Why Jeremy Clarkson Is Glad He Left Top Gear When He Did

Given that he, James May and Richard Hammond are now fronting a new motoring show with a much larger budget and fewer constraints, you could argue the aftermath of that punch has worked out nicely for Jeremy Clarkson. However, there is another reason why the ex-Top Gear presenter is glad he left his show behind when he did.

At a talk in London this week, the 56-year-old said: “I think we would have stayed at the BBC and then the show would have got tired and boring, eventually we would have piloted it into a hillside and that would have been the end,” adding: “At the time it was all tragic but now we’ve been forced to reinvent ourselves and we’re online, where you can do anything, like f*** a horse…Now we’re looking at losing Top Gear as a fantastic thing to happen.”

And the new - as yet unnamed - Amazon Prime show is indeed shaping up to be a rather different beast than Top Gear as we’d come to know it. There’s the obvious point of it being online, but also the studio format has been ditched. No more news, no more celebrity segments, just a series of expensive and no doubt very slick car films.

In the speech, Clarkson also rubbished claims that he’d tried to sabotage Chris Evans’ revival of Top Gear, revealing a peculiarity in his contract with the BBC. “It’s been suggested that I am behind it, that I am trying to scupper him. But I discovered the other day that every time it gets recommissioned I get paid.”

Source: The Sun