The Grand Tour

Five things wrong with TGT:

1) Having the studio sections prerecorded weeks / months in advance means they fail to be current, reactive or even relevant. Case in point - the traffic light section on this week's show, was a one-off event for LGBT awareness to coincide with Pride weekend but which actually was so popular with Londoners as a whole that it was kept as a semi-permanent installation. This happened in JUNE. Yep, six months ago. No-one cares, and bringing it up just made them look even more dinosaurish and Telegraphy than normal.

2) Thin, repeated jokes. OK - we get it. Celebrity Brain Crash is just "celebrity gets not-killed." If you can't interview celebrities and give them a challenge, why not get on actual car enthusiasts, amateurs etc? Make it a car show for car people..... The American thinks that everything that isn't American is communist; despite the cold war ending in 1991. The Hammond-behaving-like-a-yobbo-doing-donuts in Episode 3 was just weak, and even the cars this week didn't go anywhere - at least the previous "alternative build-your-own" cars they've done in the past actually worked to an extent (the camper vans, the car-boats, the convertible people carrier).

3) Only two actual films per episode - the "review" and the "challenge/adventure" - too thin. I remember TG being packed with one film per presenter at least, plus an actual celebrity interview, plus perhaps a challenge or studio-based feature.

4) It's on Amazon. It needs to be sold to a TV channel stat. Otherwise people will just pirate it.

5) It's unimaginative, repetitive, uninspired and without the incentive of ratings, will just die.

With regard to point 2.
The whole point of constantly talking 'the Americian' driver is that this versions racing driver is the polar opposite of the mute one on Top Gear.
You can see the scribble of the page of ideas in the first meeting post-top gear on the screen with that one - but you have to work out the thinking for yourself. It's just that it's not working well on screen.

The celeb interviews is another 'clever on paper' joke. Given its now up there for ever, the only point would be to have them on to plug something, which would quickly loose any topically.

It's as though they've watched the Dave repeats, seen Clarkson have some big Hollywood star on with 'a new movie out in June' back from 2010 and didn't want TGT to fall into the same trap.

Until recently I'd have agreed. However the way Russia is currently behaving...


AIUI Amazon are instead using it to start streaming services in areas they don't offer a shopping website, rather than selling it. Though given that one aim of it was to lead people to Amazon Prime subscriptions, realise that delivery is now zero additional cost, quick and convenient, and then buy stuff...



Be interesting to know if the production team get any viewing metrics fed back to them. I can't believe Amazon don't have great analytics on where people stop watching, pause, FF to skip, REW to watch again - after all that data is presumably available to them as they own the entire viewing ecosystem.

And as predicted - Amazon Prime Video is now available standalone in territories which don't have Amazon e-tail sites and thus don't have general Amazon Prime delivery : https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/14/amazon-prime-video-global/

Not really sure why they think Celebrity Braincrash is a good enough joke to waste time on every week.

Watched every episode of this and there's something missing about it, it's not quite working. Then again I haven't regularly watched Top Gear in the last five or six years so I don't know how much it's changed since then. (to be fair, I honestly thought it wasn't that long! Where does the time go etc etc)

So we've reached episode 6 and there's a fresh homophobic scandal with Richard Hammond describing all adult men that eat ice cream as gay.

🤗 hello & here's the full richard hammond 'ice creams are gay' piece and yeah, it's awful pic.twitter.com/JhDisRsc1Q

— ollie cole (@ProducerOllie) December 26, 2016

Interesting to see if this gets picked up in the media and what Amazon's response will be.

Bit odd how this has just now caused an uproar considering the show was out three days ago. Reminds me of Sachsgate when people only started complaining days after the actual broadcast

Difference is really that Sachsgate was on a live or as-live radio show that was broadcast once. TGT is delivered purely via an on-demand platform, and is designed to be watched when you want, not 'live'.

Oh - and... Err... Christmas.

I know what you mean, I perhaps thought that The Grand Tour would have much more people looking in than a typical on demand only show, I guess that's not the case.

(Not defending the joke by the way - it doesn't even make sense - just interested in the mechanics of controversies like this and Sachsgate)

The international service is Amazon Originals and little else. In fact it doesn't even have every Amazon Original - the glaring omission being season two of The Man in the High Castle for some reason.

Its a strange day when Jeremy the one who telling off the others for saying something stupid

pic.twitter.com/MDCyNCG4us

(Source: Paddy O'Connell's Twitter feed, I give up trying to embed the bloody thing into this post) )