The Grand Tour: Sand Job review – Blokey pantomime clocks in at more than two hours, but it’s actually enjoyable

I consider myself a collector of vintage German cars. I currently have a collection of… one: a 2008 VW Polo, pristine in glistening silver. I am laying it down like a bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc, fully in the expectation that it will one day have accrued a value sufficient to give my dog the life he deserves. My motoring credentials, though impressive, are not uncommon among Britons. For all the environmental pressure to wean ourselves off petrol, we are a nation of motoring enthusiasts. And no export has typified that, in the past decades, more than Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May: three journalists whose BBC show, Top Gear, was a runaway international success, and who now ply their trade for Amazon with The Grand Tour.

The Grand Tour’s penultimate adventure is titled “Sand Job” – which I think is an abstruse sexual pun – and finds Clarkson, Hammond and May tasked with a drive from the desert town of Choum in Mauritania to the beaches of Dakar in Senegal, the finishing line for the famous Paris-Dakar rally. “There’s no such place as Mauritania!” cries Hammond, but, in fact, there is. A vast, dusty, inhospitable place, where temperatures regularly exceed 50C and where the roads have been paved, not with good intentions, but by centuries of vicious sandstorms. For the journey, they will be riding in three specially modified sports cars: Clarkson in a Jaguar (or “JAAAAAG” as the bumper now reads), Hammond in an Aston Martin, and May in a Maserati. “We’ve brought lightly modified supermodels to a kick-boxing championship,” Clarkson announces, as their rides arrive in Choum. And so it proves.

The Grand Tour – like these cars, which have been engorged for desert purposes with vast headlight racks, tyres lifting the chassis off the ground, and vents to try to cool the engines – is a strange beast. It is predominantly a work of elaborate fiction, played semi-knowingly for its audience (and with a runtime of 135 minutes, the same as Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story, there is plenty of scope for hijinks). The set-pieces become more provocatively risible as the episode progresses, culminating in a sequence in which Clarkson lets a rogue snowmobile loose in the Sahara Desert, only for it to make an absurdist reappearance, as surely as Chekhov’s gun goes off, later in the narrative. With this sense that the production team are pulling the strings, sequences with a perceived jeopardy – such as driving the cars through an inhospitable mountain pass or trying to float them across the Senegal River – feel blunted.

But it’s no surprise, given the show’s track record. In the 2022 episode “A Scandi Flick”, May was badly injured during a set-piece in a tunnel (which is referenced in “Sand Job”). That incident, in turn, evoked images of Hammond’s life-threatening accident in 2006, which was front-page news. So, it’s perhaps no bad thing that health and safety has got its hands on The Grand Tour, especially as Clarkson and May are both now in their sixties. But the whole thing ends up feeling very camp; a pantomime enacted for middle-aged men.

Which isn’t to say that “Sand Job” is unenjoyable. For those who find the dispassionately third-person approach employed by most nature documentaries anaemic, The Grand Tour serves as a zippier depiction of humanity’s intersection with geography. A drone shot of a train pulling into Choum is as remarkable as anything David Attenborough could cook up (and Hammond’s exclamation of “that is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen”, rather less portentous). Mauritania – a country that only made slaveholding criminal in 2007 – is a fascinating place, from historic Chinguetti, where the sands are slowly eating the town alive, to the capital Nouakchott, where a procession of Frankenstein cars speak to Mauritanian isolation from the world. Purely as travel journalism, The Grand Tour works.

“Maybe we could do some car stuff in our car programme,” Clarkson muses at one point. The show is a long way from the product reviews of Top Gear. And yet, while its hosts might feel like it has become a picaresque buddy comedy, The Grand Tour does keep its mechanised co-stars front and centre. The fourth wall is deliberately broken, whether by calls to Mr Wilman (Andy Wilman, the show’s executive producer) or shots of support vehicles, giving the show the impression of having its engine exposed. As an anthropological chronicle of the relationship between man and his best friend (not dog: car), Hammond’s pan-Saharan attempts to make his Aston Martin functioning are almost moving. And there’s no starker reminder of the permeation of globalisation than seeing how eyeballs always bulge in the direction of a Maserati, even in the far recesses of the desert, 4,000km from Bologna.

“It’s incredible,” Hammond reflects to Clarkson. “You’ve had so many opportunities to make your insanity real.” But there is nothing truly insane about The Grand Tour. It is a boys’ own adventure where three middle-aged, middle-class men get to live out their audience’s fantasies, in much the manner that Anthony Bourdain did for erudite foodies. The jokes about Ebola-induced diarrhoea and the fetishisation of a cold, crisp lager are blokey, but against such an expansive backdrop, the outlook is far from parochial.