James May And The Dull Men (Quest)
There’s one crucial difference between being dull and being boring.
A dull man will happily spend the afternoon in his shed, adjusting the height of his lawnmower blades.
A bore will tell you all about it afterwards.
James May And The Dull Men celebrates the questions that preoccupy the minds of chaps past a certain age, such as the difference between a bradawl and an awl, or how far it’s possible to stretch an extendable metal tape measure before it sags.
For many years the motoring sidekick of Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, these days James May is white-haired and bearded, looking like Santa Claus’s older and slightly disreputable brother.
Freed from the obligation to attempt marathon car treks or undignified stunts, he is able now to pursue less flamboyant activities, on more modest platforms.
Instead of multi-million-pound contracts with Amazon Prime, he has tinkered in his workshop on BBC4, taking radios, vacuum cleaners and bicycles to bits.
Now, he’s pottering around on Quest (find it on Freeview, channel no. 12), whose annual budget probably wouldn’t cover a single day of filming on an Amazon show such as The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power (even though that turgid series is more dull than anything May could ever dream up).
James May And The Dull Men celebrates the questions that preoccupy the minds of chaps past a certain age, such as the difference between a bradawl and an awl, or how far it’s possible to stretch an extendable metal tape measure before it sags
For many years the motoring sidekick of Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond , these days James May is white-haired and bearded, looking like Santa Claus’s older and slightly disreputable brother. Pictured: James May (left) and Seb Tiley (right)
His challenge, as he happily does nothing very exciting for an hour, is to avoid boring us.
He came close as he tried to learn the art of cutting hair in less than three hours – on discovering that his hairdressing scissors were made of Tokyo steel, James began extolling the quality of his Japanese chisel collection.
Mason, the young man brought in to teach him the basics of barbering, visibly glazed over.
James had a lot to learn. He claimed never to have used a hairdryer, which, coming from him, seemed plausible.
For his victim, he picked one of the camera crew — Ruby, a young woman with strawberry blonde tresses to her waist.
‘Do you know how long it took me to grow it this long?’ she fretted.
‘I only let my mum cut my hair.’
When the ordeal was over, Ruby did declare herself pleased with the result. But I’m surprised it’s still acceptable, or even legal, to use underlings for experiments.
The escapade smacked of laddish larks in the Noughties, when junior members of the ‘posse’ were expected to be game for anything.
It was all worthwhile, though, if only for the punchline. Another of the team, Seb, suggested the name for James’s salon: The Darling Cuts Of May.
Seb also helped devise the Sunbrella, a brolly fitted with LED lights and painted sky-blue on the underside, to give the impression of a summer’s day in winter.
James made a bowl out of bits of broken pottery found in his garden. ‘I think this may be the dullest thing ever committed to television,’ he grumbled cheerfully.
Far from it. He clearly hasn’t spent hours on end watching Clarkson plough a field.