Top Gear creator reacts to mania around beloved hosts: “Would I want any of that? Would I b****cks”

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

"If you had Ricky Gervais walking down one side of the street, and Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond walking down the other, everyone would be asking for selfies and autographs with those guys,” explains Andy Wilman, the executive producer of both Top Gear and its big-budget globe-trotting progeny Grand Tour. "Ricky Gervais is probably more famous, but people just wouldn’t go near him because he’s got a famous aura, whereas people would think, 'You three are in the studio talking about going to the pub and all that sort of thing, we know you and you absolutely belong to us.' The mania and the fan stuff around them was insane. There was no barrier. Would I want any of that? Would I bollocks."

And so it comes of something of a surprise that the challenge-setter, mission-controller and arse-kicker-in-chief to the holy triumvirate should now break cover to write Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure – a memoir and insider’s account of life on both shows. "I’ve always agreed with Chris Blackwell [founder of Island Records], who gave Bob Marley and the Wailers to the world. When asked why there was no photograph of him with Marley he said, 'People behind the camera should stay behind the camera.' And that suited me because I was very comfortable with the effect my input was having and genuinely had no desire to be famous."

The book has come about because "Jeremy kept getting asked to write about what was going on behind the scenes but said he couldn’t remember anything, and told the publisher to ask me to do it because I’ve got a better memory than him. I’m sure the accountants at Penguin would prefer to have Jeremy’s name on it but it’s mine," he smiles. "I agreed to do it because I wanted a sense of wrapping everything up [after The Grand Tour ended last year], a bit of catharsis, plus I wanted to do something that was not a collaboration like a TV show. My book, my rules. It’s nice to have a bit of control for once."

You can get through Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure like Sir Michael Gambon taking a corner in the show’s famous Reasonably Priced Car – ie on two wheels. "Jeremy said he read it in a day," shrugs the author, "I think that’s a compliment." It may well have refreshed what remains of Clarkson’s memory, but this book earns its stripes from the very different perspective the author is able to provide. That is to say, from the driver’s seat as Top Gear is rebooted and then ends up attracting a reported 350 million viewers in 200 countries; from a seat in Clarkson’s kitchen as he waits to find out if his oldest friend (he and Clarkson were at school together in the mid 1970s) is to be sacked following the infamous altercation with a producer; and then from a leather-trimmed Recaro sport seat as the team win the Amazon Prime lottery and set off on The Grand Tour from 2016 to 2024.

The stories are all here – and told with a laugh-out-loud combination of perfect delivery, self-deprecation and honesty. Fans of both shows will have heard some of them before (the H982 FKL number plate in Argentina that seemed to reference the Falklands conflict so directly the presenters and crew had to be evacuated before they were lynched, for instance), but not all of them (Wilman’s six-year-old son booting ‘The Stig’ between the legs, Wilman breaking down in tears in the office of the BBC’s director-general after Clarkson was sacked). And they will certainly not have heard them from the man responsible for editing hours of automobile-related carnage into smash-hit TV. When Clarkson was once asked why they didn’t put out a “bloopers version” of Top Gear, he replied that they already did that every week; but, if this account is anything to go by, it turns out that the hardest thing might have been deciding which ones to leave out.

Finding Hollywood A-listers to appear was a breeze by comparison. The £2,000 flat fee – a mere token in that world – guaranteed that only the enthusiastic would become involved. So while Mark Wahlberg could have been more invested, Tom Cruise enjoyed his time on the show so much that the Wilman family still get a cake from him every Christmas. Although this might also be due to the fact that the exec producer stepped in when a security guard wouldn’t let Cruise use the presenters’ urinals because he wasn’t in possession of a wristband – "There was none of this 'Do you know who I am?' nonsense despite the fact he was (a) Tom Cruise and (b) desperate."

It’s all in the book – but one thing you won’t get is a lesson in how to make the most-watched factual TV programme in the world. "There was no masterplan," laughs the 'fourth man'. "We just started to tit about… we did 'Can Granny do a Donut?' and 'What’s the Right Convertible for a Bald Man?' for our own benefit as a bit of a giggle, and it all seemed to strike a chord. We didn’t go home thinking, 'We’re creating something special here.' We were more, 'Hope we can make this work.'"

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