| Name | James May |
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| Caption | May in 2006. |
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| Birth name | James Daniel May |
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| Birth date | January 16, 1963 |
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| Birth place | Bristol, England, United Kingdom |
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| Residence | Hammersmith, London, England, United Kingdom |
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| Nationality | British |
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| Other names | Captain Slow |
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| Known for | Presenting: |
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| Education | Caerleon Endowed Junior SchoolOakwood Comprehensive SchoolLancaster University |
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| Years active | 1998–present |
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| Employer | BBC, The Daily Telegraph,(previously Channel 4, ITV and Sky) |
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| Occupation | Author, writer, journalist, television presenter, media personality, pianist |
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| Home town | Bristol, England |
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| Height | |
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| Partner | Sarah Frater (2000–present) |
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James Daniel May (born 16 January 1963) is an English
television presenter, award-winning
journalist and
writer.
May is best known as co-presenter of the motoring programme Top Gear alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, and has presented a variety of other television documentaries and entertainment programmes around themes including science and technology, childhood toys, cars, food and drink, and the plight of manliness in modern times. In 2009 he presented a two part documentary programme marking the 40th anniversary of the moon landings, culminating in him taking a flight to the edge of space aboard a U2 spy plane.
In addition he has released a variety of DVDs and books with similar themes, and writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph's motoring section.
On Top Gear, his nickname is "Captain Slow", because of his careful driving style, love of small, underpowered cars and his habit of getting lost and distracted whilst driving. In a February 2007 episode of Top Gear he carried out a successful top speed test drive of a Bugatti Veyron at the Ehra-Lessien Volkswagen test track, reaching . In July 2010 he repeated the attempt in the updated Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, reaching the vehicle's top speed of , confirming that it had retaken the title as the fastest road car in production.
Early life
James May was born in
Bristol, one of four children; he has two sisters and a brother.
In his early years, May attended
Caerleon Endowed Junior School in
Newport,
Monmouthshire. He spent his teenage years in
South Yorkshire where he attended
Oakwood Comprehensive School in
Rotherham and was a choirboy at
Whiston Parish Church. He was also at school with
Life On Mars and
Ashes to Ashes star
Dean Andrews. A keen
flautist and pianist, he later studied music at
Lancaster University, where he was a member of
Pendle College. After graduating, May briefly worked at a hospital in Chelsea as a records' officer, and had a short stint in
Her Majesty's Civil Service.
Personal life
May currently lives in
Hammersmith,
London with dance critic Sarah Frater, whom he has dated since 2000, and with his cat Fusker, who was a gift from
Richard Hammond's wife, Mindy.
May has owned a number of cars:
Bentley T2, Triumph 2000, Rover P6, Alfa Romeo 164, 1971 Rolls-Royce Corniche, Jaguar XJS,
Range Rover, Fiat Panda, Datsun 120Y, Vauxhall Cavalier, Porsche 911, Porsche Boxster S (which he claims is the first car he has ever purchased new), Mini Cooper, Citroen Ami, Mazda MX-5, Ferrari F430 and several classic motorcycles. He has a penchant for prestige cars like Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, simple and basic cars such as the Fiat Panda, and motorcycles. He often uses a Brompton folding bicycle for commuting. He passed his driving test on his second attempt, and justified this by saying "All the best people pass the second time". He considers himself to be a Rolls Royce expert.
May obtained a light aircraft pilot's licence in October 2006 having trained at White Waltham Airfield despite suffering from mild acrophobia. Although he had not qualified for night flying at the time, he was still able to fly a Cessna 182 in a Top Gear challenge with Richard Hammond as a passenger in which his lack of night rating features prominently. Because he is not allowed to steer an aircraft during night time he and Richard Hammond lost the race from north Italy to London, England against Jeremy Clarkson in a Bugatti Veyron. He owns a and an American Champion 8KCAB Super Decathlon with the registration number G-OCOK, a play on "Oh, cock", his trademark phrase used on Top Gear. In July 2008, May announced on a radio show that he was selling the Luscombe.
May was presented an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Lancaster University on July 15th, at its 2010 award ceremonies.
