It’s a glorious morning in the Home Counties and, in the garden of a picturesque, timber-framed, 500-year-old farmhouse, former Hertfordshire cop turned TV presenter Ant Anstead, 47, is sitting beneath a cherry tree, recalling his first encounter with his girlfriend of five years, Oscar-winning actress Renée “Bridget Jones” Zellweger.
“Renée is a hands-on car girl,” he rhapsodises. “She used a grinder to cut metal, she was welding, she was on the spanners.” This was on Anstead’s 2021 US show Celebrity IOU: Joyride. Zellweger, who “never normally does [projects] outside film”, was collaborating with Anstead to restore a Ford Bronco and an Oldsmobile. The cars were gifts for two brothers, both nurses, who had cared for her friend and agent Nanci Ryder when she was dying from motor neurone disease. Coincidentally, Anstead’s friend, rugby player Lewis Moody, also has the disease: “It’s so cruel.”
Zellweger, 57, immediately impressed Anstead. “A lot of people in America don’t drive stick [manual cars] but, on the first day of filming, we needed to relocate a car for a scene. Ren jumps in, goes, ‘I’ll do it!’, slams it into first, and off she goes. I’m like, ‘Wow. This lady really knows her cars.’”
He continues: “Her dad’s a Swiss engineer; you pick up things from your parents. She’s a very real person. She’s absolutely brilliant, the most grounded, humble person. If there’s a car job to be done at home, I say, ‘We’re doing this together. Put your overalls on, let’s go.’”
The Hollywood A-lister may seem an unlikely match for a British ex-cop. Born in Texas, she has been out with a number of famous names, from the actors Jim Carrey and Bradley Cooper, to the musician Jack White. She was also, very briefly, married to the country singer Kenny Chesney in 2004. Yet, among petrolheads, Anstead is a superstar, both here and in the US, with, to date, 28 television shows to his name, most notably Discovery’s Wheeler Dealers.
He’s also renowned for his friendship with former Formula One world champion and “wonderful man” Jenson Button, with whom he co-hosts events such as the luxury motoring festival Celebration of Speed, in Devon, and (until recent financial woes) ran Radford Motors, designing custom, limited-run sports cars.
Normally, Anstead lives not far from Button in Laguna Beach, California, but for the past few years he has been spending chunks of time in Hertfordshire, painstakingly restoring a Grade-II-listed house.
Anstead bought the derelict property to “say thank you” to his parents. Both now in their seventies, they worked in the school catering industry and brought up their five children in a string of tied accommodation provided by various boarding schools. Subsequently, they ran the award-winning White Horse pub in Bedford. Having retired, they were living in a “tiny” ex-council bungalow and Anstead decided he wanted to build them a “dream home” to retire in. His efforts feature in his latest show, Ant Anstead: Born Mechanic, in which he also buys, restores and sells old cars.
But why choose a place with rotting beams and endless planning issues? “Dad’s very active and needs a project, so I deliberately looked for this,” he says.
His parents, along with his two children from his first marriage, Amelie, 22, a Team GB rugby player, and Archie, 19, who works in the City, all feature in the programme, now in its third season. “Dad is built for TV. He sings in a local choir, loves a bit of drama; he’d be ace on Strictly if his knees would allow him. Mum was more cautious, but we agreed there’d be none of the contrived nature of some reality TV shows. You can see it’s very, very real. That rear end will fall down if I don’t intervene.”
Indeed, it’s clear that Anstead – who’s scrupulously polite, switched on and down to earth – is living on a building site. His parents will soon be moving into the front (restored) half of the house and will be cooking in a temporary kitchen, as the current one is condemned and set to be demolished next year. “I’ve really taken on the burden of being the house’s custodian and everyone in the village is saying, ‘Thank you. This was a falling-down wreck that’s been transformed.’”
Photos of Anstead and Zellweger together are dotted around the property. She’s the lock-screen picture on his phone, but she doesn’t appear in the show, instead contributing behind the scenes, notably when Anstead was tracking down some reclaimed gates on eBay. “Ren was looking over my shoulder without me realising. The next day I went to buy them and they were gone. I was mad. I arrived here and they were in the barn with a balloon on them for my birthday. She’d secretly contacted my dad and arranged for him to collect them. As a gift, it knocks a pair of socks on the head.”
Anstead’s parents’ jobs offered him the opportunity to attend the Hertfordshire public school Haileybury. His background was very different from that of the other, moneyed pupils. “They teased me that my dad was a dinner lady, but I was in the rugby, cricket and football teams, and the sporty crowd is always the cool crowd. And I knew where the free food was.”
