After nearly two decades presenting shows such as ‘Top Gear’ and ‘The Grand Tour’, Jeremy Clarkson has announced that he’s quitting studio-based motoring shows in order to focus on longer specials, along with long-time colleagues Richard Hammond and James May.

The notorious trio recently wrapped filming on the third season of their Amazon car show ‘The Grand Tour’, where reportedly Clarkson told the studio audience that it was “the end of an era”.

And, according to a report in The Sun on Friday (December 14th), he and co-stars Hammond and May are set to abandon the studio-based format in order to present “big budget specials” – think something along the lines of the ‘Top Gear’ specials – which will apparently be rolled out over the next couple of years.

“It’s a really sad day. I will miss the banter with each other and with the audience,” Clarkson told the publication. “But we’ve been doing that show for effectively 17 years – sitting around in studios watching cars race around the track.”

Clarkson, Hammond and MayHammond, Clarkson and May on 'Top Gear Live' in 2014

“We all agreed that we’ve been doing it a long time and everything eventually runs its course. Besides, I’m 58 and I’m too fat to be climbing on to the stage.”

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Clarkson, along with Hammond and May, presented 22 seasons of the highly popular ‘Top Gear’ for the BBC, making it one of the most widely syndicated shows across the globe. However, Clarkson was memorably fired from the network in 2015 after a much-publicised ‘fracas’ with a producer while filming.

He and his two co-presenters were soon snapped by Amazon for ‘The Grand Tour’ for three seasons, the last of which has finished production.

“We have travelled to China, Mongolia, Detroit and so many other places,” Richard Hammond recently told Metro about the third helping of ‘The Grand Tour’. “We can all be a bit grumpy. We’ve been through a lot together and you cannot spend as much time together as we do without winding each other up.”

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