Filming for the new series of The Grand Tour is likely to be delayed after Jeremy Clarkson was taken to hospital with a respiratory infection.
Fans of the presenter have been sending get well messages over social media after it emerged that he is in hospital in Majorca where he was taken ill while on holiday.
The Sunday Times columnist revealed his condition to Jemima Khan, the journalist and a friend, who tweeted asking him for a holiday snap. He replied: “I could send you one but it’s of me in a wheelchair, connected up to tubes, in a hospital.”
He later uploaded a picture to Instagram of a cannula coming out of his arm with the caption: “Not the sort of bangles I usually choose on holiday.”
James May, his co-presenter on The Grand Tour, said: “He hasn’t had an accident, he’s not been injured and his life is not in danger. He’s just been not very well. He’s got some sort of chest infection.” May joked: “Sadly, we will be seeing him again”.
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The setback is likely to cause a delay in the filming of The Grand Tour, Clarkson’s TV motoring show, which was to begin a new series on Amazon in the autumn. After his holiday, Clarkson was due to resume filming as part of a tight schedule that allowed little room for delays.
Until he fell ill, Clarkson, 57, was in apparently fine form, implying on Twitter that he had managed to win at tennis against Lisa Hogan, his partner, who is a decade younger. His social media updates suggested that he was mixing with a younger crowd, tweeting to his 6.76 million followers a photo of himself doing a move called dabbing while on a nightclub dancefloor. Asked in private by one well-wisher whether there was anything he needed in hospital, Clarkson replied: “a smoking room”.
It’s the second time in recent weeks that one of The Grand Tour’s three presenters – who previously fronted BBC’s Top Gear – has been hospitalised. Richard Hammond received surgery after his kneecap was smashed during filming. An electric powered supercar he was driving careered down a hillside after Hammond lost control on a mountain bend in Switzerland. Hammond is now recovering but has been on crutches and is unable to drive. Clarkson and May, the other of the three presenters, had until now been standing in for him on filming assignments. May was unable to drive for part of last year after he fell on an icy pavement, breaking his arm.
Interviewed last year in The Sunday Times, Clarkson revealed that he feared falling ill while filming, saying that at one point in Namibia during the making of the first series of The Grand Tour he was frightened he might drop dead. “I was genuinely scared. I thought what if [the car] does break, what if I have to walk through the desert. I won’t be able to. I can’t even walk over there.”