James May at Pub In The Park 2024 in Marlow, England. Photo / Getty Images
The former Grand Tour host on masculinity, Top Gear controversy and the joy of ‘dull’ hobbies.
James May can’t shake my hand because he is nursing a fractured wrist. Not because he overturned a Zenos E10S while drag racing in Morocco but because he fell off his bicycle near Hammersmith Bridge.
He’s annoyed about it, not least because it has badly spoiled filming for a new Channel 5 show The Great Explorers.
“At my age, this sort of thing takes much longer to heal,” he says. “I woke up one day and the one thing I never thought would happen had happened: I felt old. It’s partly my hair; my baggy face.”
Dressed in a crumpled shirt and nondescript denim, he gives an amiable shrug, taking a last drag of a cigarette outside the Chiswick hotel where we have met. “There is a trend these days to write old men like me off.”
Since he and Richard Hammond left Top Gear in 2015, following the sacking of Jeremy Clarkson for punching a producer, May, 61, has continued to produce a remarkable number of projects, so many in fact it’s hard to keep up.
There was the Amazon Prime remake of Top Gear, The Grand Tour, which bowed out this September. There have been the Our Man In travel documentaries; the BBC technology documentary series The Reassembler; the Amazon Prime cooking programme Oh Cook!, and What Next, the YouTube channel devoted to food and gin, created by May, Clarkson, and Hammond.
May, who combines the avuncular calm of a vicar with the fey appearance of a slightly mad inventor, seems determined to prove that no one should be dismissing him just because he is “pale, male and stale”.
“You do see people saying white men are the root of all problems, and I’m sure we have been the root of many of them. But I certainly don’t feel obliged to go round apologising for being an old white man, because I can operate a screw-cutting lathe and most people can’t.”
Which gets us to the heart of his latest TV series, James May and the Dull Men’s Club in which May does indeed spend time operating a screw-cutting lathe.
Inspired by the curiously popular Facebook phenomenon in which men – and the occasional woman – share tips on removing recalcitrant blackberries from hedges and post pictures of their favourite park bench, it’s both beautifully banal and peculiarly tetchy.
May was dimly aware of the club before the idea of making a TV show was suggested, but as an inveterate “maker of things” and with a pathological obsession with how things work, the movement plays straight to his views on the state of the modern man.
“It’s a bit farty to say this, but what used to be considered the attributes of basic manliness are being mocked. The idea of being thorough, or being able to make things or use tools: it’s all considered a bit dad, a bit dull.
“So in the show we decided to headbutt it by being interesting about being dull while acknowledging that everyone thinks the things we do are dull.”
This Donald Rumsfeld style statement doesn’t quite do justice to the strange bathetic poetry of the Dull Men’s Club.
Filmed largely in May’s own workshop – which is not your average workshop since it has a small fitted kitchen and underfloor heating – in the grounds of the house he shares in Wiltshire with his long-term partner Sarah Frater, a dance critic, it features May and various like-minded men constructing extraordinary solutions to every day problems and asking questions that arguably don’t need an answer.
They establish if it really is possible to use a hammer to crack a nut, and invent a urine-shooting quasi human-like contraption to scare deer away from rose bushes. They also find out if you can cook dinner in the washing machine. (Spoiler, you can’t: May’s white sheets ended up covered in tinned beef stew.)
It is, I suggest, a bit eccentric. Is there a Venn diagram that would include Top Gear and Grand Tour viewers alongside a typical Dull Man?
“Probably not,” May concedes. “Some of the Top Gear viewers were very technically minded. But probably not in the hard core ‘I’ve counted all the beans in a tin of beans’ kind of way, which is something we actually do later in the series.”
May was always the odd one out in the unholy trinity of himself, Clarkson and Hammond, under whose swaggering schoolboy machismo Top Gear became one of the BBC’s best loved programmes.
It continued for several years without them without generating the same impact but has been suspended since March last year following an accident involving the then presenter Freddie Flintoff.
Much of the show’s USP relied on Clarkson getting excited about a fast car and then saying something wildly inappropriate; May, with his nerdier, more philosophical demeanour, was invariably the foil to Clarkson’s testosterone-fuelled belligerence and Hammond’s untempered excitability.
The Lancaster University music graduate, who counts his interests as collecting art and making furniture and who today tells me that one of his life’s ambitions is to make his own shirts, was always, I suggest, an unlikely frontman for what he agrees was “an old-fashioned ra ra show about cars”.
