James May: The Last Slow Man Standing Between Us and the End of the World
James May, the man who once spent eight hours gluing together a 1:32 scale Airfix Spitfire while the rest of us were doom-scrolling about the end of the world, has quietly become the last credible moral voice in global television. This is, of course, the same television industry that just green-lit “Celebrity Cage Fight: Climate Edition,” so the bar is currently buried somewhere in the Mariana Trench. Yet, from the vantage point of a planet that can’t decide whether to freeze or fry, May’s unhurried, tweed-jacketed dissent feels almost revolutionary.
Born in Bristol but broadcasting to 214 territories via Amazon’s algorithmic empire, May embodies the curious contradiction of 21st-century soft power: a man who looks like he still writes cheques in a queue, yet is streamed in 4K to teenagers in Jakarta who think “sod it” is a British unit of measurement. His travelogues, from “The Reassembler” to “Our Man in Japan,” are marketed as whimsy, but function as accidental ethnographies of a world lurching between heritage and hyper-modernity. In Osaka, he marvels at vending-machine panties; in Ukraine, he politely refuses moonshine distilled in a bathtub that probably predates Chernobyl. The joke, never quite spoken, is that the same global supply chain that put the panties in the machine also shipped the bathtub copper—May just happens to be the only one still reading the fine print on the shipping label.
Internationally, May’s greatest export is not the catchphrase “cock” (though UNESCO is reportedly considering it for intangible cultural heritage status) but the radical notion that slower is survivable. While Netflix pumps out dystopias at the speed of a swipe, May’s programmes dare to linger—on the torque settings of a 1972 Triumph carburettor, on the way Okinawan sunlight refracts through a glass of awamori. The effect is disarming: binge-watching becomes meditation, and meditation becomes a subversive act against the Attention Economy’s death spiral. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a product manager just felt a cold sweat and doesn’t know why.
Critics—those joyless gargoyles who mistake cynicism for sophistication—dismiss him as “Top Gear’s house plant with a driving licence.” They miss the geopolitical punchline: May is arguably Britain’s most effective post-Brexit diplomat. When he trundles across India in a tuk-tuk shaped like a bungalow, he isn’t just producing content; he’s performing the last vestige of Commonwealth charm offensive without the gunboats. The Foreign Office, reduced to tweeting memes about trade deals nobody asked for, must watch through its fingers as this accidental envoy achieves what no white paper ever has: convincing 1.4 billion people that Brits are harmlessly eccentric rather than actively malicious. It’s either soft power or Stockholm syndrome; the ratings suggest both.
Meanwhile, the planet burns at 1.5°C above pre-industrial averages, and May’s response is to restore a 1950s Kenwood Chef mixer. On the surface, it’s culinary cosplay; underneath, it’s a manifesto. Every repaired appliance is a tiny act of climate defiance, a refusal to feed the maw of planned obsolescence that keeps Shenzhen soldering irons glowing at 3 a.m. International energy analysts could learn something from a man who once spent an entire episode recalibrating a toaster instead of flying to Dubai to announce a sustainability initiative printed on laminated cardstock.
In the end, James May matters because he accidentally proves a bleak cosmic joke: the species that invented the microchip and the guillotine still needs a middle-aged Englishman to remind it that patience is not merely a virtue but a survival strategy. As COP delegates jet home clutching souvenir tote bags, and the rest of us queue for the metaverse, May will still be in a shed somewhere, gently tightening a screw and muttering, “Oh, cock.” It’s not salvation, but in 2024 it’s the closest thing we’ve got to a maintenance manual for civilisation. And if that doesn’t terrify you, congratulations—you’ve just been appointed Minister for the Future. Bring your own spanner.