Journalism
During the early 1980s, May worked as a writer for
The Engineer and later
Autocar magazine, from which he was dismissed. He has since written for several publications, including a regular column called
England Made Me in
Car Magazine, articles for
Top Gear magazine, and a weekly column in
The Daily Telegraph.
He has written a book titled May On Motors, which is a collection of his published articles, and co-authored Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure, based on the TV series of the same name.
He has also written the afterword to Long Lane with Turnings, published in September 2006, the final book by motoring writer L. J. K. Setright. In the same month he co-presented a tribute to Raymond Baxter. His book, Notes From The Hard Shoulder, was published on 26 April 2007. James May's 20th Century, a book to accompany the television series of the same name, was published on 6 September 2007.
Dismissal from Autocar
In an interview with
Richard Allinson on
BBC Radio 2, May confessed that he was fired in 1992 from
Autocar magazine after putting together a hidden message or
acrostic in one issue. At the end of the year, the magazine's "Road Test Year Book" supplement was published. Each spread featured four reviews and each review started with a large red letter (known in
typography as an
initial). May's role was to put the entire supplement together, which "was extremely boring and took several months". He went on to say:
So I had this idea that if I re-edited the beginnings of all the little texts, I could make these red letters spell out a message through the magazine, which I thought was brilliant. I can't remember exactly what it said, but it was to the effect that "You might think this is a really great thing, but if you were sitting here making it up you'd realise it's a real pain in the arse". It took me about two months to do it and on the day that it came out I'd actually forgotten that I'd done it because there's a bit of a gap between it being "put to bed" and coming out on the shelves. When I arrived at work that morning everybody was looking at their shoes and I was summoned to the managing director of the company's office. The thing had come out and nobody at work had spotted what I'd done because I'd made the words work around the pages so you never saw a whole word. But all the readers had seen it and they'd written in thinking they'd won a prize or a car or something.
May's original message, punctuated appropriately, reads: "So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse."
Radio and television
His past television credits include presenting
Driven on
Channel 4 in 1998-99, narrating an eight-part
BBC One series called
Road Rage School, and co-hosting the
ITV1 coverage of the
2006 London Boat Show. He also wrote and presented a Christmas special called
James May's Top Toys (for BBC One) exploring the toys of his childhood. This list was followed up the next year by a sequel of sorts, broadcast on
BBC Two, entitled
, this time attempting to investigate the gender divide of toy appeal. In series 3, episode 3 of
Gordon Ramsay's
The F Word, May managed to beat Ramsay in eating animal penises as well as with his
fish pie recipe.
Top Gear
May first co-presented
Top Gear in 1999, before it was axed by the BBC because of poor viewing figures. He rejoined the show in the second series of the present
Top Gear format in 2003, where he earned the nickname "Captain Slow" owing to his "careful" driving style. Despite this sobriquet, he has done some especially high-speed driving, including in
Top Gear Series 9, taking a
Bugatti Veyron to its top speed of 253 mph (407 km/h) which is nearly one-third of the
speed of sound at sea level and later on taking a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport edition to 259 mph (417 km/h). In an earlier episode he also tested the original version of the
Bugatti Veyron against the new
Pagani Zonda F. On the show he claimed that it was 'a piece of cake' driving those cars, but seconds later
Jeremy Clarkson played a tape showing him spinning wildly over the test track in the Zonda. Originally he didn't want to do this test, but Clarkson hurt his neck in the previous episode while driving a truck through a brick wall and
Richard Hammond claimed that he was busy selling fish at
Morrisons. He is often mocked for a poor sense of direction, shown getting lost many times through out the course of the series, including race tracks and even being mocked once by Jeremy and Hammond for mistaking a normal
Range Rover as the camera crew. He also flew in a
Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon at a speed of around 1320 mph for his television programme,
James May's 20th Century. He also became one of the first people — with co-presenter
Jeremy Clarkson and an
Icelandic support crew — to travel by car to the
magnetic North Pole, using a modified
Toyota Hilux. He was also one of the first people to drive across the
Makgadikgadi salt plains in
Botswana. He has also driven a 1.3 litre
Suzuki SJ413 through the Bolivian jungle and along
Death Road and over the Andes to the Pacific Ocean in Chile. He also drove a modified Toyota Hilux (that was also used as a crew car during the North pole expedition) up the side of the erupting volcano
Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland.
