Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure: Top Gear, Grand Tour and Twenty Years of Magic and Mayhem

Top Gear turned gloomy Sunday nights into celebratory Friday nights.

It made household names of presenters Clarkson, Hammond and May, their unique chemistry and buddy movie antics proving irresistible to a vast global audience. With these three at the helm, Top Gear earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the most popular factual TV show on the planet.

Then, a short while later, it was all gone.

How did a thoroughly sensible little consumer advice programme on cars turn into a global phenomenon in the first place, though? How did it all go wrong? And how did they rise from the ashes as The Grand Tour, and go on to scale even greater heights?

One man has all the answers.

There from the beginning, Top Gear and The Grand Tour co-creator, and Jeremy’s oldest friend, Andy Wilman, opens the bonnet on over twenty years of motoring mayhem. In Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure, the mysterious man in the shadows tells the inside story of your favourite TV shows for the first time.

Irreverent, joyful and as laugh-out-loud funny as the shows themselves, it’s the best book about Top Gear and The Grand Tour . . . in the world.

Andy Wilman is the author of no books. Except this one. He did however have a career in journalism which began at Auto Express and continued at Top Gear magazine, before making the leap from print to television when he helped produce Jeremy Clarkson’s Motorworld. After a brief and monumentally forgettable spell in front of the camera Andy realised the best place for his face was behind it, and with that sorted he and Jeremy went on to make some very watchable telly, including Meet the Neighbours, the 2002 reinvented Top Gear, The Grand Tour, and a couple of cracking WW2 documentaries. His driving licence is currently in a drawer somewhere at the DVLA.