Top Gear boss shares sad reason staff didn’t fight hard to save show

Former Top Gear producer Andy Wilman says the show had become such a ‘s**t***w’ with everyone on it exhausted – that the public fought much harder than those involved to save it after Jeremy Clarkson was suspended for punching a producer.

Wilman believes Clarkson and co-presenters James May and Richard Hammond, along with those behind the camera, may have been thinking the scandal was fate telling them to stop because the hit series was ‘collapsing in on itself’.

The BBC show became the world’s most popular factual programme with the same three presenters for 21 series, until in 2015 a producer claimed Clarkson punched him in a hotel.

After an investigation the BBC dropped Clarkson and the others who made the show such a success did not want to continue without him despite BBC approaches.

But Wilman said there may have been an element where they let it fold because of the exhausting schedule and past controversies.

Wilman said of Clarkson’s bust-up and the fall-out: ‘Jeremy and the producer have agreed never to talk about it. All of us, we respect that.

‘The only thing I’ve got to offer is ‘Do you realise how much our show was falling apart at the seams, the wheels were coming off.’

‘That pressure in that last series we were filming, the whole thing was collapsing in on itself. 

‘Our timetables, our everything. We went on air and we still had three shows worth of films to shoot.

‘That’s like starting an F1 season and you still haven’t built the front of the car. The timetable had shrunk and shrunk.

‘Wednesday night you’d finish the studio record and then it’s off to a location to film Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

‘That was the environment. Nobody came to the BBC and talked about it. They would have gone ‘it’s irrelevant, you should have run your show better’.’

Speaking about the period between Clarkson being suspended pending inquiries and his contract not being renewed, leading Wilman to quit, he added: ‘I kind of observed and watched. 

‘There were a few big PR supremo guys going (to Clarkson) ‘do you want some help, do you want some reputational management help?’

‘And he kept on saying ‘no’, and ‘no’, and put the phone down, sat in his flat and he cut himself off.

‘My interpretation is he knew now this huge thing was in jeopardy and he was waiting for his punishment.

‘There may have been a bit as well, we were all so exhausted that did we go ‘Shall we let it crash? It’s fate telling us to stop’.

‘The public doing those million strong petitions were fighting much harder than we ever were in terms of on the front foot. That we were done, yeah.’

There had been previous controversies, in which Wilman admits mistakes were made, where the show upset fans with a remark deemed racist, and Mexicans for calling them lazy.

The year before Clarkson’s bust-up, they were set upon in Argentina because Argentinians thought Clarkson’s number plate was a deliberately provocative one referring to the Falklands War.

Wilman told the High Performance podcast: ‘We still had our lives, but maybe it was a full stop.

‘Maybe we were just thinking ‘Bloody hell, this is a s**tshow that has to end’.’

Speaking to The Sun, Wilman said of his longtime friend Clarkson: ‘I think people totally misunderstand Jeremy… He’s never an angry person.’

He further hit out at the BBC’s attitude towards Jeremy’s co-hosts, Richard Hammond and James May, after they got rid of Jeremy, trying to ‘split’ the trio up after Jeremy’s departure. 

Andy said: ‘They thought they could just blithely go, “Right, let’s put a wedge between them, and then we’ll have two of them and we’ll f*** them over.”‘

Top Gear is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.