The Gran Tour

Imagine if Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson, and co were grannies from Salford. And instead of traversing the world, they were exploring Blackpool. That was the idea we had that became The Gran Tour, a web series that sent our lovely grannies from the streets of Blackpool to the playas of Spain and Turkey.

RentalCars.com are a division of Booking.com, and are the world’s largest online car rental service. They put out a call for social media content with a very loose brief - simply to build brand awareness, and increase engagement, and just to be different and fun. For our creative team, that was equally exciting and daunting - just a bunch of people who wanted to create something entertaining? That’s our kind of people. But what were we going to develop? 

The Gran Tour was borne out of the pun on The Grand Tour, and it all went upwards from there. We wanted to pair the spirit of adventure and boundlessness of The Grand Tour, and present it in an unexpected, unforgettable way that’s both entertaining, and uniquely inspiring.

First thing’s first - we needed some grans. So we went along to Mature Movers, a dance group in Eccles, and discovered our stars. As the original plan was just for some medium form content for social media, us and our lovely talent (Pat, 74, June L, 72, and June G, 79) were free to focus on the entertainment aspect of the films, and have some real fun with it. So we took to Blackpool for a riotous weekend! 

After the initial success of the first Gran Tour videos, which performed excellently engagement wise - and more importantly, generated click-throughs from that engagement! - we were commissioned to grow and adapt The Gran Tour into something even bigger and better. We took our grannies even further afield, to Spain, and spent a week on location developing a series of films from a 20 minute director’s cut and 12 minute mini documentary, to micro and medium snippets and sizzle reels for social and online, as well as following up with seasonal specials over Christmas, and a series of minis. 

Taking The Gran Tour international presented its own set of challenges, not limited to the shooting either. From handling the logistics of the trip, to helping one of our lovely grannies get her passport for the first time, it’s safe to say that this series is one of the most intense - and fun - projects we’ve ever worked on. We were directors, production, creative… and logistics, gran-sitters, tour managers, embassy navigators… and we loved it! 

We really enjoyed developing this project in its entirety, from conceptual stages, through casting, storyboarding, a lot of pre-production, all the way to the finished product. And we relished every opportunity this project presented us with to its fullest extent! So we’re really looking forward to more longer form work in the future.