James May, who along with Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond has signed a deal to front the new Amazon Prime show, was of the opinion the two shows could “spur each other on”.
Appearing as guest on This Morning with Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford, the former Top Gear presenter said: “The really interesting thing about it is, I think it’s going to be very healthy having two big international car programmes...”
May told This Morning: “Well, let’s not call it the last ever, we don’t know, it is the end of the current tour, [so‘] it’s the end of seven years of fairly constant touring.
“We’ve been to 32 countries and we think we’ve played to 2.2 million people all the way around the world... all the way to Australia and back, so that ends on Sunday night at the O2 but that’s not the end of the whole thing.
“It’s the end of the beginning as Churchill would have said.”
I think it’s going to be very healthy having two big international car programmes
May said their new show “will start roughly in the autumn of next year” and said it does not yet have a name.
“We don’t know what it’s called yet, we’ve had a lot of brainstorming sessions on names,” May explained.
“It’s actually very difficult to come up with a new name for something that hasn’t already been bagged by someone else.” Filming on the programme has started, with Clarkson tweeting a photo of the presenters, their crew, cars and trucks in October.
Amazon has refused to comment on speculation about how much the deal is worth, and all May would reveal was that their budget is “quite big”.
He went on to say: “But it does cost a lot of money to make high-quality TV in exotic locations. I know everyone thinks we’ve been given a massive sack full of money and gone off and bought Lamborghinis and gone off for lunch but it isn’t actually like that... We don’t get all the money in one go and a huge, huge portion of it has to go on making the films.”
“It can’t be done cheaply and they want it to look brilliant and we have to pay for an office and get a pencil sharpener!”