It feels appropriate that James May’s new BBC4 show should be about putting things back together after they have been taken apart. The BBC is doing something similar with Top Gear after Jeremy Clarkson’s axing last year, while May, Clarkson and co-presenter Richard Hammond will front a new motoring show on Amazon Prime.
May’s BBC4 show, The Reassembler, in which he puts back together a lawn mower, an electric guitar and a telephone, is likely to be his last hurrah for the BBC given the scale of his commitment to Amazon.
“The Amazon thing is going to be very complicated and it takes up a huge amount of time,” says May. The trio and executive producer Andy Wilman signed a three-year deal with the on-demand broadcaster last year worth a reputed £160m, with Clarkson on £10m a series, Hammond and May on £7m each. May says the numbers are “all bollocks. The figures aren’t right and anyway they don’t give us a great big bag of money and say, ‘here’s your money go off and spend it’. They give it to us bits at a time.
“It is massively expensive what we are doing, for reasons that I hope will become apparent when you see it. We are doing it over three years and there are going to be 30-plus long episodes. So no, we haven’t all been out and bought a yacht. I’ve got a new pair of trainers, that’s the only difference in my life since I started working for Amazon.”
That and the tan, thanks to May and his fellow presenters filming in the Caribbean and north Africa for the as yet untitled Amazon show. May confirms it will begin in the autumn, with each run likely to be 11 episodes, possibly more. It will be scheduled – albeit not in the traditional sense – so won’t be immediately available to binge-watch.
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It will also leave the TV studio behind, disappointing devotees of the “cool wall” but an exciting prospect for fans of Top Gear’s sumptuously filmed location shoots.
May says they are making more episodes than they did in the latter days of Top Gear and it is “logistically more complicated ... We are making a series of TV films and we don’t have a base”.
“Top Gear used to take up pretty much all our time and that is true now, worse actually,” he adds. “And by the end of the three years I’ll be dead anyway.”
May first discussed the idea for The Reassembler several years ago and had all but agreed to do it before signing up with Amazon, along with another series of BBC2’s Cars of the People. “I couldn’t say, ‘oh I’m not going to do it now because I’ve gone off to make myself rich with Amazon’. That would have been appalling,” he says. “I like putting things together and I find it very difficult to believe that other people wouldn’t be utterly fascinated. A more rational part of me accepts that a lot of people are going to think it’s utterly dreary.”
Each episode features May in a workshop, faced in the first instalment with 331 parts of a petrol-engine lawn mower. Ten hours later – 30 minutes of TV, including interspersed archive clips – it is rebuilt. It’s not quite “slow TV” – the phenomenon which won BBC4 two of its three Royal Television Society awards last week – but it has an old-fashioned, meditative feel about it, an arty side project before his Amazon blockbuster. May is “Captain Slow”, after all.
“I don’t actually know what the budget was but speaking from a purely selfish point of view it wasn’t a very well paid gig,” he says. “It was the TV equivalent of the contents of your 2p and 1p jar shaken out and used to buy something nice. What’s the rule, if it’s not successful it’s art? This is definitely art.”
We meet a few days short of a year since Clarkson was dropped from Top Gear after a damning internal report into his “fracas” with producer Oisin Tymon. He was followed out the door by Wilman, Hammond and May who said it would be “lame” to do Top Gear with a “surrogate Jeremy”.
“I remember thinking at the end of 2015 on New Year’s Eve, I’m actually quite glad to see the back of that one,” says May. “2015 was a bit complicated and had some very traumatic bits in it.”
It also, he says, had some “rather deserty bits in it” when he ended up “cooking shepherd’s pie on YouTube. It wasn’t as traumatic as having to go to war in Afghanistan, it was just a bit trying. I didn’t want to throw my life and career away”.
May briefly considered “taking a few years out or knocking it on the head” and becoming a teacher, but reality intervened in the form of a global bidding war for the services of the three presenters who turned Top Gear into a £50m BBC brand.
“People still wanted us to keep doing it so we had a duty to,” he says. “And you didn’t want to be the one who didn’t keep doing it, it would have looked churlish and mean spirited.”
“There’s a lot of politics in television and a lot of in-fighting and all that sort of stuff but in the end we are purveyors of entertainment,” he adds. “Viewers are not really bogged down in who’s doing what and who hates who and who’s doing best in the ratings. They watch television to be entertained.”
The rebooted Top Gear returns to BBC2 in May, with Chris Evans presenting it with Matt LeBlanc. It has already proved controversial, culminating in the “doughnut” episode near the Cenotaph which had Evans apologising “unreservedly”.
“That was probably a little bit ill-judged,” says May. Has he ever doughnuted around the Cenotaph? “I have driven up and down that road yes but no, I don’t do doughnuts. It’s inappropriate wherever you do it in my view.
“It was possibly a little unwise, ill-advised,” he adds. “Once they got to the point where they had to reinvent it, they had to have the balls to reinvent it totally, which is what they have done.”
He missed Evans comparing the former Top Gear trio to Zippy, George and Bungle from the children’s show Rainbow. “That’s quite good actually. Zippy? That’s Hammond. Is Bungle nice? I’ll be Bungle. Jeremy is George. A bit of good-natured sparring is great for everybody.” But he plays down the fact that Evans will be on air before them. “We are doing it carefully, it will be ready when it’s ready. For once, we are not in a race.”
May is a firm supporter of the BBC. “It would be a shame if the BBC didn’t exist, once it disappears you will never have it back,” he says. “Some people have got it in for the BBC for no apparently good reason. The Amazon lot are perfectly reasonable, level-headed people who just want to make TV programmes, I don’t think they are the enemy of the BBC or the other way round.
“It’s not a war, these things can coexist. We can have Amazon and Netflix and the BBC and BT Sport and people can make choices, that’s what modern life is all about,” he adds. “We are in the middle of a massive experiment, there will be a shakedown and we will see what comes out. I wouldn’t be surprised if the BBC was still in it, but they won’t be alone.”
Just before Christmas May broke his arm when he slipped leaving a restaurant and, unable to do much with it in a sling, spent six weeks making an Airfix model, a 1/48th scale Grumman F4F Wildcat. “I wasn’t really significantly drunk,” he remembers. “I went down with a massive wham. People always say if you’ve been drinking you just bounce. Well I didn’t, I went down with a loud cracking noise and that was that.”
The Reassembler will air on BBC4 at 9pm on 4, 5 and 6 April
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