As his new programme about famous explorers debuts, the former Top Gear presenter talks to Andrew Billen about life after The Grand Tour.
We are, obviously, in a bar, although not the Royal Oak, the pub James May part-owns in the Wiltshire village where he lives, but the Cross Keys, near his other home in west London. We have secured an unheated games room at the back, but it does not stay unheated for long once May spots its wood-burning stove. He is soon making a fire. As he works, he delivers a mini-lecture on why the stove door should initially be kept ajar so as to adjust the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide, and what to do thereafter (close the door). I thank him for this gratis masterclass.
“But I don’t think anybody really knows,” Mays says. “Well, actually, the Scandis do, because they write big books about it. They love a bit of log bollocks.”
When we meet he is a week off turning 62, but although he trembles in the January chill, he looks otherwise as roadworthy as when he joined Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond on the BBC’s Top Gear two decades ago. This testy, testosteronic triumvirate became heroes of the counter-counterculture, reactionary in everything from their jokes to their alcohol consumption. (This mid-morning, May, a fan of beer, wine and spirits, is on the hot chocolate, because there is one beverage he hates and it is coffee.) When Clarkson crashed their telly vehicle in 2015 and was fired for assaulting a producer who had failed to conjure a steak after a day’s filming in North Yorkshire, May and Hammond resigned in solidarity, but the three did not have to wait long before Prime Video pounced on them. For another eight years, they bumped and bounced classic cars around the world until The Grand Tour was itself hauled to the scrapyard last year, by which time the trio were multimillionaires and – or so they would insist – heartily sick of one another’s company.
But age cannot depreciate May. His hair, for one big thing, remains defiantly Seventies roadie. “I either look like I’ve had some sort of weird Victorian ailment or a bit like Valerie Singleton in her Blue Peter days,” he says of having tried it shorter. With his white moustache and goatee, I say he is going a bit Big Yin. “I think,” he says, “men have a duty to experiment with facial hair.”
Last summer he broke his wrist falling off his bike after failing to negotiate a puddle, and without his regular 10-mile cycle rides he has felt “podgy and lethargic”. You will clock his bandaged hand on Channel 5’s James May’s Great Explorers, in which he disassembles the myths and scrutinises the nuts and futtocks of the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Walter Raleigh and James Cook. The three-parter is funny and irreverent – at one point he calls the British Museum “the world’s largest lost property office” – but also one of the most seriously educative series he has made (and he has made nearly 30 since 1998). For Channel 5, his signing is a big deal and its PRs have supplied him with briefing notes, because, he explains, they think he is senile.
“So it reads here, ‘Channel 5 is the destination for unmissable, high-quality factual programming.’ That’s not the sort of thing I am known for, is it?”
Or it. When Channel 5 launched, it was famous for its soft porn.
“Yeah, porn,” he says turning faux-naive. “Apparently a lot of teenagers look at porn now on the internet, whereas when I was a teenager, it was something you might find on a building site, if you were lucky.”
Or in a hedge on the way to school. Pretty vanilla by today’s standards (I believe). “Not even sex. In some ways I’m glad I’m not young any more. It sounds like hard work.”
The briefing notes put to one side, we turn to his series’ verdicts on history’s great grand tourists. He accuses Cook of being party to a “land grab by an empire [British] hellbent on world domination”, calls Raleigh a “wild boy with a taste for violence”, and relays the unwelcome news that Columbus was the largest single trader of enslaved indigenous people of his era. Such debunking may surprise those who assume that Clarkson’s politics were something that his Top Gear amigos had also navigated towards. Does May, I ask, think Kemi Badenoch will approve of Great Explorers?
“Is Badenoch pro or against reparations? She would be against, wouldn’t she? Well, my first response to your question would be, I hope she enjoys it. And I hope…”
She learns something?
“I mean, I don’t want people to get the impression that this is a deep analysis of the psychology and policy of colonialism. It is really about navigation and sail technology and barrel-making and biscuits. Those ship’s biscuits are so awful.”
The thing is, I say, he is a centrist who identifies as a “bloke”, but the term seems to have been colonised by the right.
Now ‘bloke’ possibly means yob. Men are being, in many ways, belittled.
