James May
James May | |
|---|---|
 May in 2006 | |
| Born | James Daniel May 16 January 1963[1] |
| Nationality | British |
| Other names | Captain Slow |
| Education | Caerleon Endowed Junior School Oakwood Comprehensive School |
| Alma mater | Lancaster University |
| Occupation(s) | Author, writer, journalist, television presenter, pianist, media personality |
| Years active | 1998–present |
| Employer(s) | BBC, The Daily Telegraph, (previously Channel 4, ITV & Sky) |
| Known for | Presenting: |
| Height | 1.85 m (6 ft 1 in) |
| Partner | Sarah Frater (2000–present) |
James Daniel May (born 16 January 1963[2]) is an English broadcaster, 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.[3] 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 character has the nickname "Captain Slow", because he is cast as having a careful driving style, a love of small, underpowered cars and habit of getting lost and distracted whilst driving. In a February 2007 episode of Top Gear[4] he carried out a successful top speed test drive of a Bugatti Veyron at the Ehra-Lessien Volkswagen test track, reaching 407 kilometres per hour (253 mph). In July 2010 he repeated the attempt in the updated Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, reaching the vehicle's top speed of 417.6 kilometres per hour (259.5 mph),[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] He was also at school with Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes star Dean Andrews.[8] 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.[9]
Personal life
May currently lives in Hammersmith, London with dance critic Sarah Frater, whom he has dated since 2000.[10][11]
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),[12] Mini Cooper, Citroen Ami, Mazda MX-5, Ferrari F430, Porsche 993 C2 Coupé S[13] 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.[14] He passed his driving test on his second attempt, and justified this by saying "All the best people pass the second time".[15] He considers himself to be a Rolls Royce expert.[16]
May obtained a light aircraft pilot's licence in October 2006 having trained at White Waltham Airfield. He owns a Luscombe 8A 'Silvaire' and an American Champion 8KCAB Super Decathlon. In July 2008, May announced on a radio show that he was selling the Luscombe.[17] May was presented an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Lancaster University on 15 July 2010. [18]
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,[19] 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."[20]
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,[21] and co-hosting the ITV1 coverage of the 2006 London Boat Show.[22] He also wrote and presented a Christmas special called James May's Top Toys (for BBC One) exploring the toys of his childhood.[23] 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.[24] In series 3, episode 3[25] of Gordon Ramsay's The F Word, May managed to beat Ramsay in eating animal penises[26] and with his fish pie recipe.[27][28]
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 character's careful driving style. Despite this sobriquet, he has done some especially high-speed driving, including in Top Gear Series 10, 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 did not 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.[29] 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.[30] 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.[31]
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.[3] This was followed by another documentary on BBC Four called James May at the Edge of Space, where May was flown to the edge of space (70,000 ft) in a U.S. Air Force 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 programme.[32] This made him one of the highest flying persons, along with the pilot, at that time, after the crew of the International Space Station.[32]
James May's Toy Stories
Beginning in October 2009, May presented a 6-part TV series showing favourite toys of the past era and whether they can be applied in the modern day. The toys featured were Airfix, Plasticine, Meccano, Scalextric, Lego and Hornby. In each show, May attempts to take each toy to its limits, also fulfilling several of his boyhood dreams in the process. For example, in August 2009, May built a full-sized house out of Lego at Denbies Wine Estate in Surrey.[33] 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[34] 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.[35] Also for the series, he recreated the banked track at Brooklands using Scalextric track,[36] 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.[37] The running order is:
| Episode number | Featured toy | Feat accomplished |
|---|---|---|
| One | Airfix | Building a 1:1 scale Spitfire model in the plastic injection moulding style of Airfix |
| Two | Plasticine | Making a garden entirely from plasticine and submitting it to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show |
| Three | Meccano | Building a bridge crossing Liverpool's revamped Pier Head canal |
| Four | Scalextric | Creating a life-size representation of the Brooklands racetrack entirely in Scalextric |
| Five | Lego | Constructing a life-size house made entirely from Lego bricks |
| Six | Hornby | Creating the world's longest OO gauge train set from Barnstaple to Bideford, a distance of around 10 miles. |
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.[38] A second series was transmitted in late 2007, this time with May and Clarke in the Californian wine country,[39] and was followed by a third series in 2009 called Oz and James Drink to Britain.
| Programme | Notes |
|---|---|
| Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure | Book released (October 2006), DVD released (2007) |
| Oz and James Drink to Britain | Book released (January 2009), DVD released (2009) |
Television
| Year | Title | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 1999 | Top Gear (Original Format) | Presenter |
| 2003 | Top Gear (Current Format) | Presenter |
| 2005 | James May's Top Toys | Presenter |
| 2006 | Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure | Presenter |
| 2006 | Inside Killer Sharks | Presenter |
| 2006 | Petrolheads | Guest |
| 2007 | Top Gear of the Pops | Presenter |
| 2007 | James May's 20th Century | Presenter |
| 2007 | James May: My Sisters' Top Toys | Presenter |
| 2008 | Top Ground Gear Force | Presenter |
| 2008 | James May's Big Ideas | Presenter |
| 2009 | Oz and James Drink to Britain | Presenter |
| 2009 | James May on the Moon | Presenter |
| 2009 | James May at the Edge of Space | Presenter |
| 2009 | James May's Toy Stories | Presenter |
| 2010 | James May's Man Lab | Presenter |
DVD
| Title | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|
| James May's Motormania Car Quiz | DMD | 2006 |
| James May's 20th Century | ITV | 2007 |
| James May's Big Ideas | DMD | 2009 |
| James May's Moon Adventures1 | BBC | 2009 |
| James May's Amazing Brain Trainer | DMD | 2009 |
| James May's Toy Stories | BBC | 2009 |
| Oz and James Big Wine Adventure: Series One | BBC | 2006 |
| Oz and James Big Wine Adventure: Series Two | BBC | 2008 |
| Oz and James Drink to Britain: Series Three | BBC | 2009 |
| Top Gear Apocalypse | BBC | 2010 |
^1 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
| Title | Publisher | Year |
|---|---|---|
| May on Motors: On the Road with James May | Virgin Books | 2006 |
| Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure | BBC Books | 2006 |
| May on Motors | Virgin Books | 2007 |
| Notes from the Hard Shoulder | Virgin Books | 2007 |
| James May's 20th Century | Hodder & Stoughton | 2007 |
| James May's Magnificent Machines | Hodder & Stoughton | 2008 |
| Oz and James Drink to Britain | Pavilion (Anova) | 2009 |
| James May's Car Fever (H/B) | Hodder & Stoughton | 2009 |
| James May's Car Fever (P/B) | Hodder & Stoughton | 2009 |
| James May's Toy Stories | Conway (Anova) | 2009 |
| James May's Car Fever: Volume 2 | Hodder & Stoughton | 2010 |
| How to Land an A330 Airbus | Hodder & Stoughton | 2010 |
References
- ^ Philby, Charlotte (27 September 2008). "My Secret Life: James May, TV presenter, age 45 - Profiles, People - The Independent". London: www.independent.co.uk. Retrieved 20 January 2010.
