Speaking of old and Oliver, are the old episodes of Top Gear like the Africa special available somewhere for streaming? I’m not British so no BBC for me.
They're all on Amazon; a couple seasons are free with Prime, others are either like $1-2 per episode or free with some weird car-focused other channel subscription
So buying all the specials is like $20 total - well worth it!
Speaking of old and Oliver, are the old episodes of Top Gear like the Africa special available somewhere for streaming? I’m not British so no BBC for me.
They're all on Amazon; a couple seasons are free with Prime, others are either like $1-2 per episode or free with some weird car-focused other channel subscription
So buying all the specials is like $20 total - well worth it!
A good chunk of the specials are also available free on youtube... for who knows what reason. I'm assuming either piracy that BBC/Amazon hasn't noticed or... idiocy? Either way it's nice.
Speaking of old and Oliver, are the old episodes of Top Gear like the Africa special available somewhere for streaming? I’m not British so no BBC for me.
They're all on Amazon; a couple seasons are free with Prime, others are either like $1-2 per episode or free with some weird car-focused other channel subscription
So buying all the specials is like $20 total - well worth it!
Yeah I finally sprung for all the specials a year or so ago and haven't regretted the investment once.
I think Amazon even collected them all under "Season Zero" on the page.
TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
I'm so glad I still have the shows ripped from their air date, just floating around in the ocean out there, so they had the actual music in them along with the news.
The joke for this bit with the cheap cars is completely lost if you don't use the actual song (which is what happened on the Amazon/syndication plays and a lot of other places)
There is quite a bit of music missing from the syndicated version on that one. Amazon must think I hate that one because every time I get to it in a rewatch I load up the one I have saved instead.
Clarkson wrote an article about the special, some mild spoilers in it.
Clarkson writes about the new Grand Tour Special: "Living the American dream — in Scotland"
Living the American dream — in Scotland: Classic US cars may look iconic but there are many reasons why we don't drive them here, as we learnt on our daftest Grand Tour yet
By Jeremy Clarkson (Sunday Times, July 18) [Note: this article contains very mild spoilers]
In order to make the last few Grand Tour specials, I've driven a V8 beach buggy across the Namib, a Bentley Continental on the horrific roads of Madagascar and hurtled down the Mekong in a jet-propelled Vietnam war boat with two Corvette engines in the back.
For the next outing we were planning on a trip to the snowy wastelands of northern Russia. The production team laboured for months, sourcing locations, shipping the cars to the start point and getting permission to close Murmansk's main airport for the day, for the biggest stunt we'd ever attempted. But just a week before we were due to set off, Covid arrived, so we went to Scotland instead.
Now, what we normally do with a 90-minute special is choose three improbable cars and then try to get them across terrain that's wholly unsuitable. This creates jeopardy and tension. Will the Lancia get across Botswana? Will the Volvo get across the Serengeti? Will Hammond crash again?
But you can't very well do that in Scotland because it's got roads and petrol stations and everyone speaks a form of English. So if we began by saying, "Can we drive these cars all the way from Berwick-upon-Tweed to the Outer Hebrides?", everyone would just say "Yes" and turn over to watch Countryfile instead.
We needed to ask a different question and what we came up with is: in Europe, we drink American beer and wear American trousers and listen to American music, but we've never taken to their cars. Why?
When I was growing up, we'd sit down to watch the latest American cop show so we'd see Jim Rockford tearing about in his Pontiac Firebird and Starsky in his Ford Gran Torino and fat Frank Cannon in his Lincoln Continental and then we'd turn to our fathers and say, "Dad, can I have a Ford Anglia?" Why did we do that?
To work this out I bought a Lincoln Continental Mark V, as driven by Jock Ewing in Dallas, James bought a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, as driven by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, and Richard bought a boat-tail Buick Riviera, as blown up by Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout.
I don't think I've ever seen a collection of such stupid cars in one place ever before. But they were stupid in the way that a kid's fridge drawing is stupid. Or a Damien Hirst pickled shark. They were fun stupid.
My £10,000 Wedgwood blue Lincoln had button-backed velour upholstery, which was extremely squidgy, and an actual Cartier clock. It was like sitting in a Cheshire sitting room, only with extra Fablon and not much space. Incredibly, although the car is 19 feet long — three feet longer than a modern Range Rover — it has only two doors and very little room in the back. The boot's big, though. You could put Frank Cannon in there. Maybe there was an episode once where someone did.
