Andy Wilman was interviewed by Freddy Clode in September 2019.
Andy Wilman gave an exclusive interview in September 2019 to the Home & Hosed Podcast. In this three-part interview we hear him telling everything from his youth till now. Andy Wilman is the executive producer of The Grand Tour.
The first years
Wilman tells about the time when Top Gear was cancelled by the BBC Management. When he heard that Jeremy Clarkson said to Andy “let’s go to the pub and let’s have that show”. It turned out Jeremy had already thought out all the things which made Top Gear in the new format (since 2002) famous.
Andy was the one who was came with the way how to do these things. As always Jeremy has a brilliant idea and Andy makes it possible to do it.
When the first season was finally launched it was a great learning thing. It wasn’t getting reasonable viewing figures with 3 to 3.5 million viewers.
The idea of the anonymous racing driver turned out to become a very popular character. Although they first want to name him The Gimp, most of them didn’t agreed with that name. Therefor they changed the name to The Stig. The stig was how, newly arrived, boys were called at Repton School.
Hammond´s Crash
Andy talks about the Crash Richard Hammond had in 20 september 2006. He informs us about what happened behind the scenes of this accident, and how everyone reacted on the bad news.
From then on the show kept on growing and growing and became a huge worldwide succes. That resulted in them winning the title “The Most Watched Factual TV Show in the World”.
The End
Later after 2010 there was a storm coming. The BBC Management want to get rid of the presenters they did too much things wrong in their eyes. Then they did some things which upset the BBC management even more like Birma, Mexico and finally Argentina.
So the management wanted an investigation of their work offices. The reason they gave the presenters were pretty vague. But the investigator came back with a report in which he stated that everything worked perfect.
All this stress between the BBC Management and the presenters finally lead to the well known fracas in March 2015.
Click here to find more interviews with the trio on this website.
You can also visit us on Facebook, Twiter and Instagram.