He learnt to drive on school premises and, aged 16, began restoring his first vehicle, an MG Midget, coincidentally nicknamed Bridget. “I could only afford a crappy car, so I was constantly nursing it.”
At 18, he joined Hertfordshire Constabulary. At first, he was a beat policeman, patrolling vast chunks of the county alone, from affluent rural pockets to deprived inner-city areas. One of his jobs was guarding the convicted serial killer, the “Railway Murderer” John Duffy, in a police safe house. He was one of the first emergency workers on the scene at the 2000 Hatfield rail crash, which killed four people and injured 70, and performed CPR four times, the last on a 16-year-old boy.
“I had more experience in those few years than you would normally get in a lifetime,” he says. “Policing’s a weird job because it’s 90 per cent boredom, 10 per cent utter fear. You go from mundane daily interactions to ultimately doing something that really shapes the way you think about things. I have an interesting relationship with death, with negativity, with the knowledge that people can be incredibly cruel and bad things happen.
“The police are better now at supporting officers who deal with traumatic things, but back then it really wasn’t like that; you just got on with it.”
Aged 23, he became one of the youngest officers in the elite Tactical Firearms Team. “From then I was only attending the very, very worst jobs.” He’ll say no more, only that he has two commendations for acts of bravery. “Or stupidity, as I now realise,” he laughs. Working shifts gave him time to renovate cars and play semi-professional football – first as a goalkeeper, then as a striker, winning Ryman League promotions in both positions. “I’m the only goalie/striker to have done that,” he says.
In 2005, he was injured at work. That, combined with the birth of Amelie, inspired him to quit policing to buy, restore and sell cars full-time. “Life’s short. I wanted to do something that wouldn’t kill me, that I really loved.”
Entrepreneurial life was daunting. “I filled out the police reapplication form three times,” he says. But he persisted and, in 2013, was spotted in his workshop by Channel 4, which asked him to co-present the programme For the Love of Cars with Philip Glenister. “I had absolutely no ambition to be on TV, but that’s how it worked out.”
In 2016, he auditioned for Top Gear after Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond left the BBC show. After a 12-week process, Anstead was within touching distance of bagging the job when he crashed a brand-new £85,000 Mercedes-AMG C63 at Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey. “The track was empty. I lost control and slid the car into a tyre wall so hard it bent.”
The gig eventually went to Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc. “I see that tyre wall as a blessing,” Anstead insists. “The first Top Gear reboot was just OK. It wasn’t good enough; the bar was so high it had to be exceptional.” After one season, Evans quit. “Matt, Rory [Reid] and Chris [Harris] took over and they started to find their feet.”
Then, in 2019, Andrew Flintoff and Paddy McGuinness joined Harris as hosts. But the show was halted in 2023 after Flintoff was seriously injured in a crash. Anstead says he would be keen to see it revived. “It’s a format everyone loves. Why wouldn’t it come back?”
Meanwhile, Anstead thrived elsewhere. In 2016, he landed his highest-profile role to date, hosting Wheeler Dealers for the US Discovery Channel. Having split from his first wife, he married property developer and reality star Christina Haack, and they had a baby son, Hudson, now seven. They then separated in 2019 and subsequently divorced.
The same year, Wheeler Dealers announced it was relocating to the UK. Keen to stay close to Hudson, with whom he shares custody, he declined to follow (he still makes guest appearances on the show). “I’d established this really lovely ecosystem. My older kids went to boarding school in the UK, they’d have time in California, and I’d travel to them. I’m fully American. I’m going through the green card process. I use words like ‘sidewalk’. I was staying.”
Californian life sounds idyllic. Anstead loves the beach and, at weekends, plays over-35 five-a-side football. “My strike partner is Jürgen Klinsmann,” he says nonchalantly. He and Zellweger are rarely bothered by fans. “The community just doesn’t care. I bump into famous people in the coffee shop all the time.”
He calls Zellweger “the missus”, so will they marry? “I still believe in marriage, but right now we’re really happy. We don’t need the pressure of a label.”
Living in the US has also made him appreciate how much the UK does to protect its heritage. Restoring the farmhouse involves “loads of red tape, but I do that happily because it’s so important to preserve. I worry we’re losing a generation of craftspeople able to sustain a country full of old homes and cars.”
“I love waving the British flag in America,” he adds. “I always rave about how we do things really, really well, and we need a second generation to come through and continue to do it. I have faith it will happen. My glass is always half full.”
Ant Anstead: Born Mechanic begins on Quest on Monday 27 July at 9pm