Under the bonnet, which is longer than most European cars, and houses, there was a 6.6 litre V8 engine, which somehow managed to produce just 166 horsepower. Fast? No. That's not what you'd call this car. Or gainly. Mainly because its wheels were so far inboard, it was like looking at a hippopotamus sitting on a cake trolley.
James's Cadillac, meanwhile, looked as if they'd mined all of the world's supply of burgundy to make it. It was even more burgundy than the bedspreads you get in every American motel. And not just on the outside. Even the gear shifter was burgundy. Under the bonnet there was an 8.2 litre engine — the largest V8 ever fitted to a production car at the time — and though I never looked, I suspect that was burgundy as well. Hammond's Buick, meanwhile, was very ugly and the windscreen wipers broke, which, given this was Scotland, would prove a constant problem.
There was another, much bigger issue though. It's something you won't see on the screen because it was all happening behind the scenes. The problem of filming during a pandemic.
We couldn't, for instance, take rooms in a hotel. We had to take over the whole thing, bring in our own catering staff and eat, at tables for one, all facing in the same direction as if we were sitting an exam. Also, the bars were shut and we had to be in bed at ten.
Sometimes, when a town simply didn't have a hotel big enough for the 50 people on our crew and the staff needed to run the Covid testing programme, we had to use caravans. All of us. Which meant our slow-moving convoy was about 17 miles long. I'd like to apologise now, if I may, to the good people of Scotland who were stuck behind us. And to the man who owned the woods into which my caravan crashed on day four.
I know what you're thinking.
Oh no, another "scripted" Grand Tour caravan stunt. But it wasn't. We'd decided not to make fun of caravans on this occasion because we've been there and done that, so imagine my surprise, while driving along in the Wedgwood blue Wilmslow lounge, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that I was being overtaken by my 'van.
Instinctively I thought I was in the middle of a very large accident, which was confusing because I was still on the road and I still had control of the steering and the brakes. Plus there was no sound of rending metal and tortured tyres, noises that normally accompany a car crash. It turned out that the towbar had simply come off and that as a result, my sleeping quarters were buried at the bottom of a bank, in a thick and impenetrable forest.
Eventually, after seven days of solid rain — I did not drive the Lincoln for even so much as a yard without the wipers on — we arrived in that bit of Scotland that can puff out its chest in any competition to find "the most beautiful place in the world". But we couldn't see any of it because everything above our shoes was in the clouds.
And then we were on Skye and then we were on a ferry to the Outer Hebrides. And when we landed on North Uist, a spookily beautiful island I'd never even heard of, we headed immediately to the nearest bar, which was full of Joanna Lumley.
Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer were there too, and so was the director from A League of Their Own, who was on a recce prior to the arrival of Jamie Redknapp. It seems that every television show, penned in by Covid, had decided that North Uist was about as "exotic" as Britain could muster and had headed there as well. There was even one scene for which we had to wait for Joanna Lumley to herd some cows across the sea before we could fire up our cameras.
The only issue that remained was that in our shorter, "unplugged" Grand Tour lockdown special, I realised that Richard Hammond had made it all the way to within sight of the finishing post without having a single accident. He went to bed every night and took his own trousers off, rather than getting a paramedic to do it for him.
It's OK though, don't worry. With seconds to go, he managed it. And it's his best accident yet, mainly because he didn't have to go off in an air ambulance.
Instead he went home on a plane we'd had to charter to keep us all safe from the bat flu. Me though? I went home in my Lincoln and I still have it today.
So why did we never buy American cars? No idea. They're hilarious.
***
The Grand Tour Presents: Lockdown is on Amazon Prime Video from July
I have a fondness for big ol' American boats, probably due to my granddad's '79 Ford Thunderbird.
My defining memory of that car is being driven to school at about 10 years old and being rear-ended by a new car while we were waiting to turn into the school parking lot. What makes it so memorable is that when we got out and looked the car that hit us had caved in the whole front end. The Thunderbird had some scratches on the rear bumper.
I fucking adore cars like that. (I still kick myself repeatedly for having to pass up a gorgeous '77 Thunderbird for a three-figure price in the early '00s.) Really looking forward to this one.
Six hundred bucks he wanted for it. Nobody wanted the things. It was in lovely condition, similar burgundy color to May's Cadillac in the trailer. Probably a 10K car now.
A while later I test-drove one I found on a used car lot, same model year, that was going for like $275. Scruffier on the outside, faded paint etc, but it was mechanically fine, still even had the factory 8-track player in it. I'm glad to report the thing was just as hilarious to drive as I'd hoped. Taking it down State St in SLC, I cracked up at how everything got out of its way. Lovely memory.
