Comic geniuses, the lot of them. Few people could disagree that the six stars of Monty Python, the troupe behind TV’s most surreal sketch show, were all individually brilliant.

With a combined IQ approaching 1,000, they might be the most intellectually qualified comedians in history. John Cleese has a law degree from Cambridge University. Terry Gilliam studied physics, political science and fine art in Los Angeles. All of the others — Michael Palin, Eric Idle, the late Terry Jones and Graham Chapman — graduated from Oxbridge.

Yet, they apparently don’t have a business brain cell between them. With perhaps Palin as the exception, their record of financial mismanagement, legal entanglements and hapless investments is feckless beyond belief.

You wouldn’t trust them to run the proverbial whelk stall. In fact, the whelks themselves could probably do a better job.

The surviving Pythons have been feuding, on and off, for years – and now at least two of their daughters are involved, spreading the animosity across the generations. This week, 80-year-old Idle has bemoaned his poverty. ‘I don’t know why people always assume we’re loaded,’ he complained on X (formerly Twitter). ‘Python is a disaster. I have to work for my living. Not easy at this age.’

Idle was the driving force behind Spamalot, the hit West End and Broadway musical based on their 1975 Arthurian movie Monty Python And The Holy Grail. It grossed nearly £120million during its long runs, with Idle taking the lion’s share of royalties – more than ten times the amount most of the others received, according to a bitter John Cleese.

Yet last year Idle put his five-bedroomed house in the Hollywood Hills on the market for $6.5million (£5.14million). It has a wine cellar, swimming pool, koi carp pond and gardens Idle calls ‘an enchanted forest’. He bought it for north of $1million in the mid-’90s with his wife, former model Tania Kosevich, and ex-Beatles George Harrison and Ringo Starr were regular visitors. It has now sold, he says.

Idle heaps the blame for his altered fortunes on Terry Gilliam’s 43-year-old daughter Holly, a media lawyer who assumed management of the Python brand in 2014.

‘I guess if you put a Gilliam child in as your manager, you should not be so surprised,’ he sniped. How true the allegation is, we don’t know, but Idle doubled down by claiming: ‘One Gilliam is bad enough. Two can take out any company.’

Idle’s daughter Lily, a 33-year-old photographer and mental health campaigner, chimed in on social media: ‘I’m so proud of my dad for finally, finally, finally starting to share the truth. He has always stood up to bullies and narcissists and absolutely deserves reassurance and validation for doing so.’

Gilliam, meanwhile, harboured doubts of his own – in an unguarded moment at a party a few years ago, he sounded off about his least favourite Pythons. Idle was a pathetic case, he said, clinging on to his life in Hollywood long after his career was dead. Cleese was slightly more bankable, but an equally ‘miserable git’.

Holly Gilliam was a co-producer of the Monty Python Live (Mostly) reunion shows in 2014 at the O2 arena in London, staged when Terry Jones was beginning to show signs of the dementia that would go on to kill him six years later.

At the time, it was estimated each of the five stars made £2.2million from the ten performances.

For most people, that’s a lifetime’s earnings crammed into a fortnight.But to the Pythons, it was a reluctant obligation, forced on them by a disastrous court case – resulting from just one of a catalogue of guileless decisions and poor financial judgments, going back decades.

These created an atmosphere of intense mistrust between the stars, which increased to outright loathing in some cases. When Idle sneers at Gilliam and his family, the comments are not meant in jest. There’s real acid in them.

Cracks opened up in the group even while the Pythons were writing their Flying Circus sketches for the BBC in the early 1970s. Cleese threatened to leave after the second series, and did quit after the third, in 1973.

But he was persuaded to rejoin in 1975, for the Holy Grail film. Idle, a besotted admirer of British rock groups, was coaxing bands into investing cash – about £10,000 each from Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Genesis and Jethro Tull.

‘They are the best backers,’ he crowed. ‘They don’t care and they don’t interfere, they don’t say, ‘Oh, there should be another scene over here’. And they didn’t want the money back.’

Bungs from rockers were never going to be enough to finance the Holy Grail, though. Palin’s diaries reveal the Pythons had been in negotiations for years with producers and wheeler-dealers, often with a naivety that boggles the mind. At a party to launch a potboiler of a Python book in November 1973, one producer worked his way around the room with a sheaf of documents.

