His father ran a probate business in the market square and sent his sons to the mixed Ripon Grammar School. Hammond was brought up a Christian and even revealed that his parents met through the church (years later he was to present a documentary called Richard Hammond’s Search for the Holy Grail). As he grew into his teens however, he grew disillusioned with religion, particularly when he became more aware of what he felt was the conflict it can cause in society. There is scant biographical information available about his school years and when he does talk of those formative days, it’s usually in a jovial and rather nondescript fashion.
‘I’ll never forget standing outside a door,’ he told the Daily Mirror, ‘knowing that on the other side was not only a classroom full of strangers but also some of them were girls. I’d rather have walked into a room full of crocodiles! Then I discovered they were actually quite nice but I was hopeless at pursuing them.’
He had the usual schoolboy crushes although the biggest one obviously didn’t make too much of an impression as he isn’t sure of her name, possibly Sarah. But when she grabbed and kissed him at a school party, he was frightened away and ‘went off her immediately’.
From 1987 to 1989, Hammond attended the Harrogate College of Art and Technology to study photography and television production, from where he eventually graduated with a National Diploma in Visual Communication. It was at college that he started to play bass guitar and joined in bands, as well as hanging out with his good friend Jonathan Baldwin (who would become a noted author and academic).
After graduation, he began working for several regional radio stations, including Radio Cleveland, Radio York, Radio Cumbria, Radio Leeds and Radio Lancashire. One of his shows was the oddly titled ‘Lamb Bank’ on BBC Radio Cumbria but by 1995, he had become restless and was looking for openings in TV work. The path to Top Gear began perhaps during this uncertain period when he landed a job with a PR company organising corporate events for the Ferrari Owners Club and Renault Sport, among others. Cars had always been on his radar: ‘When I was five, I sat on my father’s lap and asked him how many days it was before I could take my driving test.’
This PR work put him at the heart of the motorsport trade and with his effervescent personality and already-impressive radio broadcasting experience it was perhaps inevitable that TV producers picked up on his talents. Thus, in 1998, a team of satellite TV producers approached Hammond to present Motor Week, which he did for a year to great acclaim. At this point, the offers started to flood in, with work for various motor shows such as 4 Wheels, 2 Wheels, Kits n’ Cruisin’ and Used Bike Heaven. He even had a stint on The Money Channel’s Money Matters and Livetime for Granada Breeze. It was in 2001, however, that the call for an audition for a more famous motor show came into his agent’s office and would soon change his life.
James May, the laconic driver christened ‘Captain Slow’ by his Top Gear presenters, shares his birthday with Cliff ‘The Grinder’ Thorburn, the snooker World Champion famous for being slow. Born in Bristol, on 16 January 1963, he has two sisters and a brother. His father was a steelworker, his mother a nurse. Early school years were at Caerleon Endowed Junior School in Newport, south Wales. As May hit his teens, the family moved north (just like Hammond’s) and he then attended Oakwood Comprehensive School in Rotherham.
May has since said that although his family moved house quite often and ‘all over Britain’ when he was a child, he was very happy: ‘we had food and shoes.’ Like most boys of that age he wanted to be a fighter pilot although the statistical nerd was fighting to get out too, as he has revealed that he also fancied being a surgeon. He attributes his natural tendency for being thorough and meticulous to his dad and credits his mum for bringing him up to be ‘nice’. May’s father is also responsible for his love of cars: when he was three, he woke one morning to find a gleaming die-cast model of a beige Aston Martin DB4 on his pillow: ‘a very exciting moment and the first spark.’
Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, May revealed to the Sunday Mirror that he was not really a lothario at school or in early adulthood: ‘I was never a heartbreaker because I’m too soft but there have been enough girlfriends for me to know there’s nothing odd.’ As a grown man, he has said his idea of a dream night would be one with ‘ladies and aeroplanes’, so essentially not much has changed from teenage years!
Reflecting on life in a 2008 interview, May admitted that one of his regrets was not working harder at school: had he tried harder, he might have been able to pursue his dream job as a surgeon or pilot. To be fair, most fans would probably think he’s still ended up with a pretty fine choice of employment, though.
However, there was little sign of the rebellious teenage ways of Clarkson, as among the knife-edge pastimes during these pubescent years, May was a choirboy as well as an accomplished pianist and flautist. Having said that, he told the Independent that, ‘the moment that changed me forever’ was ‘punching a guy called Kenneth Ingram in the face after choir practice when I was nine. We had an argument over who would be head boy. It was a brutal arena, the village church choir.’ As a teenager he used to earn pocket money by playing medieval banquets and even had to dress 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