THE Grand Tour has announced a second UK special as the boys head to Wales for more motor mayhem.
Hosts Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May usually travel the globe for Amazon’s original series, but their plans to film abroad were immediately halted amid the Coronavirus.
The team were forced to abandon their trip to Russia and opted to film in Scotland, with a mission to travel to the Outer Herbrides in classic 70s American cars.
With the Scotland special due to air this month – fans have questioned where the next special will be filmed.
Viewers will be delighted to learn that second UK special has already been filmed in Wales and is set to air later this year.
Executive producer Andy Wilman confirmed: “We shot another one in England in Wales, which will keep the wheels turning for a while.
“We have to shoot two more big ones far away. Where they are, we don’t know yet because it’s tricky.
“We are planning but a country can go on the red list at short notice, so at the minute we don’t know where we’re going.
“But we want to shoot one in the Autumn and one in February because if we don’t we’re not producing any content.”
Andy explained that he “dug deeper” to ensure that the UK specials were just as memorable as the other episodes filmed abroad.
He continued: “The thing I love the most is we normally go to the most exotic faraway places in the world, we can be in Madagascar or Mongolia but because we made it in lockdown we couldn’t go anywhere
“We were in Scotland , it is beautiful to match any of those places.
“Once that happens you dig deeper as a filming team to make a better story because you can’t rely on the South China Sea to give it a story. So we dug deeper, we all brought our a-game and I think that shows.”
The Grand Tour team had planned a trip to the snowy wastelands of northern Russia but was forced to abandon it amid Covid.
Nevertheless, James, 58, has revealed that their Russia trip is simply on hold.
He said: “We’ve got a big plan for Russia on hold, which we couldn’t do when Covid kicked off.
“It would be nice to finish that one off since we’ve set it all up. We’ve even bought the cars, they’re in storage somewhere… I’d like to do that.”
James said he was thrilled with the UK specials, saying he had campaigned for them in he past.
He said: “I often campaigned for doing some in the UK because we do have a big audience in the UK but we also have a big audience all over the world.
“The UK is exotic if you live in America or Japan…so I don’t think going to any so called exotic location is the vital ingredient for The Grand Tour.
“The vital ingredient is us three picking over our subjects and mucking about and we can do that in the UK as well as we can do that anywhere else.”
Jeremy also opened up about the challenges of deciding where to film next amid travel restrictions.
He said: “It’s one of the big nightmares, we’ve chosen a country, I won’t say which one.
“We’re working on a story in a country, which was an amber country and it went red a few days ago, so we’re back to the drawing board.
“It’s very tricky at the moment, you need three or four months to set up a big foreign tour.
“It’s all very well us planning, you spend thousands of pounds setting up one of these shoots and then someone says you can’t go there now.
“We are facing some difficulties to try and find somewhere to go.”
He praised the Scotland special for being just as “exotic” as the other episodes they’ve previously filmed.
He added: “If you’re watching it in America, Australia, Chilli, India or wherever it might be then Scotland is incredibly exotic. It’s exotic to them as Africa is to us. So every bit of the world is exotic to someone.”
Richard, 51, echoed this sentiment and told viewers that the upcoming special made them look at Scotland with “fresh eyes”.
He said: “The key thing to remember is Scotland might not be far away if you live in England but if you live in Hawaii or New York, Scotland is a bl**dy long way away and it is beautiful and deserves it’s place and deserves to be shown to the world.
“Scotland is internationally known and so far above it’s weight. It’s such a small country but so well known and rightly so.
“The affect for us doing it was to make us look with fresh eyes and served as a good double purpose.”
The Grand Tour’s Scotland special will be available on Amazon Prime on July 30.
