'Jeremy Clarkson? He's the devil and a dimwit': James May on the problem with his TV co-star



Useless men and neighbourhood militias... Top Gear’s Captain Slow declares a riotous call to arms for the modern male

'When I was at school we learned a lot of things that people simply don't do any more,' said James May

Many interviews take place over a drink. But at nine in the morning?

James May won’t take no for an answer. He insists I try his new whisky cloud: a device for atomising scotch with compressed air, so that it can be supped through a pipe in the manner of a hookah.



‘It came from our experiments in how to make snow by shock-freezing a cloud of water vapour,’ he explains, before taking a lungful.



The pipe is passed around and a pleasant fug descends. We’re in a warehouse near Wimbledon, formerly used to build stage sets for rock concerts. Sparks fly noisily from an angle grinder in the corner, threatening to ignite the sawdust on the floor. A functioning train set shuttles drinks from the bar, winding between toys, tools, banjos, swords, soldering kits and half-eaten sandwiches. Propped up against the door is what appears to be a rocket bicycle.



This is the Man Lab. May’s series of the same name returns to BBC2 next month, with the semi-educational goal of reintroducing the skills and hobbies of May’s youth to the Twitter generation. Science experiments and engineering will also be undertaken – which I presume would explain the rocket bike?



‘It’s not a rocket bike,’ says May. ‘It’s a Swiss Army bike. It does useful things. Regenerative brakes pressurise a canister, so that at the bottom of hills you can creosote fences. It’s got a grinder powered by the back wheel for sharpening knives. It’s got a food blender on the front that you can make a smoothie in.



‘When I was 12, me and my mates loved doing all this stuff. We built bicycles, train sets, tried to make aeroplanes that flew, tried to paint pictures, tried to play musical instruments. Man Lab is essentially Sixties junior school. We do map-reading, painting, bicycle repair, music. Then we do some reading. It’s great.’



And youngsters could profit from learning those things?

‘I’ve got to be careful with this,’ he says, ‘because I believe that there are only ever two generations in the world: there are the “young people” who we all moan about because of their rioting, and then there’s everyone else.



'By the time you get to 40, you and your dad believe that your childhoods were the same. But when I was at school we learned a lot of things that people simply don’t do any more, like lathe work, the three-view engineering drawing, basic woodwork…’

On the August riots: 'I would always try to work out what's gone wrong, rather than just saying they should all be put in prison, hanged or beaten or whatever'

May stops himself. Approaching 50 and already lumbered with the ‘Captain Slow’ epithet by Top Gear, he’s careful to avoid being seen as a fuddy-duddy. He agonised about becoming the face of London Pride beer, ‘because ale is still perceived by a lot of people as being a bit Victorian and eating kippers and talking about steam engines’.



He does like steam engines, but he’s no reactionary. Living in Hammersmith with no kids, a cat and dance critic Sarah Frater, he reckons he’s the dictionary definition of the liberal intelligentsia.



In fact, when we last spoke, he outlined a laissez-faire manifesto in which ‘Don’t be a prat’ should be the one and only law. Does he still agree that ‘Don’t be a prat’ is sufficient, in light of the August riots?



‘I thought they were being prats,’ he says, before frowning. ‘I wrestled with this one. On the third night of the riots, I was in my little office when I thought, hang on a minute, there’s a bit of an ugly crowd gathering outside. I went outside to say “What’s going on?” and realised, oh, it’s my neighbours. They were forming a posse. One was going, “I’ve got a shovel.” Another was going, “I’ve got an axe.”



'Someone said we’d need a car as a roadblock and I said I didn’t mind sacrificing my Fiat. I was thinking, this is going to be like a really, really bad version of Les Misérables: these middle-class people standing on an old Fiat, waving gardening tools and shouting at rampaging youths, “I think I should have a word with your father.” As it happened, the youths didn’t come our way.



‘I don’t doubt for a moment that people joined in who are just thieving little bastards. But I would always try to work out what’s gone wrong, rather than just saying they should all be put in prison, hanged or beaten or whatever.



