James May’s One-Man Show Attracts Only Half a Theatre

The harsh reality of life after Top Gear and The Grand Tour is hitting home for former presenter James May, with disastrous ticket sales for his new one-man stage show James May: Explorers. The Age of Discovery.

There were row after row of empty seats at the second show of James’ 13-date UK tour at Bath’s Forum venue on Wednesday night.

The show, which ties in with his latest documentary James May’s Greatest Explorers, promised to blend theatrical techniques with the star’s trademark storytelling to deliver ‘an evening of compelling intellectual entertainment.’ 

Some 800 tickets went unsold in the 1,640-capacity venue – which is around half.

Interest in his show about historic explorers was so low that the entire 460-seat rear circle section of the Somerset theatre was closed off by the bosses and those fans who did attend were offered better seats closer the stage apparently to make it seem busier.

Two weeks before Wednesday night’s performance, the ticketing company, Ticketline, sent out emails to those who had already bought cheaper tickets in the rear circle offering a free upgrade to better seats closer to the stage.

It read: ‘I am contacting you regarding your booking for James May at Bath Forum on the 1st October 2025. The venue has been in touch to inform us that the rear circle has been closed for this show. 

‘Your original tickets are no longer valid, and you have been allocated new seats in the front circle.’

On arrival, ushers explained the awkward decision saying: ‘As you can see, we just haven’t sold enough tickets and everyone who has bought in the rear circle has been offered tickets closer to the stage so the entire rear circle is closed.’

While the rear circle of the theatre – containing 462 seats – was closed completely, this publication also counted just 137 ticket holders filling up the 333 seats in the front circle. That meant 196 seats were also empty in that section.

There was a total of 685 empty front and rear circle seats. There were also large gaps in the stalls seating right in front of the stage, with perhaps as many as another 150 empty seats.

James, 62, tried to make light of the embarrassingly low turn out on a couple of occasions during the two hour show.

The first words James said as he stepped on stage was ‘Thank you very much for coming. Especially those who have come disguised as empty seats.’

Later he compares his show to that of astronomers Brian Cox, adding his was ‘much bigger and much more popular than mine’.

And then he jokingly thanked the audience for coming back from the interval for the second half.

Friday night’s show at the Bristol Hippodrome has so far similarly attracted dismal ticket sales.

As of 10am today, there were still 1,490 tickets remaining unsold. That means only 451 tickets had at that time sold at the 1,941 capacity venue – just 23% of the venue’s capacity.

The current fortunes of James and his two former Top Gear and Grand Tour co-stars Jeremy Clarkson, 65, and Richard Hammond, 55, could not be more different.

The trio wound up their 22-year collaboration as co-presenters last autumn.

Jeremy is today experiencing the best success of his career as he this week wound up the fifth series of Amazon Prime hit Clarkson’s Farm.

The TV icon even received a National Television Award last month, scooping the Best Factual Entertainment award for Clarkson’s Farm.

While James stood in front of a half-empty regional theatre, Jeremy is basking in the glory of just this week his announcing the end of filming of the fifth series of Clarkson’s Farm which has had various spin-offs such as a brewery, a butchers, and a Cotswolds pub which has a waiting list to get a table. 

Jeremy also hosts a reboot of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Richard, however, recently said he has just experienced the worst year of his life, after a tough work year as he also goes through a painful and expensive divorce.

Richard recently spoke to Daily Mail about his difficult past year, including his divorce, death of his father Alan and the end of The Grand Tour. 

First his long, successful screen partnership with great mates James May and Jeremy Clarkson came to an end, with an elegiac final episode of The Grand Tour. ‘That was a big loss. Huge.’ Then his father Alan died in a hospice at the age of 80, from cancer. They were close. ‘I loved him dearly.’ 

And a third blow came in January when Richard and Mindy Hammond announced their marriage was over after 23 years.

‘Let’s get something out of the way straight away,’ the presenter says in the first episode of his new series of Richard Hammond’s Workshop. The show is about his struggles to run a classic car restoration business, but this time he feels the need to address the rumours. ‘There has been a slight change in my circumstances recently. I got divorced. Which means I now live here.’ 

And James too is clearly struggling to achieve popularity and relevance any more if this latest one man show – which is also linked to a new Channel 5 TV series – is anything to go by.

James seemed rather crestfallen on stage as he said: ‘Putting this show together we realised quite quickly that it’s a massively complicated subject. It really is the whole story of humanity. And we are just stretching very slightly at the surface of it.’

Looking out to a half-full auditorium, he added: ‘But if you like it, and I hope you do, we can come back next year and do Explorers 2, and the year after, Explorers 3, and then Explorers 4, until it eventually it turns into something a little like the Mission Impossible franchise. And you’ll say ‘Is he still doing Explorers – I thought he was dead.’

And sadly much of the show did die on its feet with mediocre jokes and technical problems besetting it as a smoke machine filled the entire stage with a mist which hid the presenter completely in the opening minutes and sound issues which made his show sidekick – an Australian man called Brett – largely inaudible.

James did get a chance, 24 minutes in, to turn a poor gag into a plug for his own gin brand. And a ripple of laughter came when he twice made jokes about former co-star Hammond dying his hair.

But the writing was on the wall after the first dreary 25 minutes, when his mention of an interval ‘much later on’ where drinks could be had in the theatre bar was rather awkwardly met with a cheers from audience members.

Returning to the stage right after the interval, May sounded sincere when he told audience members: ‘Thank you for coming back’.