The Grand Tour: Sand Job, review: tired, flabby, in need of a rest – and that's just the show
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Sometimes, when you know precisely what you’re going to get, it can be consoling. It can also be deeply tedious. Depending on your point of view, therefore, you will either find the latest edition of The Grand Tour (Amazon Prime Video) everything you’d hoped for or the same old cobblers.
In either case, no one could dispute that it is just too long. Two hours and 15 minutes of Last of the Summer Petrol is, surely, proof that someone let go of the editorial reins. I happen to like cars and travel, and I’ve even got time for the Clarkson, Hammond and May triumvirate of naughty ninnies. But not this much.
Remember that these travelogues began as segments in Top Gear. Viewers, it turned out, liked the old men arsing around more than the motoring journalism, and so eventually those segments turned in to whole episode “specials”. But it’s not special when it’s all you get, all of the time, and it goes on forever.
The irony for Sand Job (a subtitle we will ignore), is that it consists of a journey across a country, Mauritania, that the three amigos introduce to us as confoundingly dull. There is nothing to see, almost literally, but sand and more sand. Jeremy Clarkson reminds us that only 58 filming permits have been issued since 1960. This is not because they’re hard to come by but because there’s very little to film. And this is our theatre for the next two and a bit hours.
One thing we know about The Grand Tour, however, is that they have some of the best photographers in the business, and they do the absolute best they can. When the wide angles and the drones are let loose on the vast horizons of the Sahara (including one sensational overhead shot of a goods train that ClarkMayHam all agree is the biggest thing they’ve ever seen) the show’s production values touch the heights. Unfortunately it then plummets back down to a series of erection jokes that would flatter a primary school toilet wall.
You’ll note I have avoided any details of what the “Rogue Heroes”, as they term themselves, actually do in Mauritania. This is largely because they don’t do very much. The contrived goal is for the three of them to dress up a Maserati, an Aston and a Jag as Paris-Dakar-style rally cars, and then drive across the desert and end up in Senegal. Complete non-spoiler alert: everything goes wrong, right on cue; they sabotage each other’s vehicles (reminding you that practical jokes, not sarcasm, are the lowest form of wit); and occasionally pretend to be scared.
And that is pretty much that, on and on and on like a tailback on the M6. So much time is spent doing so little that it is impossible not to watch Sand Job without thinking about the imbroglio between Clarkson and his Amazon paymasters last year after his comments about Meghan Markle in The Sun. He was going to be dropped, and then he wasn’t, and then it all went quiet and now here we are with a new Grand Tour that feels very much like it had already been filmed and, well, they might as well bung it out anyway.
This is the penultimate ever episode of The Grand Tour, and it feels like it. Not so much a sand job as a bodge job, then, and boy does it feel like it.
On Amazon Prime Video now