'At the same time, if a load of them had advanced down our street with petrol bombs intent on arson, I would go out with my slightly fey neighbours and beat them to death with garden tools. Because you have no choice when it gets to that point, so… I can’t remember what your question was…’

'Man Lab is essentially Sixties junior school. We do map-reading, painting, bicycle repair, music. Then we do some reading. It's great,' said James (pictured with his Swiss Army bike)

It was about having fewer rules.



‘Oh yes. A surgeon once told me, “Surgery is a sign of failure because it’s a last resort.” Which I think is a very healthy view. I think we should be trying to encourage society to heal itself, and I don’t think you do that with rules.



'There’s an ever-increasing burden of paperwork and administration and computer passwords and tax codes already on people’s shoulders and I’m not sure how much more we can bear. We’re going to be like Rome, completely submerged in bureaucracy and unable to do anything else because there won’t be the time or the energy. So I think, yes, fewer rules is something to aim for.’



Do you think teaching kids the skills and pastimes in Man Lab might have helped to prevent the riots?



‘Well, I’ve been talking to some people from an organisation called Wizard Education. They’re trying to rehabilitate very difficult, often violent, dangerous kids with broken backgrounds, and they do it by projects. I donated a broken motorcycle to them. I was told that lads who were psychotically disturbed by their backgrounds could occasionally be saved by learning mechanics. People are very sniffy about hobbies. Jeremy is very sniffy about them. But they’re actually extremely healthy because they broaden the mind and keep it fluid.’



Ah, yes, Jeremy Clarkson. May’s Top Gear co-host has recently been spending more time in his London flat – and wrote a lachrymose column about his inability to work the coffee machine, the internet or the washing machine. May doesn’t hold with this kind of thing. Useless Man Syndrome, he calls it.



‘I thought he was a total dimwit there,’ he says.



‘What he’s effectively saying is he’s rejoicing in being stupid. It’s imagined by some blokes that it makes them somehow endearing or lovable. A washing machine tells you on the front what to do. There are even little pictures.



'This does happen to men on their own, sadly. When my dad rented a flat in the Midlands near a factory he was running, I went to visit him and opened his cupboard to see nothing but a tin of meatballs and a bottle of scotch. I thought, oh no, what’s happened to my dad?’



Is Clarkson’s flat like that?



‘Well, a tin of meatballs, you’d have to be able to open the tin. That might be a bit tricky for him.’



May clearly likes his co-star, or he wouldn’t insult him so readily. By now their triple act with Richard Hammond is a well-worn institution. But how long will it last?



‘For as long as we can get away with it,’ May replies – although the last time we met, he put a figure of five years on it.



How long will Top Gear last? 'For as long as we can get away with it,' said May

That was two years ago. Two years which the trio must have found an uphill struggle. There was the problem of Ben Collins ‘coming out’ as The Stig and being fired from the show amid legal recriminations. Then, after they called Mexicans ‘lazy, feckless and flatulent’ on air, Tony Blair took it upon himself to apologise to Mexico for their ‘prejudice’.



‘My honest view is that we did it badly, the Mexican joke,’ says May.

‘In the editing it lost the humour a bit. But the idea that Tony Blair, a former leader of this country, actually goes to Mexico and apologises on behalf of three nitwits who make a stupid car programme? He’s got his sense of the world order slightly wrong.’



It didn’t end there, though. There was a minor scandal when it was alleged that footage apparently showing Clarkson driving a Lamborghini at 207mph was actually shot with a racing driver, and a larger one about their review of the electric Nissan Leaf. It was suggested it had been driven around in circles so that it ran out of power, to comic effect. Does it annoy May when people complain about this kind of thing?



‘It does. I know some people get a bit baity about it and complain that it’s fake… It isn’t fake. It’s storytelling. That’s not the same. The argument I’ve always made is that everything we do is true, but we have to give it a plot. We have a race. We drive across the desert. We go to the North Pole. Then it’s edited and condensed. But the result is true.’



Some people’s complaints about the show are rather more serious. Green activist George Monbiot wrote 2,000 words accusing May and Clarkson of having an anti-environmentalist agenda.

