Richard Hammond, everyone's second-favourite Top Gear presenter, is a lucky bloke. Not only did he manage to present an entire series of a crushingly dreadful weekday teatime ITV magazine show without anyone realising, but he's also not dead.

And, by rights, Richard Hammond should be dead; natural selection usually makes sure that anyone driving a car at 288mph – regardless of crashes – probably shouldn't hang around on the planet for too long. Somehow, though, Richard Hammond managed to cheat death when his British land speed record attempt went spectacularly arse-upwards, and now he's given his first interview about the accident. And what saved Richard Hammond's life? Paramedics? Air ambulances? Seatbelts? No. It was Lego.

For a while a few weeks ago it looked as if nature was fighting back against TV presenters doing dumb things. First Steve Irwin got killed by a stingray and then Richard Hammond almost met the same fate in a car going 288mph. It looks like it was passing fad, though; no other presenters have had horrible accidents since – although we do compulsively read the newspapers every morning to see if a meteor has landed on Justin Lee Collins' face yet – and also, we get the feeling that nature just wanted to see Russell Crowe star in a Steve Irwin biopic and it got a bit sulky when that didn't happen.

As for Richard Hammond, though, just a few weeks ago doctors were getting ready to write him off, but now he's made such a good recovery from his nasty and – let's face it – stupid crash that he's able to give an interview to The Mirror all about what it feels like to really mangle yourself up for a television programme about cars:

“I was upside down inhaling a field. My nose and eyes were full of earth. I’d gone ploughing on my head. It was 50-50 what was going to happen. I may have been dead, I may not have woken up… Doctors use a point system. Fifteen is normal, three is a flatline. I was a three. I was that close to being dead. My mind was like an office that had been utterly ransacked. All the filing cabinets were knocked over. It was a total mess and I couldn’t find my way around anymore. My own mind was like a foreign place. I didn’t know where anything was. It was like everybody had messed up the furniture, nothing was familiar. Like somebody had ripped my head apart. It was utterly terrifying — the scariest thing that has ever happened to me. It made me panic. It made me desperate. Basically, I was mad as a bag of snakes.”

What saved Richard Hammond – known as Hamster due to his ability to stuff food into his jowl and freak little children out by eating his own shit – was Lego. Sadly this doesn't mean that doctors rebuilt Richard Hammond's brain with pieces of interlocking Danish plastic – although how cool would that be? – but that he played it a lot while he was getting better:

“Lego saved my life. It’s really good therapy for a brain injury. I was a Lego fiend when I was eight and, suddenly, it was all I wanted to do again. James May sent me a pack of Supercars Top Trumps. I played with Mindy [his wife] and we were addicted. While I couldn’t remember the day, my name or the doctor’s name, I could remember the specific capacity of a Pagani Zonda.”

Oh good – the crash didn't destroy Richard Hammond's underlying smugness. While we await the commemorative 'cut the tiny man who likes cars out of the wreckage' Lego set with baited breath, we're not too sure that it was Lego or doctors or medicine that saved his life; if The Sugababes had threatened to sing us better, we'd have made sure we got better before they could warm up their voices, too.

Read more:

Lego saved my live after jet-car crash, says Top Gear man – Times

Richard Hammond Talks About His 288mph Car Smash – Star Trip 

[story by Stuart Heritage]