TRYING to cross the English Channel in homemade amphibious cars or tackling Bolivia’s Death Road in old bangers were not the biggest challenges for Top Gear’s daring hosts.
Instead, the toughest hurdle Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May faced was a small group of BBC executives apparently tarring them with the same brush as racist comedian Bernard Manning.
Producer Andy Wilman, who helped turn Top Gear into the world’s most popular factual programme, believes some politically incorrect comments featured on the show left “Islington lefties” within the state broadcaster comparing the hosts to the controversial Seventies Mancunian stand-up comic.
And he is clearly riled that his time with Top Gear came to an end despite being truly remorseful for the remarks.
Andy, who is releasing his memoirs, Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure, tells The Sun: “We’d said sorry, but you got that sense that they were going, ‘That’s not enough’. It was, ‘We need to root out your primeval urges, so we’ll investigate the place’.
“I thought it was a Bernard Manning brush going on.”
Trouble had brewed following a joke on the show about “a slope” — a derogatory term used to describe people of East or South East Asian descent — being on a bridge they built in Thailand in 2014.
That followed an apology the presenters had made three years earlier for characterising Mexicans as lazy.
‘I had death anxiety’
Broadcaster Andy, 63, has finally decided to blow the lid on how Top Gear ended up a write-off a decade after he left.
As producer from 2002 to 2015, he had a ring-side seat of all the motoring show’s rows and death-defying crashes.
He thinks that a small clique had it in for his old pal Jeremy Clarkson, claiming the BBC secretly tried to split up the popular presenting trio.
But Andy — who has also produced Clarkson’s Farm and The Grand Tour with Jeremy — believes Top Gear can return to our TV screens, although he fears the corporation doesn’t “understand” what made it a success.
It has been off air since presenter Freddie Flintoff suffered life-changing injuries in a high-speed crash in December 2022, which Andy says was “avoidable”.
Andy and Jeremy’s friendship stretches back half a century to when Andy joined Repton private school in Derbyshire, aged 13. He felt awkward because of a neurological disability that affected his balance and co-ordination.
Jeremy, who was a couple of years older, met him in a corridor and announced: “From what the teachers told us about your disability, I was expecting a man in a white coat to wheel in a trolley carrying a fish tank with just a brain bobbing about wearing a school cap with wires connected to it.”
The pair became the closest of friends and were even best man at each other’s weddings.
After leaving Repton, Jeremy helped Andy land a job in journalism, writing about cars, and from there he got into television.
Later, when Jeremy persuaded the BBC to bring back Top Gear in 2002, he chose Andy as his producer. Finding new presenters wasn’t easy.
James May was ruled out because he had been part of the original, straight-laced Top Gear set-up that the reboot was trying to get away from.
And the thousands of audition tapes were largely uninspiring, with Richard Hammond invited to try out despite his homemade video demo — in which he jumped off a wall in a Batman outfit — being “a bit s**t”.
Gently stirring sugar into his coffee with a biro pen, Andy recalls: “The whole thing was a bit s**t. Because you’ve got a man in a party-shop Batman outfit jumping off a wall. And it didn’t seem to gel with whatever he was landing next to. He wasn’t landing next to a Batmobile. We were like, ‘What the f*** is he doing?’. But there was something appealing about him. His delivery was good.”
Richard appeared to be doomed after a “mundane” audition in front of Jeremy and Andy.
The pair picked him, however, on the basis of a post-audition rant about messing things up that had them crying with laughter.
Also in the presenting team was Jason Dawe and an unidentified track driver nicknamed The Stig, who Jeremy had wanted to call The Gimp.
The role of the mystery motorist was filled by three people — Perry McCarthy, Ben Collins and Phil Keen.
And the revamped show proved a hit thanks to segments such as Star In A Reasonably Priced Car, in which a celebrity raced around a test track in Dunsfold, Surrey.
But after the first series, the BBC considered dropping Jason and Richard.
While Jason was replaced by James May, Richard got a reprieve.
For the next 12 years, Top Gear’s hosting line-up did not change and, in the 2013 edition of Guinness World Records, it was recognised as the most-watched factual programme in the world, reaching 350million viewers in 212 territories.
