Top Gear: axed in 2001, Wilman's 2002 studio relaunch built a £50m-a-year BBC brand

Top Gear had run at the BBC from 1977 as a conventional motoring magazine show. Ratings fell, Clarkson left in 1999, and the BBC cancelled the half-hour programme in 2001; much of the team decamped to Channel 5's rival Fifth Gear. Producer Andy Wilman chose a different route: together with Clarkson he proposed a new Top Gear anchored from a studio with a live audience, celebrity segment 'Star in a Reasonably Priced Car', and — from the second series — a presenting trio of Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May whose chemistry became the programme's real product.

The relaunched show, first broadcast in 2002, drew considerably better ratings than the old format and kept growing into a global franchise: live shows, DVDs, books, a magazine and format sales. By 2015 it was described as the most popular factual television programme in the world, with a Guinness World Records entry and an audience of 350 million across 214 territories, and was worth more than £50m a year to the corporation.

The BBC monetised it through a joint venture, Bedder 6, set up with the people who made the show: BBC Worldwide held 50%, Clarkson 30% and Wilman 20%. In September 2012 BBC Worldwide paid £8.4m for Clarkson's stake and £5.6m for Wilman's, consolidating all of the brand's intellectual property and profits — an explicit price for what the format had become.

The relaunched show became the BBC's biggest global brand: about £50m a year from sales, DVDs, live shows and licensing, with 350 million viewers across 214 territories.

The reinvention changed the product, not just the cast: a studio audience for energy, fixed celebrity and challenge segments that could be marketed and exported as a format.

It was built around a specific trio whose on-screen chemistry could not be copied by rivals like Fifth Gear, giving the BBC a defensible show rather than a commodity car magazine.

The Bedder 6 joint venture tied the talent's income to the brand's global growth, aligning the people who made the show with its commercial exploitation.

The BBC treated the relaunched show as a global brand from early on — live tours, licensing and DVDs — rather than a domestic scheduling filler.

A revival succeeds when it keeps the name but reinvents the product — studio, live audience, fixed segments — rather than re-presenting the old show. Team chemistry, not nostalgia, did the work.

In March 2015 the BBC dropped Clarkson after he attacked a producer; Hammond and May left with him, and the trio moved to Amazon, whose The Grand Tour launched in 2016. BBC Worldwide, already sole owner of the brand, kept the format but successors — Chris Evans for one series, then Matt LeBlanc with rotating co-hosts — never matched the ratings, and in 2023 production was paused after Freddie Flintoff's crash. The money-spinner era is remembered as ending with the talent that the 2002 relaunch had put at its centre.