Late to the party (so I've trundled back over the last couple of pages to recap), but I'm a couple of episodes into Clarkson's Farm now and yeah, this is top stuff.
The best thing is all the sheep drama will have been real. You don't need to stage that, that shit happens constantly to far better farmers than Clarkson.
Really, thats the reason Clarksons farm was good and A Massive Hunt was bad. Spending over a year on a farm you have zero need to stage drama, it'll happen on its own sooner or later. A massive hunt suffered because the journey itself was too short to allow things to happen naturally so they had to fake it, it was obvious and the show suffered for it.
The best thing is all the sheep drama will have been real. You don't need to stage that, that shit happens constantly to far better farmers than Clarkson.
Really, thats the reason Clarksons farm was good and A Massive Hunt was bad. Spending over a year on a farm you have zero need to stage drama, it'll happen on its own sooner or later. A massive hunt suffered because the journey itself was too short to allow things to happen naturally so they had to fake it, it was obvious and the show suffered for it.
I mean it happens to a degree in all the specials but the good ones also have a degree of serendipity that blurs the lines and suspends your disbelief. AMH either had more staged events or was just far more obvious about it. It feels like they were forced in that direction because usually their journeys are like a thousand miles but this one was a couple of hundred just across really bad roads.
I mean it happens to a degree in all the specials but the good ones also have a degree of serendipity that blurs the lines and suspends your disbelief. AMH either had more staged events or was just far more obvious about it. It feels like they were forced in that direction because usually their journeys are like a thousand miles but this one was a couple of hundred just across really bad roads.
After Mongolia, they're really in a tough place to top that.
That's the thing, they don't need to top it. This isn't seasons 1-X of your favorite Big Bad show. I would be quite happy if they just stick to the long form adventures like we're mostly (barring Massive Hunt) getting. One of the things I like seeing in these (and it might be fake) is how Jeremy is arguably the better tourist of the 3, in terms of fitting in, being polite to the locals, etc. As an ex-pat, when they are in the market and he's talking about haggling with people who make your fun money in a day... it's just... Yeah, not a good look.
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
After Mongolia, they're really in a tough place to top that.
That's the thing, they don't need to top it. This isn't seasons 1-X of your favorite Big Bad show. I would be quite happy if they just stick to the long form adventures like we're mostly (barring Massive Hunt) getting. One of the things I like seeing in these (and it might be fake) is how Jeremy is arguably the better tourist of the 3, in terms of fitting in, being polite to the locals, etc. As an ex-pat, when they are in the market and he's talking about haggling with people who make your fun money in a day... it's just... Yeah, not a good look.
*Cut to Richard Hammond haggling over a watch*
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
What they need to do is have a season of all three trying to work on Clarkson's farm. For once, he could blow their actual minds by actually showing real knowledge of something practical, and then we get to watch him channel his inner Kaleb trying to keep the other two from doing the same stupid shit he did the first time around.
And then Kaleb is there to try and keep them from falling into farm equipment.
I wouldn't be surprised if they did make a cameo in the future season but at the same time it might be weird contractually since their solo projects seem to be ring fenced off from their collaboration stuff?
What they need to do is have a season of all three trying to work on Clarkson's farm. For once, he could blow their actual minds by actually showing real knowledge of something practical, and then we get to watch him channel his inner Kaleb trying to keep the other two from doing the same stupid shit he did the first time around.
And then Kaleb is there to try and keep them from falling into farm equipment.
Watching Clarkson's Farm, it really felt like something that May should show up in. I know Hammond likes animals, but for whatever reason I totally thought May would be a good fit for a farm show.
Posts
They're all on Amazon; a couple seasons are free with Prime, others are either like $1-2 per episode or free with some weird car-focused other channel subscription
So buying all the specials is like $20 total - well worth it!
A good chunk of the specials are also available free on youtube... for who knows what reason. I'm assuming either piracy that BBC/Amazon hasn't noticed or... idiocy? Either way it's nice.
Yeah I finally sprung for all the specials a year or so ago and haven't regretted the investment once.
I think Amazon even collected them all under "Season Zero" on the page.
Its fun though. And makes me want to fire up Farming Simulator 2019 on my Playstation.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
The joke for this bit with the cheap cars is completely lost if you don't use the actual song (which is what happened on the Amazon/syndication plays and a lot of other places)
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
wait, what did it get changed to?
