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Louise Thomas
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Richard Hammond has spoken about the future of The Grand Tour after ending his TV partnership with Jeremy Clarkson and James May.
The former Top Gear trio began presenting the show in 2016 and have worked on the show for five seasons and 46 episodes in total.
Fans of the series may have feared that the show would be leaving their screens for good when the final episode debuts on 13 September but Hammond has now quashed those concerns.
Speaking to Metro.co.uk, the presenter has revealed the show will be “carrying on.”
He said: “The Grand Tour continues. We’re stepping away as the hosts, but Prime will be continuing it.”
Hamond then jokingly added: “So I can’t wait to sit on my own chair and watch somebody else do it. That’s amazing.”
The TV star admitted that he didn’t know who the new presenters would be but did share some advice with his successors. “If you’re making any show that at its heart has a subject, whether it’s cooking, dancing or cars, the hosts, the primary makers of it, have to have that passion in their heart. And we always did,” said the 54-year-old.
Clarkson, Hammond and May’s 22-year journey of working together, across both Top Gear and The Grand Tour, comes to an end later this month with an episode called ‘One For The Road’ which was filmed in Zimbabwe and Botswana. The episode will reportedly end on Kubu Island, which the gang visited as part of a Top Gear special in 2007.
Meanwhile, Clarkson, who is currently enjoying the biggest success of his career with Clarkson’s Farm, has reflected on why he decided to cut professional ties with both Hammond and May.
‘After 36 years of talking about cars on television, I’m packing it in, because I’m too old and fat to get into the cars that I like and not interested in driving those I don’t,” he said in a new interview with The Sunday Times.
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“What this means of course is that my 22-year partnership with James May and Richard Hammond is now over. You can see our final road trip together on Amazon Prime very soon. It’s emotional.”
Clarkson said the trio had “thought long and hard about how we should end our 22-year partnership, but in the end we just went to the end of the alphabet” and selected Zimbabwe as a place to set the special.
“There was another reason why we chose Zimbabwe, though,” he continued, revealing: “We would drive across it from east to west, as usual, but then we could cross the border and finish up where we began all those years ago: the Makgadikgadi salt pans in Botswana.”