‘John Gledhill had with him a sheet of proposals, which towards the end of the party he was getting people to sign,’ Palin noted in his diary. ‘I couldn’t take much of it in but seeing other signatures, and presuming it was merely a contract for story development in order to get the £6,000 front money, I too signed.’

Four days later, everyone was having second thoughts. The Pythons met at Cleese’s house: ‘No one seemed to be talking to each other. It was like a morgue,’ said Palin.

Another producer named Mark Forstater ‘ran through the clauses. It was increasingly clear that we were being asked to sign away our copyright on the film, which is tantamount to signing away every bargaining counter that Python ever had’. Palin worried that all this wrangling was going to end in a ‘personal tangle’ – made worse as ‘there is no villain of the piece, no easy target who we can slander and malign. Both Gledhill and Mark are nice people’.To Palin, a genuinely lovely and loyal man, there is no higher praise.

Few people ever describe Cleese as ‘nice’. But he too failed to see the perils of trusting self-style producers and financial advisers.

In a candid moment two years ago, he admitted: ‘I never knew how much money I had. I remember in America someone asked me where my investments were and I said, ‘I have no idea at all’.

‘I never understand money and I don’t find it very interesting, which is a real disadvantage in the world that we live in. I advise anybody who is a bit vague about it to become less vague because it has cost me a lot.

‘I have just relied on people and in one or two cases that has been very good, but in one or two others, it has been disastrous.’

The ‘personal tangle’ with Mark Forstater reached a crisis in 2013, when the producer – by now styling himself ‘the seventh Python’ – claimed that he was owed royalties as a co-creator of the film.

‘It may have been what he wanted but it was never going to be accepted by the Pythons,’ protested Palin at a high court hearing. ‘He was not the creator of the film. He came on board, he became the producer, but I don’t think he was entitled to anything beyond that.’

A judge disagreed and the Pythons were ordered to pay more than £1million in royalties and legal costs. By then, Cleese was so furious at the uneven share-out of the spoils from Spamalot that he was referring to Eric Idle as ‘Yoko’.

To compare him to the woman who supposedly broke up The Beatles was a particularly vicious jibe, since Idle was so proud of his friendships within the band.

Idle axed Cleese’s recorded contribution, as the voice of God, from Spamalot, saying, ‘I’ve surgically removed him. He’s had plenty of money already – he’s always in financial crisis. I just sit at home watching the cheques come in, then I send them on to John in case he’s getting married again.’

That was a barbed reference to Cleese’s cataclysmic £12.5million divorce from third wife Alyce Faye Eichelberger in 2007. The settlement cleaned him out, forcing him to sell off his art collection and memorabilia from box office hits such as A Fish Called Wanda, as well as his house in Holland Park, west London, which went for £2.5million. He also gave Eichelberger the deeds to their £1million apartment on New York’s swanky Upper West Side. The O2 shows in 2014 went some small way to restoring his finances, but the sell-out performances did not satisfy Idle, who wanted to continue. Palin blocked that, partly as he knew his closest friend in the gang, Terry Jones, was more unwell than most realised.

‘This is the last time we’ll be working together,’ Palin told the BBC that year. He also hinted that the blame lay with Idle and Cleese for being prima donnas.

‘John and Eric had lifestyles, how can I say it, they were slightly more complicated. They wanted to go on holidays in Barbados and all that, rather more than Terry and myself, who were just happy going to have a pint at the pub. They were stars and we weren’t, and the trouble with stars is they can be a bit difficult. So there were difficulties now and then between those who had higher expectations of life and those of us at the humbler end of the writing spectrum.’

Despite signing that film rights agreement he knew little about, Palin has displayed the greatest financial acumen of the Pythons, having bought and knocked through two houses either side of the north London terrace property he’s lived in since the late 1960s. Jones left a financial mess when he died aged 77, in 2020, eight years after marrying his second wife Anna Soderstrom – a Swedish knitwear designer who was 41 years his junior and nearly a decade younger than his two children from a previous marriage.

In 2016 he signed a will in her favour, which children Bill and Sally claimed to be ‘an effective total disinheritance’. He had already transferred his £2.8million north London home jointly into Anna’s name with his own. It was alleged that, two days after the will was signed, Anna moved out – taking their daughter Siri and leaving Terry to be looked after by carers.

