Oh Cook!: The cookbook from James May with simple, easy recipes that any idiot can make.

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This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here. As you’d expect, it’s in hardback form, but it’s not as heft and thick as those giant doorstop cookbooks that gather dust on your shelves. My fears on egg poaching were presented in such hilarious fashion on the pages, that's I realized it was all ok. Highlights include the very tasty black pudding hash (I only tried black pudding in the last few years, in Edinburgh of all places, and I’m a little annoyed that I avoided it for so long), the shakshuka and the sticky buffalo wings.

However, my wife has done a great job at trying out some of the recipes, and most of them have turned out to be pretty great. This was a week that urgently needed light relief, so cometh the hour, cometh the James May, erstwhile Top Gear amigo, the id to Richard Hammond’s ego (with no prizes for guessing who the super-ego might be in this formulation). It is a precision-oriented approach that traditionally lends itself well to the kitchen but May appears far more concerned with the gadgets involved than accurately measuring out ingredients. It is a reassuring prospect given the Grand Tour presenter's latest venture into the world of home economics.

It is like taking that perfect family photo, where the predecessors all have us looking in opposite directions or trying to get the dog to turn around. I thought I might plough a little bit of it and have a go at growing potatoes or parsnips, something that I imagine would be quite easy - it probably isn't. May is best known as co-presenter of the motoring programme Top Gear alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond. From my personal experience, many of these tend to be pretty bland or simply unimaginative, and admittedly not always healthy. Also with all the cooking I've ever done, I was too nervous to make a true omelette or poach an egg!

He has, however, carried out some exceptionally high-speed driving (including taking a Bugatti Veyron to its top speed).

Every time we do something, somebody in the eight or 10 assembled people in the room pipes up with, 'Have you thought about doing it like that? The remaining gimmick, of having home economist and proper cook Nikki Morgan being kept in a cupboard, brought out to help him with tricky bits, leans hard towards the latter. Clarkson laughs that I’m fastidious but, at 60, I can at last make things that are edible, which is very satisfying. One of the best meals I ate was a cosy dinner for two with Jeremy Clarkson when we were trying to break a world record reaching the North Pole in a motor vehicle. Remove the pudding from the oven, unwrap the kitchen foil, then snip the string and unwrap the parchment.

Rice noodles were invented as a way of stretching a poor harvest, while instant noodles were Japan’s response to being flooded with cheap US wheat to keep them from starving and turning to communism after the second world war. In the 1990s I expanded my repertoire to seven or eight things, mainly variations on shepherd’s pie.Michael Hogan for The Telegraph gave the series three out of five stars, saying the show has "unlikely charm" and there was "finally a cookery show for blokes".