The same ones that were in decline before getting thrown off the Beeb and spent the next too many years making miserable programs. About the time they started getting their groove back something(s) mysterious and unmentioned melted down in the background. Then this pandemic hit utterly derailing any work they might have been doing.
Or so you would think given the only public face Clarkson has put on it in recent memory was popping up on IG to announce cancelling episode 2 premiere this Spring. Oh wait, he made a dank (in the old sense of the word) video in his potato cellar where he looked shell shocked and mumbled many words of little meaning and again a conjoined screen PSA stumble carried off by the other two in that same week. Instead of showing what he has been doing, I’d like to highlight in 1 minute how far he has fallen.
James May went off the cliff and is falling deeper and deeper into his sepia colored world. The years of pummeling by everyone at one point appeared to be turning him into the very thing he hates most. That utter pillock Clarkson. Removing the shell of personal assistants and slick editing of professionally written dialogue has shown what a false assumption that was. Where Clarkson wafts of rockstar burnout from the safe environs of his farm. Observe James in his Quar-cantina trying to figure things out on his lonesome, recycling hep lingo meta-ironically, and peppering dank (modern meaning) memes over his preparation of canned Haggis. Looking like he’s just spent a long night sorting similar screws by a compound system of thread gauge > fastener type and damned well intends to continue that methodology to cooking.
Richard Hammond, this man should be a space cadet and by far the least presentable of the presenters after almost dying multiple times. Not to mention putting JC on his heels at how voluminously he could self medicate in recent years. To be frank, his character had gone a bit soft belying problems of an unspecified, yet entirely lamentable, nature curtailing his abilities on set. So how in bloody hell is he the most stable and by far the only good humored one of the three? He’s still married to the same woman, his kids don’t appear to hate him, and he appears to be enjoying life. Unbelievably he’s managed shed all the accumulated stress and neurosis over the course of a few weeks at home making silly videos with a daughter (who’s clearly following her dad’s career path). In which he most recently emulated “The Long Way Round” in his courtyard with too many flubs and losing at her patter than I can recount.
At this point I’d illegally download from MN a web series with just Hammond being filmed by his daughter as she randomly coddles and puts him on about slightly embarrassing aspects of life viewers would never see... from her roving vantage behind the camera. Then masterfully register on Drivetribe as username: Sp3rmSandwich737 to scream in Clarkson’s general direction about how rubbish seasons 1 & 2 of GT were. Who knows, maybe the break will see them all come back with something worth laughing at again. Someone certainly let all the magic smoke out of their wiring during the BBC years.