There is quite a bit of music missing from the syndicated version on that one. Amazon must think I hate that one because every time I get to it in a rewatch I load up the one I have saved instead.
Nope!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.topgear.com/car-reviews/mazda/mazda2?amp=1
Judging by Clarksons comments, it will be well into 2022 before that comes out. He said something about it taking a year to be filmed.
James is making his own gin, 60ish bucks American but you can't buy it outside the UK right now.
Bourbon's better.
woo! season 2 of Kaleb's Farm confirmed!
Living the American dream — in Scotland: Classic US cars may look iconic but there are many reasons why we don't drive them here, as we learnt on our daftest Grand Tour yet
By Jeremy Clarkson (Sunday Times, July 18) [Note: this article contains very mild spoilers]
In order to make the last few Grand Tour specials, I've driven a V8 beach buggy across the Namib, a Bentley Continental on the horrific roads of Madagascar and hurtled down the Mekong in a jet-propelled Vietnam war boat with two Corvette engines in the back.
For the next outing we were planning on a trip to the snowy wastelands of northern Russia. The production team laboured for months, sourcing locations, shipping the cars to the start point and getting permission to close Murmansk's main airport for the day, for the biggest stunt we'd ever attempted. But just a week before we were due to set off, Covid arrived, so we went to Scotland instead.
Now, what we normally do with a 90-minute special is choose three improbable cars and then try to get them across terrain that's wholly unsuitable. This creates jeopardy and tension. Will the Lancia get across Botswana? Will the Volvo get across the Serengeti? Will Hammond crash again?
But you can't very well do that in Scotland because it's got roads and petrol stations and everyone speaks a form of English. So if we began by saying, "Can we drive these cars all the way from Berwick-upon-Tweed to the Outer Hebrides?", everyone would just say "Yes" and turn over to watch Countryfile instead.
We needed to ask a different question and what we came up with is: in Europe, we drink American beer and wear American trousers and listen to American music, but we've never taken to their cars. Why?
When I was growing up, we'd sit down to watch the latest American cop show so we'd see Jim Rockford tearing about in his Pontiac Firebird and Starsky in his Ford Gran Torino and fat Frank Cannon in his Lincoln Continental and then we'd turn to our fathers and say, "Dad, can I have a Ford Anglia?" Why did we do that?
To work this out I bought a Lincoln Continental Mark V, as driven by Jock Ewing in Dallas, James bought a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, as driven by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, and Richard bought a boat-tail Buick Riviera, as blown up by Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout.
I don't think I've ever seen a collection of such stupid cars in one place ever before. But they were stupid in the way that a kid's fridge drawing is stupid. Or a Damien Hirst pickled shark. They were fun stupid.
My £10,000 Wedgwood blue Lincoln had button-backed velour upholstery, which was extremely squidgy, and an actual Cartier clock. It was like sitting in a Cheshire sitting room, only with extra Fablon and not much space. Incredibly, although the car is 19 feet long — three feet longer than a modern Range Rover — it has only two doors and very little room in the back. The boot's big, though. You could put Frank Cannon in there. Maybe there was an episode once where someone did.
Under the bonnet, which is longer than most European cars, and houses, there was a 6.6 litre V8 engine, which somehow managed to produce just 166 horsepower. Fast? No. That's not what you'd call this car. Or gainly. Mainly because its wheels were so far inboard, it was like looking at a hippopotamus sitting on a cake trolley.
James's Cadillac, meanwhile, looked as if they'd mined all of the world's supply of burgundy to make it. It was even more burgundy than the bedspreads you get in every American motel. And not just on the outside. Even the gear shifter was burgundy. Under the bonnet there was an 8.2 litre engine — the largest V8 ever fitted to a production car at the time — and though I never looked, I suspect that was burgundy as well. Hammond's Buick, meanwhile, was very ugly and the windscreen wipers broke, which, given this was Scotland, would prove a constant problem.
There was another, much bigger issue though. It's something you won't see on the screen because it was all happening behind the scenes. The problem of filming during a pandemic.
We couldn't, for instance, take rooms in a hotel. We had to take over the whole thing, bring in our own catering staff and eat, at tables for one, all facing in the same direction as if we were sitting an exam. Also, the bars were shut and we had to be in bed at ten.
