This is what I do when I have spare half an hour. Instead of studying and making my movie for BA. Wanted to put it on Drivetribe, don’t know if I should.
Btw, I hate the fact tumblr won’t allow uploding movie file over 100MB. I had to lower quality of it. Sorry.
ALL RIGHTS BELONG TO AMAZON, I DO NOT OWN ANY OF THEM. Don’t sue me, please.
James May told 5 Live that people that go on television must all be slightly needy. He said: "You don't want to be not loved… I suspect that actually people can see that: 'I just want people to like me!'"
This clip is from Afternoon Edition BBC Radio 5 Live
Jeremy Clarkson tries the meat-free "Impossible burger"
Published on Apr 19, 2017
Can this burger save the world? Meat is one of the biggest causes of greenhouse gases. Hence Bill Gates and Google's latest big idea: a meat-free burger made in a laboratory from plants, but which bleeds and sizzles. Now it's coming to Britain.
Watch Sunday Times Driving columnist Jeremy Clarkson take the Impossible burger challenge.
Read the article in full at www.driving.co.uk/news/lifestyle/impossible-burger/
Jeremy Clarkson’s mission Impossible (burger)
If they think that the United States Cattlemen’s Association is going to be a problem, Impossible Foods hasn’t bargained for Jeremy Clarkson. A scourge of “vegetabalists”, he wrote in The Sunday Times his own suggestion for tackling the global problems caused by livestock: instead of eating cattle, eat a vegetarian. So how would he react to the Impossible burger?The Sunday Times arranged a blind trial (unofficially — Impossible Foods prefers its products to be tested under scientific conditions) at one of Clarkson’s favourite restaurants. For impartiality, it should be pointed out that the burger looked distinctly jet-lagged by the time it arrived in London after an unrefrigerated 10-hour flight from Los Angeles. Chefs at the diner did their best to restore its original texture and shape, but it was clear it had seen better days.Clarkson began the test with a series of excuses, explaining that his taste buds might trick him into making the wrong choice because of damage caused by years of smoking. The Impossible burger and a meat burger were served side by side, each in a bun with garnish. Clarkson sampled both. After some deliberation, he chose correctly. Characteristically magnanimous in victory — not — he then launched into a diatribe against “vegetabalists”.“Beef farmers of the world, relax,” he said, triumphantly. “If you’re going to be a vegetarian, you can’t say, ‘I want my vegetables to look like meat.’ You just have to accept that you’ve got to eat like a budgerigar. If there’s some other commercial reason for doing it [making burgers from plants], then fair enough. But just for vegetarianism — pah! Go and eat seeds, sit on a perch and crap on sandpaper. If that’s how you want to live life, that’s fine. Just don’t come crying to me.”Yet when pressed on his verdict, he admitted that the Impossible burger tasted “OK”. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it,” he conceded. By Clarkson’s standards, that’s high praise. Gates and Google, you may be onto something.
JAMES MAY: AT FIRST MY ROLLS-ROYCE CORNICHE WAS ECSTASY — NOW IT’S JUST ITCHY
Leather upholstery dries out, cracks, scuffs and stains. Don't let that put you off buying James May's Corniche
Published 07 March 2017 By James May
MY RELATIONSHIP with old cars has worsened steadily over the past few years. Having made two series of Cars of the People for BBC2, I can state categorically that they don’t work properly. Not even when they’ve been lent to you by Porsche’s own museum.
As an idea, the car came good only circa 2005. Everything before that was a protracted research and development programme foisted on the unsuspecting public. We should probably keep one example of everything in a museum, as a warning from history, but the rest should start new lives as kettles and toasters.
My relationship with my own old car, a Rolls-Royce Corniche hard-top, is especially troublesome. I wanted one of these ever since, as a fluff-faced youth, I dropped back in a line of slow-moving traffic to allow one to blend in from a slip road.
In those old days, as Tennyson might have it, one summer noon, an arm/Rose up from out the bosom of the car,/Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,/Waving a thank-you to me.
I was besotted.
I eventually bought one 20 years later, in 2008, a lovely original and unmolested 1972 car in garnet with a rich-tea-biscuit interior. I fell for that old “Rolls-Royce for Mondeo money” chestnut and, on the whole, it’s worked out quite well.
A Corniche with a 1950s-era 6.75-litre V8 is not economical, spares for old Roycers are a little on the dear side and I have been a bit neurotic about the whole business and made sure it’s never wanted for anything. Not even an internal lightbulb. I paid £20,000 for the car and I’ve probably spent more than half that on looking after it, so the big question is: has it depreciated? We’ll find out in two weeks, as it’s up for sale at the Bonhams Goodwood Members’ Meeting auction. I simply can’t drive it any more.
