Clarkson, Hammond and May: "There's camaraderie, but it's creatively fuelled by loathing" - JOE.co.uk

 Clarkson, Hammond and May: "There's camaraderie, but it's creatively fuelled by loathing" - JOE.co.uk

We sat down with The Grand Tour trio and talked about everything from their $13m new venture to celebs they’d like to kill. One of them said Jeremy.
It’s a chilly morning in London’s King’s Cross. In the back rooms of a fancy hotel, we meet Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.Not content with launching the most anticipated show of the year – The Grand Tour, you might have heard about it – they’re embarking on another digital excursion: DriveTribe, “an experiential social platform for every fan of every car and bike culture imaginable.”

We meet on the day of the launch, but they’d been having some difficulty navigating Apple’s notoriously trixy App Store upload system that morning. Clarkson lays the blame squarely at James’ feet.He’s the most tech savvy out of the three of us, which is why the app is four hours late,” he says, miming an impression of a fuddy-duddy James May at a keyboard, murmuring technical bletherings to himself. James isn’t going to stand for that. “I’m higher up the technical pecking order than he is,” he responds. “But then so are most animals.”Even when they’re not racing clapped-out old motors across far-flung nations or gunning supercars around rainy racetracks, they’re still having a pop at each other. It’s what makes their partnership work, and it hasn’t gone unspecified

“I don’t think the three of us would be mates if we were all at Sixth Form or university,” James notes. “There’s camaraderie, but it is creatively fuelled by a little nugget of loathing. People always go on about ‘magic chemistry’. They think it’s a buddy movie – it’s conflict.” He pauses. “We’ll call it ‘creative tension’.This creative tension must have been stretched to the limit, given the amount of time they’ve spent together recently. “On average, over the last five months there’s only been one day a week at most where I haven’t seen one of them,” James says. “There probably hasn’t been a day at all when I haven’t communicated with them in some way. It’s horrific, bearing in mind we don’t even like each other.”He’s joking, but he’s also not joking.

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind since the three of them, along with producer Andy Wilman, decided to leave BBC’s Top Gear for pastures new. It’s fair to say that The Grand Tour has been an out-and-out success. Amazon don’t release viewing figures, but one suspects that Jeff Bezos and co will be seeing a decent return on their “very, very, very expensive” deal. But we’re not here to talk about The Grand Tour. We’re here to talk about the trio’s next step into the digital world.DriveTibe is part-social media site, part-content distribution platform. Users sign up and are invited to join ‘tribes’ – each tribe is dedicated to a different subculture or genre of driving and cars – if it’s automotive, there’ll be a tribe for it.The whole idea of this is to really pull out, to the Nth degree, everything that makes a petrolhead a petrolhead,” says Hammond. “Whether they’re loving old rusty trucks or photographs of supercars in the street, this should address all of those in a way that you never can on a long-form television program.”