The Top Gear trio ran out of road after much controversy

Offensive 'banter' helped propel the presenters to popularity but viewers' enthusiasm has waned

- Louis Chilton

All good things must come to an end – and most bad things, too. When it was reported on Saturday that ex-Top Gear stars Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May were parting ways after 21 years as a trio, you couldn’t really describe it as “going out with a bang”. A backfiring car exhaust, at a push. No, this could more accurately be described as an anticlimax – the Top Gear bandwagon’s slow crawl to a halt after burning up the last dregs of premium unleaded.

The long and short of it is this: W Chump & Sons, the production company belonging to Clarkson, Hammond, and May, has reportedly dissolved. The Grand Tour, Prime Video’s motoring, travel, and heterosexual banter-themed series and de facto successor to Top Gear, has seemingly recorded its final episode – or at least the final one with this presenting lineup. (The last hurrah, a special in which the three of them travel to Zimbabwe, is yet to come out.)

The reasons for this may not have been specified, but it doesn’t take too many deductive acrobatics to hazard a guess. For two decades, the three presenters have been peddling the same regressive, unedifying programming, dogged along the way by a procession of controversies. If the series are popular and profitable – as, for years, they undoubtedly were – this isn’t seen as a problem. But now? It just might be.

In its pomp, Top Gear was one of the BBC’s biggest success stories. From 2003 to 2015, Clarkson, Hammond and May were three of the most visible and popular presenters on British television. It is doubtless