The Grand Tour's Fourth Episode Was Half As Long In India Due To Amazon's Extreme Censoring

As you might know if you watched it, The Grand Tour’s fourth episode was 62 minutes long. Unless you were watching in India, in which case the instalment was only 30 minutes in duration. Yep, yes than half as long. The reason? It was massively censored in the country.

Mashable reports that parts of the episode which showed the windscreen of Jeremy Clarkson’s ‘bone car’ being made from cow parts were cut. With a whopping 32 minutes missing however, we can only assume massive chunks of the ‘eco car’ segment were cut.

Cows are considered sacred in Hinduism, and with almost 80 per cent of the country’s population identifies as Hindus, Amazon was clearly trying its best to avoid offending. But did it go too far?

It’s apparently common practice for broadcasters to censor parts of programmes for release in India, but the sheer scale of the cuts to this Grand Tour episode are seen as unusual, and Amazon’s extreme censorship has been labelled by some media outlets as ‘heavy-handed’.

Amazon told Mashable India:

“Amazon is a responsible company and we are here to entertain the Indian customer with award-winning content from the US along with blockbusters from Indian and regional makers…We will keep Indian cultural sensitivities in mind while offering this content to customers.”

The Grand Tour continues this Friday with episode six of its debut series.
Source: The Independent, Mashable