THE Top Gear trio of Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond were TV dynamite.
At the show’s peak, a record-breaking 350million viewers would tune in around the world to watch the legendary line-up.
But a new book reveals senior bosses at the BBC wanted to sack one of the presenters because they were three middle-aged white men.
In exclusive extracts, the show’s co-creator and series producer Andy Wilman writes: “Even though the public were clear about their feelings for Richard, James and Jeremy, sometimes the BBC senior management appeared not to have got the memo.”
He was summoned to one meeting, where bosses told him they had “tremendous news” — Top Gear was pulling in young black and Asian viewers.
The executive added: “So, how about replacing one of your line-up with a young . . . black or Asian presenter.”
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Andy replied: “So hang on, you’ve got young black and Asian viewers who have chosen, seemingly quite happily, to watch three white, middle-class, middle-aged men doing what they do, and in response to that, we should now break that team up — the one they enjoy watching — and give them something they’re most likely not asking for?
“Isn’t that sort of patronising to . . . young black and Asian viewers?”
He added: “I knew this was checkmate. I’d managed to get patronising and ethnic diversity into the same sentence.”
Andy’s long-term pal Jeremy Clarkson came up with the idea to revive Top Gear in late 2000.
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The pair had been friends since their school days in Derbyshire, bonding over tormenting teachers with their shared love of pranks.
They quickly came up with the idea for their Star In A Reasonably Priced Car feature but did not have any co-presenters for Jeremy.
In his book, Andy reveals how James May was initially rejected and Richard Hammond fluffed his audition.
But Richard was able to win everyone over with an off-the-cuff rant about how this was typical of his miserable career so far, which had included a stint on Cumbria Radio where he read out the names of lambs up for adoption.
Andy writes: “By this point we were in tears of laughter. Jeremy could barely speak. We knew there and then we had a keeper.”
He also tells how Richard turned up for the second show with a black eye after being in a drunken fight.
Andy says: “It turned out he’d been in the pub with one of his West Country yokel mates and the two of them had got into a fierce debate about which was the best Subaru.
“This developed into a full-on fight in the road outside the pub. It hadn’t occurred to him that being on national television now came with certain responsibilities.
“Still, the make-up lady did sterling work and at least the subject matter of his fight, Subarus, was on brand.”
Richard’s late Christmas present from the BBC, given to him in the new year, was that he kept his job.
Andy Wilman
After the first series, however, the BBC wanted to sack Richard and fellow original presenter Jason Dawe.
Dawe did go but Hammond was given a reprieve.
Andy says: “Much to Jeremy’s and my shock, the BBC high-ups also weren’t sure about Richard. It wasn’t a definite decision, as with Jason, but axing Richard was definitely on the table.
“Richard’s late Christmas present from the BBC, given to him in the new year, was that he kept his job.”
James May was only reconsidered for the role after Jeremy bumped into him at a car launch and found they disagreed entirely on the new vehicle.
He felt May would be a “good counterpoint to me and Hammond”. But BBC bosses didn’t like the idea of “three white middleish-aged males” and wanted more “chalk and cheese”.
Andy says: “Luckily Jeremy and I could counter with evidence that ‘cheese and cheese’ also works really well.
“Trinny and Susannah, for example — two poshos whose joint chemistry had made their show one of the most popular on television.”
Andy says James and Richard played a game called “eBay roulette”, which “had quite simple rules: You both get drunk, you bid on a car you like the look of that hasn’t got many hours left, you go to bed.
“If when you wake up, you discover that you now own it, you obviously have to go and buy it. Even if you’re so drunk that you didn’t realise the car is in Blackpool.”
But it wasn’t all fun and japes. Andy reveals he feels partly responsible for the 2006 crash that nearly cost Hammond his life when he attempted to break the land speed record in a jet-powered dragster.
Andy had given permission for “one more run” — to get shots of the afterburner — when a tyre blew.
He was then embroiled in a row with BBC News, who wanted to release footage of the crash before it was shown on Top Gear.
Andy says: “BBC News decided that since the crash was such a newsworthy event they should be the first to show it. Mercifully, the BBC Director of Television came down on our side.”
But in 2011 the wheels started to come off. First, the show landed in trouble when a quip about Mexicans being lazy forced the BBC to apologise.
