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He may have left Clarkson and Hammond behind, but there’s still plenty of fun in James May’s first solo travel show...
Our 52-page guide includes Mike Mulvihill’s Seven Days, your essential Movie Planner and a special preview of James May’s wartsand-all tour of Japan
Vicious snowball fights and naked bathing with monks? It sounds like an out-take from The Grand Tour, but James May is actually taking on these bizarre experiences in his new series Our Man In Japan, his first travel show without cohorts Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond.
It was an obsession with Japan – he’s been ten times, always for work – that led him to propose the idea to Amazon Prime, who also make The Grand Tour. ‘The things I love about Japan are the colourful, patterny things,’ says James, 56. ‘Its artwork. The bigger view can be scruffy, the backstreets of Tokyo, but once you get inside you see all this beautiful stuff.’
James has little time to enjoy the beauty in the first episode, as he attempts various dangerous escapades. On the snowy northern island of Hokkaido he takes a ride on a husky sled, which he falls off numerous times at speed. ‘I was bruised,’ he admits. ‘The crew had assured me it was quite genteel. I had words with them afterwards.’
But it was joining in a snowball fight – a Japanese sport called Yukigassen in which about 100 teams compete – that taught James most about the country, as he was pummelled with snowballs ‘like lumps of concrete’. ‘The Japanese are able to take something fluffy and community-spirited and weaponise it and make rules,’ he says.
On his travels James tries his hand at archery and Japanese flower-arranging, and dresses up as a samurai warrior. But he also gets time to explore Japan’s spiritual side, by climbing into a hot tub, naked, with a monk on Mount Haguro, a holy mountain. ‘There is a dormant spiritual side to me because I was a choirboy and that affects you very deeply,’ he says. ‘I think the monk and I ended up communicating at a spiritual level. The fact we were naked is sort of irrelevant really, because that’s how they do it.’
And how was it filming his odyssey without Clarkson and Hammond? ‘It’s easier with the other two there because you don’t have to fill so much of the time yourself,’ he says. ‘But they do get on my nerves. There’s not much
common ground – both of them are tweedy and I’m a townie!’ Despite the fact you can barely switch on the telly these days without seeing Joanna Lumley or Sue Perkins on a foreign jolly – both have recently visited Japan – James hopes he’s managed to put his own stamp on this show. ‘It’s more me, it’s less manicured, it’s a bit more scrappy,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to denigrate other people’s shows, but I hope ours is particularly honest. You see quite a lot of the warty nature of travelling in my show.’ ■