“Are you saying Top Gear was just a terrific stunt and that really what I wanted to be doing was making an Airfix Spitfire?” he says with a genial raise of his eyebrow.
“Actually I think we were quite metrosexual on that show, which to me means you are like a bloke but can appreciate a good cushion, which I do. But it’s true I kind of fell into it.
“And I did always like cars and machines and things [he still has nine cars, which he houses in two underground bunkers; he also owns a light aircraft]. Clarkson’s job was to be very bumptious and go “phwoar” a lot. My role was to be slightly more considered and say, “Well, actually, what does this really mean?”
He thinks it’s unlikely Top Gear, and The Grand Tour, could be made again in the same format. “Top Gear was very much of its time. Social attitudes towards the car have changed quite a bit. These days [because of climate change], it’s become more political.”
Yet he also thinks that Top Gear was often accused of being things it wasn’t. “I don’t think it was sexist or misogynistic. It was just painfully honest. It was a view of the world, distorted through the eyes of people who were unreasonably concerned about cars.”
Surely, though, in its unrepentant petrol-head celebration of boys’ toys, it also offered an admittedly highly entertaining vision of masculinity at its most basic and vulgar?
“I’m a bit conflicted about this. I own an orange Ferrari with gold wheels. Part of me does feel that cars like that are a cry for help. I sometimes think that flashy supercars are for men that worry that women don’t find them interesting any more.
“But really, Top Gear was a sitcom panto cum travel show,” he adds.
“We also exposed the folly of it all, while accepting we were a little bit guilty. We were a bit bratty but I think people quite like that.”
Still, didn’t he find himself wincing at Clarkson, who called anything he didn’t like “gay” and casually embroiled the show in several racist controversies?
“At virtually everything he said, yes. But I didn’t wince about Clarkson being controversial because it’s his job to be an arse and he is very good at it. I’d wince at him not misunderstanding some basic principle of aerodynamics. I’d think, ‘how can you not know that?’”
Are he and Clarkson friends? “In what sense?” Would he be the first person you’d contact if something awful happened to you? “Certainly not. I wouldn’t talk to anyone about that sort of thing. I suppose if something happened to him, I’d send a curt note telling him to pull himself together. Which I suspect is what he’d send to me.”
May speaks with such an easy reasonableness, it obscures the extent to which he sometimes avoids directly answering a question. I can’t work out, for instance, if he has deep affection for Clarkson, or a sort of gritted teeth tolerance; politically at least he comes across as much more liberal.
“We are certainly very different,” he agrees. “It’s like following people on X who you don’t agree with. People have said to me, ‘why do you follow JK Rowling?’ Because I’m interested to see what she says. I’m not looking for the so-called echo chamber, I’m looking for the other view.
“People talk about the chemistry between people on TV but it’s a very delicate thing and almost impossible to manufacture. You can’t reduce it to bullet points.”
May, who also has a house in Hammersmith, grew up in Bristol and the Midlands before his family settled in Yorkshire. He describes his father, who managed an aluminium factory, as “a West Country working class council house kid who hauled himself up”, while his mother stayed at home to raise him and his two sisters and brother.
He puts his interest in the mechanical world down to his father (as a teenager he had a part-time job at his father’s factory) and to the fact he grew up in the industrial North where, he says, “there was quite a lot of emphasis on practical skills for boys”.
A former choir boy, he went to state school where he became obsessed with music, metal work, and poetry – he quotes Tennyson and Hilaire Belloc during our interview. Both Clarkson and Hammond were privately educated – did he feel the odd one out?
“I’ve got quite a few friends who went to posh public schools, Harrow and Eton, and I think they were better prepared for life than me because the public school system in the 1970s mentally toughened people in a way that I wasn’t. But I don’t think they are better educated than me or more capable. In many ways less so because I don’t think any of them can iron their own shirts.”
After university, where he studied the saxophone and the flute, he drifted aimlessly through a succession of jobs on car magazines before landing Top Gear in 2003. A few years previously he met Sarah; the couple have no children. She strikes me as being very tolerant of his desire to spend endless hours making hinge pins in his workshop.
“I help around the house. I do a lot of house work. There’s a myth that men live in squalor but most men are quite tidy. Sarah likes to garden but she is not very good at looking after her tools. So I get a bit neurotic about maintaining her secateurs.”
