The Grand Tour

Top Gear: What Would Richard Hammond Be Doing If He Wasn’t A Presenter?

In a recent interview on their YouTube channel, DriveTribe picked Richard Hammond’s brains on all things Hamster, young and old. It was an interesting chat which has Richard opening up about his career, interests and future plans.

During the interview, Richard is asked what he’d be doing now if he hadn’t got the Top Gear job. I think we can all safely say that his life would probably be completely different, he may have stayed in cars but we doubt anything he would have done would have been as successful as Top Gear.

Luckily for us, Hammond tended to agree and said:

“If I hadn’t got the Top Gear job twenty years ago, to be honest I was working quite a lot with ITV, I’d have carried on doing my car shows with Grenada for as long as that lasted. I was [also] doing a small regional car show on ITV so I would have stuck with it but I doubt whatever I’d done would have grown to be something with the scale and reach of Top Gear globally and I don’t think any of us expected that.”

The success that followed with Top Gear, and subsequently The Grand Tour, must have been a monumental surprise for Clarkson, Hammond and May. Richard continued:

“It was a surprise, a delightful one, but a surprise.. we didn’t set out and sit down and say ‘right lets make the biggest show in the world’, we just said ‘lets make the best car show we can’ and thats all of us ever did.”

Is that the key to the trio’s success? Their honest passion for what they do? Well it certainly seems so as Richard elaborated:

“I think that helped it because I think we stuck to the subject.. our passion is for cars and for making TV about them and thats all we wanted to do. We didn’t think cynically ‘if we skew it this way, if we make it that way it’ll work in North America or South Africa, we just made the best show we could.”

It does seem that is the key as to why they are such a massive success worldwide, they are just doing what they love and doing what they love well. The three’s clear friendship and great onscreen banter also can’t help their legacy at all. You can see the full video below:

Related Articles

Back to top button