“I think the definition has changed. Being a bloke used to mean camaraderie. And then, at one point, it meant being dependable and handy, and then more recently it came to mean sort of endearingly hopeless. Now ‘bloke’ possibly means yob. Men are being, in many ways, belittled. My idea of man-ness – and I would say this, because I’m not a tough guy or anything like that – is a kind of dependability and practicality. Men are supposed to be able to do things. They’re not supposed to rejoice in their own uselessness and think it’s cute, because it isn’t. It’s feeble.”
I suppose people could be suspicious of him because his shows have featured so few women (although some are interviewed on Great Explorers including – political correctness gone mad – a female skipper). Does he enjoy the frisson of male-only company?
“I like the company of women because I find them really fascinating and they’re sort of the most wonderful thing on earth, but there is a camaraderie that men have when they’re trying to achieve something. You see it on building sites and factories where things are being made. There’s a bit of a movement going on, people saying, ‘Oh, we need to reinvent safe male spaces,’ and I used to think, ‘Oh, sod off. They’re called garages and workshops.’ ”
And if you’re posh, gentlemen’s clubs.
“I’ve been to a few of those places and if it’s blokes together eating too much red meat and farting a lot, I haven’t got much time for it, to be honest. But a load of blokes building a shed or playing darts, I could go for that. But I’m perfectly happy if there’s a load of women there as well.”
He has been with his partner, Sarah Frater, the dance critic, for 24 years (he has said he felt he left it too late to have children), but does he have platonic women friends? “Yes, loads. Some of them I’ve known for 45-plus years.”
I imagine his technique with women was to make them laugh.
“Well, maybe a bit later on. Not when I was young. I think I was actually too nerdy. I was a bit of a late developer.
Were there girls at his school?
“I went to a modern comprehensive. I had lots of girlfriends and things.”
But no sex involved?
“Not until I was about 16.”
That sounds quite early to me, I say (envious). “Sixth-form college. I must have been 17 actually.”
‘I don’t actually think our Top Gear had to end’
May hates the television cliché of celebrities on personal “journeys” in order to discover themselves. “I think, ‘Oh, f*** off!’ Find out some stuff and tell me something authoritative, or at least considered.” For him, one of the merits of Great Explorers is that it is about journeys to the end of the earth, not the soul.
Compare and contrast The Grand Tour, the diesel-oiled phoenix that rose from the ashes of Clarkson and co’s Top Gear. During its run, the show increasingly depended on our interest in its presenters. Particularly once the portable big-tent studio that substituted for the BBC’s aircraft hangar in Surrey was decommissioned, The Grand Tour no longer gloried in its cars. Instead, we watched hoping to observe the drivers’ characters revealed under pressure. The problem was, every time crisis stripped off a layer of self, the new layer revealed looked exactly as tough and leathery as the one before. And if it was insights into an inter-bloke dynamic you were interested in, you could never be sure the trio’s hostility was scripted or spontaneous. Someone’s car would break down and the other two would gloatingly zoom past. But why wouldn’t they, since a film crew with its attendant mechanics, was already at the beleaguered party’s side, ready to help?
I would judge last September’s feature-length finale of The Grand Tour a masterpiece; epic, funny and moving – because parting is always such sweet sorrow, even for frenemies. Only in the most limited sense, however, was The Grand Tour factual programming. In one scene the three smelted a pile of silver trinkets bought cheap in Zimbabwe and came up with the idea of moulding them into accessories for their cars, in May’s case a solid silver steering wheel. In the morning it had miraculously been fitted to his Triumph Stag. It was magic realism, I say, not documentary.
“It was a pantomime, really, I think. We ask you to go along with it. I mean, it was a mixture of things that were obviously deeply and knowingly contrived, but then a lot of the stuff that made it in was just stuff that happened. The expression in television is, ‘The universe will provide.’ If you’re going to drive across the spine of Africa or drive through India, stuff is going to happen. It just is. If the cameras are rolling, well, you’ve got your content.”
Perhaps, to continue this line of thinking, the universe provided for Clarkson, Hammond and May when stuff happened in that Yorkshire hotel in 2015. Perhaps 10 years ago this spring the universe decided to give Amazon’s then-newish streaming service a blast of front-page publicity and make three motoring journalists super-rich. Or perhaps the trio’s split from the BBC was avoidable?
