Top Gear’s James May crashes

Top Gear presenter James May has crashed in to a field in a hot air balloon in Cambridge whilst filming a race against Richard Hammond for the next series of Top Gear.

Crashes and Top Gear do go hand in hand. Which is hardly a shock. You can’t play silly buggers and come out unscathed every time, although just about every accident the boys have had has been nothing but a scrape. Apart from the Hamster. He did it in spades.

But now it’s Captain Slow’s turn to have  a bit of a coming together, Appropriately, considering his apparent aversion for the flamboyant and reckless, he managed to do it in a hot air balloon. Which means it was another of Top Gear’s mad races, this time with May in a caravan attached to a hot air balloon over the Cambridgeshire countryside, and the Hamster in a Lambo.

The hot air balloon was meant to land on the village green at Eltisley in Cambridgeshire. Which tends to indicate that the Beeb’s elf ‘n’ safety bods were on the ball before the stunt was started. Eltisley is in the middle of nowhere surrounded by fields, a few miles east of St Neots. So even if it went wrong – which it did – it shouldn’t have been a big cause for concern.

Apparently the balloon was blown off-course by high winds, and May ended up in a row of trees and hedges in a field near the A428. Which must have ticked off not just the crew who has been waiting all day for the wind to drop, but also the cricketers in their whites waiting to greet May (but if they were as amiable as the cricketers in our recent Jaguar XFR review shoot they wouldn’t exactly have been pouting and stomping).

No doubt the wingers and moaners will come out of the woodwork in force to bemoan the excesses of Top Gear. And call for an end to the programme. But I think it’s probably best just to ignore them.

You can’t make an omelette (or a TG episode) without breaking a few eggs.

Balloon Image: Geoff Robinson Photography
Source: Daily Mail