News that the BBC’s hit motoring show Top Gear is on indefinite hiatus is hitting fans hard across the globe. Some have contacted the show’s former presenters in hopes that the original trio of James May, Jeremy Clarkson, and Richard Hammond could restore Top Gear to its former glory. Now, May is speaking out against that and reminding fans about where the focus should be in his eyes.
As the BBC put it, Top Gear isn’t coming back for the “foreseeable future”. It was, of course, initially put on hold after a life-changing accident involving presenter Freddie Flintoff. In the wake of that accident, the BBC made a public apology to Flintoff, paid him over $11 million, and reportedly told many staff members to focus on other projects.
Fans who were hoping for a better outcome for the show itself have been reaching out to the old presenters. James May specifically called them out in BBC’s Today podcast that will be released this week. “[They] were saying, ‘Well, now they’ve done that wrong, you can come back in and rescue it,’” he said. “I was just thinking, ‘The bloke has hurt himself very badly in a life-changing way and you could perhaps not use it as an opportunity to be partisan. You could perhaps say, ‘Rotten bit of luck, get well soon’.”
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In the podcast, May clearly shifts the conversation away from a television program and back onto a person whose work on that program ultimately led to a grisly injury. May went on to say that Top Gear “does need a bit of a rethink” and suggested just how he’d do it. “There must be another way of doing a show about cars that will perhaps embrace more fulsomely many of the questions that are being asked about cars that weren’t being asked for a long time.”
This idea extends far beyond the “big boy adventures” that May, Clarkson, and Hammond still get up to on Amazon’s Grand Tour from time to time. Instead, he thinks that Top Gear could get into “philosophizing in an entertaining and informative way.” Is that the right solution for the world’s most famous motoring show? Let us know what you think in the comments below.