‘We don’t have an anti-environmentalist agenda,’ says May.



‘We’re not there to consider the environment. We’re there to assess cars. It (the Nissan) did run out. One of the criticisms was, it didn’t start with a fully charged battery. But you wouldn’t always.



'The thing about electric cars, of which I’m a huge fan, is that you have to deal with the world the way it is. Most people buy cars and they want to use it like they use a kettle. They don’t want to take any nonsense from it. You have to show that refuelling is difficult. It will require a huge amount of planning ahead and forethought.



‘I think people like George Monbiot have an agenda. Their agenda is to watch our programme, not with an open mind, but to find the bit that reveals our deceit. Nobody’s mentioned the fact that we were both very enthusiastic about the idea of electric propulsion. But we have to point out what you’re getting into. They are more expensive. You’re embracing a massive new burden of admin in your life.’



Was Monbiot right, though, to say that Top Gear is ‘a mouthpiece for an extreme form of libertarianism and individualism’ – basically accusing it of being a right-wing show?



‘I don’t think libertarianism is right-wing, is it?’



No, but certain people of the left do seem to think that Clarkson is the Devil…



‘Well, he is. My personal views – these are mine, not Jeremy’s or Richard’s or (producer) Andy Wilman’s or the BBC’s – are that I like the idea of a society that tries to reduce rules, reduces interference and encourages individual open-mindedness and freedom of thought. That’s how I feel; I don’t see that as a right-wing view. I know we go into a lot of cod political stuff, Jeremy goes on about cyclists, but for God’s sake, it’s a car programme produced by three stupid blokes. It’s not a religion. It’s not a political movement.’



Alongside what seems to be a permanently increased scrutiny of Top Gear’s ‘agenda’ there have been repeated calls for the BBC to reveal full details of its stars’ salaries, led by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. How did that go down in the Top Gear camp?

‘We were nowhere near the top 20, which was a relief,’ says May. ‘I couldn’t really understand what their point was. I suppose they (MPs) are feeling a bit sore because everybody found out how much they’d been nicking.



‘I don’t really like talking about money – we never talk about it among ourselves, because it’s terribly ill-mannered – but everybody imagines, because I’ve ended up by chance on this programme that’s a bit of a global phenomenon, that I’m like Mick Jagger, that I’ll buy a Rolls-Royce on my credit card. But I’m not like that.



'Top Gear makes money, for the BBC and ultimately for the country. So I don’t think there’s anything particularly to be ashamed of. We do actually spend it quite carefully. It’s all spent on the programme; the programme is very widely sold and brings in more money than it spends.’



May sits back in his rickety chair, our conversation having moved into his Man Lab ‘office’ – actually more of a cigarette-scented tool shed, complete with nuts and bolts arranged in ascending order of size and a cubbyhole marked ‘Danger Tape’. He’s had enough talk of Top Gear and begins enthusing about a potential project, a BBC documentary about the Industrial Revolution. He also yearns to do a programme about music.



‘I sometimes worry about what I’ll do when this all ends,’ he says, referring to his presenting career.



‘It won’t last much longer. I was talking to “Razor” Ruddock about footballers, most of whose careers are over by the time they’re 30. And because they spent their whole childhood playing football and becoming brilliant at it, they can’t do anything else.



'We’re a bit like that. I’d be very happy with being a teacher. I did a talk about Man Lab not long ago at an junior school and one of the teachers said, “If you want to be a teacher we’d be happy to have you.” I thought that sounded fun.’



Settle down, class, and ignore the smell of whisky. Mr May will now demonstrate his bicycle-powered knife-sharpener. Is this what our troubled youth needs? It might just be.





‘James May’s Man Lab’ returns to BBC2 on October 31.



The accompanying book is published by Hodder & Stoughton on October 13, priced at £20





THE FLYING CARAVAN - AND MORE INCREDIBLE JAMES MAY CONTRAPTIONS

The Top Gear 'caravan airship'

A Lego house built for James May's Toy Stories

A 1:1 scale model Spitfire, featured on Toy Stories

May's car-boat on Top Gear, a modified Triumph Herald



