The Grand Tour's "Carnage a Trois" Episode Falls Largely Flat
Before you read any further, be advised this article contains spoilers of the episode. You’ve been warned!
Like “Lochdown,” the French installment of The Grand Tour starts with a simple question the trio of presenters intend to answer over the next hour and five-ish minutes. This time the inquiry is “What is the matter with the French?” Cue the mimes and baguettes, because you’re in for a lot of very stereotypical jokes about France and French people, none of which will be new or funny to you if you’re over the age of 15. Viewers see some shots of James and Richard pretending to build a catapult for no reason in particular, and Clarkson talks about unusual French laws that have nothing to do with cars.
The car portion of the light entertainment hour starts out promising enough, as the presenters show up with the voitures they’ve purchased. Clarkson selects a Citroën CX Safari (wagon), just like he did on the old Top Gear episode (S15, E4) where he turned one into a motorhome. Hammond goes sporty and selects the three-seater Matra Murena, useful for the French man who has a wife and a mistress. May goes for a Renault Avantime that’s the exact same color as the one Top Gear turned into a track car (S12, E3). With three interesting French cars selected, the hosts proceed to give zero detail about the age, mileage, price, or condition of their vehicles. The trio doesn’t look or comment on one another’s choices at all, in fact. It all feels very rushed.
We head straight into the second segment, a brief history of a handful of French automobiles highlighting quirky and backward designs. Interesting here is something called the Helicar, a 1930s-looking design driven by a front-mounted propeller. Hammond drives it, as the other two presenters move on to quirky Renaults and the 2CV. A 2CV is destroyed by being dropped from a helicopter, because that’s a thing to do. At around the 15-minute mark, hopes are high for more interesting information on French cars. The Helicar was very obscure and very interesting.
But instead, it’s on to more stereotypes about how the French have a general disregard for their cars’ intended use, cargo capacity, how to park, how to be practical, and how to drive. It’s a terrible segment that’s light on entertainment, high on senseless car damage, and that’s it.
“Looking after a car is disgusting [in France],” declares Clarkson. Ready for some offensive pretend French accents?
Moving on, there’s an off-road challenge: Three French family cars asked to go much further off the pavement than they were designed to. Clarkson has a very charming Citroën Berlingo, Hammond is in the Renault Scenic he banged up in the prior segment, and May’s driving the same Peugeot 407 he just broke by slamming a dishwasher into the trunk. French people don’t wash their cars by the way, but they did invent rallying. The off-roading segment sees all three cars entirely destroyed, flipped over intentionally or similar, and goes on a while.
At the 28-minute mark, the hosts return to the French cars they purchased and highlight interesting and quirky features. It would’ve been better to hear the rationales and interesting nature of the cars at first sight, but we’re stretching our material as thin as possible this episode. After a brief driving segment of under two minutes, it’s back to the discussion of French laws (this time with regard to driving, at least). French people don’t use roundabouts properly, by the way. There’s a convenient man standing at the roundabout as Hammond blocks traffic and shouts obscenities at him. French people like baguettes and eat large sandwiches, you know.
The team heads to the familiar Millbrook Proving Ground and its Belgian pavers to show how the old CX is much softer in its suspension setup than a newer BMW 5-Series wagon. Said 5-Series is destroyed because it’s too rough to defuse a bomb in the cargo area, or whatever. French people don’t like government intervention, and they eat a lot of cheese.
Next up is a pretend rally race of some hot French hatchbacks. Cars are decorated in the Top Gear tradition with fake sponsored liveries. When doors are open the sponsors say Arse Biscuits or Le Balls, and other mature humor for adult people. All the hosts choose a hatchback but it doesn’t really matter which, because the race immediately ends for a lunch break of snails and wine. At 47 minutes in, one begins to wonder if this episode will make any points at all. The race continues after lunch but is stopped again because of a workers’ strike at the track. Fun! Eight minutes later the race is over, and the Citroën Saxo won it, driven by the show’s racing driver, Abbie Eaton.
The tone changes for the penultimate segment of the show, as Clarkson and Hammond explore the elegance and excellence of the Citroën SM. The segment is beautifully filmed and scored, and our hosts convey actual information about an interesting car. They declare the SM the best French car of all time. It might break down a lot, but it’s so stunning to look at it doesn’t matter.
The conclusion is a quick one and comes suddenly. Despite all the automotive quirks and cultural characteristics, there’s not a lot wrong with the French. That might’ve been a nice place to end, but there are nine more minutes to fill. Time to destroy a Citroën C3 Pluriel because it has an annoying roof arrangement. Enter catapult and the White Cliffs of Dover. The C3 is catapulted over the English Channel and lands on a house in France. What of the host’s three cars? No idea, they’re not shown again.
“Carnage a Trois” is not quite as bad as “A Massive Hunt,” but it comes close. For a special episode of a show that releases only a handful of episodes a year, there wasn’t much to recommend it. It was sort of like the history of Peugeot segment from Top Gear (S22, E5). But where that piece went on for eight minutes, this had nine times longer to fill. Without an adventure to go on, it was more like a Grand Tour episode from prior seasons. One loose narrative with different clips here and there. Beautifully filmed, as always.
But that segmentation format was what the show was supposed to leave behind. In exchange for dropping from 12 or 14 episodes a year to two, adventure and film-like content was promised. That didn’t happen here. And I’m not ignoring the masked COVID elephant in the room: Old Top Gear made plenty of great episodes (also an hour-long) within the confines of Great Britain. The majority of this special was incredibly boring.
Sort of leaves me thinking the trio is struggling for content. If there’s no adventure left and the rarely-released specials consist of strung-together segments, we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel. For their part, the hosts have proclaimed it’s a new type of special. May said, “It’s the first time we’ve done a special like that ever, not going from one place to another place: We’re simply driving around in order to investigate the subject. We might have stumbled across a fantastic original idea without us realising it!”
So they made a special that’s an all-original new idea for a special because it’s in the format of how their show (and Top Gear before it) used to be. Brilliant.
[Images: Amazon]
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
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Don't mean to be rude, but there wasn't a convenient Brit' at the roundabout in Paris. They never left Britain for this episode. Anyway, I thought it was slightly better Lochdown, but still not nearly as fun or as interesting as previous adventures. And what was all that business of James hiding under a tablecloth? James used to be my favourite of the trio, but after watching the way he interacts with his crew and director on Oh Cook! and Our Man In... I've come to the conclusion he can be quite unpleasant.
I always enjoy watching Clarkson going on about "what is the matter with the French," particularly when discussing cars, when his own country basically has no domestic auto industry, having lost it to Germany and all their former colonial subjects after decades of building nothing but increasingly boring, unreliable cars. It seems odd to be so smug about French cars when your own industry died with the flatulent whimper of the Rover 75 and Reliant. They do truly love picking on mass-market Renaults, Citroëns, and Peugeots, but never seem to put everyday British cars through the same paces…because there aren't any mass-market British cars, unless you want to count that little BMW that looks sort of like a MINI. Funny thing, that. Meanwhile, I climbed into my "bloody minded" thirty-seven-year-old Citroën 2CV last month and drove without incident from Baltimore to Savannah and back and with a smile on my face the whole time. Guess I'll have to go on with Clarkson wondering what's the matter with me. Whatever will I do?