In episode one of The Grand Tour, second series, Richard Hammond drives up a Swiss mountain, skids at 120mph, somersaults through the air, then rolls downhill in a £1m car that, moments later, sets itself on fire. He crawls from the cockpit just before it’s consumed by flames. The recording from the onboard microphone survived the inferno, even though the video was burnt to a crisp, so the screech of metal is painfully audible, as well as Hammond’s muffled noises. “I was upside down with a helmet and seatbelt, squashed up with a broken leg, saying, ‘Somebody will come and get me,’” he recalls. “Then I thought, ‘No, I really do need to get out now, a fire may have started.’”

Five months on, sitting