James May

James Daniel May (born 16 January 1963) is an English television presenter and journalist.

During the early 1980s, May worked as a sub-editor for The Engineer and later Autocar magazine, from which he was dismissed for performing a prank.

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.

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 (known in typography as an initial).

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."

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 (for BBC One).

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.

May was briefly a co-presenter of the original Top Gear series in 1999.

Clarkson recalls May's firing in 2000 caused him to retreat into alcoholism for a brief period of time.

Following the first season of the show's relaunch in 2002, Clarkson managed to convince Andrew Wilman to rehire him to replace Jason Dawe.

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, which has since ceased operating.

May has presented other programmes on themes including science and technology, toys, wine culture, and the plight of manliness in modern times.

He wrote a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph's motoring section from 2003 to 2011.

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 Junior School in Newport.

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, and also spent a year studying metalwork at a technical college.

After graduating, May briefly worked at a hospital in Chelsea as a records officer and had a short stint in the civil service before taking up journalism and broadcasting in his thirties.

He 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.

He has written the book May on Motors (2006), which is a collection of his published articles, and co-authored Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure (2006), 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.

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 253 mph, then in 2010 he achieved 259.11 mph 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, he 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.

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 (2124 km/h) for his television programme, James May's 20th Century.

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.

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 program was cancelled the following year.