Sitting in a cafe in southwest London, Richard Hammond looks in rude health and largely unchanged since his near-fatal accident. That is, apart from the hair, which has grown from the short and spiky schoolboy crop to a shaggy 1970s television-cop affair.
The fan sites appear to prefer the old look – and believe me there are many (one even includes a version of the Lord’s Prayer dedicated to the Hamster, including the line “But deliver us from Clarkson”) – but the hair seems to mirror a more reflective frame of mind, following the difficult experiences of the past 18 months. When I remind him we’ve met once before, a couple of years ago, he looks bewildered. “Well, a lot’s happened since then,” he says ruefully.
For those who somehow missed the story that dominated the headlines for much of autumn 2006, Hammond sustained a serious brain injury while driving a jet-powered dragster for BBC’s Top Gear programme on a disused airfield in Yorkshire. He had reached 314mph – an unofficial British land-speed record – before the accident, which was caused by a tyre bursting and sending the car spinning out of control, turning it upside down and leaving Hammond’s head effectively to act as a brake as his helmet dug into the ground.
He was airlifted to hospital and for a couple of days it was unclear whether he would survive. There was talk of brain damage, so when Hammond did reemerge, seemingly unscathed, to host the first episode of the new series of Top Gear in January 2007 it appeared to be a turbocharged recovery. “It wasn’t quite like that,” he admits. “I went back to work too early but I thought the worst thing I could do was stay at home and continue feeling like a patient.
“It’s been a bloody long journey and it’s still going. It’s when I consider how far I’ve come since I was in hospital that I realise there was a lot more to fix than I thought. The swelling has gone down, my brain is as mended as it’s likely to be. Now it seems to be more a case of rewiring itself. That’s assuming I’m sitting here talking to you and I’m not about to wake up in hospital, in some sort of Life on Mars moment . . . Now that was a difficult TV series to watch.”
Despite the jokes, Hammond confesses to having “suffered mortally with depression” and having lost all his coping mechanisms. He still talks regularly to his psychiatrist. “I damaged all the complicated bits of the brain to do with processing and emotional control. I was prey to every single emotion that swept over me and I couldn’t deal with it. I had to relearn things from scratch,” he says. “I’ll still have a week when I’m freaking out about something and I’ll realise it’s because I’m encountering a new emotional state and I have to evolve a new strategy to cope with it.
“When I did the 24-hour race for Top Gear in September I was scared and nervous and it was making me argumentative, angry; making me think I wasn’t good enough for the job, feeling awful.”
He’s still not back to his old self. “I’m a hell of a lot more fixed than I was, but every time something happens, if I make an odd decision, say [which can happen], you realise how broken you were.
“I damaged the part of my brain to do with spatial awareness. Sometimes I have trouble parking. My memory is a lot better but the other day I forgot the Pin numbers to all my cards. All of them. Completely gone.”
Yet he still remembers the registration number of his first car: a 1976 Toyota Corolla, which he painted with Shelby racing stripes before writing it off shortly before his 18th birthday.
After his jet-car experience he bought himself a nice, sedate Ferrari 550, but is thinking of selling it as he’s got a Morgan Aeromax on the way and he’s not sure where to fit it in alongside the Porsche 997 Carrera S, the Ford Mustang, the Morgan V6 Roadster, the Opel Kadett (named Oliver in his Top Gear trek across Botswana), the Volvo 940 estate, the 1957 Series I Land Rover, the heavily “pimped” V8 Land Rover 110 and wife Mindy’s yellow Land Rover Td5 110 Station Wagon.
Mindy also has a Harley-Davidson motorbike, a present from Hammond, who is customising a Harley Street Glide. “It’s going to be almost entirely black, with massive chrome wheels,” he says gleefully. “I want it to make children cry when it’s parked, let alone when it moves. Mind you, Mindy and I will still be the world’s smallest and least intimidating motorcycle gang.”
Hammond was born in suburban Birmingham, before the family moved to Ripon, North Yorkshire, where his father ran a probate business and his mother was a charity consultant. His grandfather had worked for a coachbuilder and Hammond inherited his love of cars from him. At 18 he went to art college (he’s still not sure why) then began a career in local radio before financial hardship forced him to take a “sensible job” working in public relations. “I realised something had to change when I ended up selling my motorbike so I could afford to buy a tin of beans,” he says.
He can still remember making Lego models on the living room carpet of the cars he saw on Top Gear, and the dream of becoming the show’s presenter remained. He left PR to take up the offer of working one day a week for Men & Motors, the satellite channel once best known for soft porn. But even when, in 2001, he was called to audition for Top Gear, he never imagined his childhood dream could become reality. “Even when we were recording the first episode and Jeremy said, ‘Hello and welcome to Top Gear,’ my immediate thought was, ‘Oh great, Top Gear’s back.’ Then I suddenly realised, ‘Oh s***, I’m on it’.”
Now it’s difficult to imagine the show without him. Who else would Clarkson find to rib quite so mercilessly about his height, taste in denim jackets and alleged teeth whitening? “I never take it for granted,” says Hammond, “I’m always terrified I’ll be fired.”
In recent years he has presented everything from Crufts, the dog show, to Brainiac, a wacky science programme, and co-written a bestselling book about his crash with Mindy. He also found time in January to move Mindy, their two young daughters – Isabella, 7, and Willow, 4 – and their cars, bikes, dogs, horses and ducks to Buckinghamshire, then promptly moved them back again.
“We sold our house near Cheltenham then rented a colossal, utterly ruined old farm on the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border, and sort of fell in love with it,” he explains. “When we got to Buckinghamshire I realised my heart wasn’t in it. I mean we had Angelina Jolie round the corner, it wasn’t all bad, but I didn’t want to come home and see Mindy immaculately dressed and the girls playing nicely in front of the TV; I liked everyone running around covered in mud. We could have adapted, but I didn’t want it.”
So they moved back, and Hammond is looking to buy a farm. “I plan to find someone to manage it for me. Then I’ll stand there in my posh farmer wellies and annoy everyone by flouncing up from London every weekend and calling my cows sheeps.”
In the flesh, he’s not so relentlessly chirpy as on TV, he’s prone to self-doubt and there is that mean Harley – so does the Hamster have a less than cuddly side? “I am a thoroughly nice chap,” he insists. “But not all the way through. I love a pub crawl and I can’t be held responsible for the consequences if I drink certain types of lager . . .”
Source: http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/driving/features/article3416209.ece
