Maine native hosting History Channel show
For more than a decade Mainer Josh Hancock has called Los Angeles home, working as an automotive consultant. Now he’s in front of the camera as the host of the new TV show “Shifting Gears.”
Try as he might to conceal his Maine accent, his proclivity to pronounce car as “caah” still slips through.
No worries, though, because his director thinks it’s cute and he’s having the time of his life in Hollywood, whether it’s finding cars for a Martin Scorsese film or tooling around in Austin Powers’ Jaguar.
“I just have one of the best jobs that there is,” said Hancock, whose current stable of vehicles includes such gems as an Audi A8 and a convertible Jaguar XKR, in addition to a Lincoln Aviator and Ford F-150 truck.
The York native is host and co-executive producer of “Shifting Gears,” which airs Saturdays at 6:30 p.m. on the History Channel.
The show is a mix of information and entertainment.
In one the segments, Hancock takes a crack guessing what kind of car people drive based on their personality.
He also explores how a shiny new car can change a person’s life. In the first episode, he swapped an aspiring writer’s beat-up 1991 Ford Escort for an $85,000 Maserati Spider, and the cameras rolled as the writer spun around Los Angeles for three days in his dream car, astonishing friends and turning heads.
In another segment, Hancock drove a beat-up 1975 Cadillac El Dorado to a fancy restaurant and rigged it to conk out on the valet.
The offbeat show is part of the History Channel’s effort to appeal to a broader audience on cable TV.
“We’re trying to do some new things, some different things, to capture more of the male audience without changing the brand,” said Charles Maday, History Channel head of programming.
Shifting Gears is the network’s first car series. Maday said it’s different from car shows on other networks because there’s always a historical segment included to educate viewers.
Hosting Shifting Gears is a dream job for Hancock, who began his driving career at age 8, meandering up and down his grandmother’s quarter-mile driveway in the family car.
His uncle, retired Maine State Trooper William Hancock, gave him proper driving lessons when he was around 13. Together, Josh and his uncle spent hours fiddling with cars, talking about cars, driving cars.
His father, Frank E. Hancock, was the state’s attorney general in the early 1960s.
“I like to say that I learned how to be an orator and a negotiator and the mayor from my father, and I learned how to love cars and fix cars from my uncle. He could fix anything. We just had the best time,” he said.
At 45, Hancock still has the same enthusiasm for cars as when he was tooling around in his first vehicle, a sea-mist green 1970 Ford Bronco with a white top.
Right now, he’s got a constant flow of cars to choose and test drive from whatever movie he’s working on at the time.
While he gets to drive dream machines like the Audi A8 and Jaguar XKR, those don’t compare to Hollywood machines that surround him, like the “Goldmember” Cadillac from the third Austin Powers movie, or one of the super cars from “Gone in 60 Seconds.”
The excitement tends to spread quickly, literally.
“When we built all the ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ cars kids used to chase me down the street. It was a constant, ‘Do you want to race?”‘ he said.
Hancock graduated from Northwood University in Michigan with a major in business and minor in automotive marketing, and began his career by talking his way onto the St. Louis set of the 1990 movie “White Palace,” starting Susan Sarandon and James Spader.
He was hired as a stunt driver but ended up consulting with the movie’s production staff about cars. The crew hired him for their next film in Los Angeles, and he’s been there ever since.
“I just found this niche that nobody filled,” he said. “Nobody had a say on the cars on the creative level. It always came from the director and the writer, and they didn’t necessarily know cars.”
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On the Net:
Hancock’s Web site www.joshcar.com
History Channel http://www.historychannel.com
AP-ES-09-28-03 1315EDT
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