instinctive” dynamic that stood them in good stead.
“We sometimes, if somebody’s doing something ridiculous, it needs somebody that you know to react to it. The best way I can put it is…
“When we were doing the big specials, we’d be spending a long time planning those, and on the BBC’s time, simply because you can’t just say to the BBC, ‘Hey, we’re going to spend £1million or whatever it costs to do this massive thing and they say, ‘Ok what’s going to happen?’ ‘I don’t know, s**t will go down. Something funny will happen’. That’s not really enough.”
Explaining that after such long periods of planning, he, Jeremy, and James would instantly feel immersed in different shooting locations.
Richard added they’d reached a point where they had an instinctive idea between the three of them of who should react to what. “We knew without having to communicate, ‘Right, that’s how that will work’,” he said.
