'DIY Jet boat and Paramotor tried to kill me, but Land Rovers saved my life' Jimmy deVille interview

[Music] welcome to the late break show idol chat this is a slightly different idol chat we have the brown chairs we have three people not two and we are doing this live in front of an audience in a field because this is the late break show live on tour so come along while i meet this man here jimmy deville from goblin garage workshop a lovely chap who i've actually worked with and we're going to be asking questions from myself but also from my colleague here richard sniff petrol porter welcome aboard thanks for joining me obviously i've only got two brown chairs so i'm going in the deck chair in the middle um and this is different how we normally do it because we've got a generator running and we're in a field but apart from that it's really similar the ambiance is high yeah yeah yeah and we're using microphones because there's an audience you and i have actually worked together for a few years now but your main job is that you front a show your frontal show called uh the goblin garage goblin works garage goblin what i miss i miss the word word it works really key that word i remember asking you the origins of the the name yeah yeah recount the name so um i dabbled with jet engines and i've got a jet thrust boat and there's a there's a guy it's just hang on don't you just so casually mention that yeah i dabble with jet engines i've got a jet thrust boat yeah so i'm the only british person not to have died driving a jet crash so is that true yeah we had uh cobb john cole in 1952 died actually on my birthday 1952 september 29th on loch ness and then we had mr campbell obviously in the blue bed yeah and i i did a tv show but i wanted to build a jet plus boat i didn't want to set a speed record i want that to be clear what i want to do is experience what it was like to basically be strapped to a jet engine on water and then getting into it i found out that the massive challenge with jet thrust boats is getting on the plane so the boat lifts out of the water and then you start to go places quite quickly so it wants to go higher but you want to stay yeah but if you but see when a boat's in the water it sort of sinks in yeah and what you need is torque to push it forwards and get it out and what a jet thrust engine doesn't do is have any torque because it's pushing you with air so campbell took eight years to get bluebird on the plane going 400 miles an hour cobb took about three months i built the boat and did it in four weeks did you really yeah so i i bought a jet plane uh i bought a jet provost jp which has a um a viper tour one engine um which has about 3000 horsepower equivalent and i bought um from rochester actually not far from here i bought a a racing a racing mono ski racing yeah is it like is it like a p1 powerboat type hole or is it one i don't know seven half meters big blue boat i didn't know anything about those oh my gosh and you built one in four weeks yeah but i basically took the engine out of the jp and i dropped it on the back and so the starter motor was about here um it was sucking in air about there and we were lucky enough to take it up to loch ness and then give it a two-seater yeah and uh we did a 21-mile run and i topped out 100 miles an hour we then did a 180 away and i said that's enough for that really yeah they are it's a sketchy thing well that's a much more interesting intro than i was going to do myself for this um near death in a jet boat brilliant let's just pack up and go um what i wanted to do is rewind almost and say that i first got to know about you from when you did a tv series about engines purely about engines yeah that was all right yeah the fascination of the of the engine which i thought was a great idea because some people like bill like my brother is their fascination when they grew up was actually more about the engine than the rest of the car my brother never cared about what the body work was what the interior was like he just wanted to know what engine what gearbox and what's it going to do yeah i mean i think that comes down to for a lot of us it comes down to two things uh we're both fans of both of them i think is tamiya cars i just was blown away with their mechanics and that and then haines manuals you know just i got my first names manual was of a mini wasn't gonna get a mini and i knew that thing i knew the mini like the back of my hand before i even touched one wow and i never got one and that car there is the car that fourteen-year-old jimmy james you were you thought you were going to get as many as your first car but you didn't they were always too rusty and i lived in south london uh we had a two-car drive my parents had both had a metro a black one and a blue one and uh there was no room for a car so and the the level of car i could afford was a rust bucket so the only places they were gonna go was on the street and there was no way i could work on it on the street so it never happened wow yeah so well you've made it i've done it now yeah i was going to say you've really gone through it with it just out of the shot of the camera as minnie jimmy's brought his mini along that's almost like a tongue twister jimmy's brought his minion his clubman along which is just a phenomenal piece of work i have to say it's so detailed it's well it's fantastic one thing i was going to say to you so before seeing you on the tv and that was discovery channel that show yeah discovery yeah and then subsequently goblin works garage you were in the military i know that much yeah but i don't know much about previous military because so can we just rewind and sort of go through your interest in sort of cars or motorbikes and vehicles when you were growing up and then military because i know just over there is your land rover defender yeah and i know land rovers play a massive part in your life so just go can you go through that with me if you want to talk more about androids i'll give the microphone to him yeah okay so um it's a weird one um because not only that i'm was an explosives and special