JARRAD BOYD
Ex-Top Gear presenters, Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond could face legal action from the BBC over any similarities between their new show The Grand Tour and BBC’s Top Gear, according to the show’s producer.
Producer of The Grand Tour, Andy Wilman told the Daily Telegraph lawyers acting on behalf of the new Amazon motoring show had warned the shows presenters they risked legal action from the BBC if they included content too similar to Top Gear.
Mr Wilman said the legal discussion between the presenters and lawyers became hilarious, as the lawyers called in to question whether or not one of the shows presenters James May would be able to use the word c**k.
May had frequently used the word during his tenure on Top Gear and it had become somewhat of a catchphrase.
Mr Wilman said the discussions became more amusing as the lawyers went into further detail on what constituted a similarity.
“They got funnier and funnier,” he said.
“We went to Namibia to make a big film. The lawyers got out a film we had done [for Top Gear] in Botswana.”
“The lawyers go through everything and they said, ‘There’s a scene [in Top Gear] where you’re in the middle of the Okavango and you go, “This scenery is beautiful”, so watch that you don’t do that.”
“So we were in the desert in Namibia and we had to go, “for legal reasons, this scenery is s**t’.”
Mr Wilman said the new show’s studio will have a leaderboard showing how cars had performed, though presenters were banned from having handwritten information on the leaderboard, amidst fears of infringing upon Top Gear’s intellectual property rights.
“There’s a leaderboard, but we can’t have handwritten stuff, that’s all got to change for the lawyers. We still test cars and stuff though,” he said.
The producer also said The Grand Tour will have a news section though they will refrain from calling it “the news”, as this was the name of the news section on Top Gear.
The Grand Tour is set to release on Amazon Prime later this year.
