James May
James Daniel May is an English television presenter, author and journalist. He is best known as a co-presenter, alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, of the motoring programme Top Gear from 2003 until 2015 and the television series The Grand Tour for Amazon Prime Video from 2016 to 2024. He also served as a director of the production company W. Chump & Sons.
May has presented other programmes on themes including travel, science & technology, toys, wine culture, and the plight of manliness in modern times. He wrote a weekly column for The Daily Telegraphs motoring section from 2003 to 2011.
Early life
James Daniel May was born in Bristol, the son of aluminium factory manager James May and his wife Kathleen. He was one of four children; he has two sisters and a brother. May attended Caerleon Endowed School in Newport, Wales. He spent his teenage years in South Yorkshire where he attended Oakwood Comprehensive School in Rotherham and was a choirboy at Whiston Parish Church.May studied music at Pendle College, Lancaster University, where he learned to play the flute and piano; he also spent a year studying metalwork at a technical college. After graduating, May briefly worked in a number of jobs including for a car dealer, at a jewelry shop, in a pub, at a hospital in Chelsea as a records officer and had a short stint in the civil service. He then took up journalism and broadcasting in his thirties. He also held a part-time job as a moulder at the foundry his father was employed at and suggested in a 2017 interview with The Times that this formed his interest in mechanics.
Journalism career
In 1989, May began working as a sub-editor for The Engineer and later for Autocar magazine in the early 1990s, from which he was dismissed for performing a prank. He subsequently wrote car review columns for Scotland on Sunday and Country Life and revealed in a 2025 interview with The Times that he was also sacked from those two positions. He has since written for several publications, including the regular column England Made Me in Car Magazine, articles for Top Gear magazine, and a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph.He has written the book 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 wrote 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. Notes From The Hard Shoulder and James May's 20th Century, a book to accompany the television series of the same name, were published in 2007.
Dismissal from ''Autocar''
In an interview with Richard Allinson on BBC Radio 2, May confessed that in 1992 he was dismissed from Autocar magazine after putting together an acrostic in one issue. At the end of the year, the magazine's "Road Test Yearbook" 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.To alleviate the tedium, May wrote each review such that the initials on the first four spreads read "ROAD", "TEST", "YEAR" and "BOOK". Subsequent spreads seemingly had random letters, starting with "SOYO" and "UTHI"; when punctuated, these letters spelt out the message: "So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse."
In a 2019 interview with Carscoops.com, May stated that while the hidden message originally passed through the magazine's pre-printing review processes unnoticed, he was found out when readers began calling in to Autocars offices, thinking there might be a prize involved. Upon learning of this, the magazine's management called for May to be fired.
Television career
His past television credits include presenting Driven on Channel 4 in 1998, 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. James May: My Sisters' Top Toys attempted 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 bull penis and rotten shark and with his fish pie recipe.''Top Gear''
May was briefly a co-presenter of the original Top Gear series in 1999. During an interview in 2020, Jeremy Clarkson claimed that the show's original producers had decided to replace him with May in 1999, though they felt dissatisfied with May as he was soon fired in 2000, shortly before the entire programme was cancelled the following year. In 2002, May auditioned for the new version of Top Gear but was initially rejected by BBC executives who felt that his background was too similar to Clarkson and Hammond's and had limited appeal. Following the first season of Top Gear's relaunch, Clarkson managed to convince the show's producer Andy Wilman in 2003 to rehire May as Jason Dawe's replacement. By May's admission in 2025, he and Clarkson had met during the launch of a new Audi A4 convertible in France and after disagreeing on the car, Clarkson had thought the bickering between them would work on the programme.May first co-presented the revived series of Top Gear in its second series in 2003, where he earned the nickname "Captain Slow" owing to his careful driving style, and his OCD-like obsessions with order. Despite this sobriquet, he has done some especially high-speed driving – in the 2007 series, he took a Bugatti Veyron to its top speed of, then in 2010 he achieved in the Veyron's newer 16.4 Super Sport edition. In an earlier episode he also tested the original version of the Bugatti Veyron against the Pagani Zonda F.
May, along with co-presenter Jeremy Clarkson and an Icelandic support crew, travelled by car to the magnetic North Pole in 2007, using a modified Toyota Hilux. In the words of Clarkson, May was the first person to go there "who didn't want to be there". He also drove a modified Toyota Hilux up the side of the erupting volcano Eyjafjallajökull.
Following the BBC's decision not to renew Jeremy Clarkson's contract with the show on 25 March 2015, May stated in April 2015 that he would not continue to present Top Gear as part of a new line-up of presenters.
Science
May presented Inside Killer Sharks, a documentary for Sky, and James May's 20th Century, investigating inventions. He flew in a Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon at a speed of around 1320 mph for his television programme, 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. He also presented James May's Man Lab from 2010 to 2013. In 2013, May narrated To Space & Back, a documentary on the influence of developments in space exploration on modern technology produced by Sky-Skan and The Franklin Institute.''James May on the Moon''
James May on the Moon commemorated 40 years since man first landed on the Moon. This was followed by another documentary on BBC Four called James May at the Edge of Space, where May was flown to the stratosphere in a US 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. This made him one of the highest flying people, along with the pilot, at that time, after the crew of the International Space Station.''James May's Toy Stories''
Beginning in October 2009, May presented a six-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. In August 2009, May built a full-sized house out of Lego at Denbies Wine Estate in Surrey. 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; 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 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 parts of the track being stolen and vandals placing coins on the track, causing a short circuit. Later, in 2011, May tried for the record again, proposing a race between German model railroad enthusiasts and their British counterparts. The two teams would start at opposite ends along double tracked mainline. This time, the effort succeeded with both teams successfully running three trains the entire route.
A special Christmas Episode called Flight Club, aired in December 2012. In this special, James and his team built a huge toy glider that flew 22 miles from Devon to the island of Lundy.
In 2013, May created a life-size, fully functional motorcycle and sidecar made entirely out of the construction toy Meccano. Joined by Oz Clarke, he then completed a full lap of the Isle of Man TT Course, a full mile-long circuit.