James May: 'You have to be a bit mad & conceited to go on TV
Dec 27, 2016 23:14:29 GMT
slfriend79 likes this
Post by RedMoon11 on Dec 27, 2016 23:14:29 GMT
Unfortunately the writer didn't fact check and got a few things wrong
James May: 'You have to be a bit mad and conceited to go on television'
CREDIT: ANDREW CROWLEY FOR THE TELEGRAPH
BY Nick Curtis
27 DECEMBER 2016 • 6:00AM
Two people – his agent and a BBC employee – ring James May during our interview to check he has actually arrived.
“Nobody believes I can actually exist by myself,” grumbles the 53-year-old. “I am actually a perfectly capable modern man who can cook, clean, wash and find my way to places, but nobody believes it.” For this, we can blame his onscreen persona as “Captain Slow”, the hapless straight man to the bombastic Jeremy Clarkson and the hyperactive Richard Hammond, first on the BBC’s Top Gear, and now on The Grand Tour, the Amazon show they created together after Clarkson was sacked by the BBC for punching a producer.
“I have never really changed my view of Jeremy, which is that he is a k***, as I said on the news [after the assault],” May says. The most annoying thing about Clarkson, he adds, is “he is a bit of a Stuckist: part of him is actually locked in the 1920s”. The most annoying thing about Hammond is “his face. His chirpiness and his silly little beard.” He knew Hammond had got over his near-fatal head injury sustained in a supercar crash ten years ago when he emerged “just as much a t*** as he always was”.
The three of them are work colleagues, “not mates” and it is the “bit of needle and friction” between them that makes their shows so successful. Top Gear played to more than 5m viewers here and 350m in 214 territories worldwide before the trio’s departure. Amazon does not release viewing figures but claimed The Grand Tour was its highest rated premiere ever. It is also the most illegally downloaded TV show in history.
“We are ridiculous caricatures of ourselves now,” says May, and the stunts that turned Top Gear from a boring motoring programme into a phenomenon have become more outrageous in The Grand Tour; Hammond and May knocking down Clarkson’s house, a how-to guide to stowing away in an Audi, the three of them building cars out of bones, wood and mud. “We are only making a piece of entertainment, it’s a silly car show,” says May. “We are sending ourselves up and making a mockery of the car in a lot of cases.”
He is afraid the joke is lost on a large tranche of the viewers, though. “There are some moments in both shows – and I have talked about this with Clarkson - where we look quite Brexit-y, quite UKIP-y because we laugh at foreigners,” he says. “But if you watch carefully the country we mock most is Britain, because we despair of it slightly. But some people do take it literally and think we are basically UKIP Which is an awful thought for me, and for the others I think.” He thinks some of Clarkson’s Top Gear jokes, like the one about a bridge in Burma having a ‘slope’ on it, should perhaps not have been broadcast: “But people like Jeremy being a bit of a d***, so we won’t stop him. It would be like stopping Bernard Manning being fat.”
May is actually the kind of bien-pensant, metrosexual egalitarian that Clarkson often affects to despise: a vicar’s son, comprehensive-educated, who studied music at university, plays the piano and reads medieval poetry. May lobbied for Scotland to stay in the UK and voted for Britain to remain in Europe, and lives in Hammersmith with his partner of 18 years, dance critic Sarah Frater. They have no children which “doesn’t bother” him: instead, he has three supercars, including a “quite embarrassing” Ferrari 458, and a collection of motorbikes. The view of him as a geeky petrolhead with both feet in the past won’t be dispelled by his new show, he fears.
The Reassembler, returning to BBC Four for a special Christmas series, sees May putting back together dismantled relics of the past: his own childhood Hornby train set, a Kenwood food mixer, a Honda Z50a mini Trail bike, a dansette record player. “What worries me is that people will misconstrue it and think I am one of those people who thinks everything was better in the past,” he says. But while the devices on the show are “historically relevant in a way that art or music or architecture are, they also help to remind you that the past was terrible.” He was a boy in the ‘70s “hardly anything worked and the place was filthy” and now finds himself “a mature, middle-aged man in the internet age, which I think is fantastic”.
The show is nerdy and indulgent, he admits, but also plays into the trend towards ‘slow TV’, shows which are gentle and consoling - the antithesis of The Grand Tour. He is glad to be back doing something with the nation’s main terrestrial broadcaster. “It could probably do with a bit of rethinking and modernising, but so could the car industry and so could the British government.”
