Top Gear: From A-Z – 2015 Top Gear Christmas Special celebrates Clarkson, Hammond & May

The BBC will air a Top Gear Christmas special this year – Top Gear: From A-Z – celebrating the 13 years of Clarkson, Hammond and May’s antics.

You might have thought it unlikely that the BBC would have a Top Gear Special for Christmas 2015, especially one featuring Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, after the trio left the BBC in the wake of the ‘Clarkson Fracas’ earlier this year. But that’s exactly what’s happening.

Unsurprisingly, the special won’t be a new ‘special’ in the vein of previous years (many of which didn’t actually manage to air at Christmas), but a retrospective (nay, a celebration) of 13 years of perhaps the most successful BBC show – in the world.

The two-part special is to be narrated by comic John Bishop, and will be littered with guest stars from the show – one for each letter of the alphabet –  behind the scenes insights and feature the best, and silliest, moments from the show under Clarkson, Hammond and May.

The blurb from the Beeb says:

This two-part extravaganza celebrates the best and brightest from the Clarkson, Hammond and May years.  Top Gear: From A-Z will feature astonishing footage, insider facts and quirky statistics from the past 13 years of the world’s biggest motoring show.  It’ll laugh with the best, the oddest and the silliest moments from Top Gear, in alphabetical order, with each of the letters introduced by a star guest from the Top Gear celebrity fold.

Voiced by John Bishop and with behind-the-scenes insights and a daft alphabet (B is for Bark, I is for Inch High, Q is for Queuing and so on) this is not only about the stunts, pranks and pratfalls but the brilliant journalism, beautiful photography and the trio of middle aged men who sat at the heart of the show.

So despite the fallout with the trio, the BBC is going to celebrate their tenure at Top Gear, partly because it will garner a big audience, and partly to feed the Top Gear audience with something ahead of Chris Evans take on the Top Gear mix in 2016.

The Top Gear: From A-Z Christmas Special will air over Christmas, but we don’t have details of exactly when yet. We’ll update here when we do.