Big stars such as Hollywood’s Tom Cruise got behind the wheel of the Reasonably Priced Car, although not all were the huge fans they claimed to be.
Andy was thrilled to have Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood on the show.
But when the subject of Richard’s “accident” was raised, it became clear that Ronnie did not know about the famous high-speed crash that almost killed the presenter in 2006.
Andy recalls with a smile: “He goes, ‘What, did he fall out of a tree?’. And when I told Hammond that, Hammond was choking with laughter.”
The more successful Top Gear became, the more audacious the ideas had to be. That put so much stress on Andy that his doctors prescribed antidepressants as he believed every ache or pain was deadly.
He explains: “I had ‘death anxiety’. I’d have a knot in my back and go, ‘Right, that’s cancer, I know it’. And somebody would go, ‘Hang on, aren’t you really stressed?’. And I’m like, ‘Don’t give me that st, it’s cancer’.”
The tension boiled over on set, too, with Jeremy and Andy shouting “f*** you” at each other when filming in Vietnam went wrong.
The pair made up the next morning. Then there were the comments about Mexicans and the bridge in Thailand.
Speaking to Andy at a central London editing suite, it is clear he is genuinely sorry about the insulting material.
He says: “In the fallout, we felt in ourselves that it was utterly charmless.
“And charm had always been the thing we tried to run with.”
Andy is keen to point out he received a lot of support within the BBC and that the compliance department had often been on his side.
But a probe was launched into the Top Gear operation and an executive was placed in the editing room with Andy.
The producer thinks this was because “the BBC does have that Islington left-wing ideological socialism going on in its management”.
They viewed Andy, Jeremy, Richard and James as “Tory boys”, but, he says, were wrong. Top Gear was diverse in the targets for its near-the-knuckle humour.
In one infamous escapades, they poked fun at “Bible-bashing rednecks” in the state of Alabama by daubing “Man Love Rules OK” on Richard’s truck.
On another of his motoring shows, Meet The Neighbours, in Italy, Jeremy expressed sympathy for refugees coming to Europe.
Andy says: “I think people totally misunderstand Jeremy. In Meet The Neighbours, he does his sum-up piece where he goes, we’ve always been a melting pot. That is not Nigel Farage.”
The final straw was when Jeremy verbally and physically attacked Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon in March 2015. ‘Kidding themselves’ Andy, though, does not think his friend had issues with his temper, revealing: “He’s never an angry person.”
Jeremy was sacked, leaving Top Gear’s future up in the air. But the four men got offers to bring their talents to streaming giants Netflix and Amazon.
In the background, the BBC made lucrative offers to Richard and James to stay on, attempting to split the team in two.
Andy says: “There was no love lost with the BBC at that point. “I thought it was unpleasant, because they didn’t understand what us four have been through over 13 years. 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’.”
In the end, James and Richard stuck with Jeremy and Andy, signing a deal to make The Grand Tour for Amazon.
The BBC rebooted Top Gear with Virgin Radio presenter Chris Evans and Friends actor Matt LeBlanc.
But it failed to captivate viewers in the same way, which Andy says was because it was brought back too quickly in exactly the same format.
He adds: “The vibe was, it will come back bigger and better.
“People start kidding themselves because they have to justify their decision. ‘Losing Jeremy won’t matter’, that sort of thing. You’re like, ‘It f***ing will’.”
Viewing figures plummeted, but what ended the show was Freddie suffering severe facial injuries when his three-wheeler rolled over on the Top Gear track.
There are concerns the stunts that made the show a hit can never be safe. Andy disagrees, saying: “Freddie’s crash was preventable, avoidable. You can make the danger levels acceptable.”
Andy reckons Top Gear could ride again, saying: “I think it could return, but there’s got to be a will. No one’s pushing it.”
For now, he’s focused on planning series six of Clarkson’s Farm — a much gentler production.
He muses: “The worst that can happen is a few bumps and scrapes involving agricultural machinery or Jeremy getting butted in the nuts by a goat. That’s as dangerous as it gets.”
- Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure (Penguin Michael Joseph, £22), is out on Thursday.
