KEY POINTS:
You'd have to say it's a very good question. And, funnily enough, it wasn't a Fleet St hack but the daughter of Top Gear's Richard Hammond who - at just 7 - rather cogently inquired about the actual official nature of his "job" as one of British television's top-rating troika of ageing petrolheads. "Daddy," Isabella Hammond said to him one wet day, "you know when you go out with Uncle Jeremy and you mess about in cars?" Yes, Daddy replied. "Is that work?" A fine question.
An excellent question, in fact ... and one many might be inclined to answer with a firm "no". Some have actually gone as far as describing what he and his fellow Top Gear hosts, James May and the aforementioned "Uncle Jeremy" Clarkson, actually get up to is, well, quite a lot of cocking about.
"A great deal of cocking about, yes ...," Hammond confirms by phone from the office of his home in rural Herefordshire. However this was not what he told his probing young daughter. "What I did say to her was 'look out the window, Izzi. Is it raining?' Yes. 'Well are you getting wet?' No. 'That's because there's a roof over your head. So yes, it is work.' That's my justification." Well yes, he does seem to have a point.
Top Gear and its Top Gear Live spin-off - which comes to Auckland for four nights next month - are clearly nice little earners. In May last year The Sun newspaper (yes, I know) said "pint-sized Richard" was earning an estimated $25,000 to $38,000 - per episode, mind - and wanted this "revved up to a racy" $76,000 an episode.
Even if these figures are way off, it should be pointed out the show isn't his only TV work. In June last year the Guardian reported Hammond had launched his own company, Hamster's Wheel (one of his nicknames is Hamster), after doing a $5 million deal to make a children's science series for the BBC. Hammond has also recently published his fourth book, As You Do.
Meanwhile, The Sun speculated last August that the home from which he's now talking to me - sitting on more than eight lovely hectares of land - cost him more than $5.1 million. Whatever it cost it certainly provides a nice spot for parking his collection of vehicles including a Porsche 997 Carrera S, a 1968 Ford Mustang, a Morgan V6 Roadster, a '57 Land Rover, a pimped V8 Land Rover and an Opel Kadett called Oliver, which was used for a Top Gear expedition to Botswana, a trip which also features in As You Do. His wife Mindy, who he married in 2002 and has had two daughters with, has a Land Rover and a Harley Davidson bike. No shortage of lolly, then, you'd say. So as a justification, it works rather well that Top Gear is work.
Indeed it's nice work - if you can get it. What I've always wondered was exactly how he did. With a name like Zog Ziegler he was unlikely to forget him. But a Mr Zog Ziegler it was who put it in Hammond's mind that he might make a living out of cars or, rather, cocking about in them. There was sump oil in the Hammond family's blood anyway. His grandfather trained as cabinet maker but found his way into coachbuilding, working for Rolls Royce in the 1930s.
Hammond, born 40 years ago in Birmingham, grew up adoring and dreaming about cars and eventually began collecting them. However his education was at art college, something he's said in the past he still can't quite explain, though he tells me he still paints occasionally. His broadcasting career began in regional radio - followed by a stint in PR - and it was at one regional station, where he'd taken over an existing show from another broadcaster, that he met Ziegler. "This guy, every week, would come on the show and just talk about a new car. I just thought 'What? You're doing that for living? Brilliant!' I thought 'I want to be a motoring journalist' so eventually I got a job doing small satellite television programmes about cars."
The small satellite TV station the shows were broadcast on was called, rather manfully, Men & Motors, but was apparently once best known for screening soft porn. However the M&M billet got him an audition in 2001 for Top Gear - "which is my dream job, so I'm a lucky boy." It may surprise some fans of the show, but Top Gear has actually been on air for more than 30 years. It began life as a rather conventional half-hour car show on BBC Birmingham in 1977 and was at various times presented by such unlikely show ponies as Angela Rippon and Noel Edmonds.
Clarkson became involved in the late 1980s, quit in 1999, but returned when the show was retooled and relaunched - after falling ratings - in 2002. Hammond was on board for the revamp, though May didn't join the line-up until the second series. It can hardly be overstated how successful the restyled Top Gear, which screens here on Prime, has become in the last six years. The show is now seen in more than 100 countries and has an estimated worldwide audience of 385 million viewers. Then there's the tat, which includes a magazine, toys, CD, DVDS and computer games.
The British version of the show - Australian, American and Russian spin-offs are rumoured - has one of the most profitable shows on the books for BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the public broadcaster. Top Gear Live, which has or will be seen in London, Birmingham, Sydney and Hong Kong, Dublin and Johannesburg as well as Auckland, is yet another way BBC Worldwide is milking the brand.
The 64,000 horsepower question, of course, is why a show which involves three buffoons going mad in an endless procession of expensive motors has been such a runaway success. I'll chance my arm here and say that much of the reason is surely to do with the show being more about blokeish, adolescent stunts and gags than it is about cars. This may explain all the women. Hammond claims the show has a 50 per cent female audience in Britain. "It has become a very broad audience, it's not just car geeks," Hammond says.
