4 hours Ago By Karen Rockett
Former Top Gear presenter James May has said he doesn't believe the BBC should have cancelled Top Gear describing it as "one of the world's biggest shows." He said: "I don’t actually think our Top Gear had to end. I thought it was very unfortunate and I don’t actually think our Top Gear had to end because of it" he said referring to the incident in a Yorkshire hotel in March 2015 when his co-pesenter Jeremy Clarkson attacked a colleague following a late night row over the fact there was no hot food available.
May, 62, added: "I think it could have been patched up and put down to a bit of high stress and flightiness, to be honest. It happened. It’s regrettable and it’s unfortunate, but it didn’t need to lead to the collapse of something very successful.
# “Maybe these things are ordained and it was time for us to move on. We had been doing it by then for a decade, I think, more. And I never imagined it would last as long.
I went into it from magazine journalism and I thought it would be a good laugh probably for a couple of years. “I mean, without being big-headed about it, we were Top Gear and we were one of the biggest TV shows in the world at the time. It was quite an intense environment and it’s not entirely surprising that it occasionally went off the rails.
If we’d been AC/DC or Thin Lizzy, nobody would have been the slightest bit surprised.” Clarkson was suspended by the BBC after a late night row at the Simonstone Hall hotel in North Yorkshire, where the programme team had travelled for a location shoot. Clarkson launched " an unprovoked physical and verbal attack” on a colleague, Oisin Tymon, during which he was “struck, resulting in swelling and bleeding to his lip”.
The then BBC director general Tony Hall said he took the decision to end Clarkson’s BBC career “with great regret”, 16 days after he was suspended following the “fracas” with a member of the Top Gear production team, saying the presenter had “crossed a line”. A BBC report into the incident revealed Clarkson verbally abused Tymon “on more than one occasion – both during the attack and subsequently inside the hotel – and contained the strongest expletives and threats to sack him. “The abuse was at such volume as to be heard in the dining room, and the shouting was audible in a hotel bedroom.
” May said: “We’re all blokes and we worked quite hard and quite long hours and it was exciting but it was quite difficult.” After Clarkson was fired from the series for punching the producer, May and Hammond also left and the trio were immediately hired for a new motoring series, The Grand Tour, on Amazon Prime Video. Since then, May said Top Gear "has followed a very similar format and framework to the way we left it".
May told The Times Magazine: "We used to squabble but, no, we weren’t Fleetwood Mac. We didn’t get that bad. We didn’t end up absolutely loathing each other, taking legal action against each other or anything like that.
” "I saw Jeremy recently. He seemed all right. We just seem older.
We’re not natural friends. That’s actually why it worked. I often looked back at Top Gear and The Grand Tour and thought in many ways I didn’t really belong on it.
But that’s exactly why I was on it. It needed one of each of us for it to work.”.
