The Grand Tour: First episode breaks Amazon audience records

Jeremy Clarkson's new motoring show The Grand Tour has broken records to become the most-watched series premiere on Amazon Prime Video, the streaming service has said.

Although the company does not release specific audience numbers, it issued a press release saying "millions" had tuned in to watch the first instalment of the globe-trotting car show, which stars the former Top Gear presenter and his regular co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May.

Amazon Prime usually caters to binge-watchers by uploading a whole series at once, but The Grand Tour is being released in a more traditional TV format of one episode per week.

Episode one, which went online at a minute after midnight on Friday 18 November, surpassed the viewing figures reached by the previous record-holder, alternative history drama The Man in the High Castle.

In contrast, the BBC's reboot of Top Gear, fronted by Chris Evans – who will not return for a second series – and former Friends stat Matt LeBlanc, struggled to win over viewers, with just 1.9 million tuning in by the end of the series.

Membership of Amazon's streaming site also soared. "Total new Prime membership sign-ups [on Friday] exceeded all previous days with the exception of Amazon's Prime Day," entertainment website The Wrap says.

With each of the 36 planned episodes costing the site a reported £4.5m, it is clear Amazon is expecting big things from Clarkson and co.

Luckily, episode one received a generally warm reception from critics as well as from fans of the trio's previous TV incarnation.

The Grand Tour "blows Top Gear out of the water", said the Daily Telegraph's critic Ed Power, while the London Evening Standard's Ben Foster said Amazon's mammoth investment had produced "stunningly beautiful results".

Episode two, which was filmed in Johannesburg, will be available at one minute past midnight this Friday.

Grand Tour: How does Jeremy  Clarkson's new show compare to Top Gear?

18 November

The first episode of Jeremy Clarkson's new big-budget motoring series The Grand Tour has been given rave reviews – but how does it compare with the BBC's Top Gear?

The Grand Tour, which launched on the Amazon Prime streaming service overnight, sees the return of Clarkson, who was fired from Top Gear for his infamous "fracas" with a producer. He's joined by former co-presenters James May and Richard Hammond.

The series, which screeched onto screens in spectacular fashion, is said to have an eye-watering budget of around £4.5m for each of its 36 planned instalments. The Mad Max Fury Road-style opening sequence showed the hosts crossing the desert in Ford Mustangs, flanked by a convoy of cars, vans, bikes, a pirate ship and a squadron of fighter jets overhead.

It also featured a new racing track called the Eboladrome; a race between a Porsche 918, a McLaren P1 and a Ferrari LaFerrari; and a segment where celebrities, including Jeremy Renner, Armie Hammer and Carol Vorderman, met untimely ends.

Ben Travis at the Evening Standard, describes it as a "stunningly beautiful show" – basically "Top Gear with a nitros boost of Amazon finances", even if it "can't quite reconcile its attempts to be a general entertainment show and a must-watch for car nuts".

"Those who have never counted themselves as Jeremy Clarkson fans aren't exactly going to be won over," says Travis. "But episode one is a confident opener that leaves the BBC's attempted Top Gear revival in the dust."

Ed Power at the Daily Telegraph agrees, calling The Grand Tour "the Cecil B DeMille /Auto Trader crossover you hadn't realised you needed in your life". The critic says the show was always "going to arrive with a bang", but the real question was: could it recapture the chemistry that made Top Gear an international sensation?

While the rival franchises have a great deal in common, the new show "blows Top Gear out of the water", says Power. "Petrol heads can rejoice".

The Grand Tour is different to Top Gear in format, says Sam Wollaston in The Guardian. "There are loads of new ideas, or the BBC lawyers would have been on to them."

Yet it's all utterly familiar, because it's the personnel that matter, he says. The BBC will be left wondering how they'll compete, he adds. But "fans of old Top Gear are going to be happy".

Indeed, Amazon's Grand Tour is really just "Top Gear on steroids", says Allen St John at Forbes. All the things we loved about the show are here, with just enough tweaking to avoid intellectual property issues.

St John complains that the first episode spent too much time with the three presenters instead of the groundbreaking cars, but he expects that "after a few episodes they'll stop trying quite so hard and settle back into their old groove".

A new episode of The Grand Tour airs every Friday on Amazon

Clarkson's latest Falklands row: What really happened?

17 November

Jeremy Clarkson has claimed an Argentinian airport worker stopped him from flying in revenge for his infamous 2014 Falklands number plate row.

The former Top Gear host says he and co-presenters James May and Richard Hammond were prevented from boarding a flight from Stuttgart to Heathrow by a member of check-in staff.

