The Grand Tour star Jeremy Clarkson has lifted a lid on why the show has so many deleted scenes fans never get to see.
Clarkson is back with James May and Richard Hammond in their latest Amazon Prime Video special 'Lochdown', where the boys improvise during the COVID-19 pandemic by racing across Scotland.
While viewers will have lots of fun seeing the trio speeding across the Scottish landscapes in American cars, Clarkson has admitted to the Radio Times that huge amounts of footage shot for the special will never see the light of day.
"Most of it doesn't get shown for a very good reason," he said.
The presenter also explained: "Our shooting ratio is off the charts. I think the average shooting ratio for a TV show these days is 12:1. For every one minute, 11 get thrown away.
"I think David Attenborough's is probably 500:1, for obvious reasons, you know, he spends 499 hours waiting for a polar bear to come out. But ours is a massive shooting ratio. It's like 1200:1.
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"As Andy Wilman, our producer, always says, that's how rubbish the three of us are. We have to throw away 1,199 hours to get one good one. So lots of stuff ends up on the cutting floor. Lots of it does."
That's quite a lot of deleted footage! Clarkson, May and Hammond's producer Andy Wilman confirmed this week that a second pandemic special, filmed in Wales, is on the way soon.
Beyond that, the team are struggling to make any firm plans because travel restrictions are frequently being altered by the UK government.
"It's one of the big nightmares, it is," the producer admitted to the RT. "We chose a country, I won't say which one we chose, but we were working on a story in a country which was an amber country, so we could have gone to it, and then it went red just a few days ago, so back to the drawing board."
The Grand Tour will premiere 'Lochdown' on Friday, July 30 on Amazon Prime Video.
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Justin is a freelance entertainment journalist and writer. He first joined Digital Spy as a freelance entertainment reporter in 2010 and also worked as a sub-editor for the brand, serving as Night News Editor from 2016 to 2024. Over more than a decade, Justin has covered numerous major entertainment events from the US and has interviewed a wide-ranging group of public figures, from comedian Steve Coogan to icons from the Star Trek universe, cast members from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and reality stars from numerous Real Housewives cities and the Below Deck franchise. Justin has also been on the ground to cover major pop culture events like the Star Wars Celebration and the D23 Expo. He's written for titles across the Hearst network, plus the likes of CBR and Us Weekly.
