Congratulations on the new season. I’m sure it’s wonderful for you guys to work together, but if you don’t mind, what was it like building the chemistry that you needed in order to be able to do the show together that has such a long history. What did you guys do to find that, or did it really just find this instantaneously?
Mike Brewer: I can answer this one if you like. Okay, me and Elvis previously had done a series in the UK called Wheeler Dealers Dream Car, but before we were even considered to be together on Wheeler Dealers Dream Car, we did an audition day to see what the chemistry would be like between us. It’s very much the same as my relationship with my previous co-hosts and I hope I’m speaking for Elvis here as well, that on that very first meeting, it’s almost like love at first sight. If you both have a passion and an interest about exactly the same thing and you have a desire to improve that thing and to do the best you possibly can, then you’ve obviously got kinship and that’s exactly what happened with me and Elvis as soon as we went to do the test together, to see if it would work with us together.
Within five minutes of being there we were doing nothing but talking about cars and within ten minutes we were laughing at each other’s faces and within half an hour we had our arms around each other just enjoying what was about to happen the rest of our futures together. So yeah, the chemistry was instant and it’s been fantastic ever since it’s only gone from strength to strength. We’ve become very close friends, as well as work colleagues.
Marc Priestly: Yeah. I would totally agree with that. I was going to say we didn’t actually need to do anything to support the chemistry because it was just there. I think that was true I had never met Mike before until that day, and knew by early on, very early on in the day that this was something that could definitely work. I think when we did do a screen test and we filmed some scenes together, it just felt completely natural and it was almost like we’d known each other for years. Since doing that, it has just continued in the same vein and I got to the end of that first series of Dream Car, and when people asked me what it was like at the end of that, I said I’ve never laughed so much every single day at work. I would say having been through that process, and now being through one season of Wheeler Dealers, it’s exactly the same. I really genuinely love going to work because we just have a lot of fun and we’re both very, very passionate about the same things, which is making this great content around these great cars.
Good to hear. What was the most joyful moment filming this particular season for each of you?
Mike Brewer: Joyful, oh my goodness. There’s been so many. I can point to a couple. On the very first episode we took out an 850 Mini. So this is a Mini that should have nothing more than 60 horsepower, and I’ll say Elvis’s Formula One background and engineering skills came to the fore where we re-engineered the engine of the of the little Mini to make it a breed better, get exhaust gases out faster, to perform a much higher speed. We managed to save a car that when it came out the showroom in 1965 could only read 77 miles an hour. That’s its top speed back then, and we took a car that should be collecting a pension, it’s of a pensionable age, and we took it to 90 miles an hour. I think that was a real moment. It was very exciting, and I claim it as a British record for the 850 Mini.
Marc Priestly: Yeah. That was a specifically special moment for me of course, because having joined the Wheeler Dealers family, I’m fully prepared to getting my hands dirty and stuck into any jobs on any car, fully ready to get the welder out, fully ready to do all sorts of things, taking engines and gearboxes out, but when someone comes along and says, well we want you to take this little car and basically make it go as fast as you can, that’s music to my ears. That’s what I’ve been doing throughout my entire career over the last 20 years. So that was a real dream for me, and like Mike said, what we achieved with it was really great and having now seen that show here in the UK go on air, it was a real moment. So that’s probably one of the most joyous moments for me too.
Absolutely. You both been to the UAE, right? I’m going to assume with Formula One, this is a major stop and Mike I know for you, you’ve dealt with the car culture here. What stood out about the car culture here in the UAE?
Mike Brewer: Looking at the car culture in the UAE, your roads are a lot wider, so you can get away with a lot of bigger vehicles, but the car culture is more or less exactly the same. Every time I’ve been to the UAE, there’s been a huge amount of passion from fans, from enthusiasts, that want to gather, want to show off their cars, they tend to look after their cars in the same way we do, they do modifications in the same way we do. They tend to be very similar in the sense that I’d say the only difference is size. In the UAE, you have those gigantic SUV’s like you’re do in America, but we simply don’t have them here in the UK. Our road network is Victorian or Roman in some instances, and that is much narrower and we can’t get away with those bigger vehicles. That would be the biggest difference.
