Maverick explorer and cheese buff James May's curiosity remains in top gear
James May is in his London attic. 'Hence the pointy roof,' he says, jerking a thumb at the long white space, exactly as his laconic TV persona might. Books, hi-fi equipment, lamps, a cluttered desk and work table line what you could also call a den, a studio, even a garret – but please, not a man cave.
'I find that term slightly dismissive,' he says. 'It's not like a padded place where I'm put where I can't do any harm. I come up here to try and do interesting and creative and satisfying things. And I think it's very right that people do that.'
His current project is Explorers: The Age of Discovery, a theatre show he'll unveil in Australia this winter. 'It's terrifying,' he says, 'because it's a huge subject' – spanning as it does the earliest human migrations through to the great navigators of the age of sail, and the cosmic ambitions of the present day.
'It's a series of stories about the philosophy of exploration, and it is intended as a piece of entertainment,' he says. 'It will be correct, I hope, but it's not going to be a lecture. It's supposed to feel like an evening at the theatre, with lights and sounds and some dry ice effects and, you know, me strutting about.'
The combination of deep research, intense inquiry and offhand delivery will be familiar to fans of May's broad range of small-screen adventures, from his two decades as 'Captain Slow' on the Top Gear/ Grand Tour team to his many escapades in travel, toy construction, machine disassembly, kitchen craft and modern man skills.
Whether he's dissecting pasta dishes on YouTube, exploding old record players or hurtling through Mongolia in a battered SUV, May's appeal lies in the enthusiastic pursuit of understanding, sans performative airs and, for the most part, scripts. So why the treacherous leap to solo theatre act?
'To be honest, because I thought it was about time I tried something serious and a bit more challenging. You do get a very enjoyable frisson that comes from live performance because it's in the moment. You can't stop and start again, there's no editing, so it is a bit scary.
'It's not in my comfort zone. But for that reason, maybe it'll inspire me to do something good. Or I might finally fall flat on my face and be found out.'
May's path to showbiz was meandering. Born in Bristol, he studied music at Lancaster University and did time in the civil service, car dealerships and hospital administration before finding a home in automotive journalism. He was fired from Autocar in 1992 for an imaginative sub-editing prank, an early sign of his maverick style as a media player.
'I can be quite nerdy, and I'm also quite faddy, so I become intensely interested in one thing for three months and then … I put it slightly to one side while I become [fixated] on that other thing,' he says of his seemingly scattershot trajectory from spy planes to pool tables.
The only thread, he says, is 'the stuff that interests me and that people will let me do. The great thing about sandwiches of the ′70s and all that stuff I've done on YouTube is they're just daft ideas that didn't really fit in with any so-called proper TV.
'YouTube is a great gift in that respect … and I can see why conventional TV production is quite worried because we can occasionally get remarkable results with a few hundred pounds worth of handheld kit and a slightly offbeat but engaging idea about noodles.'
That cuts both ways, of course. Try and measure the months of hard graft that went into his Cars of the People BBC series, for instance, against the thing for which tens of millions of casual web-surfers will remember him: tersely saying the word 'cheese' while placing a block of it on a workbench.
'Yes, it's absurd, isn't it? I don't think anybody's going to look back on a meme in the way they look back on Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. What will we send on the capsule into space for other forms of life to know about us? I suspect probably .0001 to the minus 10 per cent of it because it's all bollocks, really.'
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO JAMES MAY
Worst habit? Either leaving pants on the floor, or cowardice.
Greatest fear? That I will lose my body and not my mind. I believe that I'd rather lose my mind but have my body working so that I could skip through fields going, 'Tra-la, hello clouds'. But people tell me it's not quite that simple.
The line that has stayed with you? At 17 or 18, I applied for a technical role at the BBC. They sent me quite a curt letter which included the line, 'We suggest that you pursue a career in another direction'. I've used that line myself on people when they're being difficult.
Biggest regret? Not bucking up earlier. I did waste quite a bit of my twenties achieving nothing.
Favourite book? My five-volume Poets of the English Language [Heron Books, early '70s]. My dad bought it and I stole it, frankly, years ago and took it away with me to college.
The artwork/ song you wish was yours? I'd feel pretty chuffed if I'd written the Beach Boys' God Only Knows.
If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? Back to the late '80s to see if they were as horrible as I remember.
For all his throwaway lines, there's perfectly serious intent behind May's big ideas. His Man Lab series of the early 2010s was 'ahead of the curve' of gender role interrogation, he says, in that 'we were addressing something which annoyed me at the time and is still a bit of a problem: men feigning uselessness in the belief that it's somehow cute or sophisticated or appealing, because I don't think it is.'
Whatever your gender, once you've done the hard work to disarm a World War II bomb, make a lemon squeezer in a home-made smelting furnace or launch your pet's ashes into space, 'that opens the floodgates on being able to have a go at anything for the sheer fun of it', he says.
'We're still doing some stuff for Discovery [channel] about trying to invent and make things in sheds, which is really an elaborate excuse for mucking about and getting some tools out.'
This, he concedes, describes the place where he'd generally rather be. 'I was never hell-bent on the idea of making money. I mean, you can see that from all the money I've lost on stupid ventures like the DriveTribe social media platform [wound up in 2022] and owning a pub [the still-functioning Royal Oak in Oxfordshire], which is pointless, really.'
Which returns us to the potential returns versus clear perils of an internationally touring live theatre show that will occupy the best part of this year in development at home, and then in performance from Australasia to the UK, and possibly into next year in the Americas and Europe.
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'I think it's partly down to a slight insecurity that means it's very difficult to say no,' he muses. 'They say, 'Do you want to do an Explorers live show?' And I did think, 'Oooh, that sounds like it could be quite hard work', but before I knew it, I just said, 'Yes, OK, send me the contract'. And now here we are.'
That's the natural explorer's spirit for you.
'I'm not sure I would have ever been an explorer in the sense of Captain Cook or Pythias the Greek. I would probably have been too timid, to be honest, or I would have probably believed that I wasn't supposed to do that,' he says. 'I have massive imposter syndrome.'
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