He confessed: “We just thought we’d make a car show, I remember the conversation in White City BBC HQ.
“It was before James (May) joined but the rest of us were all in place and weirdly some of the people we still work with now, we were all in that room.
“We all said, ‘right, these are the grand rules of Top Gear, it’s about the real world, cars that people really buy, no supercars, no foreign travel, we’re only going to drive proper cars that people buy in this country’.
“Then, that didn’t last very long at all, we realised that’s not what people wanted. Not what we wanted to make, we never made it with any science or calculation, we just made the best car show we could.”
However, the future of the long-running show currently remains undecided following the crash of Freddie Flintoff last year.
