James May explains why TV partnership with Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond has ended

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Kelly Rissman

US News Reporter

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James May has explained why he’s ended his TV partnership with Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond.

The trio first started working together on BBC’s Top Gear in 2002 and moved over to Amazon for Prime Video series The Grand Tour, which premiered in 2016.

However, a recent special of the car show, titled One for the Road, is the swansong for the trio’s onscreen partnership – and May has reflected on why they have decided to cut ties professionally.

According to May, a part of the appeal was the fact they came to the decision on their own terms, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We are getting on a bit and everything does have to end. To be honest, we wanted to end it on our own terms. As we always used to say, ‘We want to land it safely, not fly it into a cliff.’”

May said that he believes the trio have “largely exhausted our take on the subject”, adding: “Not the subject itself. There’s space, I think, for a new approach to it, but it can’t come from us. We’re a bit too stuck in our way of doing it.”

When asked if that subject was cars of “the friendship between three men”, May said: “I sometimes wonder if it is the friendship – we wind each other up so badly – but it definitely started out as cars and our enthusiasm for them and even, dare I say it, our knowledge of them.

“But it is also about human relationships. And without wishing to sound pretentious, also the human condition – a view of what life means from the perspective of people who are a bit overly obsessed about cars. And, of course, it also turned into a travel show, a pantomime, a circus – all these other things as well.”

Clarkson, who is currently enjoying the biggest success of his career with Clarkson’s Farm, previously said the trio had “thought long and hard about how we should end our 22-year partnership, but in the end we just went to the end of the alphabet” and selected Zimbabwe as a place to set the special.

“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.”

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Clarkson said it “makes the three of us happy” that their working relationship did not disintegrate “in a blizzard of outrage and tabloid headlines”, but was “landed safely and gently”.