Vroom vroom, brrrrrrrrrm, beep beep. “Get outta my way, ya bum.” Zooooooom, wheeeeee, chug chug chug.

The Grand Tour – or, if you prefer, Continuity Top Gear or, if you prefer, Men! – is back on Prime Video. And if I know you, you’re sitting in a cardboard box right now using a saucepan as a steering wheel and making the above noises as you watch.

Men will watch Top Gear/The Grand Tour rather than go to therapy, as you know. (I think this was an early catchphrase.) I include myself in that. And I don’t even like cars.

Top Gear was once a flaccid consumer car show that engorged into a vehicle for Jeremy Clarkson’s priapic, post-ironic humour. Before long, he and the chortling oxpecker birds that groomed him, James May and Richard Hammond, toured the world with lavish budgets engaged in vehicular high jinks, tomfoolery and even, on occasion, shenanigans.

It was hugely popular and only came to an end because Clarkson punched an Irish man for refusing to give him hot meats. The BBC hadn’t allowed this since the 1980s, so Clarkson was fired. And because Hammond and May were bonded with him like imprinted ducklings, they left too.

Luckily, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon’s Prime Video, was moved to tears by the plight of these exiled millionaires. “Come over here to my garden, which is paradise,” he said. “Here you can drive cars on lavish budgets and punch as many Irish men as you like.”

And so The Grand Tour was born – as, soon after, was Clarkson’s Farm, a show in which Clarkson discovered a love for the environment by buying a big chunk of it.

Jeremy Clarkson’s journey from rogue to redemption is complete

In a world of unscrupulous looksmaxxers and mean-spirited manosphere weirdos, the moral panics caused by the original Top Gear seem quaint now. Thinking about these make me nostalgic for a time when chauvinism came wrapped in a veneer of irony rather than gibbering from the drooling mouths of men with large social-media followings and problematic tattoos.

By the final episode of The Grand Tour that starred the original trio, they seemed like genteel and weary hobbyists rather than edgy petrolheads. It felt a little like a visit to your local men’s shed or watching a less frenetic episode of Last of the Summer Wine.

Unlike in days of yore, I worried not that someone would die on-screen because of an ill-conceived stunt (as Hammond once almost did) but simply because they felt they had lived long enough. I genuinely thought, towards the end, that they were going to walk into the desert to expire in peace (a classic Amazon worker retirement plan, really).

One way or another it ended.

“Whither the Grand Tour?” all the dads cried.

“Maybe you could go to therapy now,” their families said hopefully.

“No, I’m sure there’s something else on,” all dads said before spending a year or so flicking through the channels.

And now they’ve landed on this, its sixth season, aka Men II: The Next Generation, in which three whole new ex-boys, who in the opening scenes receive Clarkson’s blessing, drive across the California desert in a convoy of supercars burning the last of mankind’s petrol. No carpooling for them. They hate the environment.

This really is a show in debt to the old ways. As beautifully and expensively shot as ever, it features self-deprecating quips, half-baked rivalry and loud and fast vroom-vrooms all vrooming away in an exotic location.

It is, essentially, three men from the 2020s, some of whom have been on TikTok or possibly Bebo, cosplaying as three men from the early 2000s who can remember rationing, old money and the purpose of petrol.

The new presenters are Francis Bourgeois, James Engelsman and Thomas Holland. They do not yet have the chemistry Clarkson had with his symbiotes. In time, I suspect, Bourgeois will become the Clarkson of the group, although he’s gangly and nerdy rather than ironically boorish and ovoid.

The existence of the show raises so many questions for me. Do young people today even know what cars are? Do they know what television programmes are? They probably think this is a “book”.

This iteration of The Grand Tour is benignly entertaining, although it lacks the bite of Top Gear’s heyday. Provisional Top Gear was, in a way, the worst thing that ever happened to Continuity Top Gear/The Grand Tour, ending the possibility of there being another straightforward motoring show, because now the audience would expect at least one explosion or ironic slur per episode.

In this episode, for example, the trio must race their supercars against some jets even though that’s not a particularly visually arresting thing to do.

Look, it’s all fine. Less masculinity in crisis and more masculinity in quiet acceptance of decline.

The Mandalorian and Grogu, a film that I am insisting is a TV show because it appears on my laptop screen via Disney+, is also a programme about masculinity.

It is, essentially, a portrait of a beleaguered single father and small-business owner attempting to juggle work and childcare. For Grogu (Timothée Chalamet … I mean Baby Yoda, the best actor of his generation) and The Mandalorian (a shiny bucket, voiced by a distant Pedro Pascal), every day is take-your-weird-muppet-child-to-work day. (I’ve no issue with weird muppety kids; I’m related to a few who make Grogu look “normal”.)

So the latter takes the former out with him on bounty-hunting cases, and neither seems to find this remotely traumatising.

In the opening scenes, for example, Grogu gurgles with delight as The Mandalorian (I think The is his first name) murders a whole space barracks full of imperial soldiers. Then The Mandalorian endangers his verdure muppet son’s life to do some more murdering rather than instantly escaping an imminent explosion.

Typically, “do not explode the child” is taught in Parenting 101. If there’s ever a custody hearing over Grogu, brought by The Mandalorian’s wife, Chewbacca or whatever (I’m not up to date on my Star Wars lore), then this is damning stuff.

I suspect, indeed, that The Mandalorian’s issues with “the Empire” may have originated with imperial social services taking an interest.

But, ignoring the possibility that The Mandalorian might, indeed, be making poor life choices, the whole point of this film is just an excuse to say “Pew pew” while wearing a bucket on your head.

And this is probably as it should be. Yes, the choice for all thinking men in these days of woe is between “Pew pew” and “vroom vroom”. Would we have it any other way?