JAY BROOKS FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
The story, if you’re in a bit of a hurry, is as follows. In 1986 I sat next to a Top Gear producer at the launch of the Citroën AX. He offered me a job and two years later I started to appear on screen. I did that for a while, got ideas above my station, left, and made some mostly forgettable programmes before dreaming up a new format for Top Gear. I then did that, got fired, started The Grand Tour with Amazon and now, after 36 years of talking about cars on television, I’m packing it in, because I’m too old and fat to get into the cars that I like and not interested in driving those I don’t.
What this means