“I thought it was very unfortunate and I don’t actually think our Top Gear had to end because of it. I think it could have been patched up and put down to a bit of high stress and flightiness, to be honest. It happened. It’s regrettable and it’s unfortunate, but it didn’t need to lead to the collapse of something very successful. Maybe these things are ordained and it was time for us to move on. We had been doing it by then for a decade, I think, more. And I never imagined it would last as long. I went into it from magazine journalism and I thought it would be a good laugh probably for a couple of years.
“I mean, without being big-headed about it, we were Top Gear and we were one of the biggest TV shows in the world at the time. It was quite an intense environment and it’s not entirely surprising that it occasionally went off the rails. If we’d been AC/DC or Thin Lizzy, nobody would have been the slightest bit surprised.”
And they were blokes.
“We’re all blokes and we worked quite hard and quite long hours and it was exciting but it was quite difficult.”
Did they fight? “No, not seriously. We used to squabble but, no, we weren’t Fleetwood Mac. We didn’t get that bad. We didn’t end up absolutely loathing each other, taking legal action against each other or anything like that.”
Although I have always thought May and Clarkson shared the same speech patterns and that Hammond was Sorcerer Clarkson’s devoted apprentice, the three, May says, were never very alike. “I like to think of myself as fairly liberal. I think of the other two as Stuckists, trying to live in the Twenties. I’ve always said Jeremy is a bit of an Edwardian and Hammond is Toad of Toad Hall with his little waistcoat and his vintage car.”
On location, May and Hammond convened meetings of “James & Richard’s Debating Society” (up for debate one night: how do you know a dog is a dog?) and the club has never been dissolved. “Jeremy never really got involved in that. I think he just thought we were being boorish or something. Or maybe he doesn’t have very many views on, say, a society that grows vertically and then falls over.
“I think Jeremy likes to have strong opinions. It’s what on the internet would be called, ‘Trust me, bro.’ But then again, when we went to the North Pole years ago, I spent many days sitting alongside Jeremy Clarkson and indeed sharing a tent with him, and we had some very entertaining discussions about banalities like food from our childhood and people’s trousers. Stuff like that.”
Does he share Clarkson’s view, as expressed on the GT finale, that electric vehicles are unreviewable as they are, like fridges, just “white goods”?
“No. I completely disagree with him on that. We have debated that quite a lot. I think the electric so-called revolution – it isn’t one really, as we’ve had electric cars for well over 100 years – is a great experiment and it makes cars interesting to talk about again. I know what he means because he’s saying there’s no engine to fall in love with. We have become very obsessed with internal combustion mainly because it’s flawed and it’s the flaws that make it fascinating. It’s a bit like people.”
‘I saw Jeremy recently. He seemed all right’
It strikes me that TG and GT were never about friendship. They were sit-docs about people who had to work together, and more The Office than Last of the Summer Wine. May likes that thought. “We’re not natural friends. That’s actually why it worked. I often looked back at Top Gear and The Grand Tour and thought in many ways I didn’t really belong on it. But that’s exactly why I was on it. It needed one of each of us for it to work.”
At the end of the last Grand Tour, the three stood on a mound on the Makadikadi salt pan in Botswana and gazed in opposing directions. Then they roared off towards their different horizons and we saw May delete his colleagues’ numbers from his phone. He came up with the joke, he says, but when I ask whether they will ever work together again, he says he wouldn’t have thought so, no.
I often looked back at Top Gear and The Grand Tour and thought in many ways I didn’t really belong on it.
So how are Clarkson-May relations? The former has banned the latter from his pub, the Farmer’s Dog in Oxfordshire, but May says he wasn’t intending to visit it anyway, given it is 130 kilometres from his own hostelry. I ask whether, when Clarkson had his heart attack (which is how Clarkson described it to Newsnight in November), May rang him. “I didn’t read that bit. I thought he was warned that he would have a heart attack. I did actually see him a few weeks later, at a funeral, unfortunately, of someone we both knew. He seemed all right. We just seem older.”
The three have certainly ended up in different places, Clarkson, most successfully, on Prime Video’s Clarkson’s Farm, Hammond on his car restoration show Richard Hammond’s Workshop and May in his nerd-fest, James May and the Dull Men, shown, like Hammond’s programme, on Discovery+. None appears to be on a route back to the BBC, although May advised the corporation to release Top Gear from the state of permanent suspension it has been in since presenter Andrew Flintoff’s accident in December 2022.
