May's ways

JAMES May, the long-haired, laconic member of the Top Gear team, with Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, has received strange objects through the post from his female fans over the years.

"One woman sent me a model of me made out of marzipan and somebody else knitted me a James May doll. It actually looked like me, it was quite disturbing. I think it was meant as a compliment. It wasn't a voodoo doll," he says.

Knitted dolls and cakes? Does this suggest his fans may be of a certain age?

"The woman who sent the cake claimed to be a 26-year-old physiotherapist. I'd assumed the woman who sent me the doll was some old spinster, but I met her at an event and she was in her late 20s - she just liked knitting," says May. "I don't think I've had any underwear through the post but it could have been intercepted and I don't know about it."

As anyone who watches Top Gear knows, Clarkson is the tall, pompous one, Hammond is the short, cheeky one - and May is? "I'm the nice one," he quips.

They obviously all get along famously, but Hammond's near fatal high-speed crash last year hasn't changed May's attitude towards the dangers of the job.

"We don't take any wanton risks. Although some stuff we do looks pretty hairy, we do take all the precautions. Hammond's accident was extremely unfortunate and the chances of it going that wrong were extremely slim.

"People are always saying that he was terribly lucky to survive. I think he was actually very unlucky to have the accident in the first place."

Nicknamed Captain Slow because he often finishes last in high speed track races, May isn't really interested in zooming around racetracks. He has his small fleet of cars to keep him happy, including a Porsche Boxter S, a Fiat Panda, a Bentley from the 1980s and a Rolls-Royce from the 1970s, for which he paid £22,000.

"It lives in a garage and is brought out for special occasions," he says proudly.

He sold his Porsche 911 to help pay for another vehicle, a small plane - a 1946 Luscombe monoplane, to be precise, with a wingspan of 30ft. "It's the Morris Minor of aeroplanes," he explains.

"I find flying slightly surreal and nerve-racking, but that's one of the things I like about it. Learning to fly is time-consuming and expensive, but it's great."

The 44-year-old keeps his plane on an airfield near Maidenhead, Berks, but the furthest he's flown so far is to the south coast.

May has long been fascinated by engineering and invention and so was eager to film the BBC TV series James May's 20th Century, due to be repeated in the autumn, and has now written a tie-in book of the same name.

In it he explores the iconic themes of the last century including cars, flight, television, rock 'n' roll, video games, skyscrapers and much more, and reveals why some innovations like the Zeppelin, the Theremin and the motorcycle sidecar struggled to stay the distance.

"My favourite invention is the aeroplane," says the presenter. "I suspect the greatest invention of all time might be the bicycle, but of course that's a 19th century invention.

"The worst invention is the microwave oven. I can't actually see what it's for. There are a lot of domestic gadgets like this - the microwave, soda stream machine, the toasted sandwich maker. And then there are things like one-coat gloss paint which sell for a while because people think they save you so much time and effort, but after a while we collectively admit that they're rubbish and forget about them."

Microwaves are good for reheating food, I suggest. "Well, you shouldn't be reheating things," he argues. "An oven will heat things a lot better than a microwave."

You may gather that he doesn't have a microwave, although he recalls that someone once bought him one - he took it back to the shop and exchanged it for a radio.

While his TV pals Clarkson and Hammond live in the country and are married with children, May is happy to remain an urban bachelor, living in Hammersmith with his cat, Fusker.

"I wouldn't want to live in the countryside. It's for driving through and looking at - and then you leave it alone. I don't think we should live in it unless we're farmers. I like the community of London, I like pubs, curry houses and chip shops and noodle bars and the river and shops."

He's been with his girlfriend, Sarah, for six years but they don't live together and it's an arrangement that May doesn't plan to change. Why have they never married? "I just haven't. Not everybody does," he says, a touch defensively. "I haven't really thought about it. I don't have enough of my own space, in my view. That's the disadvantage of city living. I don't have enough space for all my cars and motorcycles. I only live in a small house. It's the right size for one person, and Sarah has her own flat in Notting Hill."

The Bristol-born bachelor, who recently ventured to the North Pole in a car with Jeremy Clarkson (Clarkson said that May was the first man to reach the North Pole who didn't want to go there in the first place), was particularly interested in musical innovations of the 20th century - which is understandable, given that he did a music degree at Lancaster University and is a classically trained pianist and talented flautist. He has a piano at home, but doesn't play it much, he confesses.

"I'm not at home often enough and you need to have peace in your heart to sit there and do your piano practice. People think that playing the piano is a relaxation, but it isn't actually. It's a frustration for the most part."

He didn't pursue a career in music because he wasn't good enough, he admits. "You have to be extremely good to make anything significant of it and I'm not that good. I was a bit lost as a youth and didn't know where I was going or what I was going to do."

After a succession of jobs he landed himself a post as a sub-editor for The Engineer magazine and then went on to Autocar magazine, but was fired for putting a derogatory hidden message in a supplement when he was a bit bored.

He then became a columnist for Car magazine and later went into TV, presenting Driven on Channel 4, Top Gear and even Top Of The Pops on BBC2. He also writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph.

This summer he has been to California to film another Big Wine Adventure series with Oz Clarke, while a new series of Top Gear begins in the autumn.

May reveals that he has only ever refused to do one stunt on the show - and that was to appear naked. "I can't remember why they asked me to do it but I thought it was too unsavoury for the viewers. And it was cold as well."

n James May's 20th Century (Hodder & Stoughton, £20)

Mike Amos is away