It was a huge show – then a huge scandal. What is James May’s view on Top Gear’s Clarksongate, and is it true that he is getting gazillions for his new gig The Grand Tour? He tells all

How did you feel when Jeremy Clarkson thumped a BBC producer last year? James May looks at me testily across the table of this west London pub, like I’ve just reversed my Toyota Yaris into his Ferrari. “In retrospect,” he says, “it wasn’t a glorious moment.” Quite. But how did you feel? Cross, amused, delighted? After all, Clarksongate resulted not just in Clarkson getting sacked, but you quitting Top Gear, thereby nearly writing off one of BBC Worldwide’s most lucrative global franchises. “Was I annoyed? I was a bit pissed off – because it made my life more complicated. That was the main problem.”



One complication was that May had just placed an order for a bright orange, limited-edition 2014 Ferrari 458 Speciale, worth more than £200,000 and capable of 0-60mph in three seconds. How was he going to pay for it now that he and Richard Hammond had decided to quit the show following Clarkson’s sacking? The 53-year-old’s main source of income had dried up. Am I going to get a “Boo-hoo”? Probably not: May has four other cars in his fleet, including another Ferrari, as well as scores of motorcycles, a Brompton bicycle – and a £120,000 Super Decathlon light aircraft. Then there are his homes in London and Wiltshire.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Clarkson and James May in a spot of bother on Top Gear, 2009. Photograph: BBC

But the big mystery is why May and Hammond didn’t, like their Cabinet namesakes, stage a coup. Couldn’t they have carried on presenting Top Gear without Clarkson? “There were noises all round. I don’t know to what extent they wanted us to stay. I quickly realised the best outcome for us was to stay together because that’s what our fans want. They’re our first loyalty and our first love.”

May thinks the global car show franchise he fronted with Clarkson and Hammond for 11 years was successful not because of the motors but because of “the sitcom element”, as he calls it. “I was a car journalist when I started on Top Gear. It was all about cars. And then it all spun out of all control and we turned into figures of ridicule to keep the viewers happy. It’s a fair deal, I suppose.”

What is the sitcom element? “We work because we hate each other. That’s the magic formula. It doesn’t work for bands. I think it works for groups of TV presenters. We get on each other’s tits massively.” Do you socialise off screen? “We try not to. That’s a no.”

I used to have a book called Amaze and Amuse Your Friends, with card tricks and jokes and things. That’s all we do.

So the on-screen animosity is real? “It’s camped-up pantomime, but the differences are real. I don’t know if we’d connect if we hadn’t been thrown together. We’re not really meant to be together. But that’s why it works.” Would it work if one of you was a woman or would that destroy the dynamic? “It would probably challenge our slightly stuckist nature, yes. Which may be an exaggeration for the purposes of telly, but must have been to some extent real because these things always are.”

Slightly stuckist is right – if too charitable. When May has presented TV shows with women, the banter has been minimal. When he, Ant Anstead and Kate Humble presented Building Cars Live last year, Humble didn’t call him “an old woman” as Clarkson did on Top Gear. Without wishing to get too PC, it’s through such banter that society’s sexist norms get gently reinforced. May demurs: “We’re not talking about serious social and political comment. It’s entertainment themed around cars. Let’s not forget this. We don’t have much of an agenda apart from amazing and amusing people. I used to have a book called Amaze and Amuse Your Friends, with card tricks and jokes and things. That’s all we do.”

So how would the three non-amigos amaze and amuse anyone once they’d left the BBC? After Clarksongate, they came up with a cunning plan that would, among other things, pay for May’s new Ferrari. They set up a production company called W Chump & Sons Ltd and gave themselves a trio of three-wheeled Reliant Robins in company livery. (Those boys, eh? Incorrigible!)

Then Amazon came knocking with, if reports are correct, wheelbarrows of cash. It wanted a piece of W Chump & Sons. “They want to own one of the world’s most popular shows,” explains May. “Without wishing to sound conceited, there’s definitely some of that. But also, I’m fairly confident we will spearhead a more general spread of streamed TV services.”

But hold on. Top Gear is a BBC format. Amazon couldn’t buy that from Chump & Sons, since it wasn’t theirs to sell. Instead, what Amazon has bought is something called The Grand Tour, a car show filmed across the globe (California, South Africa and, in the third episode, the peerless chip shops of Whitby), featuring a travelling tent big enough to contain a studio audience.

Is The Grand Tour different from Top Gear then? “Not much. The format is slightly different. The tone of it is very slightly different because the tent moves around the world so that, rather than people coming to it, we go to them. It has a local feel. But if you do watch, you’re not going to be in any way baffled by how much it’s changed. It will seem very comfortable.”