effects um technician engineer um i was always fascinated by the military because of the 4.4 i went to school with a guy whose dad was in it just blew my mind and what essentially happened was uh when i was at the sixth form i had a deputy head teacher who made a quick one of it i didn't like this guy but uh you could do something as silly as go off after you left school go travel to the forum alliance i hated it that much i went did you yeah and uh 90 i think 98 of all vehicles on the poker lions at that time were land rovers so i i lived in a little settlement called north arm which was one of the most remote settlements out there and we've got a plane in every week and a boat in every month so i bought an old series 2a long wheelbase x ambulance land rover which was absolutely knackered and it was my one bit of freedom and so yeah i tinkered with it and got it to work a bit and it had full tires and that's why i found out the beauty off-roading is is if you don't have grit you don't dig holes you just slide over the top of everything stunning it never got stuck and the military repeatedly come try to come and visit us where we were and never got there and but i used to go everywhere in the sand rover really yeah really generally yeah they should need a bunch of yeah what does someone do [Music] anyway so i got quite interested in the military and uh thereafter i've i've been uh worked for the reserves um i've served in iraq and afghanistan and everywhere i've gone uh and everything i've done with him it has all been in land rovers so i mean in iraq itself i drove to equipment i did a reconnaissance in the desert and i drove to the equipment of twice around the world uh in iraq yeah in old va land rovers 20 and also along with that came all the sort of electrical faults that you had with the td5 engine so uh for us the the the 300 actually was that was for me personally the 300 tdi was kind of land rover topping out defender i've got the 2.4 puma now but for me 300 tdi that was it that was the peak so my joy with working land rovers in the military was always when you were we'd go near americans because the americans were told in all their briefings before deploying into theater that the british had this vehicle called a smash because it's called a smash which obviously you know sometimes is a little bit rude and so they couldn't believe this and so they were all very keen to see a british match and uh so one day we turned up an american base with a snatch this is true johnny they called it [Laughter] [Laughter] turned up and he was very excited to see my snapchat and um his wing then proceeded to fall off and he just asked me he was armored and the wind fell off and he was in shock and we just casually went yes all right why he thought it was bulletproof well because they had a cable on top hidden under it but the wings are still the standard i see they weren't fully proof they were they were built for northern ireland and they needed to have a kevlar tub that was for shrapnel i suppose i remember when we had a conversation once before filming or something and it was where you talked about the fact that you liked land rovers because for all their faults they saved your life yeah yeah i mean they've just got a land rover has never not got me out of a nasty situation uh whether that's been messing around in kent in one or or you know with all teenage years we've been in nasty situations where you need to get out of there johnny some terrible house parties i had to make it quite aggressive and then yeah i i've been um hit by an ied in in iraq uh and i've had one breakdown and they got left behind in the desert and somehow we always managed to drop i mean i lost a weird one one day and we somehow managed to hold it get together enough on three wheels to drive out of there because you were being shot at uh well we were given yeah we were given 20 minutes if they said if you're stuck in one place for 20 minutes it's probably not a good idea and within 20 minutes we were able to cobble it together enough to get out of there so we didn't get shot at because we were you cobbled quickly with some old rainfalls on the other night cq this so where does this special effects thing and being in the military thing suddenly turn into getting a job on the television so after that i work i've worked behind the scenes on a lot of tv shows from from top gear oh yeah uh my earliest debut on television if any geeks out there would have been scrappy challenge um i was one of the experts on skype challenge uh people i got known for being building weird stuff and someone gave me a call one day and i absolutely adoring strategic challenge but it did ten seasons so i'm on the ninth season i got a phone call saying would you be an expert on it you know it's one of those moments ago yeah i'm there yeah and uh i mean i saw this amazing world of um people doing incredible engineering behind the scenes on tv so there's a big team of people on something like traffic challenge that make sure the engineering is strong fit and everything works otherwise you don't have a tv show and i got into that world so i built i built vehicles now for the grand tour for top gear and a whole host of shows around the world what was the weirdest slash ropius thing you you actually had to construct okay i was the only person to get a centrifuge to work which is a big spinning flaming arm that kind of wanged basketballs need to remember off at a target or something so i did that and then the weirdest thing i really the sketchiest thing i've ever built was my flying machine which i ended up i built a flying machine out of a ktm 125 motorbike in austria and i tried to fight over a mountain and i got to 900 feet and the engine cut out [Music] took me about an hour to get to 9009 at the feet and there was a lot of worry that the gopros would run up battery power but they hadn't they were still rolling um also there was a cameraman who was following me in another flying machine and he was told in the briefing your one job do not go and get any pretties follow jimmy never take it right