Jeremy Clarkson has said he felt “surprisingly unemotional” when he filmed the final The Grand Tour with Richard Hammond and James May.
The trio have presented the Amazon Prime Video show since 2016 after leaving the BBC’s motoring programme Top Gear.
In the final instalment, they travel to Zimbabwe to explore challenging landscapes in cars the three men have always wanted – a Lancia Montecarlo, a Ford Capri 3-litre, and a Triumph Stag.
Clarkson said about the end of The Grand Tour: One For The Road: “I’m not saying this in a derogatory way by any means but James has the emotions of a stone.
Credit where credit is due. Our new pub opens tomorrow and this might sound odd but I’d like to thank Oxfordshire County Council for all their help. We couldn’t have done it so fast without you.
— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) August 22, 2024
“He just doesn’t do emotions, so there were no tears from him. Hammond, yes.
“I was surprisingly unemotional in a weird way because I can see James and Hammond any time I want to, they’re only a phone call away, and I’m sure we will.
“And I’ve done enough of the travel, I was worn out by it.”
He added that he “would have been emotional” with the crew but they work on his Prime Video show, Clarkson’s Farm, where he attempts to run his farm in the Cotswolds.
Clarkson said: “There I was with all these guys that I’ve known and worked with for 24 years and I said, ‘I’ll see you all on Monday morning’ because they all work on Clarkson’s Farm.
“I’m 100% convinced I would have been a lot more emotional without the farm show.”
He also said that amid wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, it is more difficult to travel as the world is a “much more troubled place than it was 20 years ago”.
Clarkson also called travelling a “young man’s game”, and said he “dreads” going into a retirement home but, aged 64, he does “fear it’s coming”.
Hammond said there were “a lot of tears” at the end and he would miss “them terribly”.
He added: “We’ve seen each other in jungles covered in leeches, exhausted and grumpy in tents and boiling heat, elated in the most beautiful cities in the world.”
May agreed they “will miss each other” including him “going on about things”, and them “pulling me up about it”.
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He also said: “In the end we got to the point where we said, ‘No, we must stop whilst we’re still vaguely ahead. We mustn’t keep going until we embarrass ourselves’.
“It’s odd. I have mixed emotions about it. I will miss the adventure and the experiences and the craic and the ‘bantz’ and all that stuff.
“I won’t really miss the stress of it because I’m old now and a bit frail compared with back then. I don’t know what to do next, but it’s a nice thing to look back on and think, ‘we did that’.
The Grand Tour: One For The Road launches on Prime Video on Friday September 13.
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