Jeremy Clarkson has said he is “too old and fat to get into the cars I like” ahead of the final episode of The Grand Tour.
“After 36 years of talking about cars on television, I’m packing it in, because I’m too old and fat to get into the cars that I like and not interested in driving those I don’t,” the 6’5” TV presenter said.
“What this means, of course, is that my 22-year partnership with James May and Richard Hammond is now over,” he added.
“You can see our final road trip together on Amazon Prime very soon. It’s emotional,” he told The Sunday Times.
Clarkson, Hammond and May have been immortalised in TV history and British popular culture alike through Top Gear, described by Clarkson as “schoolboy naughtiness”.
“There was another reason why we chose Zimbabwe, though,” he continued, revealing: “We would drive across it from east to west, as usual, but then we could cross the border and finish up where we began all those years ago: the Makgadikgadi salt pans in Botswana.”
Top Gear featured the trio travelling the world in various eye-catching cars while playing pranks on one another. The format was copied by Amazon after the BBC fired Clarkson in 2015 when he threw a punch at a producer, prompting his co-presenters to leave the corporation.
“It was the show that sat in the BBC schedules like a big blue skid mark. It became a dartboard for the left. I’ll be honest with you,” said Clarkson, who related that in its BBC days the show refused to subscribe to “what was then called political correctness”.