Despite directing the Python films, including Life Of Brian in 1979, and pursuing a second successful career as an academic (he was an expert on Chaucer), Jones was perennially broke.

The money from the O2 shows, he admitted, might finally help him to pay off his mortgage.

Terry Gilliam, the Flying Circus cartoonist, enjoyed the most illustrious of the post-Python careers, as a Hollywood director. His films include Brazil, starring Robert De Niro, The Fisher King with Robin Williams, and Twelve Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis.

But he had a reputation for financial recklessness that terrified the most profligate L.A. investors. The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, in 1988, began with a $23million budget, doubling over time to $46million – £47million and £94million at today’s values. Despite this, it took only $8million (£17million).

Still, in 2015 he was reckoned to be the wealthiest Python, with a bank balance of perhaps £25million. Cleese was the worst off, with a reputed £6million… and that was probably optimistic. Since the split with Eichelberger, he has staged repeated ‘alimony tours’, a gruelling schedule of live performances that he calls ‘feeding the beast’. He left his homes in Britain and Montecito, California, to live on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, which levies no income tax or capital gains tax.

‘Apparently I got off lightly,’ he complains, ‘because my lawyer points out how much more I would have had to pay, had my ex-wife contributed anything to the relationship – if we had children, or even a two-way conversation.’

Again, this financial catastrophe was caused by naivety that beggars comprehension.

When Cleese told his friend the film director Michael Winner that he and Eichelberger were planning to divorce, the comedian announced airily: ‘This is going to be friendly and quick.’ Winner retorted: ‘What planet are you on? It’ll be horrific.’

A year later, wise long after the event, Cleese grumbled: ‘If ever there were a case for prenuptial agreements, this is it.’

He’s still paying. Unable to tour in lockdown, he was reduced to recording ‘a personalised threat or insult or taunt’ for fans.

Charging £249 a time, Cleese was hardly on to a money-spinner. But if Idle is as penniless as he claims, he might want to consider it, too.

Saturday evening live might get a little tricky Ayo Edebiri after her past insults Jennifer Lopez's career resurfaced.

Years before starring The bearEdebiri, 28, appeared on a 2020 episode of the podcast “Scam Goddess” to discuss Linda Taylor's welfare fraud. During her conversation with host Laci MosleyEdebiri brought up Lopez, 54, saying she believed Lopez's entire career was “one long con.”

“Well, that's the point. She thinks she is on multiple tracks, but she is not,” Edebiri explained at the time. “I think she thinks she's still good even though she doesn't sing for most of these songs.”

Edebiri confessed that she became “fascinated” by Lopez songs that reportedly featured other artists' vocals instead of the pop star's. The Emmy winner said she then started “reading” other things.

“A lot of the song descriptions will be like, 'J. Lo didn't have time to go to the studio,' like J. Lo was busy,” Edebiri said. “It's like, 'Do what?' Of course not singing!”

Four years later, Edebiri was selected to host the Saturday, February 3 episode SNL alongside Lopez himself, who will be the musical guest.

Ahead of the episode, the duo got together with the cast member Heidi Gardner to promote the show.

“I'm very excited, I love your show,” Lopez told Edebiri during a show promo teaser on Friday, February 2. Edebiri replied, “I love everything about you.”

Neither Lopez nor Edebiri have responded to the 2020 comments.

Since Edebiri's podcast appearance, she has come a long way in her career. Last month she won her first Emmy for her role in The bear.

“I am so incredibly grateful for this for so many reasons. But most importantly, this is a show about family and found family and real family,” Edebiri said during her acceptance speech. 'My parents are here tonight. I let them sit a little far away from me because I'm a bad child. But I love you guys so much.”

While Edebiri has received a lot of praise lately, she has also received some criticism for her candid movie reviews on the website Letterboxd. Despite the backlash, Edebiri brushed it off and said her comments were all in good fun.

“I'm a comedian. Everything I say online, I think I would say to someone's face,” she told reporters after the Emmy Awards in January. “I have a mailbox [account] because I love movies, I love TV, and I love this industry. I know how hard it is to make something. I respect everything that has ever been created.”

A bustling market in Tokyo and locals are minding their own business, browsing stalls or rushing to work — until a group of obese Brits stroll past and stop them in their tracks. Suddenly, heads start to turn, and the visitors are struck by the sense they’re being gossiped about.

