Ex Top Gear presenter explores the age of discovery in new live show

For years James May was part of the driving force behind the wildly popular motoring show Top Gear and laterThe Grand Tour.

Now he's bringing Explorers to New Zealand - digging deep into what drove people to seek the unknown and travel the globe.

“Having dived into it, I think we're all realising that we've chosen possibly the biggest subject on the planet, because it's about everything to do with humanity and where we are today,” he told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

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While the subject matter is weighty, May reassures that the show is still entertaining.

“It's not comedy, but It can't be a dry lecture. You can't go there and feel like you're at college, you've had to drag yourself out of bed to go and listen to that man talk for two hours about the Elizabethans. It's got to be a rollicking good night.”

The urge to explore is a natural human impulse, May said.

“We all do a little bit of exploring in our own way, even if it's only moving house and then finding out about the new town that you live in, or when you're a child walking off into the woods or across the fields to see what's on the other side.

“It's innate in us as human beings to see what's over the hill, and that is why humankind has migrated all over the world.”

Explorers, he said, is “actually the story of everything".

“Everything about humanity is as a result of migration, exploration, colonising, conquering, all these things, some of them slightly dark, of course, but that's where we are now because of all these things.”

The show is not afraid to touch on those “dark” areas.

“Historians have talked about the accidental genocide of the American peoples following the landings of Columbus and John Cabot and all the other settlers that went to America and South America.

“It's a tricky subject, I've got to be honest, and it doesn't make for particularly uplifting reading”.

May is something of an explorer himself, undertaking solo exploits in his 'Our Man in....' travelogues and presenting his James May Great Explorers TV show.

However, the show for which he is best known, Top Gear, will not be making a return, he said.

“I don't think we'll ever do a great rock band reunion, because we're already at reunion age, Jeremy [Clarkson] and I are both in our 60s, [Richard] Hammond is not far off.

“You've got to wait a respectable 20 years or so before you do the big comeback reunion, and by then we're all going to be in bath chairs.”

He is grateful, nevertheless, for the programme that launched his TV career.

“The Top Gear and Grand Tour experience occupied over a third of my life, and I'm a fairly mature man now, so I did that for longer than I did anything else, longer than I was at school, actually.

“So, I'm grateful for it. I've always said that if it ever ended, which it has done now, I would hope I would be magnanimous enough to look back on it and say, ‘well, that was a bit of luck, wasn't it? That was a great experience.’ And it was.”

Explorers - The Age of Discovery with James May plays at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Auckland, 13 August.