Former Top Gear presenter James May has questioned the wisdom of a stunt for the new series of the BBC2 show in which former Friends star Matt LeBlanc was filmed doing wheelspins near the Cenotaph war memorial.

May, who will be reunited with his former Top Gear colleagues Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond on a new motoring show on Amazon Prime, said the episode was “probably a little bit ill-judged”.

Top Gear presenter Chris Evans apologised unreservedly after LeBlanc and rally driver Ken Block performed wheelspins and doughnuts – creating circular skidmarks on the road – close to the Cenotaph in central London earlier this month.

“I have driven up and down that road, yes, but no, I don’t do doughnuts – it’s inappropriate wherever you do it in my view,” said May in an interview with MediaGuardian to be published on Monday.

No stranger to the controversies that dogged Top Gear over the last decade, culminating in Clarkson’s axing last year, May said: “It was possibly a little unwise, ill-advised.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Top Gear’s Matt LeBlanc performs stunts near the Cenotaph - video

May also revealed that the trio’s new Amazon Prime series would ditch the TV studio for a series of “massively expensive” TV films that will be shot entirely on the road.

He said the first series of the as-yet-untitled show would run for at least 11 episodes, longer than most recent series of Top Gear, and would debut on Amazon in the autumn.



The show is one of the most anticipated of the year after the trio signed a reported £160m, three-year deal with the US video-on-demand service.

“We are not a studio-centred thing anymore. We are making a series of TV films and we don’t have a base,” said May. “It is massively expensive what we are doing, for reasons that I hope will become apparent when you see it. We are doing more episodes than we did in the latter days of Top Gear. It is quite intense.”

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It is a year since Clarkson was axed from Top Gear after a damning internal report into the “fracas” with producer Oisin Tymon. He was followed out of the door by Hammond and May, who said it would be “lame” to do Top Gear with a “surrogate Jeremy”, along with executive producer Andy Wilman, with all four reuniting on Amazon.

One of the BBC’s most valuable properties, worth £50m a year to its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, Top Gear will return to BBC2 in May, several months ahead of the Amazon show.

But May said they were not in a race with the BBC2 show. “It will be ready when it’s ready,” he said. “For once we are not in a race.”

May said the figures attached to the Amazon deal – Clarkson is said to be earning £10m a series, Hammond and May £7m each – were “all bollocks”.

“The figures aren’t right and anyway they don’t give us a great big bag of money and say, ‘Here’s your money go off and spend it’. They give it to us bits at a time,” he told the Guardian.

“We are doing it over three years and there are going to be 30-plus long episodes. So no, we haven’t all been out and bought a yacht. I’ve got a new pair of trainers, that’s the only difference in my life since I started working for Amazon.”

May will next be seen on the BBC in The Reassembler, a BBC4 series in which he is filmed putting things back together after they have been taken apart, beginning with the 331 components of a petrol-engine lawnmower.

James May in the trailer for BBC4’s The Reassembler

An echo of the channel’s award-winning “slow TV” season, May said: “I like putting things together and I find it very difficult to believe that other people wouldn’t be utterly fascinated.”

With the funding and remit of the BBC uncertain ahead of a government white paper on its future in the summer, the presenter, whose other BBC shows have included Cars of the People and Man Lab, said: “It would be a shame if the BBC didn’t exist. Once it disappears you will never have it back.

“I feel that some people have got it in for the BBC for no apparently good reason. The Amazon lot are perfectly reasonable, level-headed people who just want to make TV programmes. I don’t think they are the enemy of the BBC or the other way round.”

“It’s not a war, these things can coexist. We can have Amazon and Netflix and the BBC and BT Sport and people can make choices. That’s what modern life is all about,” he added.

• This article was amended on 26 March 2016 because an earlier version said the new motoring show would be shown on Netflix in the autumn. This has been corrected to say on Amazon.



