All Amazon UK customers have the chance to watch the first episode of its big budget car show The Grand Tour for free, between now and midnight on Boxing Day (26th December 2016).
The streaming giant has also made available the first episodes of a number of other Amazon Originals shows, including The Man in the High Castle, Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle, Just Add Magic, Wishenproof, Creative Galaxy and Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street.
“There’s a stretch of time from mid-November where I’ll be away for weeks at a time” he says.
I am meeting Rory in the upstairs bar of a pub just around the corner from the BBC in central London.
As I arrive Reid is just polishing off his lunch in the otherwise empty bar. He’s friendly, relaxed, and nothing at all like his famously starving predecessor Jeremy Clarkson.
Reid is one of the main presenters of the BBC’s new and improved Top Gear line up, joining Friends star Matt le Blanc and motoring journalist Chris Harris.
Top Gear was relaunched in May this year with LeBlanc and Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans fronting the broadcaster's flagship motoring show. The pair were supported by motorsport boss Eddie Jordan, champion driver Sabine Schmitz, and journalists Chris Harris and Rory Reid over the series' six-week run.
In a new trailer, Amazon announced that the much-anticipated series will be hitting screens around the world on 18 November 2016.
Unusually for Amazon series, the show will be released in weekly episodes for 12 weeks, rather than all at once.
Producer Andy Wilman said at last month’s Edinburgh International Television Festival that he felt the series would suit a weekly release as it was not binge-watch television.
Although the much-publicised ‘steak-gate’ incident led to the end of the Clarkson, Hammond and May era of the show, the end had been looming, Wilman suggested.
“We were collapsing under the weight of the work we were doing,” he added.
Appearing at the festival to promote the team’s new Amazon Prime show The Grand Tour, Wilman would not be drawn on how much the company had paid for the series. “It’s a good whack,” he conceded, but denied that it was as much as the rumoured £4 million per episode.
In his first test drive of the Bugatti Veyron, Richard Hammond races against a £67million military aeroplane - the Eurofighter Typhoon. Richard 'The Hamster' Hammond had only just recovered from a high-speed crash the year before, but the presenter showed no fear as he reached speeds of up to 196mph in the challenge.
Reid is part of the main Top Gear line up, and is the only presenter to have been found through the show's open auditions.
Filmed at the Top Gear hangar, Extra Gear will deliver behind-the-scenes access, exclusive footage, interviews and specially recorded films to fans of the show.
The show will be available on BBC Three’s live page and on iPlayer immediately after Top Gear finishes on BBC Two.
As the cost of failure in TV gets ever higher, particularly in drama, it is no surprise when commissioners turn to the past to fill tomorrow’s schedules. Some of these second-life shows become huge hits.
Poldark returned from 1975 to score as one of the biggest new dramas of 2015. Some reboots, such as Doctor Who, become such an established part of the TV landscape that it’s hard to believe they ever went away. Others, such as ITV’s revival of Stars in Their Eyes last year, misfire.
The SVOD platform already shows older series of BBC Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson.
The details of the deal remain vague, however Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos told Buzzfeed News that the show will “fall under the same deals” of international distribution as the existing Top Gear, adding that the deal will be “multi-territory for sure.”
