James Daniel May (born 16 January 1963) is a British television presenter and award-winning journalist.
May is best known as co-presenter of the motoring program Top Gear alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond. He also writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph's motoring section. On Top Gear, his nickname is "Captain Slow", owing to his 'careful' driving style. He has, however, carried out some exceptionally high-speed driving (including taking a Bugatti Veyron to its top speed during an episode of Top Gear.
Early and Personal Life:
James May was born in Bristol, one of four children; he had two sisters and a brother. In early years James 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. Rotherham is the town where Jeremy Clarkson began his journalistic career. 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. May currently lives in Hammersmith, London with music journalist and 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 several cars, including a Bentley T2, a 1971 Rolls-Royce Corniche, a Jaguar XJS, a Range Rover, a Fiat Panda, a Datsun 120Y, a Porsche 911, a Porsche Boxster S (which he claims is the first car he has ever purchased new) a Mini Cooper and several motorcycles. He has a penchant for prestige cars like Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, as well as simple and basic cars such as the Fiat Panda and uses a Brompton folding bicycle for commuting.
May obtained a light aircraft pilot's licence in October 2006 having trained at White Waltham Airfield. 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. He owns a Luscombe 8A 'Silvaire' and an American Champion 8KCAB Super Decathlon with the registration number G-OCOK, a play on his trademark phrase used on Top Gear. In July 2008, May announced on a radio show that he was selling the Luscombe. He passed his driving test on his second attempt, and justified this by saying "All the best people pass the second time".
Journalism Career:
During the early 1980s, May worked as a writer for The Engineer and later Autocar magazine, from which he was sacked; he has since written for several publications, including a regular column called England Made Me in CAR Magazine and articles for Top Gear Magazine, as well as a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph.
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 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. 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 realize 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."
(Link to Picture of May's Hidden Message)
He has written a book titled May On Motors, which is a collection of his published articles, and co-authored Oz and James' 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.
Radio and Television Career:
His past television credits include presenting Driven on Channel 4 in 1998-1999, 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 James May: My Sister's Top Toys, this time attempting to investigate the gender divide of toy appeal.
He first co-presented Top Gear in 1999, before it was axed by the BBC owing to poor viewing figures. He rejoined the show in the second series of the present Top Gear format, where he earned the nickname "Captain Slow" owing to his "careful" driving style. Despite this nickname, he has done some especially high-speed driving, including on Top Gear Series 9 taking a Bugatti Veyron to its top speed of 253mph (407km/h) which is nearly one-third of the speed of sound at sea level. He also flew a Eurofighter Typhoon at a speed of around 1320 mph for his television program, 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 to the magnetic North Pole in a car (a modified Toyota Hilux) and also one of the first people to drive across the Makgadikgadi salt pans in Botswana. In late 2006, the BBC broadcast Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure, a series in which May, a committed bitter drinker, traveled 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.
He 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 traveled around the globe in search of implementations for concepts widely considered science fiction.
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 was followed by a another documentary on BBC Four called James May at the Edge of Space, where May was flown to the edge of space (70,000ft) in a Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Highlights of the footage from the training for the flight, and the flight itself was used in James May on The Moon, but was shown fully in this program. This made him the highest person, along with the pilot, at that time, after the crew of the International Space Station.
