That's why the grand tour ended on Amazon

Grand Tour producer Andy Wilman revealed how the success of the Amazon Prime series was created after himself, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May had left the BBC.

All four left the British broadcaster in 2015 and then set up their own production company, W. Chump & Sons, which produces The Grand Tour for Amazon Prime, as well as the Drivetribe automotive media platform.

Speaking of the shift from the traditional media team to the streaming service at the request of Amazon, Wilman said that this decision was the only way to guarantee the editorial freedom she enjoyed at the BBC.

"If we wanted to continue working together, we had to be somewhere where we could do our own show," Wilman told PandaConf's Web Summit. "We needed editorial freedom because we always had it, and by editorial freedom I mean if you go to some broadcasters, they have a tone: they will make you do a show that matches their channel, while Amazon and Netflix are a platform you do the trick, they pull it out, so we knew deep inside us that the new world, which was then ours, was where we had to go but we did not know how to get there.

Although the Grand Tour resembles the iteration of Top Gear that preceded it, the show had to legally change some elements. Part was the studio, which was more of a touring tent for the show's first series.

"Legally, because we could not do Top Gear anymore, but we wanted something that had the same elements, we had to legally change things," said Wilman. "Jeremy had seen a real detective episode where there was a tent with some sort of religious meeting and he said," Why do not we do that? Why do not we get a tent and then move it around the world? "?" "

"So we're attending our first meeting with Amazon, we're in the elevator and our lawyer told Jeremy," Do not talk about the tent, "" the high costs of moving the show around the world being considered prohibitive . "So we come in and we talk to Amazon and this guy goes" do you have any ideas? "Added Wilman, revealing that Clarkson was filling the silence with his tent site for left field," and then it was off so Amazon subscribed to that, so we had to do it. "

The Grand Tour then toured the world in its first series and was a worldwide success, much like Top Gear when Clarkson, Hammon, May and Wilman were at the helm, but the quartet's global appeal never been intentional.

"We were lucky [that] we have never dreamed of a big world show, we just wanted to do a better show than the one we had before, "said Wilman. If you have someone like Simon Cowell or [Mark] Burnett, they'll sit down and they'll design the X Factor, they'll design The Apprentice and they'll design it to become a drummer in the world; and they will have a powerful format that you can sell to other countries and we have never done it. Ours simply grew organically and many things that happened were just a happy accident. "

"Jeremy is the person who excites me the most.Although he is known to be a kind of very noisy TV presenter, he is actually a print journalist, so he's very focused on the length of attention, editing and other things like that, "he said about the enduring appeal of Top Gear and the Grand Tour. "So, all the light bulb moments that we imagined to reinvigorate the show were a bit of his own."