Will Young brands Richard Hammond ‘the worst’ Grand Tour host due to anti-gay jokes

Words: Jamie Tabberer; picture: press shot/Wiki

Will Young has branded Richard Hammond “the worst” of the three presenters of The Grand Tour over his previous gay jokes.

‘Daniel’ singer Young went on to called Jeremy Clarkson “the least worst.”

James May rounds out the trio of presenters of the show.

Young – who shot to fame in Pop Idol in 2002 –  made the remarks while appearing at The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival last week.

“He’s the worst because he says things like: ‘I’ve got lots of gay friends.'”

“Jeremy Clarkson is the least worst,” he reportedly said on stage during a panel discussion [as per Metro]. “The other two, in my opinion, are worse. The worst one is Richard Hammond. He’s the worst because he says things like: ‘I’ve got lots of gay friends.'”

Young went on: “The producers chose to make the main narrative: Jeremy Clarkson is driving a hairdresser’s car. Basically, Jeremy Clarkson is gay. They had him wearing a pink shirt. They spray the car pink. They have him playing ‘It’s Raining Men’.”

Young then tried to “track down the producers [and] was going to stand outside so that I could talk to them and say ‘you’re a c***’, basically”, adding that he “got sidetracked.”

“Clarkson was the least of my problems. It was Richard Hammond and it was the producers,” he said.

“They’re sitting in an edit suite for nine months. They created the whole thing and it was Amazon that let it go out. I was so shocked and so upset.”

Hammond came under fire in 2016 for saying on the Amazon Prime Video show that only gay men eat ice cream.

“It’s all right, I don’t eat ice cream. It’s something to do with being straight,” he infamously said at the time.

He added: “There’s nothing wrong with it, but a grown man eating an ice cream, you know, it’s a bit… It’s that way rather than that way.”

In a 2017 interview with The Times, he defended the joke and also said he doesn’t understand why gay people feel the need to come out publicly.

“Look, anyone who knows me knows I wasn’t being serious, that I’m not homophobic, ” he said. “Love is love, whatever the sex of the two people in love.

“[…] It may be because I live in a hideously safe and contained middle-class world, where a person’s sexuality is not an issue. But when I hear of people in the media coming out, I think, why do they even feel the need to mention it?”

After more backlash, Hammond told Newsweek he “entirely rejected” claims he’s homophobic, adding: “That’s just not the case. The very last thing I am is in any way anti-gay. And I said I believe that love is love is love.”

Attitude has approached Amazon and Richard Hammond’s agent for comment.

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