Yesterday, members of Amazon’s Prime service – incidentally not available yet in the UAE – received an e-mail slightly more excitable than the usual notification of a “subscribe and save” delivery of nappies. Revealing the long-awaited title of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May’s new motoring show, the subject was “Did You Guess The Name?”
The immediate answer, on seeing that their rival series to the BBC's rebooted Top Gear would be called The Grand Tour, was, well, no. Because it's crushingly dull – and for all the brickbats that have flown the trio's way over the years, one can rarely accuse them of being that. Indeed, they have so much goodwill among fans (and as we reported last week, so much power to do as they wish on Amazon), that it wouldn't have been at all surprising if they had plumped for one of the more ridiculous names they mused upon in their recent online video, our favourite being "A Small Puddle Of Excellence".
May’s suggestion, however, was never going to fly.
“I still think ‘Nigel’ was a better name,” he tweeted on Wednesday.
So what did fans think? In the vast echo chamber that is Twitter, it's possible to find an opinion to suit any agenda, and sure enough The Daily Express in the United Kingdom collated the most obviously unimpressed reactions in a story that ran "Fans disappointed with Jeremy Clarkson's 'boring' name for new show."
Generally, the consensus seems to be that as a title it’s just alright – one typical tweet ran “It’s ok...but not awesome. I suppose if the show is awesome who cares about the name” – but most would have preferred the popular Gear Knobs.
As Clarkson pointed out last week, however, any show with the word "top" or "gear" in the title would have been legally tricky. So, cheekily, instead of TG, it's GT – an inversion of Top Gear. Get it?
Whatever the reaction, on closer inspection, The Grand Tour does makes a kind of sense given the other announcements about the content of the show. It transpires that The Grand Tour will not have a studio base in the UK. Instead, the three will travel the world, hosting each episode in a new country. As Clarkson tweeted, typically dryly: "It's a sort of 'grand tour', if you like. So we've decided to call it 'The Grand Tour'."
Of course, Grand Tour has connotations with the kind of adventures young landed gentry would enjoy around Europe in the 18th century, starting in southern England, trekking through France and Germany and ending up in Italy as they took in art, culture and eligible ladies. Not hugely dissimilar, then, to when Clarkson, Hammond and May took hot hatches to Monaco in Top Gear series 17, or supercars to southern France’s Millau Viaduct in series 7. In the latter feature, Clarkson drove his favourite car of the time, a Ford GT. And he confirmed that The Grand Tour will be called by its initials, too, a reference to the long history of the Gran Turismo category of high performance luxury cars.
It’s almost as if they’ve actually thought about this – best not tell these three avowed critics of lycra-clad road cyclists that Grand Tour is also the group name for the three week-long bike races in France, Spain and Italy that close their favourite mountain passes to traffic every year.
Still, what has been fascinating about The Grand Tour news this week is that, whatever the title of the show, the appetite for it remains undimmed. And perhaps that’s because of the genre title they’ve come up with on the show’s new Facebook page: “General Chaos”.
Maybe that would have been a better name for the entire undertaking.
artslife@thenational.ae
