But episodes had typically also included car reviews, celebrity interviews, short comedy segments, and studio banter. This combination of engaging documentary-style programming and unscripted road trip movie/amateur engineering challenge has long been the backbone of Clarkson, Hammond, and May’s collaborations.
Their goal was to build a vehicle and drive it hundreds of miles off-road to civilization. Clarkson and cohosts Richard Hammond and James May were dropped onto the edge of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, with parts, provisions, and instructions.
The week prior, The Grand Tour had devoted its entire program to a unique motoring challenge. And after decades of commanding the market, Ford was discontinuing its midsize sedan in order to concentrate on other models.Īfter the film, the show returned to the studio-a large tent set up in the English countryside-where host Jeremy Clarkson tried (and failed) to hold back tears as he announced that The Grand Tour’s fourth season would feature a format change. It’s a mundane topic on the surface, but as the film showed in extensive and loving detail, mundane things like a family car can represent the way a society operates.
The Season 3 finale of Amazon’s popular car show The Grand Tour was titled “Funeral for a Ford.” The episode dedicated most of its run time to a documentary film about the history of the midsize Ford sedan.
