Jeremy Clarkson and his Top Gear co-stars return to the BBC this week in surprise move – after The Grand Tour ends
JEREMY Clarkson and his Top Gear co-stars are set to return to the BBC this week in surprise move - after Amazon Prime's The Grand Tour ends.
After they left the hit BBC show Top Gear, the trio headed over to Amazon Prime in 2016 to start up their own franchise.
However, Jeremy, 65, left fans devastated when he revealed they were all quitting the The Grand Tour back in 2024.
But now in a surprising move, BBC Two are showing the Botswana Top Gear special on Sunday night.
The special sees Jeremy, Richard Hammond and James May, travelling across to Botswana with a car that each had bought in Africa for less than £1500, to prove that they can be better than SUVs for driving up "leafy country lanes".
Jeremy has now reflected on his decision to end their two-decade long reign as the nation's top petrolhead presenters, hinting that they were running out of new ideas.
Jeremy Clarkson
He told : "I’ve driven cars higher than anyone else and further north than anyone else.
"We’ve done everything you can do with a car. When we had meetings about what to do next, people just threw their arms in the air."
He also revealed that the physical element of the show had started to take it's toll.
He said: "If you’re Bear Grylls you go to a hotel — there aren’t any hotels in the Sahara desert.”
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“[The show] is immensely physical and when you’re unfit and fat and old, which I am, Camping in Mauritania was a stretch," he admitted.
He continued: "We’ve spent more time in each other’s company than our families’ over the last 25 years so I don’t think it would have lasted as long as it did if we’d hated each other as much as James likes to think.
"James May thinks there’s never been a more interesting time for how we move around and he’s probably right, but I don’t think it’s very interesting television.
"An electric car is no different from a chest freezer or a microwave oven. There’s no glamour or excitement. This week on Top Chest Freezer! I think it suits the written media more."
At the time, Fozia Khan, Amazon Studios’ head of unscripted in the UK, said the brand could survive with another set of presenters.
“It’s come to its natural end,” she said, adding that her team was “thinking about” how the show can live on.
Jeremy will continue to host Clarkson’s Farm for Amazon after the series has become the streamer’s highest-rated UK original.
Meanwhile, Freddie Flintoff has revealed: "I wished I’d been killed’ in his horrifying Top Gear smash saying ‘I didn’t think I’d make it."
The former Cricketer, 47, suffered severe facial injuries as a result of the smash, which occurred in 2022.
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Before his crash, Freddie presented Top Gear alongside Chris Harris and Paddy McGuinness from 2019 until 2022.
The Sun revealed in 2023 how the motoring show had been axed by the BBC following the accident.