Marc Priestly: And they’re all covered in sand at all times.
Does that make the mechanics of it all a bit more difficult?
Marc Priestly: Well, it’s another challenge for sure and also just keeping them clean. Like Mike said, there’s a culture here, which is the same as there where people are very proud of their cars they not just a means of getting from A to B, people want to show them off and that means turning up for gatherings and events and showing a car off. Where I imagine you can’t go to one of those things without taking a polishing rag with you to give it a dust off when you get there.
We talked about the joys, what were the challenges for each of you? Because obviously, Elvis said joining the show in proper, I’m sure there’s a lot of things that felt completely natural and then other things that took time getting used to, and then Mike, after years and years of coming back to the joys of the show again and again, what do you find to be the challenges at this point?
Marc Priestly: I was just going to say I found working on the cars is not really the challenge, that’s the easy bit. It’s understanding, all of these cars I’ll hold my hands up, I haven’t worked on before, but that was part of the joy of uncovering the mystery of them as we went. Some of the challenges are actually around deciding what we want to do with each car. That’s going to either add value or add providence, or be in keeping with the way that these cars should be restored, because it’s very easy to get really carried away and say, you want to spend a huge amount of money and a huge amount of time on every single one and bring them back to being perfect. Obviously with my Formula One background, everything just has to be perfect all the time and money has never really been a challenge or an issue in that sense.
For me and Mike, I guess we had to get together on many of these occasions and say, okay, what are we going to set out to achieve with this car? Because we haven’t got months to do it, we haven’t got an endless budget, so what are the decisions that we can make with each of these cars? A little bit like the Mini, we wanted to make it suitable to drive on modern roads, and that meant definitely making it faster. It meant making it more usable, but we also knew that it would be really important to Mini fans and the kind of people that wanted to end up buying the car, that it stayed true to its originality, that it looked original. Sometimes those decisions are actually quite difficult to get right and I’m really pleased to say that I’m pretty convinced that throughout this series, I think we’ve got those decisions right on pretty much every occasion, but that is a real challenge that often you don’t see the full extent of when you watch a show on TV.
Mike Brewer: For me, I would say one of the most difficult challenges has always been when you’re putting a car program together is the reliability of other people. I know full well that I’ve got the best tool in the workshop, which is Elvis and I know he can turn his hands or anything, but when things leave the workshop, say a car goes out for paint, or we’re waiting for parts, or a car is going to go out for the interior retrends, that’s always been the difficult part. The show has a transmission date, we have a deadline that we need to reach, when you’re relying on other people to do a job that’s not next to you, when they’re remote, when they’re far away, it always becomes a head-scratching moment, how you can make these things work. Being honest with you, by and large, over the past 17 years of making Wheeler Dealers, we tend to just seem to get away with it. We turn out some amazing cars and sometimes we’re finishing up the cars on the day that we’re selling them. We cut it that close to the wire within a week of transmission. So it’s always been a bit of a difficult process to rely on other people. That’s why it’s important for me to build the contact book of close people around us that we can rely on, that are going to be reliable. They are going to turn up on time and do the job that we ask them to do. But that’s always been the main problem with Wheeler Dealers since day one.
Going back to day one, how much has the landscape changed since then?
Mike Brewer: I don’t think it has. Lots of people online and lots of our fans will say Wheeler Dealers has changed over the years, it really hasn’t. The only thing that’s evolved and changed is that we use better cameras now. We was using cameras that you put tape in back when we first started making it, nowadays everything’s high 4k digital, but the format is exactly the same, it’s I’m a car dealer, I have a master mechanic in the workshop, I go and buy a car, the master mechanic repairs the car, we test drive it at the end to make sure we’re happy with the work, and then we sell it for a profit. The format has remained the same as it was 17 years ago.
Absolutely. I’m thinking of the keyboard warriors online, what are the criticisms that you get that you most find annoying and find a need to continue to try keep off?
