Everybody knew that if the BBC dropped Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear as we know it would be over. It would be like The Simpsons without Homer. So a few days after the head of BBC2 spoke of bringing the show back with a replacement for Jezza, James May officially announced he is not gong to be a part of it.

It all came into focus when James May changed his Twitter bio to “former” Top Gear presenter, and came to a head when he openly spoke about how daft the show would be without Jeremy Clarkson while speaking to the Guardian:

“Me and Hammond with a surrogate Jeremy is a non-starter, it just wouldn’t work. That would be lame, or ‘awks’ as young people say. It has to be the three of us. You can’t just put a surrogate Jeremy in and expect it to carry on. It would be forced. I don’t believe they would be stupid enough to try that. It doesn’t mean I won’t go back, we may all go back in the future. It might just be we have a break from it. I don’t know.”

In another TG-related development, executive producer Andy Wilman, the man who started this new type of Top Gear with Clarkson 15 years ago, has officially resigned from the show. This confirms his earlier thoughts on the whole “fracas” situation, revealed a while ago in a leaked email:

“Our stint as guardians of Top Gear was a good one, but we were only part of the show’s history, not the whole of it. Those two words are bigger than us.”