Top Gear's Richard Hammond: My wife is a better driver than me

In fact, the diminutive presenter, nicknamed "the Hamster", insists that his wife is a better driver than him.

“People say to us ‘Oh you are terribly offensive, I know what you are like about women drivers’,” Hammond told RadioTimes.com.

“And I say, 'What? Give us an example'. We are not. For one thing, half of Top Gear’s audience is female. I have always thought my wife is a far better driver than me and I don’t ever make any jokes about women drivers.”

We are sure that Mrs Hamster – newspaper columnist Mindy Hammond – agrees. After all, Hammond says she is often left alone in their West Country home with their two children when he is on assignment and is compelled to take up all the family's driving duties.

“I work away a lot and when I go away I shed a tear or two when I know I won’t be home for a few weeks,” he adds. “When I am home I do the school run when I can – I try to strike a balance.”

Another drawback of his celebrity status is “overweight van drivers pointing at me and going on about how short I am.

"I just think: ‘I can’t do much about that but you’re still fat’. Still, it is gratifying sometimes to be recognised and to know that we make TV that people are watching. But I am still surprised when I talk to kids and a lot of them tell me they want to be famous – why?"

Hammond is fronting a new National Geographic Series, Science of Stupid (see clip below), which sees him introducing footage of accidents and trying to explain why they occurred.

Or as he puts it: “I spend my time laughing my socks off at clips of people doing stupid things, usually falling flat on their face…usually because of gravity. My job is to explain the science of what happened.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOkP3oBGH7A

Science of Stupid begins airing on Wednesday 9 April at 10pm on National Geographic