BBC Review Of The Grand Tour Is "Strangely" Negative

While generally reviews for The Grand Tour came in positively or just a little disappointed, strangely the BBC’s Arts Editor Will Gompertz is not impressed in the slightest.

"... so over-the-top and opulent you'd think that the Prince Regent was behind the camera..."

Gompertz didn’t stop there criticising the big introduction. He didn’t appreciate the trio taking to the stage “in the manner of rock stars on tour”:

"A huge crowd of cheering fans has amassed at their feet. There is no irony. It feels uncomfortably hubristic."

He then goes on to criticise the “filmic” nature of the show, claiming that “”the scale of the production, the quality of the cameras, the epic sweeping shots” gave it a cinematic film aimed more at people watching it on home TV or “or a mobile phone, which is how I imagine a lot of people will view it”.

I would suggest he got a better TV because in 4k it looked amazing - much better than than the latest season of say… Top Gear.

However, my favourite things he comes out with are:

"They go to Portugal to race three fast cars around a racetrack, which petrolheads will no doubt enjoy, but their many fans who are more interested in horseplay than horsepower might find goes on a bit."

"Squint and you might have been watching a certain popular BBC motoring franchise, though you wonder what all the newbies attracted by the hype will have made of three middle-aged men chugging around a test circuit,"

Yep. He thinks they spent too much time on their car show concentrating on the three most lusted after hyper-cars in the world put together on what’s, only just arguably, the most beautiful race track on the planet.

The kicker to all this is Clarkson being Clarkson and retweeting someone from Twitter asking Gompertz:

While not all reviews were enthusiastic it seems that most were still positive and overall happy with what was presented.

It did play almost like a pilot which is effectively, if not technically, what it was and that’s fine by me. We can see the boys are back and they obviously aim to misbehave.

That’s a good thing.

#blogpost