This was supposedly in retaliation for a incident two years ago when the Top Gear team fled Argentina after being pelted with stones by an angry crowd. Clarkson had been driving a Porsche with the number plate H982 FKL - which he denied was a reference to the 1982 Falklands war.

Clarkson told The Sun that the trio, who had been filming for their new show, The Grand Tour, were stopped at the departure lounge after getting the call to board their flight. When he protested to "this bald little guy", the man allegedly replied: "I'm from Argentina so f*** you."

"The police said it was a hate crime and he would be arrested," said Clarkson. "Yes, even the Germans were 100 per cent on our side - for once."

But a German police spokesman told the Daily Telegraph they were not aware of any "hate crime" allegations. "I don't know what was said during the argument," said Christian Woerner of Reutlingen police, "but I doubt the Falklands were mentioned."

Woerner explained that the flight gate was already closed when the Grand Tour crew arrived, and an argument had arisen when they were refused permission to board.

A spokesman for Stuttgart airport told BBC News that Clarkson and his team had missed several calls for their flight and the other passengers had already boarded. He said the "personal behaviour" of the airport worker as described in The Sun did not "conform to our approach on customer service", adding that the employee mentioned is Spanish, not Argentinian.

The row came as Clarkson prepared to launch his new motoring show after departing the BBC last year.

The first series of The Grand Tour goes live at midnight tonight on the streaming service Amazon Prime. This means it can't be watched on terrestrial television and viewers will be required to sign up for a Prime account.

Clarkson has been trying to manage expectations around the show, telling the Radio Times that it's less of a "Marvel-type Avengers Assemble thing" and more like "Last of the Summer Wine".

"I know the trailer looks amazing," he says. "But they're not going to put in the boring bits. It's still us three; it has to have that cosiness; it has to have that sitting-room intimacy."

He adds that one of the biggest differences between Amazon and the BBC is that "when we finish a film on The Grand Tour we send it to Amazon, and they ring us up and squeak, 'It's brilliant, we love it! We can't wait! It's so good!'… You never got that from the BBC."

Jeremy Clarkson's Grand Tour on a budget: Amazon cuts the price of Prime

15 November

Amazon Prime has introduced a £20 discount membership deal - just in time for Friday’s premiere of Jeremy Clarkson’s new show, The Grand Tour.

Prime membership has been cut from £79 to £59 per year, but the offer only lasts until 23:59 on Friday 18 November, the day The Grand Tour is released.

The discount applies to the full Prime service, including access to Amazon’s video streaming service Prime Video, next day delivery on certain products, music streaming, access to one million ebooks and unlimited photo storage through Prime Photos.

The Grand Tour can be viewed on any device that can log into Amazon Prime, as well as smart phones, selected smart TVs and games consoles, Amazon Fire Sticks and tablets. 

To access the discount, head over to Amazon and click on “get started”. The discounted price is only available to those who don’t already have a Prime subscription, but existing members can still access the first episode of The Grand Tour when it premieres on Friday.

Each episode of The Grand Tour is filmed from a new location in front of a live audience. They will be released week by week rather than all at once - as has been the case with other Amazon Prime series.

Jeremy Clarkson: 'It doesn't matter if The Grand Tour is a success or not'

7 November

Jeremy Clarkson says it doesn't matter if his new Amazon Prime show The Grand Tour is a success or not because "I'll be dead soon anyway."

With just over a week until the first episode of the motoring show is released on the online streaming service, the former Top Gear host said he isn't worried about the expectations placed on him.

"The stakes are lower. I’m now 56 - it doesn’t really matter anymore because I’ll be dead soon," he said.

"People could say, 'This is a terrible program and Amazon's wasted its money,' and I’ll go, 'Yeah, I'll be dead before they even notice.'"

Despite Clarkson's laidback attitude, Amazon has reportedly spent big on the show, with some analysts saying the first two seasons will cost around £160m. 

According to the Daily Mirror, the online giant was willing to invest heavily in the new show due to the success Clarkson and his co-hosts, James May and Richard Hammond, had at the BBC with Top Gear - a show that made the Guinness World Records as the most watched factual programme in the world, airing in 212 territories to an estimated global audience of 350 million.

The first episode of The Grand Tour will be released on Amazon Prime on 18 November.

Jeremy Clarkson's Grand Tour 'will just be fat men driving Lambos and shouting'

1 November

In an interview with The Sun last weekend, Jeremy Clarkson attempted to lower people's sky-high expectations of his forthcoming show for Amazon Prime, insisting The Grand Tour will not be big-budget blockbuster, but just more of what fans have come to expect from the trio – only with a touch of refinement.       