Mike Brewer: I can give you an example. Wheeler Dealers was made in America for the policy issues and the UK audience somehow, not all of them, just a tiny percentage of the UK audience, hated the fact that the show was being made in Hollywood where both myself, production, I’m pretty sure Discovery Channel, we’re delighted that his little car show from England had made it all the way to Hollywood and it was being made in California. For us, there’s one way of looking at it from some of audience’s way, there’s another way. Some of them took offense to the car show being made there so much so that they just invented that every car we were doing is an American car, so they would just write in by their hundreds and tell me, I’m not watching the show ever, because I don’t understand the American cars that you’re doing. Although I only did out of the, I think we did 110 cars in America, only 25 of them were actually American. All the rest of them were Japanese and European. So I think the best example of that is a tweet from a so-called fan that said, when are you going to come back and do some proper British cars like the Volkswagen Golf GTI? I rest my case.
Fair enough. The classic criticist.
Marc Priestly: I would just chip into that and say that having just joined the show as the new guy, I was pretty prepared for a mix of criticisms and everything else that the show gave out. I have to say, I’ve been really pleasantly surprised that people are really enjoying what we’ve made, and my experience in this short period of time that I’ve been with the Wheeler Dealer’s family has actually been just a really pleasant one with the fans. They’ve been really welcoming to me so far and I’m very grateful for that because it’s a huge amount of hard work. There’s quite a lot of pressure to join such a well-established and long running show, and I’m just genuinely really pleased that so far people seem to think that we’re all doing it justice.
Mike Brewer: I was going to say there’s been a huge outpour of love for Wheeler Dealer coming back to the UK and Elvis on the tools because they very much love Elvis and they wanted to see as Dream Car, and now we’re back in Britain. It’s been universally, my social media feeds universally have just been a 100% positive. It’s been wonderful.
Yeah. I can attest to that. I saw that it’s wonderful to see that reaction. What do you think was the biggest importance and bringing it back and what was the story behind getting there and why do you think it’s so important to be back?
Mike Brewer: Well, it went to America in the first place because there was a demand from the American audience to have an American series. So our bosses in America who, Discovery Channel is wholly an American company at the end of the day. There was a deal struck between America and the UK that they would do half the show in America, half the show in the UK, which we did for a couple of seasons and it was a real success, both in America and both here, back in Britain.
We had a host change, which was we lost Edd China, he wanted to pursue a different career and we had the new hosts come in Ant Anstead, and in that time when we had the host change, it just went to an American production but we’ve obviously been heard all over the world and in Britain, and then that was a huge success. We have three fantastic years with Ant in America, and it was amazing to work with him.
The last couple of years a couple of factors have taken place. Number one is the states of the world and international travel, has meant it’s much more difficult to house the shows in different countries. Plus my mum’s not very well. My mum’s quite poorly and when the opportunity came around from our UK bosses to say, look, it’s your friends we’re coming back to the UK and making a few shows, I jumped at the chance, not because I didn’t love America. I absolutely loved it and I love what I was doing there, but chance to be back close to my family and to have another go. The show has had three different incarnations and now this is another one of them to have another go and to see if we can still create, I think the world’s best car program and bring it back home. We did, and we have, and I’m immensely proud of that.
I’m sorry to hear about your mom, Mike. I hope she’s doing well.
Mike Brewer: She’s still very poorly and it’s made such a difference not only to me, but to the rest of my family, that I’m back here and given an access to being close to my parents and see my mum as regularly as I possibly can. That’s been a huge change for me.
Absolutely. It’s the best thing you can do really, so it’s great to hear that. Going through both of your respective careers, how different do you think that each one of you are from when you started out? Elvis, you as a mechanic starting out in the early days and Mike, you started out as a dealer, how do you look back at the person that you were and the person you are now?
Marc Priestly: Well, I would say that my career before moving into this TV world was all in the world of motorsport. It was all about motorsport and then obviously Formula One was the pinnacle of that, but ultimately at the heart of that decision to go into that career choice with the cars, it was always all about cars for me and even since I was at college, I was working on cars, I was studying motor vehicle engineering. So it’s always been about cars.
Fundamentally, I’m still the same guy, I’ve still got an ultimate love and a passion for engineering and for motor vehicle engineering specifically, and the technology behind all of that. I always say that I’ve had some amazing years in Formula One, that career obviously takes you around the world and I got to very fortunately experience the very pinnacle of that kind of career. Working with some amazing people and with the fastest car on the planet.
