More evidence that Top Gear is taking over the world? Or maybe – more likely – simply its presenters getting ready for when Jeremy actually blacks up to drive a Bentley through Africa (“total coincidence, it’s just engine oil, this is political correctness gone mad”) and the BBC has to reluctantly let go of all the money it brings in and finally pull the plug. Life after Top Gear.

He, Clarkson, has claimed war – specifically heroic war stories, which he actually does rather well. James May has toys, model aeroplanes etc, because he never really grew up. Richard Hammond – the gerbil – had a go at being Brian Cox, but he wasn’t as good at it as the real Brian Cox. So now he’s doing one of those when-the-weather-turns-nasty popular science shows. Wild Weather with Richard Hammond (BBC1) it’s called, starting with wind.

So he goes to Mount Washington in New Hampshire, one of the windiest places on earth (a gust of 231 mph was measured there once). He misquotes Captain Oates and steps out of the summit building into the storm. Where he loses his hat to the wind, as you knew he would, when he said, as he put it on, that it was his best hat.

He is at least doing what he promised to do, getting inside the weather in order to understand it properly. And that summit, though not especially high, is an extraordinarily wild place. Interesting how strange ice structures grow into the wind – there can’t be many things in nature where a big force in one direction causes something to move the opposite way. Though perhaps, technically, nothing is moving towards the wind, it’s just the ice crystals getting stopped in their tracks further and further upwind. Beautiful, whatever.

Incidentally, Richard got to the top of Mount Washington in a dirty great snowplough. And there’s a lot of that going on: look at me in this cool vehicle/machine. It’s as much about how Hammond reaches the science, and the boys’ toys he finds there, as the science itself. You can take the man out of Top Gear but … etc. From the series trailer at the start it looks as if a car will be crushed during one episode, by dropping a whole lot of water on it. I think it’s written into all of their contracts that in any television programme they make, it doesn’t matter what it’s about, they get to destroy a car. By crashing it, or dropping it from a height, or dropping something on to it, whatever. James May’s as yet unannounced baking show? Yup, the car gets wrecked, trust me.

So after Mount Washington, Richard goes to Australia to make a fire whirl (not a way of protecting scouse children against bad stuff on the internet, but a tornado made of flames). This involves flying a helicopter drone into the fire whirl, obviously. He interviews the president of the Centre for Severe Weather Research, in Boulder Colorado, in a big truck of course. He’s one of the first ever people to visit the WindEEE Research Institute in Canada, which cost $23m to make (the more big number, record wind speeds, dollars etc the better, it’s not just Top Gear science – it’s Top Trump science). Here he gets to stand in a vortex, a little man-made tornado. Oh go on, WindEEE technicians, turn it up, right up, send Hammond to Oz. Yes, I think he’d work quite well in Munchkinland; Clarkson and May can be the wicked witches of the west and east, respectively.

Finally, in Oklahoma (not so far from Kansas, is it?) Richard gets to go in another cool vehicle. Called the Dominator 3 (1 and 2 are presumably now in Oz being used by Jezza and James as Top Gear broomsticks), it’s like something between an armoured truck, mobile laboratory, Darth Vader’s helmet and an armadillo. With a few genes from a limpet, too, because it can lock itself on to the ground. Which it needs to do, because it’s designed to be driven into tornadoes, so that Reed here can find out how fast the air moves in there (let’s see if we can’t beat that 231, eh?).

Here goes, they’re on to one, chasing a tornado along tornado alley, right near where one did ONE BILLION DOLLARS of damage not so long ago. The sky blackens ominously, here it comes, right at them, perfect but a bit bloody terrifying too. It’s very dramatic and exciting; the Dominator 3 locks on, Reed fires off his data recording probe into the middle of the twister … Gotcha!

Oh, the probe was damaged, no record-breaking speed. Next time. Where’s Richard? Oz? Oh, he didn’t go with them into the tornado, couldn’t hang around waiting for one to come also, so he went home. Wild Weather Without Richard Hammond.