“I think it should come back. There have been mutterings about Amazon reinventing The Grand Tour as a sort of Son of Grand Tour without us. I think it’s time to reinvent the genre of car programming. There must be another way of doing it, but it will require some other young and worldly people to work out what it is. I don’t really know what it is.”
For May, however, it does seem the end of the road for him and Prime Video, the streamer having terminated his shows Oh Cook!, in which he learnt to cook, and Our Man in…, in which he explained the ways of Japan, Italy and India to blokes. Has Amazon cancelled him?
“I don’t really know, to be honest. I remember at one point, Amazon told me they wanted to do either really big stuff like their James Bond series or Lord of the Rings, or very small things like Oh Cook!, which for them was a tiny budget programme. But then they changed again and just wanted to do really big things. So, that wasn’t me. I’m not big enough or I don’t have enough viewers. Channel 5 is a nice home.”
He muses on what he might do for it next. A surgery programme maybe. “I mean, I would actually like to film a hip replacement.”
I wonder, however, how much he misses the travel, given that for Great Explorers Channel 5 flew him no further than Seville, supposedly on the grounds that if you replicated their original voyages the series would take at least 11 years to make.
“Yes, I still get excited about getting on aeroplanes and passport control and so on. But I’m also quite enjoying staying at home or going to places in Britain like I did in my childhood. I’ve done enough deserts and rainforests. If I want to go to Italy or Scandinavia, which I also love, I can just go on a simple holiday.”
We must not forget that Amazon left May and his former colleagues so rich that a weekend break in Europe is the smallest of change, and even a divorce such as the one Hammond announces days after I meet May is quite doable. May never reveals how much Amazon paid him, but the fact he owns two homes, his own gin business, nine cars garaged in an underground bunker (in London he drives a VW Polo and a Tesla) and a light aircraft, gives us an idea. It is far from the middle-class comforts he grew up with as the son of an aluminium factory manager in Bristol, then Newport in Wales and then Rotherham. Although a good-with-his-hands Blue Peter lad rather than a groovy Magpie viewer, he resented the BBC’s assumptions about its audience.
“There was that show called Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead? There were always kids on who had things their grandpa had made them like a go-kart or they had a sailing dinghy or a radio-controlled aircraft carrier or something and you used to watch it and think, ‘Oh, f*** off!’ ”
Like those Enid Blyton children who lived in big houses and had uncles with another big house by the sea?
“And a cook. That used to really annoy me because it was very overindulged rich kids with things that I didn’t have.”
And now he has?
“I don’t really think about that. I think the secret to a happy life – and I always thought this and I pretty much stuck to it, even when I was flat broke in my twenties – is to live within your means.”
So he doesn’t really think about money? “No, not really.”
That is a luxury for most people, isn’t it? “Well, it probably is unless they strictly live within their means.”
‘I read a lot of poetry’
We know that Great Explorers, a series visibly intent on living within its means, is not about its presenter’s self-discovery. Nevertheless, watching it you glean hints of who May is when not being sitcommed on The Grand Tour. I ask which of Columbus, Raleigh and Cook is his favourite.
“Columbus was obviously a bit of a badass. He ended up clapped in irons by his own king and queen. He definitely enslaved people and he definitely brutalised people. Raleigh? I think in modern terms we’d call him a grifter, wouldn’t we?”
I thought May, who studied music at college, plays the harpsichord and collects art, might appreciate Sir Walter, the sonnet-composing renaissance man.
“And some of his poetry is quite good. Some of it is pretty awful. People like Sir Philip Sidney are rather better. I read a lot of poetry and I’ve even written a bit.”
Does he still?
“Not very much. I write haikus.”
Can he give me one?
“Forest of bamboo/ What then should we make of you?/ Probably a hat.”
Take that, Raleigh. So Cook, with his cartography and science, is his man?
“Because I think he’s a bit of a nerd.”
It is time to go. Gathering his briefing notes, May realises triumphantly he has not referred to them once. The wood-burner is dying down, but the fire in my interviewee’s belly? It burns bright. James May is the eternal combustion engine that never combusts into anger, the Grand Tourist more likely to write a poem than raise a fist, a bloke, but one suited to the age of the electric car.
Written by: Andrew Billen
© The Times of London