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He has spent more time than he cares to remember with Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson, starting with the phenomenally successful BBC car show Top Gear before moving to Amazon Prime with its successor, The Grand Tour. Of course, the team have evolved and developed, but they certainly haven’t mellowed, he says.
“It’s definitely changed since the early days when we were sort of rather naive stumbling children,” James laughs.
“We have learned to properly dislike each other over 20 years, we have refined our mutual loathing of each other’s small habits and speech mannerisms and dress sense and food choices and opinions on bloody football… it’s appalling really.”
While he believes himself to be very easy company, James is an expert on his co-stars’ foibles. “Hammond’s got an irritating habit, and it took me many years to tell him that I didn’t like it,” he says.
“He puts Marmite on his toast, he does it in a rather…I know people think I’m pedantic, but Hammond puts his butter on his toast and he spends ages spreading his Marmite until it’s almost all off the knife, but there’s always a bit left.
“And he sticks it in the side of the bread to clean it off and for some reason when he does that I could quite easily douse him in petrol and set fire to him.
“Jeremy is mainly, well he goes on a lot, obviously, and he’s quite needy so he is very keen he says, ‘We all have to sit in the bar, we all have to sit in the restaurant’, and he says ‘cri-ti-cal’ a lot. ‘It’s cri-ti-cal, it’s lit-erally cri-ti-cal’.
“You could save a lot of humanity’s time and effort by just cutting out all these words and saying what you mean.
“They’re sort of tiny things, the sort married couples do. We’re a ménage I suppose, It’s all a bit creepy.”
Although they see each other much less than when they were working on Top Gear, Hammond and Clarkson are still ever present in May’s life.
“It’s interesting, in the past with the studio shows we did maybe two studio series a year, so I’d see them regularly most weeks. I’d have several days with Hammond and Clarkson and all the people around us.”
“Now we do it twice a year for two weeks but it feels like the same amount, I still feel like I spend all my bloody life with Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson when obviously I don’t. It feels like such an appalling looming presence.”
The latest Grand Tour Special sees them off to Scandinavia to drive saloon rally cars 127 miles north of the Arctic Circle across Norway, Sweden and Finland on a catastrophe-filled adventure through what has been described as “Europe’s last great wilderness”.
So far, so simple, but of course chaos ensues. This time, however, simp cou ens tim it isn’t Hammond – who was severely injured in a high speed crash in 2007 and has suffered at least two more – who gets into trouble, but “Captain Slow” James.
He smiles: “Hammond is a bit boring in this one, but it’s ok because I smash a car up. I drove into a cliff. Yeah, I was okay. The car wasn’t though, the car was a bit bent so we had to mend it, which took a day out of our schedule, but it had to be unsquashed.
“That meant that Hammond didn’t have to have a crash on this one, so he got off lightly. We might have to pay him slightly less for this one.”
James has been able to do some amazing things and travel to amazing places through his work with Hammond and Clarkson, and together they’ve racked up visits to an enviable list of countries.
Between Top Gear and The Grand Tour, James has worked in South Africa, Jordan, Cambodia, Chile, Bolivia, Vietnam and Madagascar, and the team has driven around much of Europe.
There was also a great deal of travelling in his other ventures, Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure with Oz Clarke, and Our Man in Japan.
It all ground to a halt during Covid, but now he’s back on the road, James is still excited to discover new places.
“I might be a bit of a child but I still get excited when I go to the airport. I get very excited, I get there and I think, ‘Oh I’m going to go on a plane’, and I buy a magazine and some sweets, it’s like going on a school coach trip.
“I just find it really exciting, and then you land and you’re somewhere else, it’s all snowy and they’ve all got big jumpers on and they’re eating herring.
“I thought I could do without the travelling, but then when we did it again I realised ‘No, I actually really like going on trips’.”
He adds: “I’m now thinking in terms of bits of the world that I haven’t been to, which is not that many, but I’ve never been to any of that bit where the Philippines or Indonesia is. I’ve never been to Bali for example, not even a holiday.
“It would be nice to think of what we could do there, but we don’t tend to think of the locations, we tend to start with the cars or the premise. Will a family car work off road, for example. Then we choose the locations.
We wouldn’t say, ‘Right we need to go to the Philippines, what’s a car angle on that?’ It wouldn’t really work like that.
“It does, despite appearances, at its heart have to be a car show. Otherwise we are undone.”
Travelling around the world to drive fast high-end cars on amazing roads would be the definition of a dream job to many, and James says he has to be grateful for the opportunities that have been granted to him.
“I don’t dwell on it because that would be a bit self-obsessed, but I do sometimes think about it. It’s been 20 years now of doing this and the stuff I’ve done that I know I never would have done in some other walk of life. And I don’t know what that other walk of life would have been because I was just adrift up until that point.
“I don’t know what else would have happened but I’ve been to so many places and seen so many remarkable things, I’m having difficulty remembering it all.
“You would have to acknowledge, without being boastful about it, that it is a dream job and if you didn’t think that about it then, to be honest, you shouldn’t do it because that would be very cynical and ungrateful. Frankly, my mother would be very disappointed in me.”
James has a “very big birthday” coming up in January when he will turn 60 and people keep asking him when he will retire from our screens. So, after more than two decades on television, when will he call it a day?
“A lot of people have been asking me that. The trouble with TV is that TV tends to retire you, rather than the other way round. Very few people in television have the strength to go, ‘I’ve had enough of that, I’ll step aside and make space for some younger people with some new ideas’.”
“Most people just keep going until somebody else goes ‘umm, James, it’s time to go’.”
“I’m just waiting for somebody to say that, it might be tomorrow, it might be this afternoon, who knows?”
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