The Grand Tour – aka Amazon does Top Gear – is back with a new trio of presenters. Whether you care will largely depend on your general attitude to television. If you think its purpose is to push boundaries, entertain, inform and edify, you may as well stop reading now. If, on the other hand, you treat TV like soma, then the lightly revamped show is probably worth your consideration.
I’m in the soma category. The only job of TV, as far as I’m concerned, is to relieve me of having to make conversation with the Fawn while I’m having my supper, and then to distract me long enough for me to be able to half-digest my food so that I’m ready to have my bath and go to bed. I don’t need great art or masterclass acting or high drama – indeed I’d almost rather not because I don’t want, at this point in my day, to be excited or filled with admiration or awe. I just want to slump there gawping, and not be made so incensed – by, say, diversity casting or an implausible excess of lesbian characters – that I want to chuck things at the screen.
They must be doing something right, because I sat through three episodes without switching over to Reacher
Judged by these criteria, The Grand Tour does the job just fine. One of the presenters, Thomas Holland, suffers slightly from being Canadian; another, James Engelsman, feels a bit like the sort of person you might see drinking a pint outside a pub in Fulham wearing a rugger shirt; the third, Francis Bourgeois, comes across for the first fraction of a second as being slightly special needs. But they must be doing something right, because I sat through three whole episodes without at any stage feeling the urge to switch over to Reacher instead.
