Back when they were making television programs together, Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson, and James May used to say they were the kings of “cocking about.” That might make you think there are a lot of good outtakes or bloopers lying around on cutting room floors, but you might be disappointed to discover that there aren’t.
In a new video for DriveTribe, the Richard Hammond explains that the nature of The Grand Tour meant editors were on the lookout for moments when progress went off the rails. Not in order to cut them out, but to feature them more prominently.
“One of the many questions I’ve been asked a lot of times, and we are regularly asked this: ‘Have you got any outtakes from The Grand Tour?'” he says. “Well, we kind of haven’t, because by definition, because we’ve made a career out of thriving on and embracing failure — total failure, often — when things go wrong, that’s guaranteed to make it in.”
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That means that any video featuring outtakes would be boring. To illustrate his point, Hammond rewatches a handful of clips from The Grand Tour, and explains why they were unexpected and made it into the program despite often contributing little to the episode’s narrative arc. Instead, they were just silly.
Stunts that he believes would have been cut out of other shows include the Dune Buggy zipline that he failed to get to the end of, the sloshing aquarium in James May’s Mercedes that made Hammond laugh so hard he nearly wet his pants, and the scales that almost tore off his Mazda MX-5’s rear bumper — none of which were planned, and all of which included amusing failure.
However, Hammond admits that some of the stunts were quite dangerous, explaining that in any other show a stunt crew would have been required to film it safely. It’s a bit of a dark admission considering the injuries that Hammond suffered in his Top Gear days, and the injuries that have ended the current iteration of the BBC show. While it’s amusing to see people getting away with it when things go wrong, perhaps May was right to say the format “needs a bit of a rethink.”