Sometimes, when a town simply didn't have a hotel big enough for the 50 people on our crew and the staff needed to run the Covid testing programme, we had to use caravans. All of us. Which meant our slow-moving convoy was about 17 miles long. I'd like to apologise now, if I may, to the good people of Scotland who were stuck behind us. And to the man who owned the woods into which my caravan crashed on day four.
I know what you're thinking.
Oh no, another "scripted" Grand Tour caravan stunt. But it wasn't. We'd decided not to make fun of caravans on this occasion because we've been there and done that, so imagine my surprise, while driving along in the Wedgwood blue Wilmslow lounge, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that I was being overtaken by my 'van.
Instinctively I thought I was in the middle of a very large accident, which was confusing because I was still on the road and I still had control of the steering and the brakes. Plus there was no sound of rending metal and tortured tyres, noises that normally accompany a car crash. It turned out that the towbar had simply come off and that as a result, my sleeping quarters were buried at the bottom of a bank, in a thick and impenetrable forest.
Eventually, after seven days of solid rain — I did not drive the Lincoln for even so much as a yard without the wipers on — we arrived in that bit of Scotland that can puff out its chest in any competition to find "the most beautiful place in the world". But we couldn't see any of it because everything above our shoes was in the clouds.
And then we were on Skye and then we were on a ferry to the Outer Hebrides. And when we landed on North Uist, a spookily beautiful island I'd never even heard of, we headed immediately to the nearest bar, which was full of Joanna Lumley.
Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer were there too, and so was the director from A League of Their Own, who was on a recce prior to the arrival of Jamie Redknapp. It seems that every television show, penned in by Covid, had decided that North Uist was about as "exotic" as Britain could muster and had headed there as well. There was even one scene for which we had to wait for Joanna Lumley to herd some cows across the sea before we could fire up our cameras.
The only issue that remained was that in our shorter, "unplugged" Grand Tour lockdown special, I realised that Richard Hammond had made it all the way to within sight of the finishing post without having a single accident. He went to bed every night and took his own trousers off, rather than getting a paramedic to do it for him.
It's OK though, don't worry. With seconds to go, he managed it. And it's his best accident yet, mainly because he didn't have to go off in an air ambulance.
Instead he went home on a plane we'd had to charter to keep us all safe from the bat flu. Me though? I went home in my Lincoln and I still have it today.
So why did we never buy American cars? No idea. They're hilarious.
***
The Grand Tour Presents: Lockdown is on Amazon Prime Video from July
Did you not watch the trailer yet? Dooo eeet.
Steam | XBL
He'll be able to buy a wider variety of seeds, but resources will become more expensive
Should be able to finish the community centre, though
(Everything I know about farming I learned from Stardew Valley)
And the engines were so terrible, but they had awful fuel efficiency to make up for it.
My defining memory of that car is being driven to school at about 10 years old and being rear-ended by a new car while we were waiting to turn into the school parking lot. What makes it so memorable is that when we got out and looked the car that hit us had caved in the whole front end. The Thunderbird had some scratches on the rear bumper.
Six hundred bucks he wanted for it. Nobody wanted the things. It was in lovely condition, similar burgundy color to May's Cadillac in the trailer. Probably a 10K car now.
A while later I test-drove one I found on a used car lot, same model year, that was going for like $275. Scruffier on the outside, faded paint etc, but it was mechanically fine, still even had the factory 8-track player in it. I'm glad to report the thing was just as hilarious to drive as I'd hoped. Taking it down State St in SLC, I cracked up at how everything got out of its way. Lovely memory.
Steam | XBL
The sheep, omg. Got me right there.
Steam | XBL
Really, thats the reason Clarksons farm was good and A Massive Hunt was bad. Spending over a year on a farm you have zero need to stage drama, it'll happen on its own sooner or later. A massive hunt suffered because the journey itself was too short to allow things to happen naturally so they had to fake it, it was obvious and the show suffered for it.
That's generally been the case with specials.
Right, yes, I'm agreeing with you.
That's the thing, they don't need to top it. This isn't seasons 1-X of your favorite Big Bad show. I would be quite happy if they just stick to the long form adventures like we're mostly (barring Massive Hunt) getting. One of the things I like seeing in these (and it might be fake) is how Jeremy is arguably the better tourist of the 3, in terms of fitting in, being polite to the locals, etc. As an ex-pat, when they are in the market and he's talking about haggling with people who make your fun money in a day... it's just... Yeah, not a good look.
*Cut to Richard Hammond haggling over a watch*
And then Kaleb is there to try and keep them from falling into farm equipment.
God that sounds absolutely fantastic