The James May rule for writing about cars that you won't believe works
After 22 years of writing this column, Porter recalls when it nearly got him sacked
There are worse jobs than being a car columnist. Every month you get given a blank space to fill with whatever you fancy as long as it’s broadly on topic, and if you constantly think about cars to an extent that might be considered weirdly unhealthy or unhealthily weird, that’s an honour and a joy. Whenever I pick up a mag, I always read the columns first. They’re often a counterpoint to everything else within the covers, a place to talk about stuff that the rest of the magazine wouldn’t mention, and that gives them a different personality. A good roster of columnists stands out in any magazine and plays a part in defining it.
Pretty much all of my favourite car writers have written a column, from the densely erudite prose of LJK Setright and the don’t-mention-the-car food reviews of George Bishop, to the warm wit of Phil Llewellin and the tightly written brilliance of Russell Bulgin. Jeremy Clarkson was a car columnist. So was James May. Being a columnist is a bit like being the lead singer of a band, because to do a half-decent job you need to have a certain misplaced confidence that says ‘PAY ATTENTION TO ME’. Once you’ve done that, you can’t flinch in boldly sharing your stupid thoughts and opinions.
> How a pointless drive in my neighbour's Volkswagen Golf Mk7 made me a better driver
James May has several good theories about column writing, one of which being that you should start with the smallest topic possible. When we worked together, May would sometimes pick up a fresh car mag, discover one of the columnists had attempted to do something expansive like sum up the state of the car industry in 800 words, and react with mock horror. ‘Oh no!’ he’d exclaim. ‘He’s gone too big!’ Whereas an entire column about the central-locking noise on Volvos, the rear fog light shape of the Nissan Qashqai or, as May himself once wrote, the smell of BMW screenwash, well, that’s just perfect.
I’ve always loved reading car columnists but I never dreamt I’d actually get to be one. Harry Metcalfe, however, had different ideas. Until the day he called with an interesting suggestion, all I’d done for evo was a monthly bout of subediting and a stupid page of made-up car news, based on the style of my Sniff Petrol website. The offer to write a column came out of nowhere and, to this day, I’ve no idea why he made it, except perhaps that I was cheap.
My first reasonably priced effort appeared in evo 052, dated February 2003. I put a lot of thought into that first one, deciding that it should set the tone for what to expect. So the stall it set out was ‘I’m a crashing nerd and I think about cars almost all the time’. Because it’s pointless pretending you’re something you’re not, isn’t it? In a subsequent column I said that personalised number plates were for vacuous idiots, and the publisher’s ad sales department, which in those days made a fortune selling advertising space to private plate companies, tried to have me sacked. Harry, bless him, stuck fast to the notion that columnists are there to say things not seen in other parts of the mag and told them to sod off.
Later I wrote about how Ferrari had become a tacky tat merchandising company that happened to build cars and got invited to visit Maranello for ‘a chat’, though when I offered to drop by during a holiday to Italy the following August the answer came back: ‘No. We are closed.’ I wrote about motorsport moustaches, Jarno Trulli’s favourite supermarket, and going to the Monaco GP with the pop band Liberty X. I tested the patience of people who come to evo for performance cars by writing about an old Montego estate and the time I bought a Rover 75. I made up drivel about a fake rock band and made a cack-fisted attempt to write an epic poem.
Over the last 22 years and 288 issues, I’ve tried to embrace the delight of being given a whole page to do with as I see fit. Only once, when I wrote in too much detail about a skip on my street, did associate editor Peter Tomalin very politely ask if I ‘had anything else’. evo has employed some incredible columnists over the years, including Gordon Murray, Tiff Needell, Ian Fraser, Peter Dron, Martin Buckley and Russell Bulgin. But by dint of being cheap and persistent, I’m now the longest serving of all. This makes me very proud, and the magazine presumably slightly embarrassed.
Assuming they’ll still have me, I’m not going to stop, but when I got to 20 years in the job I thought it would be a good idea to pick a selection of columns from the past and package them up into a compilation. Two years later, this book is finally ready. It’s called Petrolhead, it’s available from Amazon, and it’s a leave-it-in-the-loo record of a man getting to do a thing he always dreamt of. After more than two decades in the role, I can confirm there really are worse jobs.
This story was first featured in evo issue 340.
