James May: Top Gear is turning into a sitcom

Top Gear is no longer a show about cars and is on the verge of becoming a sitcom, its co-presenter James May has admitted.

The 47-year-old confirmed what many viewers have suspected - that he now plays a "character" in the hit BBC2 TV programme.

He told the Radio Times that the aspect of the long-running show which inevitably featured the trio of presenters - Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and May - getting in a pickle, did irritate him.

May admitted: "It's really almost a sitcom now, so we are characters ... When I started, Top Gear was a car show about cars, and I was interested in the technology but also the sociology and the artistry of them ... the shapes and the colours.

"That was something I've always been into. But it's a different programme now, it's turned into something else."

May, who is nicknamed Captain Slow on Top Gear because of his driving style and his tendency to get lost, added: "Ultimately we do know what we're talking about and we do let that be known occasionally.

"Very subtly, every now and then, you think, 'Oh, actually, they do love their subject and they do know a bit about it'.

"And when we cock about and everything goes wrong and we laugh about it, sometimes it winds me up.

"I think 'Oh, for God's sake, can't we do something properly that will work, not that has to catch fire or fall over'. But I think I'm probably alone on that."

May said he understood why he could not be himself on the flagship show, telling the magazine: "If I played the real me with my slightly secretive love of really nerdy things and staring at things for too long, that wouldn't make a very good Top Gear because ... well, it would make a very late-night Top Gear for people who were interested in taking cars apart."

As well as Top Gear, May is presenting James May's Man Lab for BBC2, a programme which aims to help men relearn vital skills.

The TV presenter and writer, who has previously warned that men could end up having only one job - to keep sperm warm - unless they relearn practical skills, said: "I'm not the same person in the two programmes."

Explaining his new show, he said: "The decline of practical skills, some of them very day-to-day, among a generation of British men is very worrying - they can't put up a shelf, wire a plug, countersink a screw, iron a shirt.

"They believe it's endearing and cute to be useless, whereas I think it's boring and everyone's getting sick of it."