Science
May has also presented a documentary for
Sky about sharks called
Inside Killer Sharks and a series looking at inventions and discoveries during the twentieth century, entitled
James May's 20th Century. In late 2008, the BBC broadcast
James May's Big Ideas, a three-part series in which May travelled around the globe in search of implementations for concepts widely considered
science fiction.
James May on the Moon
In June 2009 May presented a documentary on BBC Two called
James May on the Moon commemorating 40 years since man first landed on the moon. This made him one of the highest flying persons, along with the pilot, at that time, after the SR-71 pilots and the crew of the
International Space Station. Plans for Legoland to move it to their theme park fell through in September 2009 because costs to deconstruct, move and then rebuild were too high and despite a final Facebook appeal for someone to take it, it was demolished on 22 September, with the plastic bricks planned to be donated to charity. Also for the series, he has recreated the banked track at
Brooklands using
Scalextric track, and an attempt at the world's longest working model railway along the
Tarka Trail between
Barnstaple and
Bideford in North Devon, although the attempt was foiled due to vandals placing coins on the track, causing a short circuit. The running order is as follows:
Drink
In late 2006, the BBC broadcast
Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure, a series in which May, a committed
bitter drinker, travelled around France with wine expert
Oz Clarke. A second series was transmitted in late 2007, this time with May and Clarke in the Californian wine country, and was followed by a third series in 2009 called
Oz and James Drink to Britain.
Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure
Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure was first aired in 2006 on BBC2. May and wine connoisseur
Oz Clarke toured France in the first series. It was Oz's mission to educate the so-called 'scruffbag' in the arts of fine wines, including their terroir, grape types, and vineyard locations. James perhaps comprised the characteristics of a young, rebellious schoolboy as Oz played the role of his disciplining teacher. The pair had many a personality clash, but these were tongue-in-cheek and the two of them combined wit with knowledge and got on extremely well. In the second series, the pair toured
California learning more about wine. A notable moment was in the first episode, when James told Oz he'd bought them a new 'car'. Oz spotted a
Ford Mustang in the car park, but this was dismissed by James when he told Oz what he'd bought was in fact 'better'. He had, in actual fact, purchased a colossal
motorhome which was, in James's words, longer than a
Routemaster bus. Oz was clearly shocked upon learning this, but tried his best to hide his excitement. This tour bus was used by the two of them throughout the remainder of the series. In episode one of the second season about California, named
Santa Barbara, the pair met
Fess Parker, who has his own winery at
Los Olivos, in the
Santa Ynez Valley, and who they said was known for playing
Davy Crockett.
Oz and James Drink to Britain
The pair's third series was entitled
Oz and James Drink to Britain. This series consisted of Oz and James touring, instead of France and
California, Great Britain and Ireland in a bid to find the definitive drink that ultimately spoke for the nation. Rather than Oz educating James in a specialist subject, it was more the two of them learning together in a subject on which neither of them were informed. They learned the basics of brewing beer, including being taught all about
barley (notably husks - James remarked "So you've misled thousands of little husks of barley into thinking it's spring?"), all about
hops and hop gardens ("So just because they're called hop gardens doesn't mean they're quite small and at the back of a house?"), the botanicals that
gin comprises, and how to make cider. At the beginning of the series, James was given the task of picking an appropriate car for them to tour Britain in. James bought a
Rolls-Royce Corniche cabriolet, which he believed to be 'quintessentially British'. They also bought a caravan to sleep in, which Oz later described as being 'small, inadequate and poorly built'. It was a 1978 caravan built by
Sprite. Oz also said at the beginning of the series, to James, "I am utterly looking forward to spending my summer in close proximity to you, and I will provide you with much ale", to which James replied "Correct answer". Drink to Britain was first aired in January 2009.
Television
DVD
As The DVD Contains Both "On The Moon" and "The Edge Of Space", The Classification Name Is "Moon Adventures" or "James May On The Moon".
Books
References
External links
Telegraph Motoring - James May's weekly column
James May on Top Gear
Daily Mail article on May
Category:1963 births
Category:Living people
Category:British television presenters
Category:People from Bristol
Category:Top Gear
Category:English writers
Category:Alumni of Lancaster University
Category:Motoring journalists
Category:World record holders
Category:British people of Armenian descent
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