The new hosts of Top Gear, Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc, have no hard feelings toward Jeremy Clarkson and his decision to launch a competing show on Amazon.
On Monday, Evans and LeBlanc — alongside their new team of presenters, Chris Harris, Sabine Schmitz, Rory Reid and The Stig (Eddie Jordan was in South Africa) — attended the 40th BBC Worldwide Showcase in Liverpool to launch the 23rd series of Top Gear to the market.
At a roundtable interview, they were asked whether they were worried that previous presenters Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May were starting a rival car show.
“I’m not, no. I think that’s great,” said LeBlanc. “I’m a fan of the old show. If they’re making their own show, I think there’s more than enough room on television. There’s more than one cooking show, there’s more than one hunting show, there’s more than one comedy on TV. There’s enough room for two or more car shows.”
Have the two heard from them, then? LeBlanc hasn’t.
“I’ve heard from them, yeah,” countered Evans. “Gave me some tips. Gratefully appreciated. It doesn’t matter how it happened, but it happened. I’m going to keep them to myself. If they work, I’ll let you know,” Evans quipped.
Last March, Clarkson — who had been hosting the show since its relaunch in 2002 — was fired after a series of controversies. In 2014 alone, he made an anti-Asian remark on the show, uttered the N-word in rehearsal footage, and caused uproar in Argentina after locals believed his licence plate referenced the country’s defeat to the British in the 1982 Falklands War.
But the last straw for Clarkson was when he railed against producer Oisin Tymon and left him with a busted lip, according to BBC’s internal investigations.
Evans says he was not given any instruction from the BBC to stay away from the controversial material that landed the show in hot waters in the past.
“Honestly, I can say this hand on heart, I haven’t been given a single directive about the programme at all from June 13 when I got the show.
“I’ve been allowed to do, without having to ask permission, anything that I wanted to do, including getting together with Matt. I haven’t had a single directive from the BBC about anything, which was the deal.”
Top Gear has an estimated 350 million viewers in over 200 countries, entering the Guinness Book of World Records as the single most-watched factual television show.
The current series has already been filming around the world, Evans said, including — but not limited to — England, Norway and Morocco. The first theme, according to LeBlanc, will be the UK vs the US.
A sizzle reel shown at a gala on Monday evening clipped together high-energy flashes of what’s to come when the show kicks off in May. The footage ended with Evans frantically asking Schmitz to stop a speeding car so he can be sick on the side of the road. “Why is it red?” Schmitz asked him, to which Evans replied, of course: “Strawberries.”
Top Gear is expected to air on BBC First in the Middle East, where it was previously aired on OSN, shortly after its UK premiere.
