19 June 2024 , 12:44
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Former Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond has told how he “nearly wept” when his daughter realised that what he did all day was his actual job.
Speaking on his Who We Are Now podcast, Richard spoke about the fact that his daughter Izzy has followed him into a media job.
He recalled that they were walking home after Izzy had been on a Drive Tribe shoot when she made the connection about what he did.
Richard recalled: “She just turned to me and said Daddy…it’s work isn’t it?’ And I said “yeah, and I’ve been doing it for 25 years. I wasn’t just arseing about having fun It meant something to me’.”
(Getty Images)He added that because a great many of the things he did at work could be quite dangerous, Izzy had been “kept out of the loop” and not told precisely what he was doing.
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Izzy, born in 2001, was still very young when Richard had his catastrophic accident while filming for Top Gear at the former RAF Elvington airfield near York. He had been driving a 370mph jet-Vampire dragster, when one of the tyres gave out – send the car spinning out of control.
As the wrecked dragster rolled over, Richard’s helmet became embedded into the ground, flipping the visor up and forcing masses of soil into his mouth and nose. He suffered injuries to his left wye but the most disturbing aspect of the crash was that he was left with amnesia.
Just three months after the incident, he appears on Jonathan Ross’s chat show and declared himself "absolutely fixed” – but five years later, in 2011, he told the Daily Mirror: "I lost a year. I don't remember doing the interview with Jonathan Ross or doing Top Gear Live in South Africa" showing the full impact of his brain injury 5 years before.
It’s only now, as an adult, that Izzy has been able to learn how severely injured her dad had been, and even the risks he undertook for some of the other Top Gear shoots, which took the team to quite dangerous locales.
“We were never told where he was going,” she said. “When you’re young, you can’t really register that anyway, it was just ‘Daddy’s going to work.’”