off him after an hour he went this is boring he's just flying in front of him i'm going and he went and then i go uh engine out engine out look around no one's there and i'm like well i'm going in one direction and uh no one's following engine out engine out engine out and it was good because uh i crashed i snapped my leg that's not are you alright and i said yeah i'm all right and goes what should i do and i'm going to film them out of it because this is going to be great television anyway i just need a minute i'm going to be sick really yeah because he had to come down so fast to catch out that uh his spiral down to catch me up yeah so he threw up did what was your sort of you're growing up like in your school life like were you you know you were the kid that always wanted to get like a motocross bike or were you wheeling your bmx or were you i was mounted bikes yeah mounted bikes i was i um i actually went on to do student games on mountain bike i specialized i was sponsored by specialized and evans cycles back in the day so it was big time on my most right before buying my first car my mum was livid because i'd saved up some money and uh she thought i was gonna buy my first car and i bought a gt lts the original lts which was became an alley or the first carbon fiber fight and she went bonkers i was a big time on my mountain bike back in the day wow yeah are you still are you still into riding i still have my details yes i absolutely yesterday wow i've still got my man who's laughing now that's been a great value yeah yeah yeah 1997 that was proper then yeah yeah gosh so aside from cycling i don't know do you still do the open water swimming yeah we go down and fly along the coast uh just down is that the way you it's basically an engine on a rucksack yeah you know the one forget to take it off [Laughter] i saw someone doing it on the coast when i was reviewing the gr yaris on the late break show and we were trying to find a quiet place to do an intro to the video with the car and it was just it was the last day of lockdown so everyone was running around trying to get i don't know like like we were going to be denied air or something and everyone was cycling everyone was walking dogs and i did this piece of camera and just as we were doing the chat out of nowhere ten paragliders just came over hilling and it was just it was just like a huge wall of wasps yeah it was a nice morning two-stroke are they two-stroke i don't know i i've got um and it just the idea of the engine being on a rucksack yeah just i find that so the engine mounts it's your back it's your back yeah is incredible because you have this i don't know it's quite a common human thing to fantasize about flying and what's amazing about it is it's an ultralight vehicle which means it's foot launched and the first time you do it essentially you have this kite above your head and you start running and as that's the wing starts to lift you literally feel your body come off the ground and then you just sort of drift away and it is the most forget your planes because it's just you sat there the the issue i have with it is i suffer massively you might know configured from motion sickness and i do tend to if you are around this area just if you're watching just together because you just throw up quite regularly [Laughter] i'm not getting a litter so i then did the rest of my home with a sick bag in my mouth i i then got tired of it in my mouth my jaw got a bit sore so i put it in my pocket with my mobile phone it turns out you mentioned earlier about one of the influences in your life yeah being a radio controlled models yeah because you've got it down here and it's such a beautifully detailed replica 1 10th or 112th scale of the minion it's probably 110 isn't it yeah it's haunted it works oh go on all right and it's front wheel drive yeah oh it's authentic oh it is johnny it's the chip this model i wanted to keep it as close to the real thing as possible yeah i do so pick it up have a look at those wheels so so tammy did pop-up parts and they did they did back in their day they did proper alloy wheels and they were reds and silver they now cost to get an original set and i was building this car and i found the wheel that is the right wheel to buy those wheels for me 250 pounds just for the rim yeah yeah honestly and then i sprayed them to match my car sacrilege has to be done though i've i've spoken to a lot of people in fact a previous idle chat with chris harris um and and a few other people who are in the car world and maybe some of the audience who are watching this early influences on your interest in vehicles and your understanding of engineering does does come from these yeah it really does because you build it you almost always crash it and then you have to work out how to repair it right it's not off-road isn't it yeah no honestly i was i it took me about two years to get i remember seeing the monster pizza on the lunchbox and it's just blowing my mind in the playground someone had one in school what yeah i don't know i mean i was in school like a member even those days someone had a monster beetle and a lunchbox and it blew my mind yeah it was probably it took probably from that point two years of convincing and begging my parents to go to bts and when they fight and i had looked and i wanted the it was the hornet yeah but i was like i'm never already yeah yeah and then it didn't happen it never happened it was never under the christmas tree and then a year later when i sort of thought it's never gonna happen there was the box the bt's bag and i got a mad cap which i didn't actually know existed at that point um but just that first time opening that instruction yeah and the smells the grease the little packet did you ever go through this obsession see my parents were too tight to get me inside they got me some off-brands [Laughter] it was a transaction so points for that okay yeah it was quite quick but it wasn't a grasshopper or something like that it didn't have you know suspension you could see were yeah i feel denied and i have a big thing about not spoiling