up as a minstrel on one occasion. May has always had a penchant for medieval history and music, so he enjoys visiting places like Wells Cathedral.
In fact, his musical prowess was sufficiently advanced for him to go on to study music at Lancaster University (years later when his Top Gear career was in full flight, he would be presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Lancaster). He loves classical music to this day and when he finally acquired an iPod in 2008, one of the first albums downloaded onto it was a Chopin piece (his favourite is that composer’s ‘Prelude No. 24 in D Minor for the Piano’ and Couperin’s ‘Les Baricades Misterieuses’ for the harpsichord – the instrument he originally wanted to study at university). It was while at Lancaster that he developed a more rebellious streak although when pressed, he actually clarified this by saying he ‘was mildly rebellious, then … I didn’t set fire to anyone, I didn’t murder anyone, but, you know, I did occasionally wear denim waistcoats and embroider my jeans …’
After graduating, like many fellow students initially he had no focussed idea of what career to pursue, so he enrolled at an employment agency. The first job this temporary route secured him was working in the archive department of a women’s hospital in west London and he also had a brief stint in the Civil Service. By the late 1980s, he migrated to working as a writer for The Engineer: the first leap from pen pushing to journalism was simply made by applying for an advertised job in the magazine. Soon he would also secure commissioned writing for Autocar magazine.
It is at the latter where the first signs of the cheeky schoolboy humour that would later equip him perfectly to work on Top Gear came into play. In 1992, he was given the task of compiling Autocar’s end-of-year ‘Road Test Book’ supplement. This was something he found deeply boring, perhaps exacerbated by what he himself has described as his ‘innate laziness, deep down I am lazy.’
So, to spice up the tedium, he inserted a hidden message in the supplement by taking the initial letter of each spread of reviews so that when read in sequence, they formed a sentence. This crafty device is actually called an acrostic, a fact probably only James May would know. It took him two months to compile the supplement, including all the appropriate words to make up his secret message.
So what exactly did he say?
‘So you think it’s really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse!’
Later he said that he’d forgotten what he’d done because back then the lead time from editing and design to actually printing the magazine was well over two months. He told BBC Radio 2 how he eventually found out his employer’s reaction: ‘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.’
He was subsequently sacked.
Still, a start in motoring journalism had been made. Unemployed briefly and with little money right before Christmas, he pitched numerous ideas to Car magazine and the publication was sufficiently impressed by his knowledge, experience and passion to offer him his own column. James May’s writing is very fluid and understated in its humour (quite the opposite of Clarkson’s brilliant and deceptively deft smash-and-grab prose) and he quickly acquired fans within automotive journalism and the wider reading public.
And this is how his path started to turn towards Top Gear; when Channel 4 launched the Top Gear rival, Driven, as we have seen he was approached and became one of the show’s main three presenters. May impressed although the programme didn’t, but nonetheless a stuttering move into television had been made.
As Jon Bentley has mentioned, the real leap came when Jeremy Clarkson decided to leave old Top Gear, which inadvertently provided the perfect opportunity for James to bring his many talents to the nation’s foremost motoring show. At that point, by his own admission, he ‘never imagined in a million years that it would turn into the phenomenon that it has. If I had, I would have thought twice about it, to be honest – I find being famous slightly embarrassing.’
Before that could happen, however, the old version of Top Gear itself was facing what threatened to be an almost terminal turn of events …
When the BBC announced in the late summer of 2001 that Top Gear was being taken off-air for the aforementioned ‘full service and an overhaul’, many industry insiders predicted the programme was effectively in its death-throes. The announcement came some 23 years after the show had first been broadcast; given at the time of writing, the current more successful generation of Top Gear has only been on-air for eight years, that gives you some indication of just how successful and rare its predecessor’s longevity was.
However, the turn of the Millennium was a very different place in TV-land from 1977. For one, the television landscape had changed immeasurably since the heady days of 6 million car enthusiasts tuning in. Magazine shows were a tired old format and recent additions to primetime schedules such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force proved hugely popular.
Second, despite various sources seemingly re-writing much of the old Top Gear’s history into a staid and unadventurous programme like some kind of benign and cosy old uncle, in its latter years the first generation of the show was a highly controversial programme. Jeremy Clarkson worked so well when he first appeared on our screens because he was outspoken, this is not something that evolved over time. This fact is reflected in the response from many quarters when the news filtered out that Top Gear might be facing a petrol-fumed end.
Although the BBC’s statement simply said that every aspect of the format and show was under review, when directly asked about how terminal the decision was, they declined to rule out the series being abandoned for good. By 2001, ratings were well down on their lofty peak and the programme’s style was increasingly criticised by industry insiders for being ‘old fashioned’. Since Clarkson and Quentin Willson had left, ratings dropped further, struggling to get past between 2 and 3 million for most shows (although this was still substantial for a BBC2 programme and in fact had even turned back onto an upward curve of late).
Nonetheless, according to one motoring writer, Chris Gray of the Independent, ‘Top Gear has become a rotting old banger with less sex appeal than your granny.’ Gray went on to vilify the programme, saying that ‘Britain’s most famously politically incorrect motoring show’ was being pulled and bemoaned ‘Clarkson’s childish sexism and love of foreign stereotypes … he turned laddishness into an art form and MPs condemned the obsession with speed and acceleration.’
Slightly oddly, two new motoring shows – including one with the name still involved (Top Gear: Car Jack) – were already scheduled for the following year. The Car Jack format was a review programme with most features done by the general public. The second show was to be called Panic Mechanic and boasted a bent for weird and wonderful design features as well as ‘tough physical challenges’, something more reminiscent of the latter-day success of Pimp My Ride. And so there were mixed signals.
The spectre of Top Gear wasn’t finished yet, however. In 2002, a special was broadcast
