Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have concluded their TV partnership after 23 years as they’ve formally wound down their joint company, W Chump & Sons.
The trio, who first started working together on BBC’s Top Gear in 2002 and moved over to Amazon for Prime Video series The Grand Tour in 2016, shared the business with their producer Andy Wilman.
Documents filed at Companies House this week show the “voluntary winding up” of W Chump & Sons; a non-court based process where a company’s assets are realised.
Clarkson, Hammond, May and Wilman’s business closed with £24,087,100 on the books, leaving each of the men some £6m from the business venture.
In 2015, Clarkson was sacked from Top Gear for assaulting a producer and subsequently set up W Chump & Sons with Hammond and May as they signed with Prime Video to create The Grand Tour.
Premiering in 2016, the series ran for six series before it came to a close last September.
Clarkson told The Times ahead of the final series that he was “packing it in” because he’d become “too old and fat” to get into the cars he likes and is “not interested” in driving the cars he doesn’t.
The presenter added the final Grand Tour instalment had been “emotional” to film, with the final scenes being shot on the Makgadikgadi salt pans in Botswana, where the series began.
“What this means, of course, is that my 22-year partnership with James May and Richard Hammond is now over,” he said.
Clarkson explained it “makes the three of us happy” that their working relationship did not disintegrate “in a blizzard of outrage and tabloid headlines”, but was “landed safely and gently”.
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The presenter has since remained busy with his agricultural reality TV show, Clarkson’s Farm, which follows his journey as a new farmer and the challenges he faces along the way.
Meanwhile, May fronts the travel series James May’s Great Explorers for Channel 5 and Hammond stars in the classic car restoration programme Richard Hammond’s Workshop for Discovery+.
In his three-star review of the fourth season of Clarkson’s Farm, The Independent’s Nick Hilton dubbed the programme “perhaps, the best executed example of the constructed reality genre”.
He wrote: “Like crop yields after a wet winter, it might be suffering from diminishing returns, but there’s still some gentle British wit to be harvested, too.”