‘All the school kids — they pointed and laughed at us,’ says an aghast Tiffany, 24. ‘They are so open about being rude.’

Marisa, 32, is equally shocked. ‘I don’t feel like I should be here,’ she says. ‘It blows my mind that you’re not allowed to be who you are, and you just have to fit in.’

In Britain, where more than 25 per cent of adults are obese — or have a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or above — the group would barely raise an eyebrow. Here in Japan, however, where the obesity rate is just four per cent, they are an anomaly; figures of shame in a society where fat is scorned. And that is precisely why they have come to the country, as part of Channel 4 documentary series Around The World In 80 Weighs.

The group of six, whose combined weight is 855 kg, or 134 st, travel the globe to learn what other countries are doing to tackle obesity. They include Russell, 36, a healthcare insurer from Kent — who developed diabetes after his weight topped 30 st — and his wife Marisa, 31, an administrator, who started comfort eating at school after being bullied. ‘If anything bad happened, I would turn to food,’ she says.

Tiffany, an NHS waste co-ordinator, believed she was ‘this disgusting human being’ after being called fat daily as a child, and Therri-Jay, 32, a community officer from London, turned to food to cope after her best friend was murdered when she was just 14.

Then there’s 34-year-old Phil, a behaviour welfare coach from Leeds, who wants to lose weight to be a better father to his four-year-old son; while housewife Susan, 57, from Northamptonshire, blames her weight on grappling with boredom and loss.

‘I’m a bit in limbo,’ she says. ‘The children don’t need me. Cooking is a hobby but that turns into eating.’

While all members of the group — who have an average waist circumference of 54 in — have psychological triggers that fuel their overeating, our British culture of buy-one-get-one free junk-food deals, takeaways and whipped cream lattes also encourages them at every turn.

‘Society is a lot to blame for me being overweight,’ claims Therri-Jay, who laments the chicken and Chinese fast-food joints she sees ‘everywhere’, adding: ‘It makes you really think — does my country even care about me?’

So what is different in Japan, where they live and eat like locals for five days? And could this nation’s attitude towards food help foster healthier eating habits in the UK?

Of course, the national diet — known as washoku — is a world apart from our cuisine of sugary cereals, endless snacks and stodgy ready meals. Largely fresh and unprocessed, it centres on rice, fermented vegetables, soya and fish. Because Japan is a group of islands, its residents eat more fish than other Asian countries: 80g to 100g every day.

That’s quite something compared with the two-thirds of Brits who don’t even eat the recommended two portions of fish a week.

‘Vegetables that have been fermented, either by pickling with vinegar or with salt, have been broken down by bacteria and are increasingly shown to support gut health,’ says Laura Southern, nutritionist at London Food Therapy.

‘As fish is a primary source of protein for the Japanese, and they don’t eat the same quantities of red meat as the West, their diet is lower in saturated fat, which can lead to high blood pressure and heart disease.’

Soy — usually in the form of tofu, edamame or natto, which is traditionally eaten for breakfast — also provides protein, while the Japanese eschew sugary lattes for green tea, which Southern says is packed with ‘stress-reducing plant compounds and high levels of antioxidants linked to improved brain health’.

Seaweed is another staple — it contains alginate, which stops the body absorbing fat — while meals end with fruit, and puddings are a rare treat. Little wonder, then, that Japanese people consume on average 300 fewer calories a day than Brits, and 48.8g sugar per day compared with our 100.4g, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The presentation of food is just as important as the content.

Japanese YouTubers Mr and Mrs Eats (they never reveal their real names), who chaperone the Brits around Tokyo in the show, explain that rather than using one large plate, the Japanese eat from a small bowl, rotating different dishes.

The slender Mrs Eats says: ‘We eat little by little so you don’t over eat.’

Russell, who wants to lose weight with Marisa so they’re healthy enough to have children, is partial to bread, egg fried rice and prawn crackers. He decides the strategy ‘makes sense, because sometimes I leave the best bit till right at the end and that makes you finish everything on the plate even if you’re stuffed’.

Bingeing is also more difficult if you’re using chopsticks. The Brits describe them as ‘torture’ to eat with, but research from Ohio State University has found they make eating more enjoyable.

British model Lisa Snowdon has attributed her phenomenal figure to them, saying: ‘If I’m hungry and use a fork, I shovel food in. With chopsticks, it takes longer and tricks me into eating less.’

