If you look closely, Jeremy is rather feminine
As ‘The Grand Tour’ returns, James May discusses his petrolhead co-hosts – and his profound love of Lego – with Judith Woods
‘Friction. Barely concealed mutual dislike. The disequilibrium of the number three; it means one of us is always a spare wheel, ignored, left out. Usually that person is me.” It’s a curious way to define the success of an international television brand. But according to James May, it’s the uneasy tension between himself and co-presenters Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond that has made The Grand Tour and its predecessor, Top Gear, so eminently, sometimes infuriatingly, watchable.
“At least 50per cent of our audience are women and a higher percentage that don’t even like cars,” observes May, 55, looking pleased with himself about the Amazon show, which returns for a second series next week.
“Talking about the vehicles is the mother lode and we do have to provide the odd empirical fact, but essentially we’re offering a window on to the human condition refracted through the lens of three car-obsessed presenters.”
May’s apparent disdain for Clarkson, 57, and 47-year-old Hammond is all part of the shtick. Their modus operandi is constant (overgrown) boyish banter, swearing and gearstick-waggling. May, 55, is the straight man-cumverbal punchbag of the show, dubbed “Captain Slow” and derided for being sensible. It makes for great television, most crucially because burly, bluff May self-evidently doesn’t give a monkey’s. Whatever he dismissively says about his co-presenters, the three petrolhead amigos have an unbreakable chemistry.
They presented Top Gear for 22 series, peaking at 8million viewers. Then, after Clarkson lost his cool one too many times, notoriously punching a producer in 2014, the BBC sacked him. His compadres loyally left with him, whereupon Amazon promptly snapped up the trio, in a deal that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos described as “very, very expensive”.
The first season of The Grand Tour broke Amazon Video viewing and TV subscriber sign-up records. And now season two is nearly upon us, when Jaguars will be driven off ski runs, and an Alfa Romeo will be chainsawed in half, then driven round a racetrack.
When I meet May at the south-west London offices of the Grand Tour production company, he is seated at a heroically messy desk strewn with random detritus: a bottle of methylated spirits, an empty crisp packet, ketchup, a T-shirt, a Corgi Rover P6 3500 VIP.
He is sporting a new haircut and is a bit vexed his recent trip to the barber’s made the papers. “Look, it was a mess, it was grey and I’m a middle-aged man in trainers so I just cut it. But I take real issue with anyone who claims it makes me look anything like Jeremy; if a great medieval church was being built for posterity, they would have to do a lot more work on me than him to transform us into gargoyles.”
He is unruffled about being the butt of Clarkson and Hammond’s scathing humour, claiming to be less preoccupied by public opinion.
“Jeremy and Richard are conventional, they crave respectability,” he tells me, delphically. “I don’t, I never have. Richard has a big house, is generally fit for purpose and is bigger on grooming than me – although, to be fair, so is my cat. “Jeremy is pretty successful at most things and he’s very establishment. Yes, he says outrageous things that give Guardian readers aneurysms, but he’s not being offensive, he’s just being a d---.” May insists he’s immune from such venal concerns because he’s not adult enough. “Someone once told me that I was 12 inside,” he says. “The only thing 12-year-olds crave is more Lego. Lego is fun, it’s therapeutic. It’s a beautiful sensation when you click the pieces together.”
Yet he has a thoughtful side. He has written over a dozen books, and produced a plethora of documentaries, on everything from science, space and inventions to wine. He studied music at university and plays the harpsichord and piano. His partner is the dance critic Sarah Frater, and although ballet bores him, he likes contemporary stuff, because “watching people move to nice music is very pleasant”.
The conversation takes a surprising turn to the cultural significance of The Grand Tour. “I think at this point I’m supposed to say that we represent the last bastion of masculinity, which is under fire from all quarters,” he says drily. “But we don’t have an agenda. We’re just doing what is worth doing and what we like doing and what people like watching us doing. As long as nobody gets hurt I don’t give a s---.”
But if they don’t have an agenda, do they really need to keep it so blokeish? Eyebrows were raised earlier this week when the celebrity guest line-up for this series was announced – and included not a single woman. “It’s only an all-male environment because we happen to be blokes, although I think Jeremy is rather womanly in some respects,” says May, when I ask why a female presenter hasn’t been thrown into the mix. “If you look closely, some of his body language is quite feminine. Me, I’m a lesbian: I find women fascinating.”
Ouch. The schoolboy humour looks worse written down than delivered by May, who is immensely likeable but, like so many 12-year-olds before him, has clearly fallen in with the wrong crowd. “Our driver [The Grand Tour’s equivalent of The Stig] is a woman, incidentally,” he adds. “We tested loads of people and she was the fastest and the best and that’s how it should be; to employ her for any other reason would be patronising.”
To move on to another area of controversy, how will history judge a television genre dedicated to the reckless burning of fossil fuels?
“I don’t think we’ll be condemned for doing something we love, but what will happen really soon in the span of history is that [manual] driving will become the preserve of hobbyists. It will be an elitist, expensive pastime, like sailing boats,” he says. “And there’s nothing wrong with elitism; people don’t riot in the streets because they haven’t got a catamaran.”
May’s vision leapfrogs the current controversy over driverless vehicles, one of which Clarkson recently reported that he was almost killed by twice when testing. Rather, he thinks we’ll soon stop using cars as an everyday mode of transport.
“We will all end up in the sky before too long because you can go very fast without hitting pedestrians and it’s easy to map out flight paths,” asserts May. But until then, while car ownership remains “the opiate of the masses”, The Grand Tour trio see it as their role – duty, even – to entertain, inform and of course impress, with their crazily irresponsible japes.
There is an unexpected pause, so we chitchat about the contents of his garage: the Seventies Rolls-royce, the bright blue electric BMW i3, the metal flake red beach buggy, the mandatory man-opause white Porsche and the bombastic orange Ferrari with gold wheels he’s too embarrassed to take on to the open road. “You know, when I get into a car – any car – I still find it amazing that I’m allowed to drive it away.”
May’s face lights up like Christmas. Oh to be 12 again.
The Grand Tour returns to Amazon Prime Video on Dec 8