"Now it's just all hipsters with dogs and bicycles," he says, cruising new restaurants and stores. The Detroit of 2019 is totally different, according to Clarkson, and yet it irritates him. (It sounds as if it could have been Michigan Central Station, which was purchased last year by Ford for redevelopment).Įx-BBC host: I was held at gunpoint in Detroit "In 1997 in downtown Detroit, someone put a gun against my head," says Clarkson to the camera, referring to an incident described recently by The Drive website that took place when "Top Gear" visited an unidentified abandoned train station. When they drive through the more bustling streets typical of Midtown and downtown, Clarkson derides the trendier signs of rebirth. Rail-thin pioneering punker Iggy Pop's photo, however, is taped to a plain old stick.Īt one point, the "Grand Tour" guys "buy" an abandoned house for $2,2000 when they supposedly can't find a hotel. Now, on Friday, fans will get to see what happened during the show's "long overdue trip" to Detroit, as Clarkson puts it.Īlthough it includes a lot of tongue-in-cheek grumbling about the hipster-trending, millennial-populated, urban-gardening state of the city's Midtown and downtown areas, "Motown Funk" (as the episode is titled) is mostly a celebration of American muscle cars and the city that represents their spirit. "The Grand Tour" cast and crew were spotted in Detroit in June.
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"Even over here, on this side of the pond, we recognize that Detroit is the spiritual home to anyone whose communion wine is petrol and whose heart beats like a big, lumpy, wet V-8," says Clarkson during segments filmed here for the Amazon Prime Video episode that's available now.īrexit may be crumbling, but the United Kingdom's love for fast American-made automobiles is as sturdy as London Bridge, at least according to the popular car-themed series starring BBC's former "Top Gear" team of Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May.
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Meanwhile, Top Gear’s still trucking along on BBC Two, with new presenters like Matt LeBlanc - selected by a Mathematically Random Likable Actor Generator - behind the wheel.If Shakespeare had written about muscle cars, he might have sounded like British host Jeremy Clarkson talking about the Motor City on the season opener of "The Grand Tour."
![the grand tour tv the grand tour tv](https://www.digitaltveurope.com/files/2016/11/the-grand-tour.png)
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Those few minutes of TV work out to more than 32,000 annual Amazon Prime subscriptions, at $99 a pop. The opening scene - an elaborate desert sequence involving 150 cars and six jets - is said to have cost $3.2 million alone. The Grand Tour shoots around the world in 4K, with a dedicated test-driving track and a massive traveling tent with a built-in panorama view. In the words of CEO Jeff Bezos, the show is not expensive, nor even very expensive, but “ very, very, very expensive.” Rumor has it that Amazon may have paid as much as $250 million for the series.
![the grand tour tv the grand tour tv](https://resizing.flixster.com/lqXiDClkwn19LisI9WYC5_zYCks=/300x300/v2/https://flxt.tmsimg.com/assets/p13420002_b_v12_ai.jpg)
Co-presenters Hammond and May decided to leave with him, and to Amazon they went.Īll that lost revenue has got to be painful for the streaming giant. The beloved British car show from which the three men came - which has been recognized by Guinness as the world’s most widely watched factual TV program - was stopped in its tracks in March 2015, when Clarkson was fired following what a BBC inquiry described as an “ unprovoked physical and verbal attack” on a Top Gear producer. And according to the data analysis firm MUSO, that first episode has also proven to be wildly popular on less savory websites, having been pirated more than 7.9 million times already.
![the grand tour tv the grand tour tv](https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/OxNEe/s1/the-grand-tour-season-2-finale.jpg)
The show’s premiere, released November 18, is the most watched in the history of Amazon Prime.
![the grand tour tv the grand tour tv](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/s8AwizkBarM/maxresdefault.jpg)
Top Gear alums Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May - also (fondly!) known as Jezza, Hamster, and Captain Slow - have earned the dubious distinction of most illegally downloaded program ever for their new Amazon series The Grand Tour. Photo: Roderick Fountain/Courtesy of Amazon Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May on Amazon’s The Grand Tour.