OTOSOT 16 - Top Gear special

Smith and Sniff

Jonny Smith and Richard Porter

Top Gear, Road Trips, 5th Gear, The Grand Tour, Leisure, Cars, Automotive, Improv, Comedy

5 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Richard answers listeners’ questions about Top Gear from back in the day. Topics covered include finding Hammond and May, the logistics of filming road trips, opening a pub, what became of Top Gear Dog, the temperature of the grotty studio office, ideas from other shows, the disappearing Mini from the Restoration Ripoff feature, writing for Top Gear USA, re-making old segments, the terrible pilot shows, Top Ground Gear Force, the photo Jeremy found on the internet, and ideas that never got made.

End music: Stellantis by Polonez Skyline feat. Arna

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Richard Porter and this is an on the other side of things top gear special and maybe a bit of grand talk to.
0:09.0	Yes, it's Richard here. I'm on my own for this one because Johnny is on holiday and as we mentioned last week because of that I thought I would answer some questions about the Clarks and Hammond and May top gear era, maybe a
0:26.3	bit of Grand Tour as well. Lots of people have sent in questions. Thank you for that. We'll
0:31.9	start with one from Tom. He says I've heard Richard say he was there back in the day at the start of top gear. My question is how did you find Richard Hammond and James May?
0:44.0	Did you put an advert in the local paper or for James and notice in a pub?
0:49.0	Well, James wasn't there originally.
0:52.0	He sort of was.
0:53.5	We knew James.
0:54.6	I'd work with James on Old Top Gear.
0:57.0	And Jeremy knew him from sort of just being a car journeys,
1:00.6	I think.
1:01.4	And he was sort of in the frame for things but then we were
1:05.9	worried that he was too similar to Jeremy so he was put on the back burner and I think we spotted Richard on Granada Men and Motors and I
1:16.7	been involved in screen testing him for old top gear and when he came for the
1:20.4	screen test for the new format I said him, oh you almost got that job and he was like,
1:26.0	oh don't tell me that! Which is true, he did. I thought he should have got it, but my boss at the time
1:31.8	John Betley said that Adrian Simpson was a better choice because he was more
1:36.3	sort of raw material and we could shape him into our presenter. Richard was already a sort of proper TV presenter at that point. But he just came down, I guess we probably contacted his agent and invited him to come for a screen test and we just did two days of getting people in back to back in this big
1:56.1	studio behind the big Renault garage on the A40 into London and I won't say
2:02.3	the names of the other people who came in, but we saw quite a lot of people.
2:05.0	We just saw this big room with a couple of cars in it.
2:08.0	One of them was a Renault Avon team, and we got them to walk around and talk about that and then we had this desk sort of
	...

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