our children but there's a part we just want to go and buy the italian stuff for our kids so i can play with so this has been my big thing in the last two years and actually i mean it was part of i realized uh going back to linking this all together i'd kind of got a bit of ptsd from iraq not not in a horrific way but from the fact that essentially if someone bombs you twice a day what then hammers your view if someone slams the door near you it's a little bit it's disturbing yeah because you're used to it and you find you're looking for body armor that you don't have and uh something i did to really sort of get myself past that is start building these again because it took me back to those childhood days and it was amazing therapy really yeah so the tammy for me has become a real positive way of almost taking me back to that childhood like today yeah to kind of uh move forward i've heard the same with lego yeah yeah people yeah i mean i know there's there's some weird things that i find therapeutic one of them is actually cleaning cars yeah because i like doing i like doing it slowly if i've got the time i don't want to be rushed it's one of those things i'll do it and i do it methodically i don't want to be disturbed and i just can't kind of zone out exactly yeah it's on there the box is there and i might do two hours i might do one hours but then it the board goes under the sofa yeah and i'll just bring it out another day and that is it i zone out nothing's in the world is a good hacky place so now let's go let's talk about goblin works garage how did that come about and what what have been the highs and lows of that so it came about from actually i built my jet boat and i've done engine addict which that show was called and um i got invited to go to uh the classic car show at the nec and uh i took i was i think i'm probably the only person who's taking a boat or classic i took my jet boat along and i walked in there and i just saw this amazing arena filled with like-minded people and i said this is where i need to be you know i didn't have as such an output for what i was doing which was i'm an engineer i'm not a mechanic and i've always wanted to push my engineering boundaries and but i said this is where i need to be this is this i'm surrounded by like-minded people and i want to be here with these people i had such a lovely time just engaging with people letting people sit in a jet boat and i said to myself right this is it this is what i'm going to do you know owning land rovers you're going to have a bit of a key so the cars that you built because like this car this mini was built on the show yeah and the the thing that i noticed from the goblin works series is the cars are built to quite an um tv standard and i say that because having worked in tv yeah i know that when cars are built in tv they're not normally as high as standard as they would be in reality because we all know and if there's a lot of people watching this who have classic cars know that it's actually really difficult to restore a classic car or modify and and do it to a very high standard it's a time vampire yeah enormous timeline what what i'd like to say is um reading between the lines there are cars that i would call a tv car and we do them on government garage and then there's legitimate cars that is a real car and what i tend to do is i tend to pick cars that are true with crash and passion projects for me and then other ones are more tv and so something like this car how you break out of them being what i call a tele car which is if you look at it they're good at 10 meters but actually get a bit closer to the details on there is you have to essentially build them for yourself so um this car gave me full filming days and then four or five hours a night in a hotel room ordering past speaking to suppliers um whereas it should be no surprise that to build cars on telly you need a massive team of people behind you to help support you um but there's certain cars that what i will do is stand up and do it myself and this is so i have a full spreadsheet uh with every component on this car um i spoke to every supplier i sourced every car and and so this car is car i've triggered so there's more thoroughbred cars on the show and there's some that are more tele spec that may disappear they're still lovely cars and they serve a great purpose and they create conversation but there's definitely two times what i will say is massively hard and you don't see is combining engineering and all the difficulties come with that with making a tv show you've just made a hard process almost impossible because they need to film something on a certain day you might have to cut corners that you don't want to cut and when it's your passion that becomes a real kind of fight yeah so like you said we're talking about the cars and the level of the cars i want to deliver a good car because i want to be able to bring that to the show people are saying say actually you know what jimmy deville can build a car um because because people on tv a lot of people out there especially with social media like to see you fail and like to pick you apart and i i don't you know i think that's a shame something that's a shame that's happening in social media because essentially we are just all lovers of cars and you know what i might do something i'll tell you but i'm not proud of but then someone might spot it but they don't know the backstory and there's also we just did mod shop in lockdown you literally could not get past so people are saying why did you put that part in the car well we did it lockdown where all spare all parts of the cars sold out and not get any more so we literally found any parts we could and so sometimes they were hand on heart terrible but we just tried to do what the best we could to represent our culture the car world the best of our ability to ever on that show worked as hard as they could and that's the bit that isn't seeing so that can be fun yes i i learned to fear any social media or car forum so i can't believe they didn't yeah because you do want to send these