The Grand Tour Update: ISIS and Terrorism Fears lead to Episode Scrapping

What could have been a truly epic episode of The Grand Tour just got scrapped at the brainstorming meeting. Jeremy Clarkson explains the reasons in his Sunday Times column.

As announced by a teary-eyed and emotional Jeremy Clarkson in the last episode of The Grand Tour Season 3 final episode, the series is changing its format in the next season. The Amazon Prime show will reinvent itself as a proper grand tour, completely doing away with the tent, audience, reviews, and tracks to focus purely on the adventurous specials. However, season 4 filming has hit a roadblock recently.

In his column in The Sunday Times, Jeremy Clarkson mentioned that one of the films that they had planned for the next season had to be cancelled due to ISIS and terror attacks. Quoting his words, “This would be an epic journey, except it would mean crossing the Sinai peninsula and, thanks to ISIS, the chances of us all arriving on the other side with heads were slim.”

The Grand Tour is one of the biggest shows in the streaming service and has a massive budget to play around with. But the production crew appears to be struggling to find spectacular locations to film the show safely. Many suggestions from the hosts and creative team had to be turned down due to “sporadic and vicious terrorist attacks”.

This is not the first episode idea to be scrapped though as it joins other pitches like the Andaman Islands adventure which got canned because of the cannibals residing in one of the islands. The plan to film a journey in Australia too met with a resounding no, though the trio of Clarkson, May and Hammond had done an enjoyable episode set in the Land Down Under during their Top Gear days.

The makers may be struggling a bit to find the locations. But we’re sure that they will get things on track. Thankfully, there is plenty of time at their disposal to plan as the hosts have their own projects outside The Grand Tour to take care of before season 4 filming begins.

Source: The Sunday Times