RICHARD HAMMOND, the Top Gear presenter, has spoken for the first time about the high-speed car crash that nearly killed him.

Speaking only five weeks after his ill-fated spin in a jet-powered dragster, the presenter described how the brain injuries that he sustained during the crash at 288mph left him in a childlike state.

He said: “I regressed into a little boy. All my emotions became very childlike, very fragile. The last time I was in hospital was when I was five and needed grommets.

“My mind flashed back to that time. My needs became very basic. All I wanted was a penknife and a comic book with Spitfires on it.”

Hammond, 36, who is now expected to make a full recovery, also said that the accident had reignited his childhood love of Lego and the card game, Top Trumps. “Lego saved my life,” he said. “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 [his co-presenter on Top Gear] 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.”

The presenter, whose bloodshot eye is the only outward sign of his serious injuries, described his memories of the stunt, which he had been filming for the BBC programme at Elvington airfield, near York.

“I was upside down inhaling a field. My nose and eyes were full of earth. I’d gone ploughing on my head,” he said. “It was 50-50 what was going to happen. I may have been dead, I may not have woken up.”

The married father of two said that he lost consciousness soon afterwards and next remembers waking up in Leeds General Infirmary.

“Doctors use a point system. Fifteen is normal, three is a flatline. I was a three. I was that close to being dead,” he said.

“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.”

He admitted in an interview with The Daily Mirror that there had been “many, many private breakdowns” as he fought to come to terms with what happened, and recalled the difficulty of seeing his two daughters, aged 3 and 6, “terribly upset”.

The presenter said: “For two weeks, all the time I was in Leeds, I simply didn’t believe I had been in a crash.”

Surgeons considered drilling a “borehole” into his head to drain blood from his brain to relieve swelling, but the operation was not deemed necessary.

However, he added that he was on morphine to treat the “excruciating” pain, which he said “hurt like hell”.

Hammond said that he did not know what had caused the accident but dismissed reports that he had been attempting to break the land speed record.