Workers failing to call time

ONE in 10 people have confessed to taking a work call at a wedding, funeral or even during sex.

And one in six workers frequently spends more than 11 hours a week checking emails and making calls when they are away from the office.

Almost half of us cannot leave work behind when we clock off, a study of 2,000 office workers found.

Geoffrey Dennis, chief executive of SPANA animal charity, which commissioned the study, said: “It’s clear workers in Britain have a strong work ethic and often put in long hours, going beyond the call of duty.”

DOES anyone in Japan drive a car that’s not spotlessly clean? James May has his doubts.

The TV presenter and petrolhead was there for three months filming his new show for Amazon and he reckons every vehicle looked immaculate.

“In the end I asked, ‘Is having a dirty car here illegal?’

“They said, ‘No, of course not. It’s just it would be so embarrassing. It would be like having poo on your face.’

“I quite like that. It means the place looks sparkly and shiny. And the Japanese also drive incredibly politely.”

What, like James’s alter-ego Captain Slow?

Minefield

“No, I wouldn’t say slowly. Just, dare I say it, efficiently?”

That “dare I say it” is significant here, because one thing James has been keen to avoid in James May: Our Man In Japan, his six-part travelogue available today, is trotting out clichés about the Japanese people.

Theirs, he acknowledges, is “quite a conformist society”.

But the 56-year-old added: “We shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s a minefield for the Western visitor, that you’ll do everything wrong and offend your host. You won’t.

“They’re very accommodating.

It’s a very pleasant, safe, benign place visit. I’d recommend it to anybody.”

A Japanese travelogue is something James has fancied making for years.

And when, as part of the deal to make The Grand Tour specials with old mates Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, Amazon offered him a series of his own, it meant his chance had finally arrived.

So would they have let him make a show about anything he liked? “I don’t think so,” he says. “If I’d said: ‘I want to do a six-part series on making a sideboard, I think they’d have said: ‘No.’

“Foolishly, mind, because that’d be a ratings winner…”

Travelling without his pals, says James, is like “making a solo album after years of being in King Crimson or something – there’s a slight risk you’ll reveal your shortcomings, that it won’t be good as with the others.”

That said, the shackles are off. “Yes, it to meant, for example, I could spend a day with a monk, climbing a holy mountain. That wouldn’t be admitted with those two. There wouldn’t be the patience.”

But, come on, they’re way cultured than they act, right? “What, Hammond and

Not really…”

James’s show, I should stress, is still hilarious. But the butt of the joke is him, not his hosts.

“I really didn’t want to be the patronising foreigner,” he insists.

Nor, mind you, did he just want to act the clueless clown. “I didn’t want to walk around going: ‘Oh, no, I’ve fallen over! I’ve poked this man in the eye with these chopsticks!’ That would just be 70s slapstick.”

Even so, Japanese found naturally funny. “Often they’d be standing there and just start laughing at me,” he says. “But not in an unkind way.” Was it his appearance, perhaps? “What, you mean I look scruffier than most presenters? Yeah, but that’s just the way I am. Even when I make an effort I still look terrible.”

● James May: Our Man In Japan is on Amazon Prime from today. more

Clarkson? the him