The Grand Tour review, series 3: Jeremy Clarkson delivers wanton destruction in Detroit

Is there any way of reviewing the new series opener of The Grand Tour without reviewing Jeremy Clarkson? Probably not, because the two are so deeply intertwined as to be inseparable, as the BBC discovered to their cost when they continued Top Gear without him. So, let’s just get a few of Jeremy’s more predictable pet hates out of the way, including Teslas, coffee shops, rock music made after the year 1979, and vegetables – or what he calls “vegetablism”. Although from the sight of Jezza’s increasingly turbo-charged tummy, he could perhaps do with a strict regime of vegetabilism.

There’s a fair amount of wanton destruction awaiting in the third series of The Grand Tour, but nothing quite so shocking as when Clarkson churns up a bed of neatly cultivated broad beans in his Ford Mustang RTR, one of the “muscle machines” that he is racing around the deserted highways of Detroit with Hammond and May (surnames only, of course) in this opening episode.

Motor City is a test-case for everything Clarkson sees as having gone wrong with the world, its automobile factories now crumbling mausoleums that are starting to be colonised by an urban farms initiative (hence the broad bean trashing). Or as Clarkson puts it, sounding like Trump tweet: “This is Detroit. It shouldn’t be a help-yourself street allotment for organic vegan peace hippies.”

The trio’s plan for making Detroit great again is to roar around its suspiciously empty main drag. The truth is that I couldn’t care less about cars – I drive a ten-year-old Ford Mondeo for heaven’s sake – but I am interested in what these three have to say about them. There’s no doubt that Clarkson is one of the best motoring journalists on the planet and it’s in this expertise and not his increasingly flabby prejudices that his true wit lies.

The producers obviously think we need some more of the latter, however, the trio heading into Detroit’s newly gentrified centre so Clarkson can be aghast at all the florists and ramen shops. “In 1997 in downtown Detroit, someone put a gun against my head,” Jezza reminisces. “Now it’s all just hipsters with dogs and bicycles.” Actually, Detroit is still officially America’s second most violent big city, and if Jeremy wants someone a gun put against his head again, I’m sure he could find someone to oblige.

In the meantime, Richard Hammond buys a house for $2,200 (£1,700), James May learns how to “do a doughnut” (a prolonged wheelspin), and all three see who can make the most noise spinning their vehicles in the old Henry Ford Theatre, which is now rather fittingly a multistorey car park. “This car is louder than Deep Purple,” exclaims Clarkson, the hard rock band only ever having topped out at 117 decibels, and an old age of tinnitus surely beckons for Richard Hamilton.

We go back to a tent in the Cotswolds, where the audience stands around like the UFO-gawping humans in Close Encounters of a Third Kind. The roles of Hammond and May (apologies if this sounds like a Brexit story) appear here to be to be the voices of liberalism. “If only all the world were full of people like Jeremy Clarkson,” says May. “Then we could have slavery and witch burning”. The worry, of course, is that the world is full of people like Jeremy Clarkson.

And then it’s back to Detroit for yet another race whose result I won’t bore you with. If I were producing it, I would have ended the episode before that, perhaps adding a recently filmed excerpt in which Clarkson, May and Hammond take to a French autoroute in their American cars and attempt to break through a gilet jaune roadblock.

Series 3 of The Grand Tour is on Amazon Prime from 18 January