I like cars. I mean, I’m not a fanatic, as I don’t care much for motorsports nor do I pore over car sites looking for improvements in displacement. But cars do appeal to my engineering side and in many cases they are art you can drive. While my “car collection” currently sits at one, if I won the lottery I would build a big building and fill it with cars, including at least one Lamborghini (I like the bull logo) and a Cord 812.

In media, one of the most influential television shows about cars was the UK’s Top Gear program, featuring the trio of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. I watched a few episodes and especially like one from the first season where Clarkson reviews the Mercedes SL55 AMG, which is the model of the “toy” car I own.

When Clarkson’s Farm came out (the new season premiers this week) we started watching it because I knew Clarkson from Top Gear, but mainly because we own a farm. It isn’t a commercial farm like his, but we still identify a lot with what goes on there. Some of it is obviously for television, like when he looks at an overgrown pasture and says that it needs mowed, so he’ll get some sheep. A normal farmer would just hook up the bush hog.

Once we watched all of the episodes, this led us to watch, over the past few months, The Grand Tour. It is kind of a continuation of Top Gear, and the chemistry around the three presenters is unmistakable. When we completed that, I decided to watch Richard Hammond’s Workshop. This is pretty much his version of Clarkson’s Farm but involving car restoration and not farming.

TL;DR; I enjoyed the first episodes of this show, but then is just becomes exploitative. Hammond tries his best to make it entertaining, but it finally fails under the premise that car restoration, a long and tedious process when done right, makes good television.

While there are five seasons so far, I only made it to the beginning of season three, when I just had to stop watching. There were several reasons for this, but I guess I should start with an overview.

As one can imagine, Richard Hammond likes cars and motorcycles. Several years ago he asked a father and son team, Neal and Anthony Greenhouse, to restore a Jaguar of his. They did such a good job that Hammond decided to go into business with them. He would finance a new facility and be the face of the business, and the Greenhouses would do the work. Thus Richard Hammond’s Workshop was born.

The name of the business is not Richard Hammond’s Workshop, but The Smallest Cog (the idea being that they care about the whole restoration down to the smallest cog). The first season shows the struggles they faced in getting a new building and outfitting it with new facilities, like a state of the art paint room, and it is a pretty enjoyable show. You can see that Hammond really isn’t cut out to be a businessman, but it was nice to watch Neal get to express his talent with paint using really good equipment.

But as the show goes on, it starts to turn into an indictment of the whole management vs. labor relationship. Hammond starts manufacturing deadlines to make the show more interesting and expecting the Greenhouses to meet them. In one episode Neal’s back goes out, but instead of letting him take time off to recover, Hammond schedules a massage for him and then tells Neal to get back to work as there is a deadline to meet.

The last straw from me concerned Neal’s son Anthony. Anthony is sent up north to learn how to work on race car engines (early on Hammond buys an MGB GT to form a race team in order to drum up business). He asks the other worker if they could start the day with a cup of tea and is immediately reprimanded. How dare you stop work for a cup of tea. (sigh)

Meanwhile, Hammond is drinking tea whenever he likes (there is a recurring theme of him trying to read books on business in his office), using the shop labor to prepare his wife’s Mercedes for sale, visiting a friend of his in the Lake District, or spending time at the Royal Automobile Club in London.

He also spends time with a multi-millionaire name Dean Kronsbein who collects Bentleys. While he is seen as a benefactor for the business, I didn’t really care for him. To me him came across as very entitled. In one scene they are shooting clay pigeons and Kronsbein make a joke about gambling for Hammond’s business. Funny guy. Made his money making masks during the pandemic and died when his yacht hit rocks in Italy.

One of the downsides of living in the internet age is that I can look stuff up about shows while I’m watching them. I learned that Hammond is being sued for divorce by his wife, Mindy, who wants to keep their £7 million estate, and now watching them interact on the show is less about an old married couple playfully bickering and more about watching a marriage dissolve in real time. When Hammond was selling the aforementioned Mercedes he didn’t tell his wife. I don’t know what else was going on, but in my marriage doing something like that would be grounds for divorce on its own.

Also, a recurring theme of the show is how much debt the business is creating. When I stopped watching it was near £300K but it appears it is now close to £700K. When I visited the website I noticed that the Greenhouses were no longer associated with The Smallest Cog. Even though Neal owned about 20% of the business, I doubt he thought he would end up on the hook for £140K in debt, versus fulfilling his dream of working on high end cars and making money at it.

Which is a shame, because he is an artist. The best parts of the show are watching him work.

Unlike Clarkson’s Farm, which lifts up its cast, Workshop just seems to use them up. Seriously, Kaleb Cooper, who rarely left the county before being on Clarkson’s Farm, is a personality in his own right, and Harriet Cowan received a lot of praise for her brief stint on the show. Heck, a choir Clarkson sponsored just won Britain’s Got Talent.

Contrast that with Richard Hammond’s Workshop and all you see is a business that exists solely as a vehicle for a TV show, and one that has racked up massive debt and run off the people who made it worth watching in the first place.