Here’s why. I drive around in the Royce for a bit, put it back in the garage, go into the house and become aware that I feel a bit, as my grandmother would have said, queer. A bit itchy. A little like I’m coated in an invisible layer of something unsavoury.
If Sarah, my other half, approaches me after I’ve been in the Corniche, she recoils with horror and says: “Urgh. You’ve been in the Rolls-Royce.” I then have a thorough shower with carbolic soap and a wire brush, and domestic harmony is restored.
Meanwhile, I’ve discarded whatever I was wearing into the laundry basket in the bedroom. But then, come bedtime, I’m kept awake by it. Churchill was tormented by the black dog of his despair during the night; I am tyrannised by something horrible lurking in the wicker. So all the clothes have to go into the washing machine, along with the cotton liner of the basket itself. It’s become that bad.
I’d be interested to know if anyone has experienced anything similar with an old car. My highly qualified and level-headed colleagues put it down to me being “weird”, but I know I’m not imagining it. It has rendered the car fairly unusable, really, because I can’t drive it to any sort of event. I can drive it only if I end up back at home for a damn good boil.
What I am describing here is not, I suspect, a true allergy. I don’t come out in a rash, have difficulty breathing or anything like that. No one else who has ridden in the car has been affected; most people comment on how nice it smells in there. There’s nothing wrong with it (just in case you’re thinking of bidding). It’s all about me and the way I react to it, and it has become partly psychological because I’m reluctant even to open the door.
What is it? I’ve talked to a few people who understand this sort of thing, and one compelling explanation is that it’s the horsehair used to stuff the seats. Horsehair was known to cause illness among upholsterers in the olden days, not least because it could contain anthrax spores. But I have never had any problems with living horses, apart from a tendency to fall off them, so I’m not sure it’s that.
I have noticed, however, that other old leather things — jackets, antique suitcases, some other cars, Jeremy Clarkson’s face — can have a similar effect on me. I also know that tanneries in the past used processes and chemicals so horrible that modern legislation has in effect outlawed them. I’ve heard stories of visitors to tanneries vomiting.
This is what I think it is. Something that was used in the preparation of the Corniche’s leather is changing in some complex molecular way and drifting around in the car’s interior. Cleaning it with expensive stuff seems only to excite whatever is going on in there. I’m fairly confident it’s not a reaction to Bakelite or exquisite marquetry, so it must be something to do with the leather.
I realise this must all sound a bit First World problem — man can’t drive his Rolls-Royce because it makes him feel funny — but there it is. It doesn’t happen in modern leather-trimmed cars, and shoes don’t trouble my feet in the slightest. But the Rolls does, so it has to go. It’s sad because it’s a thing of great loveliness, but I was itching to own one for years and the problem should have gone away when I bought it, not gradually intensified.
What this (admittedly unusual) experience has done is fortify me in my growing belief that leather is a ridiculous material for car upholstery. I left for work this morning wearing my new coat, which is thermally insulated, lightweight, durable, wipe-down, waterproof yet breathable. Synthetics have come a long way since we turned our noses up at vinyl, leatherette and velour.
Yet as I drove I was sitting on something like a dead bullock’s buttocks. How medieval is that? Leather is too hot in summer and too cold in winter; it dries out, cracks, scuffs and stains. Car makers charge a hefty premium for it, but it’s nothing more than a by-product of cheeseburgers. Maybe it’s time for us to move on.
Unless you fancy a very tidy 1972 Corniche, in which case don’t move on just yet.
‘We are sick to death of each other . . . like any work colleagues’ A Christmas drink with Clarkson? That’s definitely not on James May’s agenda this year
James May is nicknamed Captain Slow but has a motorcycle collection and is handy behind the wheel of a 200mph Ferrari LaFerrari NEALE HAYNES
Damian Whitworth 24 December 2016
James May began this year with a broken arm that proved an uncomfortable burden during the stressful process of building a post-Top Gear career with his fellow petrolheads Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond.
The year ends after the successful launch of The Grand Tour and a message of congratulations from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and their new boss.
So will he be going out for a drink with Clarkson to celebrate? “No!” he says, shooting me a look which indicates that he thinks I might be quite mad. “I don’t even know where he is. I think he’s going away somewhere. We are sick to death of each other by the time we get out of work.”
On screen the three of them bicker and tease and moan about each other but that’s just a TV act, isn’t it? “No, we genuinely get on each other’s tits,” says May.
