It’s been well documented that James May was hospitalised after he crashed while filming an upcoming episode of The Grand Tour – and now, the presenter has opened up about the incident.
Speaking to RadioTimes.com and other press ahead of the launch of the new special – titled A Scandi Flick – May explained that although the crash looks “quite dramatic” he managed to escape more or less unscathed.
“It was very brief,” he said. “Made a loud bang. It wasn’t really that terrible, I don’t think. It looks quite dramatic but I was basically OK.
“The car wasn’t, the car was pretty bent actually,” he added. “I didn’t think it was gonna go again. But you know, with a bit of help from some ingenious local mechanics, obviously, I couldn’t do very much of it because my rib hurt but yeah, they sort of squeezed it back into shape, shall we say?”
He went on to explain that the crash didn’t end up altering the plans for the rest of the episode, although he confessed that if the car had been “completely ruined” – or if he’d suffered more extreme injuries – they might have had to make changes.
“But actually, because we managed to make the car work, we carried on,” he explained. “We lost about a day, because I had to mend the car, and I was in the hospital for the night. But apart from that, I don’t really think it made any difference.
“We still did all the things we wanted to do – it didn’t affect towing the caravan, it didn’t affect doing the skewering thing, driving on the lake. No, it didn’t really make any difference.
“It meant that the hero of the show became the yellow car for soldiering on which we wouldn’t have had without the crash, I suppose. I did it deliberately, I knew it was going to be boring otherwise [so I] sort of drove it to the cliff!”
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Meanwhile, executive producer Andy Wilman explained that he ended up a little red-faced as a result of the crash – after he had promised there were absolutely no safety concerns on the show just a few moments before being informed of the incident.
“I was doing a zoom call with this guy about renting a plane from them to do some filming with,” he said. “So I’m on the Zoom, talking to this guy. And he’s going ‘So what about safety and things like that?’ And I’m going ‘Oh, we are s**t-hot on safety. We are good on insurance and everything else, you know, we are your men for that.’
“The door bursts open behind me and someone goes, ‘James has crashed!’ So the guy can’t not hear it. So I had to leg it down there where I saw the debris and wreckage and what have you. So that was what happened. What was going through my mind was ‘I wish this man wasn’t on the Zoom call at this moment when I’m spinning him a big one about our safety procedures!’”
Additional reporting by Lauren Morris.
The Grand Tour presents: A Scandi Flick launches on Amazon Prime Video on Friday 16th September 2022 – try Amazon Prime Video for free for 30 days.
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