He seems a bit uncertain about who he is and how he comes across. “I’ve spent my life wondering what the hell I am doing. I’ve never had any idea.”
He worries that his obsessive interest in things such as aviation history and screw threads alongside his passion for poetry and art sometimes confuses people. “We seem not able to accept that men can be more than one thing, the way people used to be in the Renaissance.”
He hates being patronised. “I hate all those phrases when you put the word ‘man’ in front of something, like man flu, or man cave”. He agrees this sort of belittling tends to come from women.
“One of the interesting things about this TV show is that it is directed by a woman, who kept asking me if she could have a bit about how we feel about our screwdrivers. I said we don’t really do that. She asked me if I’d given my milling machine a name. I said no. I don’t give my cars names either, or anything except people or animals.”
He wonders if the condescension partly stems from the misapprehension that men like him are nostalgic for a time when men made things with their bare hands. “I believe in progress, in the modern world. I know it’s better than the Britain of my childhood in the Seventies where everything was broken and everything smelled and nothing worked properly.”
He also wonders whether some of the suspicion comes from what he calls the “wokerati”.
“I think they might be suspicious of what they see as traditional gender roles. Which is nonsense as a lot of women are into this stuff too. But the woke mentality would also say we must declutter the environment, we must upcycle and reuse. Which is precisely what men in workshops do at the weekend.
“The other day, I went to the local dump, which is now called the community recycling centre. There was a whole pile of discarded bikes. None of them [was] anywhere near beyond help. People had just got bored with them. Maybe that’s a good thing because you get a better one if you replace it often, but it seems tragic. We would have scavenged around when we were kids to make our own bicycles.”
May also owns a pub, the Royal Oak, in Swallowcliffe in Wiltshire. He is quick to stress that all this means is he has a say over which pictures hang on the wall; he certainly doesn’t run it.
He is not remotely romantic about pubs themselves, which are currently closing at the rate of about 50 a month. “It’s only crap pubs that are under threat. No one wants a naff smelly Victorian throwback with crap bogs and boring food.”
Does he think of pubs as particularly male spaces? “It’s true there has been a debate recently about whether the world has neglected the need for male spaces. But in the late Eighties I worked in a pub near Ravenscourt Park. There would always be a group of men hammering on the door at 6pm, this is before pubs were open all day, and they’d come in, order the same drinks, sit at the end of the bar, and moan.
“One would moan that his wife had left him. I wanted to say, ‘Is this because you are always in here moaning about her?’ Male spaces are sociologically a very complicated issue. But the pub has to move with the times. They need to serve good food and be pleasurable places to be.”
Clarkson also owns a pub, the Farmer’s Dog, in the Cotswolds, which he recently revealed was losing huge amounts of money, calculating that each customer was costing him around a tenner. “I gather he has realised that running a pub is actually quite expensive.”
May says his pub is “doing quite well” although he doesn’t make any money from it himself. “I just like being able to say I own a pub, even though it sounds a bit naff when a famous person off the telly says that sort of thing.”
Does he fear the impact of Labour’s proposed ban on outdoor smoking? “I’d be absolutely staggered if they brought that in; it’s a very American idea that you can’t smoke within 20m of a building.
“Anyway, not that many people smoke these days.” And not many young people drink, either. “No they don’t. They go to bed early and seem very burdened. They have been made to worry about too many things – their appearance, their opinions, the cost of housing.
“I envy them for being young because obviously we’d all give up everything to have a week of their virility and optimism, but I don’t think we have served them very well.”
He no longer craves having that virility himself. The days of driving across Vietnam on a second hand motorcycle are gone, and he’s fine with it.
“These days I’m a bit nesty. I want to stay at home.”
Does he fear getting old? “I’m slightly sad that there is more behind than to come. But I also feel I should embrace it. I’m in a relatively privileged position. I could just indulge myself and be creative. I’d love to learn how to properly draw, for instance.”
And yet he continues, with restless need, to make yet more TV. “I think all TV presenters are a bit vulnerable and insecure. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it.”
What is he insecure about? “I suppose I’m worried about people imagining I’m some sort of stuckist who wants to live in the past. I don’t.
“I know I have some enthusiasms that a lot of people regard as old mannish, such as making sure my spanners are in the right order. But I do that to save time.”
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