A few thoughts on communicating climate change inspired by Top Gear, The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm…

Last night I watched “One For The Road”.

After some 22 years of making television together, first on Top Gear and then at Amazon with The Grand Tour, One For The Road brought Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May together for one last epic adventure in Zimbabwe and Botswana, to close out their extraordinary television partnership.

That trio gave me some of the most memorable television moments of my childhood and Jeremy is now a regular rotating feature on my television screen through Clarkson’s Farm, which easily ranks as one of my favourite shows of all time.

With the end of their time together approaching, I have been reflecting on what made their partnership so enduring. I have also been wondering what we can learn from these master communicators about the art of engaging your audience and storytelling, and how we can apply those lessons to the way that we speak about climate change, to better bring people with us on that journey.

Firstly, a few thoughts about what made Top Gear, The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm such successes.

1. Top Gear and The Grand Tour were never really car shows. The cars just provided the forum. They were shows about people. The majority of us didn’t tune in every week to learn about the newest (or oldest!) cars. What we wanted to see was three friends having fun together. That was what we reliably came back for.

2. The same idea is true of Clarkson’s Farm, which isn’t really a show about farming. The farm just provides the setting. It is a show about Jeremy learning to become a farmer and the people helping him along that journey. That is what makes Clarkson’s Farm so appealing. The distinction is important.

3. I once heard someone say that the secret to every great TV show (whatever the genre) is that the show is actually a comedy. At their heart, all of these shows are comedy shows. They made us laugh, which is why we loved them.

4. They were shows about ordinary people. None of the trio was ever fashionable or looked like a celebrity. They were the opposite of these things, reminding you more of a dad or slightly strange uncle than a famous TV presenter. That made them relatable.      

 5. They oozed enthusiasm and emotion in the way that they spoke, which made us feel like part of the experience. I couldn’t tell you the horsepower or 0-60 times of any of the hundreds of cars I have seen the three of them reviewing over the years. But I can instantly name the ones that they liked and disliked because of the way that they spoke about and described the experience of driving them and the way those descriptions made me feel.

6. They brought us epic moments and showed that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things. Whether it was biking (almost) the length of Vietnam, driving to the North Pole (my personal favourite), or driving across Botswana, they showed what normal people could achieve with a little determination and a healthy dose of chutzpah. Whilst they were at it, they showcased some incredible places and landscapes and told us about the people who lived there.     

So - how do we apply these ideas to communicating climate change?

1. I think we need to focus less on climate change itself, in favour of narratives about people navigating, exploring, dealing with the impacts of and rising to the challenge of climate change. People connect with people, not a subject matter. The subject just provides the forum.

2. We have to try and inject humour into this wherever we can.  I know how intensely hard (and even counterintuitive, verging on dishonest) that instinctively feels when dealing with something as grim as climate change but the reality is that people only have a limited capacity for bad news stories. Give people a chance to laugh and they will join you weekly for 20 years.

3. We need the leading characters to be relatable. Most people don’t know what IPCC, UNEP or COP stands for, far less do they feel connected to the (amazing!) people who lead or work in these forums and feel unrelatable to the vast majority. This mustn’t be a story of celebrities, politicians or scientists promoting a cause; it needs to be a narrative centred on ‘ordinary’ people. I wonder if this is part of what gave Greta the impact that she had – a schoolgirl worried about her future is much more relatable and galvanising than the Secretary General of the United Nations standing at a podium talking about “global boiling”.  

4. We ordinary people have to ooze enthusiasm in the way that we speak about climate change, and we need to communicate our messages without expecting our audience to remember the statistics or other technical data that we too often rely upon to excite, alarm, or otherwise engage our audience. People connect with and remember emotions, not statistics.  

5. We need to show how ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things in the work against climate change. These stories need to focus on showcasing people and places and make them part of the adventure that we are going on with our storytellers.  Ultimately, to keep our audience engaged, we need to find a way to make these stories success stories wherever possible – the current realities of the situation we are collectively in notwithstanding.

One For The Road

Perhaps the art of communication was best summed up by James May as he drove towards the conclusion of his final adventure on The Grand Tour. After reflecting briefly on what lies ahead, James simply says to the viewers “I hope we’ve brought you a little bit of happiness”.

For their flaws and occasional stupid moments, Jeremy, Richard and James have reliably made us happy. That ability has won them one of the largest and most loyal TV audiences ever known.   

If we are going to succeed in the work against climate change, we need to bring the biggest audience the world has ever known with us on that journey. In essence, that is a communications challenge.

So much of the narrative I see around climate change is negative (often catastrophic) and framed by impenetrable data and statistics. It is unrelatable and unattainable, and the scale of the challenge is presented as so vast that it instinctively feels beyond the capacity of the average person to engage or make an impact. It feels far away or even irrelevant, a problem for people I don’t know, whose homes I will never see and whose stories I will never hear.

I think those of us in this space could learn a lot from Clarkson, Hammond and May, particularly about communicating a subject and bringing an audience on a journey.  For their many flaws they have done some amazing things, and I felt quite sad to see them standing together one last time, before they drove off on their different paths.

It turns out I learned quite a lot from this extraordinary trio. It just had nothing to do with cars.  

#climatechange #communications #storytelling #thegrandtour #onefortheroad