Andy writes: “It was actually quite a slow death. The process of us going from being the Corporation’s cheeky rascals to unacceptable villains took its own sweet time.
‘Witch hunt’
“As good as we were at walking the line, sometimes entitlement creeps in, you get giddy and you plain just f* up.”
Then, after a slur against local people while filming in Thailand caused outrage, Andy received a dressing down from the BBC’s Editorial Policy department.
Top Gear was subjected to an internal investigation into its work culture and practices — similar to what happened to MasterChef after the Gregg Wallace allegations.
Andy says: “What we had going here, in my opinion, was a witch hunt.”
Although the subsequent report cleared Top Gear of wrongdoing, it said the “relationship with the BBC was totally and utterly broken”.
Worse still, bosses ruled that another executive producer at Andy’s level must sit in on the show’s edit, “making sure we didn’t play silly buggers with the content”.
He adds that the whole investigation affair was “a fing joke”.
He hoped filming a 2014 Christmas special — which would see the stars drive used cars with V8 engines through Argentina — would let them forget all about the “s***ty politics”.
Instead, the presenters and crew infamously had to flee for their lives from angry mobs in Argentina enraged by the number plate on Jeremy’s Porsche 928 GT: “H982 FKL”, which they believed was a deliberate reference to the Falklands War in 1982.
Andy says the plate number was a complete accident.
“We didn’t rig the number plate,” he writes. “The number plates were genuine — they’d been on that Porsche for donkey’s years.”
Although another BBC management investigation found no evidence of “prankish behaviour”, pressure was building behind the scenes and the team began filming series 22 in 2015 unaware it would be their last.
In a complete fury, I called the person in the BBC press office involved in orchestrating the release and let fly about all of us having to find out in this way
Andy Wilman
On March 11, after a “killer” day’s filming, Jeremy had an altercation with producer Oisin Tymon, who claimed he had been assaulted.
Clarkson was suspended pending an investigation, and “all the cogs and wheels and pistons that made up the whole Top Gear machine suddenly fell silent”.
Although a petition to save Clarkson reached nearly a million signatures, the BBC decided to sack their main presenter.
But Andy reveals he only found out from a media briefing.
“In a complete fury, I called the person in the BBC press office involved in orchestrating the release and let fly about all of us having to find out in this way, at one point calling him a heartless c***,” he says.
During a meeting with then Director-General Tony Hall, which he said was at “a proper Bond villain meeting table”, Andy started sobbing at what a “massive waste the whole affair was and how the sacking need never have happened”.
Andy ultimately went with Clarkson, May and Hammond to Amazon to set up hugely successful series The Grand Tour.
But not before he indulged in some petty revenge by taking the awards Top Gear won over 13 years from the BBC trophy cabinet.
He says: “One quiet Sunday morning I took my son, Noah, into the building and together we heisted the lot.
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“It wouldn’t make up for all the sports days and Nativity plays I’d missed but at least this 11-year-old could partake in his own little Ocean’s Eleven.”
- Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure, by Andy Wilman (Michael Joseph, £22) is out on November 6.
Boobs flash for speedy rocker
WHENEVER the celebrities appeared on Top Gear’s Star In A Reasonably Priced Car feature to see who was fastest around the track, there was always the risk they would “make a t*t” of themselves.
But producer Andy reveals rock legend Steven Tyler took this literally.
He writes in his book: “The Aerosmith singer’s assistant had a persuasive way of encouraging her charge to speed up.
“Every time he approached the second-to-last corner, she would stand near the finish line and lift her top up.”
Although stars were eventually clamouring to see if they could top the leaderboard, when Andy and Jeremy relaunched Top Gear in 2002 they struggled to get a big name for the first show.
Andy says: “The team were having a pint in the pub debating what to do, when Harry Enfield walked in. We fell on him like jackals.
“By the time he left the pub, one of Britain’s most revered comedians was signed up!”
Everyone from Tom Cruise to Margot Robbie had a spin around the track. But one big name who always declined an invitation was Daniel Craig.
The James Bond star was often at the track getting lessons because his stunt driver was Ben Collins, who appeared as The Stig.
But Andy says it was a no because as the public saw him as Bond, he would have to top the board.
He added: “It was a shame though because Ben genuinely said the top is where Craig would have gone.”