Then there’s the Japanese saying, hara hachi bu, which means ‘to eat till you are 80 per cent full’, that children are taught from a young age.

But diet alone doesn’t explain why Japan had the longest average life expectancy among G7 countries in 2020. The island of Okinawa is home to the highest number of centenarians in the world. Unlike our MPs who dither over banning fatty BOGOF products, Japan’s politicians consider it their duty to control the nation’s health.

In 2008, after Western fast food had begun to overtake traditional Japanese fare in popularity, and the country’s men were found to be 10 per cent and women 6 per cent heavier than a decade earlier, the authorities took the extraordinary step of making it mandatory for companies to carry out annual health checks on staff, with weight monitored.

Men with a waist circumference of over 33in and women whose waists measured over 35in were given exercise and diet plans — and firms that failed to bring their staff’s weight under control faced fines.

‘If it can prevent even a small number of people from developing cardiovascular diseases, it will be good news for them and their families,’ said director of the Japan Society for the Study of Obesity, Yuji Matsuzawa, at the time.

All of which ‘might sound weird to you guys,’ says Mrs Eats, as she takes the group to fragrance company Kao to watch a health check in action, and marvel at the healthy canteen lunch menu, created by company dieticians, that costs staff just £2.

But Therri-Jay is too unsettled to eat, describing how feeling like a ‘second-class citizen’ at home makes her reach for burgers, chocolate and popcorn. ‘We’ve not been told how to cope,’ she cries.

Yet whether staff here are happy about the draconian measures enforced on them is another matter — in 2023 Japan ranked last among 18 countries surveyed for workplace wellbeing, with only 49 per cent describing themselves as happy in their jobs.

Tiffany, for her part, doesn’t see her obesity as a problem, having worked hard to overcome the trauma of being sent to a personal trainer aged 11 by her own mother; and of being bullied at school for her weight. She now weightlifts, cheerleads and firmly believes ‘you can be healthy when you’re obese. I’m not sure if I grew up in this environment I would be the same person’.

Certainly, she would be uncomfortable with the fat-shaming that is de rigueur in Japan. ‘It’s super normal for [people] to just grab you and say: “What’s going on here, buddy, you’ve picked up a few pounds,” ’ explains Mr Eats, who introduces the visitors to an employee who failed his health test and was ordered to walk 10,000 steps a day until he was slim again.

Walking is a national pastime in Japan, with the average Japanese person taking 6,500 steps a day, partly because driving is expensive — 69 per cent of households have access to a car there, compared with 77 per cent in the UK.

Japan has another weapon in its fitness armoury in the form of dai-ichi —an exercise routine that takes just three minutes, requires no equipment, and is broadcast to a backdrop of piano music several times a day on a Japanese public radio station.

Followed by everyone from children to the elderly, it comprises 13 simple moves, including arm raises and star jumps.

Therri-Jay performs the routine in Kao’s offices, mortified at showing everyone her ‘underneath’ while touching her toes.

Yet she concludes: ‘If we had to do that every morning at work I think we’d be more productive, more happy and I feel like we’d enjoy movement more.’ There are other, darker, aspects to Japan’s attitude towards the overweight. They include exercise apps such as Nenshou, launched in 2013, in which an on-screen animated character dishes out digital humiliation in the form of statements such as: ‘Fat girl, do some more exercise, OK?’ Russell and Phil, greeted by a ‘good morning, tubby!’ by the avatar on the app they are shown, appear appalled.

‘That wouldn’t go down well in the UK,’ says Phil. ‘It’s blown my mind that that’s allowed.’

More dubious still is an emerging market for renting obese people, for around £11 an hour, by companies such as Debucari, which launched in 2021.

Stressing that it is not an escort service, Debucari states its goal is to promote ‘progression away from an era where being fat had a negative image’ — yet it also suggests the obese can be hired to help clients look slimmer.

In the Channel 4 documentary, one such ‘body’ for hire, recalls how she had been told to lose weight in her previous job in a café because ‘in these places you must be thin’.

Tiffany is, not unreasonably, unconvinced by the practice: ‘I don’t quite believe there is zero fetishness about it.’