After Clarkson was fired from Top Gear, May and Hammond decided to quit, and May says he was philosophical about what might have been the end of his TV career, since it had come about by accident anyway. “I’d have had to sell the Ferrari, but that’s ok because it has appreciated in value,” he muses. But then the Amazon offer arrived, with a reported budget of £4m per show, and a decent payday for May, though he has disputed the £10m figure that has been bruited about.
Before The Grand Tour launched, the BBC retooled Top Gear with Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc sharing the driving seat, only to see ratings plummet and Evans quit after a single season. “I did watch it,” says May. “I quite liked a lot of it. I know Chris and he is mad, but you have to be bit mad to take that on. You have to be a bit mad and conceited to go on television. My honest view is that they need to re-invent it more thoroughly, which is what I suspect they are doing now, with the younger, less well known blokes like Rory Reid and Chris Harris.”
It is an irony not lost on May that performance cars are coveted by young men and driven by fat, rich old ones, and are deeply unfashionable in the kill-your-speed, emission-sensitive modern world. He, Clarkson and Hammond are greying men reporting on a gazillion-dollar industry on the brink of extinction, or revolution. Cars, May says, have only changed incrementally since their invention, compared to the leaps in train or aviation technology, but the next few decades might see “Google, Apple and Tesla” become the main manufacturers of predominantly electric automobiles, or a plethora of new makers offering bespoke vehicles, which users could possibly design and perhaps even 3D print at home.
“The job of talking about cars is going to be extremely interesting for people who are 15 or 20 years younger than me,” says May. One of the purposes of him, Hammond and Clarkson setting up their own production company, W Chump and Sons – which owns The Grand Tour and should therefore guarantee their pensions – was to “find our successors” from those contributing to their new social media network, DriveTribe. He reckons they will be ready to yield to younger blood within five years. “We are not like the Dimblebys or Attenborough,” May says. “You couldn’t do with dignity what we do in old age. I suppose I could do The Reassembler at 80. But it would be a terrible cliché.”
The Christmas Reassembler is on BBC Four on December 28 at 9pm
www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/james-may-have-bit-mad-conceited-go-television/
James May: 'You have to be a bit mad and conceited to go on television'
CREDIT: ANDREW CROWLEY FOR THE TELEGRAPH
BY Nick Curtis
27 DECEMBER 2016 • 6:00AM
Two people – his agent and a BBC employee – ring James May during our interview to check he has actually arrived.
“Nobody believes I can actually exist by myself,” grumbles the 53-year-old. “I am actually a perfectly capable modern man who can cook, clean, wash and find my way to places, but nobody believes it.” For this, we can blame his onscreen persona as “Captain Slow”, the hapless straight man to the bombastic Jeremy Clarkson and the hyperactive Richard Hammond, first on the BBC’s Top Gear, and now on The Grand Tour, the Amazon show they created together after Clarkson was sacked by the BBC for punching a producer.
“I have never really changed my view of Jeremy, which is that he is a k***, as I said on the news [after the assault],” May says. The most annoying thing about Clarkson, he adds, is “he is a bit of a Stuckist: part of him is actually locked in the 1920s”. The most annoying thing about Hammond is “his face. His chirpiness and his silly little beard.” He knew Hammond had got over his near-fatal head injury sustained in a supercar crash ten years ago when he emerged “just as much a t*** as he always was”.
The three of them are work colleagues, “not mates” and it is the “bit of needle and friction” between them that makes their shows so successful. Top Gear played to more than 5m viewers here and 350m in 214 territories worldwide before the trio’s departure. Amazon does not release viewing figures but claimed The Grand Tour was its highest rated premiere ever. It is also the most illegally downloaded TV show in history.
“We are ridiculous caricatures of ourselves now,” says May, and the stunts that turned Top Gear from a boring motoring programme into a phenomenon have become more outrageous in The Grand Tour; Hammond and May knocking down Clarkson’s house, a how-to guide to stowing away in an Audi, the three of them building cars out of bones, wood and mud. “We are only making a piece of entertainment, it’s a silly car show,” says May. “We are sending ourselves up and making a mockery of the car in a lot of cases.”
