A petrolhead’s honest review of The Grand Tour, Season 1
It Should’ve Been Called The Abysmal Tour… ultimately, it was not all it was hyped up to be. There were a few good moments, but there were too many scripted squabbles and not a lot of cars!
Car reviews were the one good part of the show, using innovative camera angles and editing to up-the-ante of motoring shows – BBC/Top Gear, you need to step it up!
However, other elements of the show made it feel about as pleasurable to watch as driving with a punctured tyre.
‘The American,’ who is The Grand Tour’s version of the Stig, could’ve been a bit less ‘redneck’ and a bit more technical – he is, after all, a former NASCAR racer, so where was his racing knowledge, and where was the terminology?
While the anti-American humour was funny to start with, it was a joke that wore very thin very quickly. The American‘s part in the show came off a bit camp and lame, and it was almost as though the show itself was an old man trying to ‘get down with the kids’ – personally, it came off as desperate and needy.
The film & challenge segments where only two of the three hosts took part were also lacklustre at best. The cinematography was excellent, but the scripts were terrible.
It wasn’t Top Gear-but-better, rather it was the horrendous realisation of a guy with a camcorder and a budget of £10 making a rip-off version of Top Gear with a cheap cast of aging actors. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and yet it is exactly how it felt to watch it.
Even the Paranormal Activity series was better, and that had a £50 budget compared to Amazon’s millions!
The two against one antics in challenges also felt rather unnecessary given they’d resort to childish, petty reasons as to why the third presenter couldn’t take part in the challenge.
Like, you’ve brought the wrong car, or you’re not invited. This wasn’t three friends fooling around, going on adventures and making memories with cars – it was three old journalists who’d done it all with the BBC, had run out of ideas on how to make a car show interesting, and had resorted to petty childhood squabbles despite having access to Amazon’s bigger unlimited budget to make a fantastic, unrestricted car show.
Celebrity Braincrash was another joke that was initially hilarious, but wore thin & fast. The part where they ‘killed’ Celebrities wasn’t funny after the 12th time of viewing, and at best it was a time filler in each episode.
Celebrity Braincrash was a constant reminder that the “this-is-Top-Gear-but-it-isn’t” model wasn’t quite working, and that the show won’t survive if it continues to base itself on that premise.
Having this in the first couple of episodes would’ve been fine as an in-joke, pointing fun at their Top Gear past and their contractual inability to interview celebrities on The Grand Tour. It’s well known that James May can’t say “Cock!” as a way of cursing on The Grand Tour, so Celebrity Braincrash would’ve been fine – if it only lasted for two episodes.
The fact that the show’s presenters & producers stretched that joke over 12 episodes, showed they clearly didn’t have enough car-related material to fill an hour’s worth of programming.
Conclusion
The humour in The Grand Tour is there, but at the moment the show is lacking the flawless execution that we’re used to with these three car journalists.
I expected a lot from this show, but overall it has failed to deliver. The opening sequence in the pilot episode promised so much, but maybe it was impossible to live up to the hype.
It was meant as a fresh beginning, a new era, and maybe this first season is evidence of the ‘Grand Tour‘ getting off to a bumpy start.
Maybe a second series would iron out the creases, smoothen the bumps in the road, fill in the pot holes of the script and remove the unnecessary lame jokes.
I would watch almost any show with these three in it, because I’m a petrolhead and they’re entertaining to watch. However, what was hyped up as a brand new breed of motoring show went down about as well as a flat tyre.
It was basically the Clarkson, Hammond and May Disaster show which occasionally featured cars – rather than a car show with three friends going on adventures.
If there was one complaint I had about Top Gear in this trio’s latter years, it was the lack of episodes – six per series – which meant less focus on cheap car challenges and adventures, but more focus on making a magazine show.
I hoped The Grand Tour would mean a fresh start with more adventures, more challenges and more humour, but instead it was just one massive cringe-worthy car crash that was sometimes difficult to watch.
Poor, if slightly entertaining at times. Needs dramatic improvement if a second season is to be produced.
6/10
– Chris JK
KPH car blog 