Top Gear

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Hamster can't remember his last meal
22/10/06
By David Stephenson

TOP GEAR presenter Richard Hammond, who suffered a severe brain injury in a high-speed crash last month, is suffering short-term memory loss.

Fellow presenter James May reveals today that Hammond has trouble remembering what he has just eaten or read.

But it is hoped the worrying memory loss is temporary and will improve over time.

Father-of-two Richard, 36, miraculously survived after a jet-powered dragster he was driving went out of control at speeds approaching 300mph at Elvington airfield near York on September 20.

After skidding off the track, the vehicle cartwheeled on grass, turned over and Richard’s head was partly buried in the ground.

In an exclusive interview, James gives an insight into the problems his colleague is dealing with while he recovers at a private hospital in Bristol after being transferred from Leeds infirmary.

Asked whether he had actually lost his memory, James said: “Oh, yeah. That was expected and perfectly normal. It’s short-term memory. He knows who people are, his wife and kids, but he forgets that he talked to me that morning, or whatever.

“We started taking the mickey with him straight after the accident wondering if it would cheer him up but I don’t think he has any recollection of it.

“The last time I spoke to him I was easily on the phone with him for 45 minutes.

“We were having a good laugh about his memory actually. He was saying he’d had macaroni cheese in hospital and he was excited because he hadn’t had it for 20 years. And then he thought maybe he’d had it yesterday, but he wasn’t sure! Then he said ‘I’ve got a car magazine in the locker beside my bed’. I said ‘I know. It’s the one I left for you’.

“He’s not better – even with the best will in the world – but his prognosis is very good. We just have to wait.”

In the first 24 hours after the crash Richard was out of immediate danger and there were reports he was laughing, joking and walking.

But James said: “I was always a bit nervous. It was a nice story but actually they didn’t know that he was better.

“There was still a risk then, an ever diminishing risk, that there still could be some permanent damage.

“It could have left him in some way incapable, left him thinking differently. But they’re utterly confident now that that’s not true. He just has to recuperate and get his memory back”.

Richard’s wife Mindy and their two children Isabella, five, and two-year-old Willow are helping him on the long road to recovery with doctors saying he needs complete rest.

James said: “I haven’t spoken to him for about two weeks. They want him to be left alone to rest.

“I’ve known Richard quite a long time. He was a mate before I started working with him. So I don’t really care if it takes him a long time to be fully geared, as long as he comes back the same way he was before, which it seems he will.

“He was very lucky he lived, but I suppose you could say he was unlucky that he only just hurt himself.

“This is speculation, there’s nothing scientific in this, but he must have been quite close to getting out without a scratch.

“There’s not a bruise on him. No cuts. Just his head took a bash, but obviously that’s where you least want to bruise it.”

On the public reaction to the crash, he said: “The thing that made it difficult at the outset was that the world is full of amateur brain surgeons.

“I even had one woman who knocked on my door to talk about brain injuries and why she thought he would be okay.

“I’d never seen her before in my life! She’d just tracked down my house.”

Top Gear has been postponed and may not reappear for six months. James said he and fellow presenter Jeremy Clarkson would not do the show without Richard.

“I don’t think it would work,” he said. “It’s one of those funny TV things. Three is normally a crowd for presenters but it works for us because we’re all so different. You couldn’t put someone else on and carry on as normal.

“To be brutally honest, soon after the crash when we couldn’t be sure whether he would be okay, we couldn’t say ‘It’s just us two for a couple of weeks while Richard gets better’, and then in four weeks, say ‘Actually, it’s a couple of years’.

“We have to wait. That’s fine. As long as he’s better, I don’t care.”

But he joked: “I’m going to have a go at him when he comes back – he’s ruined my life. Then he can mess up my life again and I can hate him again!”

James is back on BBC2 next month in Oz And James’s Big Wine Adventure, a trip through France with wine critic Oz Clarke.

TOP Gear will return to TV on January 28 — and WILL screen Richard Hammond’s crash.

BBC chiefs have been deliberating for months whether to show the 288mph dragster smash that left presenter Richard — nicknamed The Hamster — close to death.

But last night co-host Jeremy Clarkson, 46, said: “Half the world wants to see the crash so I’m sure we will show it.

“We’re looking into whether we’ve enough footage of good quality. I imagine we’ll be using it in the first show.”

Sun columnist Clarkson said Hammond, who suffered brain damage and amnesia after the September crash, was happy for the footage to be broadcast as he wanted to view it.

He said: “Richard has no idea what happened to him so he will be as keen as everyone else to see it.”

Dad-of-two Hammond, 37, has made an amazing recovery and will join Clarkson and their fellow host James May in the studio on January 24 to film footage for the show’s BBC2 return the following Sunday.

Clarkson joked that Hammond could mark his return in daredevil fashion — by PARACHUTE or arriving in a TANK. He also revealed that, despite Hammond’s crash, the next series will feature 35 stunts — including the launch of a home-made space shuttle.

Clarkson added: “We have also got footage of us being chased out of Alabama after locals thought we were homosexuals.”