On their final day the group visit a community bath house, where locals believe submersing themselves in 42c water raises their metabolism and promotes weight loss (although there is little evidence to back up their claims, and the baths apparently cause cardiac problems and are reported to be responsible for 10 per cent of all sudden deaths in Japan).

So nonchalant are most Japanese about their bodies that there are no private changing rooms at the baths, a deal-breaker no doubt for many prudish Brits.

Horrified at the prospect of changing publicly, Phil opts out — but Russell, despite ruing the belly he describes as an ‘apron’, takes the plunge: ‘I’m here to shock myself and create a new mindset.’

He describes his immersion into Japanese lifestyle as ‘pretty emotive’, while wife Marisa calls it ‘an eye-opener’. She admits: ‘In 15 years we might not be here if we don’t change.’

Before they leave the group get on the scales — and discover they’ve lost 17kg in total in just five days. They’re delighted.

‘We’re so lucky to come to Japan,’ says Susan. ‘They’re so disciplined as a country. We all agreed we’ll take the discipline with us.’

Of course, no amount of chopsticks, workouts on national radio or domineering bosses can alleviate emotional angst, and sniggering at obese people in public is not the answer.

But perhaps incorporating a few of Japan’s strategies for weight control into our national psyche might finally stop the habit too many of us have, of reaching for the biscuit jar every time we need a pick-me-up.

Around The World In 80 Weighs is next on Channel 4 on Tuesday.

• The helicopter flew over the Moxihatetea tribe settlement in northern Brazil

By James Callery

Published: 06:54 EST, November 17, 2023 | Updated: 07:18 EST, November 17, 2023

Springwatch star Chris Packham has launched an angry tirade against Jeremy Clarkson after the outspoken presenter admitted he was unimpressed by Sir David Attenborough’s latest Planet Earth series.

The celebrated naturalist, 62, used his social media presence to attack Clarkson, 63, as he shared a mixed reaction to the BBC show in his column with national tabloid The Sun.

On

He wrote: ‘Not content with fantasies about throwing over members of the royal family, he now castigates the world’s greatest broadcaster and the man who has done more than anyone has or ever will to protect life on earth. . . What a huge c**kchafer’.

The explosive rant comes after Jeremy expressed his lack of enjoyment of 97-year-old Attenborough’s latest Planet Earth series, going so far as to say he ‘hates’ the show and calling for a change in its direction.

The Grand Tour presenter admitted that while he was fascinated by the new BBC series, he found the script ‘insane’.

Clarkson wrote in his column for The Sun: ‘Oh, the photography is brilliant. Enchanting even. But the words drive me crazye’.

The outspoken presenter then pointed out that despite once admiring Attenborough’s deep knowledge of animals, he now feels his mission to educate viewers about the effects of global warming has become a bit repetitive.

He wrote: “All we get now is, ‘Here’s a translucent fish with an orange stomach, and its future is threatened by climate change, and then it’s, ‘Here’s something with pointy teeth and soon it’s going to be wiped out. by global climate change. pre workout.”

“We already know. So please tell us about the animals in the future, and not about the nice weather.”

Fans flocked to social media to support Packham and his defense against Attenborough.

One user wrote: ‘Jeremy, a man full of himself. Sir David, a man full of the wonder of life’

A second wrote: ‘Like anyone would actually listen to him compared to DA.’

While a third defiantly wrote: ‘No one should criticize David Attenborough, he is a legend’

This is not the first time Clarkson has published a controversial column in The Sun.

Earlier this year, Clarkson wrote that he dreamed of Meghan Markle being forced to parade “naked” through British cities, prompting a record 25,100 complaints to the Independent Press Standards Organization.

He later apologized and admitted that he had ‘put my foot in it’ and accepted that his language was ‘disgraceful’ and that he was ‘deeply sorry’. The Sun also apologised.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Sussex branded the article about his wife as ‘horrific, hurtful and cruel’ and questions were raised over whether Clarkson left his lucrative deal with ITV, where he hosts Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?

At the time, it was claimed that three female stars refused to work with Clarkson during filming for the quiz show, throwing filming into chaos.

While ITV’s official position was that ‘scheduling issues’ had delayed production of the highly anticipated special, The Mirror reported that chaos behind the scenes led to the decision.

Clarkson also criticized David Attenborough and Frozen Planet II last year, saying the show was no longer ‘fun’ and accusing the BBC of having a climate change agenda.