Richard Hammond On His New Show: “I Would Never Compete With Jeremy

Richard Hammond has admitted that he isn’t competing with Jeremy Clarkson as he launches a show on Discovery that walks in the footsteps of the highly praised Amazon series, Clarkson’s Farm.

Richard Hammond’s Workshop, which follows Richard as he starts a classic car restoration business called The Smallest Cog, launched a few days ago. But while it is a very similar concept to Jeremy’s show – man starts a business, finds it very difficult, films it to make up some of the costs – it is a “genuine passion project” for the presenter.

Richard has already shown us that he’s working with a father and son who already had a restoration business, but he thought they could have more success if they were to pool their resources. And while they set to work on building themselves a workshop worthy of their work, Hammond admits that the filming may have come second to the business, saying that it’s “not a produced TV show”.

He told The Sun the following:

“This show, it’s a slightly different kind of show I suspect, it’s got a slightly different feel to it.”

“What I’m trying to say is that I would never try and compete with Jeremy on a TV show because he is Jeremy Clarkson, but it’s interesting that those parallels were happening at the same time.

“He is genuinely and, genuinely always has been, passionate about his farm and I’ve always been passionate about classic cars and the restoration of them.”

If you haven’t watched the show yet, it is now available to viewers in the UK – Discovery doesn’t seem to be mirroring this in the US just yet…

Hammond said this about the new program:

“The workshop project came about before the TV show and is a genuine passion,” said Hammond. “Neil and Anthony Greenhouse, who are father and son, have been restoring my cars for years, but one day about two years ago on one of our fish-and-chips Fridays at the workshop, Neil said he was losing the business because they were developing it and he didn’t have the resources to start again.

“I said: ‘Why don’t we set up a business together and pool our resources?’ And in the early stages of the process I thought it might make a nice TV show. It turns out I’m no businessman…”