He is afraid the joke is lost on a large tranche of the viewers, though. “There are some moments in both shows – and I have talked about this with Clarkson - where we look quite Brexit-y, quite UKIP-y because we laugh at foreigners,” he says. “But if you watch carefully the country we mock most is Britain, because we despair of it slightly. But some people do take it literally and think we are basically UKIP Which is an awful thought for me, and for the others I think.” He thinks some of Clarkson’s Top Gear jokes, like the one about a bridge in Burma having a ‘slope’ on it, should perhaps not have been broadcast: “But people like Jeremy being a bit of a d***, so we won’t stop him. It would be like stopping Bernard Manning being fat.”
May is actually the kind of bien-pensant, metrosexual egalitarian that Clarkson often affects to despise: a vicar’s son, comprehensive-educated, who studied music at university, plays the piano and reads medieval poetry. May lobbied for Scotland to stay in the UK and voted for Britain to remain in Europe, and lives in Hammersmith with his partner of 18 years, dance critic Sarah Frater. They have no children which “doesn’t bother” him: instead, he has three supercars, including a “quite embarrassing” Ferrari 458, and a collection of motorbikes. The view of him as a geeky petrolhead with both feet in the past won’t be dispelled by his new show, he fears.
The Reassembler, returning to BBC Four for a special Christmas series, sees May putting back together dismantled relics of the past: his own childhood Hornby train set, a Kenwood food mixer, a Honda Z50a mini Trail bike, a dansette record player. “What worries me is that people will misconstrue it and think I am one of those people who thinks everything was better in the past,” he says. But while the devices on the show are “historically relevant in a way that art or music or architecture are, they also help to remind you that the past was terrible.” He was a boy in the ‘70s “hardly anything worked and the place was filthy” and now finds himself “a mature, middle-aged man in the internet age, which I think is fantastic”.
The show is nerdy and indulgent, he admits, but also plays into the trend towards ‘slow TV’, shows which are gentle and consoling - the antithesis of The Grand Tour. He is glad to be back doing something with the nation’s main terrestrial broadcaster. “It could probably do with a bit of rethinking and modernising, but so could the car industry and so could the British government.”
After Clarkson was fired from Top Gear, May and Hammond decided to quit, and May says he was philosophical about what might have been the end of his TV career, since it had come about by accident anyway. “I’d have had to sell the Ferrari, but that’s ok because it has appreciated in value,” he muses. But then the Amazon offer arrived, with a reported budget of £4m per show, and a decent payday for May, though he has disputed the £10m figure that has been bruited about.
Before The Grand Tour launched, the BBC retooled Top Gear with Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc sharing the driving seat, only to see ratings plummet and Evans quit after a single season. “I did watch it,” says May. “I quite liked a lot of it. I know Chris and he is mad, but you have to be bit mad to take that on. You have to be a bit mad and conceited to go on television. My honest view is that they need to re-invent it more thoroughly, which is what I suspect they are doing now, with the younger, less well known blokes like Rory Reid and Chris Harris.”
It is an irony not lost on May that performance cars are coveted by young men and driven by fat, rich old ones, and are deeply unfashionable in the kill-your-speed, emission-sensitive modern world. He, Clarkson and Hammond are greying men reporting on a gazillion-dollar industry on the brink of extinction, or revolution. Cars, May says, have only changed incrementally since their invention, compared to the leaps in train or aviation technology, but the next few decades might see “Google, Apple and Tesla” become the main manufacturers of predominantly electric automobiles, or a plethora of new makers offering bespoke vehicles, which users could possibly design and perhaps even 3D print at home.
“The job of talking about cars is going to be extremely interesting for people who are 15 or 20 years younger than me,” says May. One of the purposes of him, Hammond and Clarkson setting up their own production company, W Chump and Sons – which owns The Grand Tour and should therefore guarantee their pensions – was to “find our successors” from those contributing to their new social media network, DriveTribe. He reckons they will be ready to yield to younger blood within five years. “We are not like the Dimblebys or Attenborough,” May says. “You couldn’t do with dignity what we do in old age. I suppose I could do The Reassembler at 80. But it would be a terrible cliché.”
The Christmas Reassembler is on BBC Four on December 28 at 9pm
www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/james-may-have-bit-mad-conceited-go-television/