"Now although we three on the show are hideous car geeks, the show itself is more celebratory, it's more about attitudes to cars, what they say about you, what they do." The trio's off-screen chemistry is important too. What you see is who they are, Hammond says, and they're definitely not just work mates, they're real mates who take the piss. When I ask him what he hates most about Clarkson, Hammond says, "Well only what he says and does and how he looks. Other than that ..."
Indeed. "The show's very honest," he continues. "It's just three blokes being blokes. If you look at the three of us, we're none of us Brad Pitt, we're none of us Einstein, and we get things wrong a lot. But we just do our thing and I think that helps as well. Besides I don't want to analyse it too far because if we ever find out exactly what it is, we might f*** it up and it won't work any more," he says, then laughs rather manically.
Of course the only analysis that matters is this: since 2002, Top Gear has gone from a small, dun sedan with a knock in the motor to, well, a ratings rocket car - though after the events of late 2006 one probably shouldn't say that to Hammond.
The speed of sound is 767.58 mph. Hammond wasn't going quite that fast when a front tyre of the jet-powered dragster he was driving blew and the vehicle flipped and his head suddenly became a braking mechanism for an out-of-control rocket ship. At the moment the tyre blew, Hammond was travelling at 314 mph - that's 502 km/h to us - which is the fastest anyone has travelled on land in Britain, though of course it doesn't count unless you do it twice, in opposite directions, without, you know, crashing. One can only speculate as to the effect this has had on the show's popularity, but it's the thing most people are most likely to know about Hammond.
The crash happened in September 2006. He was back on air in January 2007. And the piss-taking started anew. Clarkson said on Hammond's first show back that the rocket car run could have been the British land-speed record but only "if you'd crashed going in the other direction as well". Meanwhile, comedian Jimmy Carr suggested that the Top Gear crew had "nearly killed the midget ... [and] you know what the problem was? His little feet couldn't reach the brake ... there should have been two of him in a raincoat ..."
But the accident was, it hardly needs to be said, extremely serious. Hammond told The Sunday Times a year ago that he returned to work too soon, struggled to regain control of his emotions - he injured the area which governs them - and sought therapy. He says now he's fully recovered, though he's said that before. "It's a long process recovering from a brain injury of any type and I always need to be very careful not to just make light of it. But then the problem is what you want to do, because you're recovering from brain injury, is make light of it. What you want to do is say to the world 'I'm absolutely fine'.
Whereas inside, frankly, sometimes you might really be struggling with emotional and mood controls or anger or whatever. "But part of your defence mechanism is always to say 'I'm fine'. And so I've always said I'm fine though actually now I think I am fine, genuinely, having said all of that. But there were times early on in the recovery when, of course, I wasn't fine ... when actually [I was] still battling back."
It's all there in the introduction to As You Do. "I can't say no," Hammond writes. "I never have been able to. Another drink, a childish dare, a journey too far; anything that ever required a resounding 'no' I have greeted with an enthusiastic 'yes' ..." But what about another rocket car ride?
Well evidently that would actually receive a no. "Out of respect for my wife Mindy I probably wouldn't drive a jetcar just because ... she went through hell and I wouldn't want to put her through that again." Besides there are plenty of other ways to risk your scone. Despite speculation in some quarters that the well of mad stunts might be growing a little dry, Hammond maintains not. Some of the scariest moments in recent years have been unexpected. Like driving through Alabama with slogans "Country & Western is rubbish" and "Man love rules" painted on the side of their vehicles.
This led to being pelted with rocks at a gas station. Was that one of the most dangerous stunts they've pulled? "Christ yes!" he says, hooting. "We didn't foresee that. Oh God, we honestly thought that the degree of insult accorded to Americans would have been the same as driving through Cornwall with the message "cream teas are rubbish" on the side of the car. We just thought they'd go 'haaa, you pesky Limeys'. But they wanted to kill us. It's the ones you don't expect that turn out to be ... like the jetcar, I knew it was fast, but it's a straight bloody line, so what can go wrong?" He laughs again. Then there was the time he had to sit in a car while artificial lightning hit it.
Lightning can produce something called the Faraday Effect, which in this case means the lightning goes around the outside of the car and earths itself rather than hitting those inside. "And afterwards I was saying to the German [in charge] 'does it always go like that?' He said [Hammond puts on vaudeville German accent] 'yes it does, but ve did it yesterday vith vone vith a sun roof and it vent straight through and hit ze handbrake.' I thought 'oh shit!"'
However, he claims the most frightening thing he's done was to sit in a car as it was lowered into water to test the assertion that you must wait for the car to go under before you can open a door to escape because the water pressure must equalise inside and out. "I didn't like that, that was unpleasant. And I had to do that four times as well to make the film."
Such is the price of cocking about. Though, of course, the ultimate reason for Top Gear's success is its frequent application of what is known as Sod's Law: what can go wrong, usually does. All Hammond and co have to worry about is whether it goes wrong on camera. "We're asked a lot by people from these clip shows whether they can have our outtakes.
There aren't any, that's the show! If things go wrong, if one of us makes an arse of himself, then that's going to go on, isn't it? It's the best bit ... that is Top Gear."
* Top Gear Live, ASB Showgrounds, February 12-15. As You Do (W&N, $39.99)