"What worries me most is that everyone is expecting Avengers Assemble; that people think we've made something between the new Star Wars movie and Iron Man.," the presenter said. "It is just three middle-aged men doing what they've always done — drive cars around corners, shout, fall over, belittle each other, bicker.

"It's not the moon - we're in Whitby. I haven't got a flying suit. It's all filmed on Planet Earth. It's the same family, we've just moved house. It's comfort food, but we've gone from serving shepherd's pie for 12 years to cottage pie. It's still potato with mince underneath."

Clarkson also wrote in The Sunday Times that the show's budget was not as large as has been reported.

"Our budget - contrary to what you may have read in various hysterical reports - was not much bigger than it had been at the BBC," he said.

Reporters "had got it into their heads that, because we had £400m an episode, we’d be reporting each week from a different planet", he added, saying it left him nervous about how the audience will respond when they realise The Grand Tour is still "full of three middle-aged men falling over, with the occasional car sticking its nose into the frame".

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The Top Gear team took their love of the Reliant Robin to new heights when they attached one of the famed vehicles to a shuttle and filmed its launch. Whether it was camera trickery or full blown reliant robin destruction, the episode went down in Top Gear folklore. 

Jeremy Clarkson says The Grand Tour has a small budget

31 October

Jeremy Clarkson says the budget for his new Amazon Prime show The Grand Tour is roughly the same as BBC's Top Gear.

In a feature for The Sunday Times previewing the show, which begins in less than three weeks' time, the presenter said filming presented massive logistical challenges leaving the team with "only enough left in the kitty each week for two pints of petrol and a box of James May's beef Hula Hoops".

He added: "Our budget - contrary to what you may have read in various hysterical reports - was not much bigger than it had been at the BBC."

Each episode of The Grand Tour is filmed from a new location in front of a live audience.

"It sounds simple. But it isn't," Clarkson said. "First of all, the tent [in which it is filmed] would have to be big enough to house a stage, a lighting rig, a crane, five cameras, a car, a tech gallery, a 4K data logging server - which is bigger than the USS Enterprise and more complicated - and an audience of at least 250 people. Any fewer and we'd have the same atmosphere you get at a village cricket match."

Consequently, the tent itself had to be huge – "a Las Vegas circus marquee, only bigger".

The logistical problems this created in being transported around the world meant they had to buy two tents, which leapfrogged one another from location to location.

As the BBC owns the format of Top Gear, The Grand Tour will be very different. Clarkson and his co-hosts, May and Richard Hammond, had to devise new material to replace regular features such as Star in a Reasonably Priced Car and racing driver the Stig for their move to Amazon.

"The only constant will be James and Richard, whom I hate," Clarkson said. "But that's really what's at the core of The Grand Tour: our relentless and unending need to belittle and humiliate one another."

The Grand Tour will premiere on Amazon Prime on Friday 18 November.

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Despite not being involved in the "fracas" that led to Clarkson's departure, May and Hammond have reportedly refused to continue without Clarkson. A BBC executive said that Hammond and May were offered the opportunity to continue the rest of the series in spite of the suspension of the show's figurehead, but they "didn't want to do it without Jeremy".

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Jeremy Clarkson returns to the scene of his controversial 'fracas'

14 October

Jeremy Clarkson has returned to the scene of the incident that sparked his departure from the BBC.

Sporting a blue cardigan, the motoring broadcaster was filming for his forthcoming Amazon Prime series, The Grand Tour, in North Yorkshire, the county where his infamous "fracas" occurred.

Alongside his co-presenter James May, Clarkson was seen in a studio described as similar to the one used on their former show, the BBC series Top Gear. Sitting in the large green tent the pair can be seen addressing a large audience and looking towards what appears to be a screen.

However, one eye-witness was more concerned by Clarkson's cardigan than anything else. The onlooker told the Daily Telegraph: "It looked more like Roy's Rolls than Rolls Royce with Clarkson in his cardi.

"He looked like a man ready for his pipe and slippers – a bit like Roy Cropper in Coronation Street. It is quite exciting though. It's brought loads of people out on to the street."

The filming is believed to have been for the first episode of The Grand Tour to be set in the UK, following on from two episodes filmed in South Africa and California.

Clarkson, May and Richard Hammond left Top Gear in March 2015 after Clarkson was sacked for what the BBC described as a "fracas" in which the star allegedly punched a producer, Oisin Tymon.

The first episode of The Grand Tour launches on November 18 on Amazon Prime Video.