The Grand Tour

[Tandum]

Clarkson, Hammond and May are back.

Amazon Video are backing 36 episodes of the trio over 3 seasons.

Not sure if it's being aired here anywhere but season one is out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Tour_(TV_series)

[pluto]

I've watched season one on Amazon Prime. Not bad but nowhere near as good as they were on Top Gear.

It feels to me very 'made for American TV' and over the top and has lost a lot of the authentic feeling that it usually had in the past (although I know it's always been scripted it never felt as forced as the new stuff does).

Plus at least with the old TG even though they did crazy stuff you still learnt a thing or two about current cars where this is basically exclusively crazy stuff and has dropped all pretense of being an educational car show.

Having said all that I enjoyed watching it, and it was a million times better than the current incarnation of TG, but we all want what they used to have and it's clear that that is gone forever...

[julianh72]

Series 1 of The Grand Tour was largely scripted and shot before it launched on Amazon, so they had limited opportunity to tweak the format to reflect viewer feedback. I suspect "Celebrity Braincrash" and "The American" won't make an appearance in Series 2. (I certainly hope not!)

Series 24 of Top Gear has just started airing on BBC Knowledge for those with access to it - not sure if / when it will make its way to FTA in Australia. I have to say, I was very pleasantly surprised with Episode 1 last night - there were a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments, as well as what seemed to be genuine wit and banter (almost certainly scripted, but they carried it off well). For example, I chuckled at Chris Harris's opening remark that putting "La" in front of "Ferrari" adds a real air of mystique - but not so much putting "Le" in front of someone's surname!

The show is vastly better without shouty Chris Evans, and Matt LeBlanc seems to have adapted to the lead presenter role very well. The other two co-hosts (Chris Harris and Rory Reid) didn't get nearly enough air-time in the last series, and the three of them seem to be developing the "chemistry" that really made the old Top Gear work so well (and which Clarkson / Hammond / May struggled to re-ignite in Series 1 of The Grand Tour).

[Tandum]

Finished the season. The studio banter is always he same like all American shows but I found a lot of the films put a smile on my dial. Tuscany .....

[JA]

^^^SPAM Reported

[gary]

In news today, it has been reported that Richard Hammond has been
badly hurt in a motorbike crash in remote Mozambique.

Story here :-
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/reality-tv/host-of-top-gear-and-the-grand-tour-richard-hammond-involved-in-horror-motorbike-accident/news-story/65bfc66e40b1788e8d918d0cf9dce86c

[pluto]

The article says he wasn't badly hurt in this latest motorbike accident, though for some reason that article talks more about his previous accident 11 years ago when he was badly hurt... I guess par for the course from the ironically named news.com.au...