Will they take in Argentina? After all, the three stooges caused a diplomatic incident there during filming for Top Gear in 2013. They were attacked for turning up with a Porsche whose number plate – H982 FKL – was seen as a reference to Britain’s victory in the 1982 Falklands conflict. In the resulting unpleasantness, the three presenters took a helicopter to safety. It was embarrassing, not least because it was left to the more modestly paid crew to remain behind with the cars and defend that oxymoron, British honour. “On the whole, we had a very nice time in Argentina,” says May. “ It was only that bit at the bottom where we were very badly misunderstood. So yes I’m sure we would go back. We haven’t planned to, though.”

What went so wrong that DJ Chris Evans felt compelled to quit Top Gear after replacing you three this year? Why did ratings plummet? “He kept wearing the same jumper,” says May evasively. Is ex-Friends actor Matt Le Blanc the guy to save the show? “He could be. I like him. You see, I want them to succeed. I want there to be two great car programmes as a result of this. We’re all idiots if we can’t do that. Maybe they’ll end up with three women on it – I don’t know.” Perhaps. But when Bake Off’s Sue Perkins was touted as a possible host, she got death threats on Twitter.

One difference is the budget. Reports are that it is10 times that of Top Gear’s. “No!” says May. “It’s not 10 times. It’s a little bit bigger but this is a more expensive show to make. The tent, the extra travel, doing it in 4K.” Hopefully, too, the catering budget is more lavish so Clarkson doesn’t get punchy again. Have you got him reined in? “He’s got himself reined in, I think.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fresh start … Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May filming The Grand Tour. Photograph: Roderick Fountain/Amazon Prime Video/PA

Reportedly, I say, you’re earning the least of the three non-amigos. “Am I?” I pass May a piece of paper quoting the Radio Times. He puts on his glasses and examines it as carefully as Homer Simpson studying the dessert menu. It says: “His estimated earnings are £10 million, about one-third those of Jeremy Clarkson and £5 million less than Richard Hammond, but still the kind of bank balance that signposts a moderately drop-dead company car befitting the trio’s multi-gazillion pound incarnation with Amazon Prime.”

Any facts you dispute? “Yes, all of them! I don’t earn £10 million. I have my own car. I don’t know what a gazillion is.” He removes his glasses. “We don’t actually lead a rock’n’roll lifestyle. There’s no cocaine in the navels of hookers. I want you to write that there was a note of regret in my voice.”

I look at May sidelong, assessing his floral shirt. Years ago, I had a beautiful Paul Smith shirt with blue and gold leaves, but I had to donate it to charity because I saw May on telly, unacceptably wearing the same model. “Well, I can see that would be a problem,” May concedes genially. “Mine was involved in a tragic accident in New Zealand where I fell off a bar and ripped it. I kept the wreckage hoping that one day it could be sewn back together. I love that shirt.”

May has made a career doing stuff that doesn’t sound like work. He did a show called Oz and James Drink to Britain, in which he and wine critic Oz Clarke spent licence-fee money hiring and driving a Rolls-Royce convertible to drink in pubs and vineyards. For another show, he built a full-size house from Lego and a Meccano motorbike and sidecar. In James May’s Big Ideas, he was strapped to a jet-pack filled with hydrogen peroxide and hovered for a few minutes above a Sussex garden.



The long goodbye: James May pottering about in a shed is perfect slow TV Read more

It’s your fault, I suggest, that British men are so mimsy, and we no longer have a decent engineering industry. He looks at me dumbfounded. We men, I explain, thinking of his recent show The Reassembler, have become voyeurs of people like you who repair engines and guitars rather than doing it ourselves. And your car shows involve us fetishising cars that we couldn’t dream of fixing, let alone manufacturing.

“I know what you mean about the voyeuristic thing,” he says. “But I think the problem for a lot of blokes – and my dad is a great example, having worked in industry and run steel foundries – is this: the idea of a man having a shed and going there to repair the lawnmower and make a piece of furniture has gone.”

The problem for a lot of blokes is the idea of a man having a shed and going there to repair the lawnmower has gone

May doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “What it’s been replaced by is the rise of men’s enthusiasm for cooking. It’s actually the same process: the kitchen is the workshop, the utensils are the tools. And the great thing is that it’s all happening in the home. There isn’t this great division where one sex owns the house and the other sex owns the garage.”

He and his partner Sarah are currently redesigning their home to reflect what he calls society’s greater gender fluidity – a term Clarkson would rip him to shreds for uttering. “We want our home to be open plan to the extent that I can be mending a bicycle, while Sarah’s sitting next to the fire reading a book,” he says.

“I’m in favour of the old roles being blurred. The old division at school where the boys did metalwork and woodwork and the girls did needlework and domestic science is awful really – and I’m glad it’s gone.” It seems May is not quite the stuckist, after all.