Faulty ignition

Apart from the next Game of Thrones, there’s nothing I’ve been looking forward to quite as much as The Grand Tour (Amazon Prime). I like Clarkson, Hammond and May, I like banter, I like political incorrectness, I like exotic scenery, I like cars, I like puerile jokes and I liked Top Gear. Take the same ingredients but with a £4.5-million-per-show budget — more than four times what they had with the BBC — and you’d have to ask yourself: ‘What could possibly stop this from being the greatest TV show ever?’

Well, I hate to be a party pooper but it’s definitely not there yet. We had some friends staying for the weekend and we all sat down eagerly after supper, fully expecting to be wowed. Instead, though, at about 40 minutes in, we found ourselves seized with a powerful urge to walk the dogs and head for bed.

It started well enough, with a spectacular opening (on which most of the first week’s budget appears to have been spent) in which Clarkson — newly liberated from the grey, rainy, cheeseparing grimness of the BBC — flew to sunny California, there to be reunited with the boys. Trailing dust, they raced across the desert, joining a Mad Max-style convoy of petrolhead crazies, before convening at the new roving Grand Tour tent, played in by the Hothouse Flowers, to meet their new global audience.

And that was where the problems began: with a PowerPoint lecture. All right, it was droll in parts, with Clarkson delivering a ‘to-may-to, to-mah-to’ riff on the linguistic differences between English and the alien language spoken by his US studio audience. But it was all overly scripted. (Though not, one got the impression from the stiltedness, overly rehearsed.)