people down and say i know you can't believe it but let me explain to you why the back stories it's not this magic kingdom where anything can happen and the problem is of course because tv does make incredible things happen yeah sometimes absolutely absolutely yeah absolutely the people then want to believe that anything is possible yeah so when something isn't quite the way that they might perceive it to be or it should be they'll go i can't believe it now a day to make this thing happen in the first place and we just ran out of time or they wouldn't let us do this or whatever the budget didn't allow it we used to get yeah yeah so you said that you wanted a mini as your first car but you never actually got one hence this yeah what was your first car it was the land rover it was yes with a torch so technically my first car was the 2a long wheelbase land rover it was called bernard in the portland bar um which weirdly i was watching a program about before when i was years later and bernard went drove past which was kind of weird um anyway that was technically my first car but i came straight home from there and i was one of my next car which is going to be a landro because i now knew everything there was to know about is i didn't but i was 19 i thought i did and weirdly my neighbor had a series 3 light blue and its number plate was jdb721n which jdb is my initials of course and uh the head cracked um a rare occasion that land rover breaking yeah very extremely hurdle but it did freak freak and um the water went anyway my name at the same time his wife had just got pregnant couldn't be dealing with it because what he could be doing with his wife being pregnant i'm not having this allowed him so his wife came to live with me it was lovely he's getting rid of it and the garage has offered him 400 quid for this land rover and i said i'll have it off you i'll give you quite a quick it was up the road brilliant he said yeah no worries i bought it home opened the booth and there was the whole engine in pieces in the back and i suddenly realized i didn't have a clue what i was doing right so the first thing i did on that land rover was build its engine which was a real voyage mechanical sort of learning for me because i literally taught myself on that land rover how to build an engine and that first time i don't know whoever's built an engineer the first time you start an engine and it runs i mean you you are frankenstein you have just bought the monster alive it is just the most yeah oh joyous i'll never forget it yeah wonderful and that was that was it i was off that was my um voyage into this mad world i'm gonna i'm gonna finish this idol chat uh jimmy by asking you if i could give you any engine at all as a present what would it be and then secondly i know during lockdown you and i love this story you've you've you've stumbled across a um a tractor in a hedge a local farm that you kind of didn't know that was in there yeah and you dragged it out and you actually rebuilt it it's really cool because it was i guess it was left for dead decades ago so what what sort of non-car vehicle could i give you so i don't know commercial vehicle tractor mower on what what's your ultimate engine okay okay for me the ultimate engine is uh simple and we're sat right in the right place because it is the merlin and we hear it here if you're lucky enough to live around here we get the spitfire's going over and i will i got home yesterday on friday it flew over almost immediately in hawking and uh that spitfire going over every single time it happens my hair's standing up on that back of my neck it's just gobsmacking i think it's one of the pinnacles of engineering the engine and the the vehicle around it but that engine the merlin supercharged just heaven so uh that's for me if uh vehicle well i mean we're sat here now and there's a porsche tractor over there johnny let's you know just put your money where your mouth is it's right there so i've got my trailer here it's my 31 years and that tractor um it shouldn't have ever run again i probably we we literally had to machine a piston linings for it it was gone the the the big end housings had gone it was gone it was gone honestly gone and to myself and my friend gab just thought well it's locked down we want to do a bit of youtube we just thought we're going to do this and it's really for me it was a brothership of me and him doing it when it shouldn't have been done it was just such a joy and driving honestly probably one of the best drives of my life if you want to smile go up the road at five mile an hour on an old tractor i'll tell you you can keep your curling's eggs that thing is just brilliant actually i just was beaming it's just such a joy in that old old tractor so yeah i probably i i've got my tractor third one right now so i've been after the porsche i just think there the the ferguson has a real beautiful look and it's it's real classic and i think those porsches i've had my arm on for about five years i just think they're a stunning bit of a design as well so yeah well and you actually own another porsche you own a porsche car so it might be a nice duo yeah thanks ever so much for watching um this idle chat episode um if you're not um a subscriber to the channel please subscribe um and leave a comment below and jimmy i look forward to your your new show involving a mote home that very very much isn't a normal motorhome all right thank you [Music]

Channel: The Late Brake Show

Views: 23,236

Rating: 4.916955 out of 5

Keywords: jonny smith reviews, car pervert, Jimmy deville, goblin works garage, extreme engines, diy paramotor, paramotor project build, jet boat project, jet engined boat, goblin mod shop, restomod, classic tractor project, barnfind tractor, jimmy deville crash, paramotor crash, paramotor fail, tamiya rc build, austin mini modified, extreme mini project, swift tune mini, project binky, ptsd therapy, landrover defender, defender 90 project, series 2 land rover, falklands, fifth gear

Id: g6ZulWQBIso

Length: 34min 1sec (2041 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021