What was it exactly, during the months of travelling the world together, that irritated May about Clarkson? “Just his presence really. We are very different people. He’s not interested in this,” he says, gesturing at his garage, where we are talking and where he comes to tinker with bikes and toy trains. “I am not interested in going shooting or to fashionable restaurants. We are work colleagues.”
Their office these days is a very large tent that they have been carting around the world while filming the series they devised after Clarkson was fired from Top Gear for punching a producer, and his co-presenters decided to follow him into the unknown. Vindication came in mostly positive reviews for the lavishly budgeted new show and a recent message from Bezos.
“He just sent an email saying well done,” May says. Amazon has not released viewing figures for The Grand Tour. “They never will. It’s policy. We know they are more than good enough but they won’t say what they actually are. They are happy.”
May is now part of both the fastest show on television and probably the slowest. In The Reassembler, perhaps the most unlikely commission of the year, he was filmed in a workshop reassembling an electric guitar, a Bakelite telephone and an antique lawnmower while providing a running commentary in his charming, idiosyncratic style. The programmes were shown on BBC Four. Clarkson may have fallen out dramatically with Auntie but May has “no quarrel whatsoever with the BBC. I approve of it and we should defend it. It can live side by side with other services like Amazon.”
He was more nervous and anxious about The Reassembler than he was about The Grand Tour. “I thought people were going to think, ‘He’s lost his marbles. He’s putting a lawnmower together and chuntering on about it and forgetting to look at the camera.’ A lot of people do think it’s complete bollocks but fortunately enough people like it. Nobody is more amazed than me.”
A second series of four programmes starts next week. He starts by putting a Hornby train set back together again. It is a gloriously bonkers and calming antidote for anyone feeling frazzled after trying to set up a child’s new Playstation. It makes compelling viewing for those of us who are hopeless at fixing things.
“You think you are hopeless. You have been told you are. Did you have a very middle-class upbringing? It’s the class system, I am afraid. Interfering. Making this distinction. The idea that you are a practical person or you are an intellectual one.
“I don’t like the idea of the 11-plus. I don’t think you can take a child aged 11 and say, ‘This person is professional, sedentary-class material. And this one is a tradesperson.’ Which is what we seem to do. That’s nonsense. Renaissance man in Italy would have embraced both equally and written poetry while designing a telescope.” He thinks that we have become “scared” of fixing things like bicycles. “It’s only a bloody bicycle. Nothing particularly mysterious about it.”
Even Clarkson took up cycling at one stage. He looks scornful. “Nooo! He rode from his flat in Notting Hill down to the BBC, which is pretty much downhill, and got a researcher to take it home again. His dalliance with cycling was brief.”
May goes to Christmas gatherings praying that the kids have been given Lego or a train set “then I won’t have to sit and talk about mortgage rates”. Parents daunted by the prospect of assembling a trampoline or a Scalextric on Christmas Day should “just do it. As long as you are not using machine tools it is not likely to hurt you. Or get the kids to put it together. Kids haven’t been hamstrung by all these sociological ideas about whether or not you are supposed to do stuff.”
He has one misgiving about The Reassembler. “The thing that worries me is that people will start to imagine that I am an evangelist for the olden days. Not at all. I can remember the Seventies. The technology was pretty terrible. Modern everything is better. I believe in video games and I am obsessed with my iPad. Sarah [his partner] takes it off me sometimes because I play with it too much. It doesn’t mean we have to completely abandon these more tangible, purely mechanical or electromechanical things. I find them very therapeutic.”
He likes that most modern products are not built to last. “The disposable society is quite a good thing. You want people to work furiously on smartphones to improve them and have a new one every six months or year because it’s going to be better. This idea that things in the past were made properly and last for ever is misty-eyed nonsense.”
May suggests that we shall get better at recycling and may once again become a great manufacturing nation where “we don’t have to worry about filling the world with crap because this bicycle or your phone is simply the current host of these materials and they will re-emerge as a kettle or a part of a computer or a part of a car. Then we can revel in making things and we can have new cars all the time.”
His own car collection includes an electric car and an old Rolls Royce, which he is trying to sell because he is allergic to the old leather. This dilapidated garage in west London contains eight motorbikes, half a dozen bicycles in varying stages of repair, workbenches and a lathe. He buys most of the bikes to fix up and plans to sell them. “I’ve got too much stuff. But compared with Gandhi we are all slightly overendowed with possessions.”