- ^ Researcha
- ^ a b James May on the Moon
- ^ "Top Gear: Season 9, Episode 2". 4 February 2007. BBC.
{{cite episode}}: Missing or empty|series=(help); Unknown parameter|episodelink=ignored (|episode-link=suggested) (help) - ^ "Top Gear: Season 15, Episode 5". 25 July 2010. BBC.
{{cite episode}}: Missing or empty|series=(help); Unknown parameter|episodelink=ignored (|episode-link=suggested) (help) - ^ "I never liked dolls much, and neither did my brother" – "James May: My Sisters' Top Toys". 23 December 2007. BBC.
{{cite episode}}: Missing or empty|series=(help); Unknown parameter|episodelink=ignored (|episode-link=suggested) (help) - ^ James May (10 November 2007). "James May column: "Frocks make a boy a man"". London: Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 31 December 2007.
- ^ "Q&A with Dean Andrews feature - 2008". Top Gear. 7 May 2008. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ Duerden, Nick (15 August 2009). "The mild one: How James May became the most in-demand presenter on British television". London: The Independent. Retrieved 18 August 2009.
- ^ http://transmission.blogs.topgear.com/2011/01/23/video-behind-the-scenes-at-the-first-of-the-new-series/
- ^ Lewis, Simon (13 June 2009). "Jeremy Clarkson? Politicians? Aston Martins? Don't get Top Gear's James May started..." London: The Daily Mail. Retrieved 15 June 2009.
- ^ May, James (22 October 2005). "As seen on TV: Porsche breaks the spell of perfection". London: Telegraph. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ Jeremy Clarkson states in the sixth episode of the sixteenth series of Top Gear that both Richard Hammond and James May own a Porsche C2 S.
- ^ "Mine's a pint: a preposterous excuse for a Porsche". London: Daily Telegraph. 3 February 2006. Retrieved 21 March 2009.
James May with his Brompton bike
- ^ "Dave: What's on Dave: James May interview". Uktv.co.uk. 29 March 2007. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ Top Gear Season 11 Episode 6
- ^ BBC Radio 5's Simon Mayo, broadcast 14 July 2008
- ^ "Honorary Degrees 2010". Lancaster University. March 2010. Retrieved 20 March 2010.
- ^ BBC Radio 2, broadcast 6 January 2006
- ^ "Captain Slow takes the fast lane - TV & Radio - Entertainment". Melbourne: theage.com.au. 19 June 2008. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ James May IMDb.com
- ^ "James May, Top Gear presenter, after-dinner speaker and awards host". Speakers Corner. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ James May's Top Toys IMDb.com
- ^ "Two Programmes - James May: My Sister's Top Toys". BBC. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ "Season 3 Episode 3 - Gordon Ramsay's F Word - BBC America". www.bbcamerica.com. Retrieved 8 February 2010.
- ^ "GORD WON'T SCOFF THAT, WILLY? - The Daily Record". www.dailyrecord.co.uk. Retrieved 8 February 2010.
- ^ [1] "The worst ever would have to be James May, with his fish pie. Even though he won, which was extraordinary. He was drinking a bottle of red wine throughout the challenge, so I thought it was in the bag."
- ^ [2] "This recipe is Gordon's version of a posh fish pie originally made by James May."
- ^ "Top Gear's James May tells BBC Trust to 'sod off' after show is rapped for 'glamorising drink-driving' | Mail Online". London: Dailymail.co.uk. 7 March 2008. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ "BBC/OU Open2.net - James May's 20th Century". Open2.net. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ "BBC/OU Open2.net - James May's Big Ideas". Open2.net. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ a b James May at the Edge of Space
- ^ "UK | England | Surrey | May starts building Lego house". BBC News. 1 August 2009. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ Radio Times 24–30 October 2009
- ^ "Entertainment | James May's Lego house demolished". BBC News. 22 September 2009. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ May to attempt Scalextric record, BBC News, 7 August 2009, Retrieved on 9 August 2009
- ^ "James May's model railway record bid derailed by vandal attack | Mail Online". London: Dailymail.co.uk. 26 August 2009. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ "Food - TV and radio - Episode guide". BBC. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
- ^ "Food - TV and Radio". BBC. Retrieved 5 November 2009.
External links
- Telegraph Motoring - James May's weekly column
- James May at IMDb
- James May on Top Gear
- Daily Mail article on May