Now to come and do this, I wouldn’t say I’m any different in terms of, I still have that same love of cars and now to be able to get back to the hands-on stuff in the workshop, which, I know honesty when you reached the very pinnacle of any career, quite often you gravitate away from what first got you there. So when you move into management roles in Formula One, you’re much less attached to the cars, you’re not doing the thing that in terms of working around the spanners that you originally loved in the first place. That’s just naturally in most industries. So to be able to come back and get my hands dirty, get stuck in with my own workshop that you were able to design from, scratch, bring my own tools in and get everything the way I want it, it’s a real dream come true. It’s just taken me back to when I was 18, 19, 20 years old and desperate to get a career with cars.
Mike Brewer: Yeah. It’s a really good question because I’ve got strict rules in places with very close friends to pull me to one side and to tell me if you ever seen me change in any shape or form to please tell me and let me know. I’m fortunate in the fact that that’s never happened, and I still have friends from 30, 40 years ago when I first started in the car trade, that I still hang out with today and they would tell you, and they would tell me that I’m no different. I’m just the same guy. I don’t let fame, celebrity, wealth, any of that go to my head, I love my job. I’m passionate about my job. I would say the only difference is I’m better at everything I do. I’m a better person at understanding people, I’m a better person at putting these shows together, I’m a better person with my time for other people, I just thought I’ve got better, but I don’t feel like I’ve changed in any way.
Do you each have a respect of white whale or a car that you’ve just always dreamed of getting your hands on, but never had a chance?
Mike Brewer: Oh yeah. How long have we got? Cause this could take a while. Yeah, me and me and Elvis in-between takes, in-between filming, we relax sit down and talk about cars and speed cars that would seem forward, and it’s so funny when the dealers, even the sound recorders, the cameramen, the researchers, everyone just calm up, we all just do talk about cars in between cars and there’s a list we do have. There’s this ideal dream go-to car list that’s always out there, and these are things that we want to get to, and we hope one day that we will get to, unfortunately with the classic car world prices on the sense at the moment, so cars tend to get away from us all the time, you get to a point where you think we can get one of those in the show and then when you check, they’ve gone up $10,000, so it starts to fall outside the limit of Wheeler Dealers and keeping the cars at a level where the common man could achieve this and could aspire to these cars. But yeah, we’ve got all kinds of things in there from Lotus Cortina, Lotus Carlton, Mexico Escort, race car, we’ve got everything. We’ve never done a Ford Transit, so it’s Mark 1 Ford Transit rather astonishingly it was one of the biggest selling Mark in Britain. All these kinds of things that are on the list, they’re just so hard to get.
Marc Priestly: I’d say that there would be a bit of a dream and it is a bit of a pipe dream to one day do an episode where money’s no object, where we can just do one where we really go for it and go for a super car episode or something and then obviously there’s a real nice synergy if we ever could get our hands on a McLaren with my background, but the one car that I know at the moment is way out of reach to Wheeler Dealers, but really is my own dream car is a Porsche 964, an all in all Porsche, which would be amazing.
What was the first car you fell in love with?
Mike Brewer: Well, mine’s really simple and I’ve said it a thousand times, I own it now so I’m there, I’ve got my dream car and it’s a 1964 Mini Cooper S.
Marc Priestly: Yeah. It is lovely. I was actually there the moment Mike bought that car and to see his little face light up, you wouldn’t believe it. Of all the cars Mike’s worked and over the years the cars Mike’s owned, to see that moment when he finally secured that little Mini was just an amazing thing to witness. For me the first car that I ever fell in love with was my first car and it was a VW Beetle. First of all, I loved it because it was mine, it was my first car, but actually I just loved the shape and the styling because it was so different from anything else and I, off the back of that then fell in love with the entire sort of eco VW culture around camper vans and VWs, and went through that whole, I went through years of going to all the shows and I still love them today, just as much. So I guess I’m a real kind of fan of the early Porsches, and that’s obviously very closely linked to the VW beetle. So that real kind of curved unique styling of that era of car was a real game changer for me.
Season 17A of Wheeler Dealers airs on Discovery in the Middle East starting tonight at 21:00 KSA
