James May: Top Gear’s future and my real relationship with Jeremy Clarkson
He’s one third of the controversial team behind The Grand Tour and Top Gear. Adam Bloodworth speaks to James May about being woke, Freddie Flintoff’s accident and working with Jeremy Clarkson
“I’ve put my foot down about that,” declares James May, a handful of M&Ms in hand. “I’ve had a stern word. Stop dressing me up. I’m not your bloody action doll.”
For over two decades James May’s reputation as ‘the nice one’ on Top Gear, and more recently The Grand Tour opposite Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, has made him one of British TV’s most successful exports. Their everything’s-a-joke style has been controversial – the trio have been called out for gags deemed homophobic and racially insensitive – but the viewing figures suggest audiences still want more.
Since Clarkson’s controversial Top Gear sacking in 2015 for punching a producer, The Grand Tour has become one of Amazon Original’s best performing series. On the show, returning this month, the trio carry over their successful style. The launch edition saw May donning a fake moustache to play a gun-wielding sheriff in a detective skit, and on his other Amazon Original series, Our Man In, May wears a furry monster suit and ghoulish mask to participate in a local cultural ceremony. “James May loves dressing up,” an official YouTube video is captioned.
When we speak, May has just turned 60, a birthday he “didn’t make much of.” Nevertheless, he feels a period of change is afoot, both for himself and for Clarkson and Hammond as all three arrive in their Bus Pass Era. “I don’t think people particularly like watching that,” he says of incidents such as when Clarkson and Hammond wore burkas in a Top Gear episode. “They’d rather see me nerd out on something I genuinely like, making a violin or some mosaics. There’s no point trying to make me play canoe polo. I’m a stiff old man, I can’t compete with 18- year-old girls who are athletes,” he says, pausing. “Plus it looks a bit pervy.”
Maybe it’ll be another enforced reinvention of Top Gear. It happens now and then, and it’s no bad thing. That’s a big, difficult question for the BBC
James May on the future of Top Gear after Freddie Flintoff’s serious crash
Doesn’t 60 feel young these days? “No, I don’t think it does. You never think you’ll be old. It’s as absurd as going to live in space. So I suppose it came as a bit of a shock. We’re really baggy now. I suppose what it means is that we’ve always known that we can’t do it forever, but now we actually have to accept that we’re much nearer to the end than the beginning.”
We are speaking in his publicist’s office in central London, where he’s promoting a new feature-length episode of The Grand Tour. It’s called Eurocrash and will be released on 16 June on Amazon. In person, May is exactly like he is on TV, and after a day of Zooms, is thankful that I’m asking questions face-to-face. He’s so enamoured by the bowl of M&Ms in front of him that during one pause in conversation, he scoops up a handful so big that some don’t make it to his mouth, falling on the table. “Sorry. You can have some if you want.” There are chocolate biscuits too – “I brought these in” – neatly arranged into circles.
In fairness, James May does love food: another Amazon Original, James May: Oh Cook!, is a sensible approximation of what a post-60 James May might look like. In it, May mostly finds excuses to drink wine and point out how he doesn’t know much about cooking. You feel May genuinely enjoys it.
It’s not all maturity, however. In Eurocrash the trio road trip from Poland to Slovenia; May chooses a 75-year-old, four-metre-long vintage Crosley convertible, an impractical car to drive for weeks on end given it can barely reach 40 mph with its 724cc engine. The car is literally picked up and shifted half its width sideways on motorways by the force created by lorries whooshing past. “I hated it. It was horrific.” He says of The Grand Tour stunts: “I didn’t enjoy any of it, if I’m honest. It makes great TV but it wasn’t pleasurable.”
Driving a car that slow on UK roads would be illegal due to the minimum speed limit, but on the mainland “it’s not illegal it’s just stupid. I wouldn’t want to crash in it. There’s no airbags. There’s nothing. It’s very light and very narrow so it’s not stable. It was like being on a bicycle when a lorry does a close pass. I didn’t like that at all. I was going for miles and miles like that.”
May and co don’t have producer credits on The Grand Tour but are heavily involved in coming up with the stunts and storylines, alongside long time producer Andy Wilman. They discuss ideas “in the pub,” says May. Once the trio went to Clarkson’s farm to hash out ideas. “We might have a beer, we talk about it over suppers. It’s a fairly rolling, ongoing process. You can’t say ‘right, we’re going to come up with an idea.’ It doesn’t work like that. They sort of emerge.’”
So what’s it actually like working with Clarkson and Hammond? “If we’d been at Sixth Form College together, I don’t think we would’ve been in the same gang, we’re too different. But that’s part of the chemistry. We’re not so different that we’re a mystery to one another but we’re different enough to come up with an acceptably different take on any aspect of it. We are cartoon versions of ourselves, exaggerations, but they’re rooted in certain amounts of truth. It’s not as if Jeremy goes around being bombastic and goes home and writes sonnets; he doesn’t. And I don’t drive very carefully and then at the weekends go racing. We are sort of very broadly what you see on the telly. We’re shit actors anyway, we couldn’t do it any other way.”
How about coming up with the un-woke jokes? “I did once say that I’m more woke than the other two, but I think I got misquoted,” says May. “What I was really saying was that they’re very un woke.” Having said that, May isn’t necessarily woke by today’s standards: I ask if he regrets Top Gear’s homophobic humour, when Clarkson would say certain cars were for homosexuals for in stance, and he seems legitimately oblivious to why that might be seen as offensive: “Did we make jokes about homosexuality?” he asks. “We have been going 20 years. A long time in the history of societal attitudes…”
Which leads us onto the show he’ll always be remembered for. Following Freddie Flintoff’s horrific accident, in which he reportedly crashed an open-topped three-wheel Morgan Super 3 car, could this finally be the end of the BBC show? May hopes not. “Maybe it’ll be another enforced reinvention of Top Gear. It happens now and then, and it’s no bad thing. That’s a big, difficult question for the BBC. The Freddie Flintoff thing is deeply unfortunate. It’s obviously a bit more serious than we first thought, it’s not just a bit of a shunt, he’s badly hurt. Whether or not it’ll keep going, I don’t know. I’d love to see it continue. It’s been going for a very long time. I watched it as a kid so I wouldn’t want it to disappear.”
Odds are it’ll still be going, in some form or other, when Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are happily tending to their respective vegetable patches. “When we first started doing Top Gear back in 2003 I thought, ‘Oh, this is a good laugh. And if we’re lucky, it might last for a few years. And here we are, 20 years later, and people don’t seem to have got sick of us. Or maybe they have and you’re not telling?”
The new feature-length episode of The Grand Tour is streaming on Prime Video from 16 June
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