He loves working in here but says that he is reluctant to pursue the “man in shed thing”. He says: “One of the problems with the way the world has gone, probably ever since Pip and Joe went to the forge in Great Expectations, there is this notion that the woman stays in the home, bloke goes in the shed after a certain age. I find that a bit miserable.”
May, 53, lives with his partner, Sarah Frater, a dance critic, and plans to convert the garage into an extension. “I will be able to mend a bicycle while there is cooking going on. Or Sarah can mend the bicycle while I do the cooking. We are gender-neutral and modern.”
Although Clarkson and Hammond call him Captain Slow he was fined for speeding at 37mph in a 30mph zone on one of his motorbikes and for The Grand Tour drove a Ferrari LaFerrari, which has a top speed of more than 200mph.
So which ride would he go for given the choice between the Ferrari LaFerrari and its 950 horsepower or the eight-reindeer power of Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen? “Santa is faster, he must be. He gets to all those chimneys in one night. But you’re more in control in the Ferrari. Animals are unpredictable.”
He and his co-presenters are careful on public roads. “We’d be ruined if we were caught doing anything reckless but also it’s a mark of civility to be able to drive politely. I hate people beeping.” He’d like to see a meter in cars “and every time you blow your horn £5 goes to the NHS”.
May himself seems very mild-mannered. “Well I am so far, but the quiet ones are always the ones who do the massive murder aren’t they? So let’s see.”
May and Clarkson were once filming in the Arctic and found themselves separated behind an ice floe. May was gripped by the thought that he could kill Clarkson with the shovel he was carrying. “This is the actual spade,” he says, picking it up and examining it fondly. Was there a specific argument that prompted his dark thoughts or did he just fantasise?
“Fantasise is probably a bit of a strong word. I’m only joking. I wouldn’t really kill him with the shovel. But it did occur to me that if you were looking for one of those perfect crimes I could probably have got away with killing him. The ice would have melted and he would have sunk to the bottom of the sea and so would the shovel.”
Did he harbour similar thoughts in the Namibian desert this year? “Not death. A bruise would do occasionally I think.”
He says that he still gets excited every time he heads to the airport for a filming trip. “It’s brilliant. But we are knocking on a bit, it’s tiring and not particularly healthy.”
When they are away filming the trio drink together and interviewers have been in awe of their capacity. Asked about his drinking this year, Clarkson deflected the question by saying that he didn’t drink as much as May. “Clarkson!” May chuckles. “No, we are not drunks. We do like a drink obviously because we are middle-aged, middle-class men. There’s no drink problem, that’s nonsense. We are very sensible grown-up people.”
He admits that he had “had a few” when he slipped on a wet pavement and broke his arm a year ago but says that it was not outside a pub, as some reported. It was a restaurant. He was with Sarah. Clarkson and Hammond certainly were not there.
James May: The Christmas Reassembler, BBC Four, Wed 9pm; The Grand Tour is available on Amazon Prime
CURRICULUM VITAE
Born January16, 1963, in Bristol
Education CaerleonEndowed Junior School; Oakwood Comprehensive School; studied music at Lancaster University
Career Temporary post as a records officer in a hospital; short stint in the civil service; sub-editor on The Engineer, then on Autocar magazine before becoming a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and Car magazine.
Family Lives with his partner, Sarah Frater
TV career began in 1998 with the Channel 4 series Driven. Presented Top Gear from 1999 to 2015 and filmed other TV series including Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure and James May’s 20th Century. He has written books: May on Motors (2006) Notes from the Hard Shoulder (2007) and James May’s 20th Century (2007).
QUICK FIRE
Clarkson or Hammond? Neither
Fly or drive? For pure pleasure probably fly. To get anywhere, drive
James May: The Reassembler - Series 2: 1. Christmas: Hornby Train Set
Much like Santa Claus, James May has spent the year in his workshop getting ready for Christmas, in a festive special in which he reassembles his favourite childhood Christmas present.
But this isn't just any Christmas present, this is the one that changed his life and sent him on to a path of mechanical intrigue and reassembly. This is the Hornby Flying Scotsman with realistic chuffing sounds which James ripped open on Christmas Day 1972.
Laid out in all its 138 tiny component parts, James lovingly reassembles the train as well as his memories of Christmases and toys past.
From the exhilarating re-magnetising of the motor's magnets to some thrilling wheel-quartering amidst a backdrop of James's continued bafflement of electricity, we watch as James rebuilds the entire train set and hopes at the end his Christmas wish will come true and the train will start up and realistically chuff into the night.
James May: 'You have to be a bit mad and conceited to go on television'
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
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