This month, we’ll see James May return to Prime Video in his new series, ‘Our Man in Italy’. But before he takes us on his travels across the beautiful country of Italy, he has one thing he wants to straighten out.
His career alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond has taken him around the world in the greatest cars, but it hasn’t been without its danger. Top Gear saw him drive up the side of a volcano, and The Grand Tour saw him sail across a rough sea in an antique.
But earlier this year it was reported that James May suffered from a heart attack while filming for Top Gear in the early days before its reboot. Phillipa Sage, Clarkson’s partner at the time, told the press that he felt chest pains due to a suspected heart attack.
“Paramedics confirmed no heart attack but not surprisingly he was clearly suffering from stress and the effects of a not so healthy lifestyle,” she said at the time.
“After a snooze, he declared he felt better and he would go ahead with the evening’s performance.”
He was asked about this by Express.co.uk.
“Oh, no, that’s from years ago,” James said on being asked about it.
“That’s b******s. I wasn’t having a heart attack, it was probably the result of excessive drinking, to be honest.
“The medics are largely bored, they don’t have anything to do and they think, ‘Ah, here’s a chance to try out all of our kit’.
“I am very grateful, they make sure you’re okay, but I didn’t think I was having a heart attack.”
As we’ve seen from the trailer of Our Man in Italy, there’s a lot of eating. We can see him creating a full English breakfast pizza as well as tasting cheese with famous TikTok personality Grace. He was asked if he’d managed to maintain his new healthy weight while traveling through Italy.
“Not entirely.,” he admitted.
“The trouble is a combination of three things. The food in Italy is very nice, two, there is always tonnes of it wherever you go, and they talk about it constantly.
“That is a cliche, but it’s a perfectly valid one…and the third one is when I was at home, especially over the pandemic period and so on, I did quite a lot of exercise and I’d go cycling every day.
“Once we’d got to Italy, I did take a folding bike with me, but I didn’t get that much of a chance to ride it, so I did about a 20th of the exercise I’d normally be doing.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but I did get a bit tubby towards the end and I still am,” he joked.
Talking about the filming of the new series, he admitted that it was “a bit chaotic”:
“It’s all a bit chaotic because it’s Italy…that’s another cliche but they will be the first to acknowledge it,” he said.
“Italy has a sort of level of disorganisation, but it all works.”
James May’s Our Man In Italy is coming to Amazon Prime Video on July 15th.
