Clarkson blocked from appearing on ITV Top Gear until 2017

Try it again, Jeremy. It's no good…

It now appears that Jeremy Clarkson's plan to launch a rival motoring show to Top Gear on ITV appears to have stalled. Badly at that. 

Until now it was widely believed the ink was already dry on a big money deal between ITV and Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May following the trio's bitter exist from the station's rivals BBC, and that the station was signalling its intent by gearing up to air the new show in the same traditional Sunday evening time slot as Top Gear.

But according to The Mirror, it’s now been revealed that a previously agreed contract clause with the Beeb prevents the trio from signing with a terrestrial rival for at least two years. So bad news ITV, unless it fancies playing the waiting game, it's unlikely that their Top Gear rival will be on air before 2017.

Related:  Why taking Top Gear to ITV just wouldn't work

The BBC will be hoping their new Top Gear host Chris Evans will make the most of this televisual head-start and be well and truly settled in his revamped offering of the show by that point, easing fears that Top Gear wasn’t going to survive and continue to make cash in lucrative foreign markets without its former hosts.

With this fresh contractual dispute, it's feasible to imagine Clarkson and co. absconding to another format as the contract stipulation only applies to terrestrial rivals, meaning streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon Prime would be ripe candidates for the presenters to take their ratings-winning patter to.

Would this be a bad thing? Not according to you: according to a recent ShortList poll, a colossal 61.54 per cent of ShortList readers told us they’d prefer it if the trio started a new motoring show on Netflix, as opposed to ITV, which garnered less than a quarter of the vote at 22.45 per cent. Sky finished on 11.02 per cent and ‘other’ finished on 5.20 per cent.

So there you have it – if the presenters really do want to reinvent the (Pirelli) wheel without waiting for two years, the internet awaits.

[Via: The Mirror]