The Top Gear Story (3 page)

In 1993,
Top Gear
was deemed successful enough to launch a spin-off magazine of the same name, which has largely been in publication ever since (and by the mid-2000s was the UK's biggest-selling car magazine). This hard-copy format allowed the production team to conduct surveys and certain features that might otherwiseSeveral Careful Owners. be restricted by the television licence fee's regulations – so, for example, the magazine was able to run an annual survey polling car owners' satisfaction with their wheels. Around this period, there was even a radio show spin-off too, although the format was naturally more limited in terms of talking about a car's aesthetics.

‘I also introduced an extreme sports show called
Radical Highs
,' recalls Bentley. ‘Someone approached me to work on
Top Gear
but I didn't think he was suitable. He did, however, have an interest in shooting extreme sports so I sent him round the world with his own camera shooting them. It was repeated for years!'

Meanwhile,
Top Gear
was coming under increasing budgetary pressures, despite having (initially) seen off many of the rival shows from other broadcasters in the 1990s. ‘There was always a drive to cut budgets,' explains Bentley. ‘One reason why we rarely had more than one presenter on the screen at a time was because two was thought to be an extravagance.'

In January 1999, Jeremy Clarkson left
Top Gear
, after 12 years on the show. Behind the scenes, events were concerning Jon Bentley, too: ‘Towards the end of the 1990s, I became more and more embroiled in BBC management and more removed from the programme. As series producer I [had been able] to worry about the content, not the politics but [now] I had to play my role in a management team and that meant going down to London to attend meetings about the future of Radio 3 and attending long consultations about the fabric of Pebble Mill.

‘At the start of 1999, Jeremy decided it was enough – he possibly saw his future at that stage more in general presenting. Meanwhile, Pebble Mill was having its own crisis so I decided to move on. I have been pretty good at spotting talent over the years, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes,' says Bentley, ‘but Jeremy
himself
is the reason for his success, not me.'

Clarkson's vacant slot was taken by James May. Yet more changes were afoot, though: the programme had attracted increasing criticism for the content of many of its features. This new generation of faces had indeed coincided with the advent of
Top Gear
becoming far more light-hearted and humorous, something many fans credit Jon Bentley with starting. Interestingly, the car reviews were also liable to be much harsher than in the somewhat more liberal past. In response, motor trade and general press criticism began to rise too, with negative reviews of what was increasingly perceived as puerile schoolboy features that encouraged fast and dangerous driving and took an irresponsible approach to the environment and global pollution (sounds familiar?).
Top Gear
's ratings started to slide …

Then, to some people's surprise and to many critics' delight, in August 2001, the BBC issued an official announcement about the programme's future, saying it would be taken off air that autumn and the show had been put, ‘On the blocks while we
give it a full service and an overhaul.' Notably, the corresponding
Top Gear
magazine was not suspended and continued to sell heavily. The BBC also stated, ‘
Top Gear
has not been axed. It's been given a rest as we look at what format will suit car enthusiasts in the future.'

Was it all over? 

O
ne of Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson’s first jobs was as a travelling Paddington Bear salesman. It might seem a long way from there to becoming Britain’s – and arguably the world’s – best known motoring journalist, but in fact his first foray into the world of employment was because his parents, Eddie Grenville Clarkson and Shirley Gabrielle Ward, owned a business selling such bears near the family’s Doncaster home (his mother was also a magistrate). According to some reports, their previous business was selling tea cosies. The bear line of work came about by accident, after they made two at home for presents for their own kids and people kept asking where they could buy them. With no small amount of ingenuity and boundless hard work later, the couple had a thriving business that was sufficiently profitable to send Jeremy to a private school.

He first attended the nearby fee-paying Hill House School and then moved on to Repton School in south Derbyshire (taking with
him a vast collection of Dinky model cars). The school building at Repton itself is a colossal grand affair, a Hogwarts-esque country pile with a staggering history of academic achievement on the site of a former twelfth-century Augustinian Priory; the school itself dates back to the second half of the sixteenth century. One of the founding fathers of the halcyon Victorian era believed that ‘healthy exertion of body and spirit together, which is found in the excitement, the emulation and the friendly strife of school games’ was the way forward for his pupils. Clearly, he didn’t have Jeremy Clarkson in mind.

So-called Old Reptonians include none other than writing legend Roald Dahl, who boarded there for four years (it was here that Cadbury’s presented ‘blind’ confectionery tastings to pupils for market research purposes, an experience widely believed to have been Dahl’s inspiration for
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
). Other notables include novelist Christopher Isherwood, poet James Fenton, Olympian Harold Abrahams of
Chariots of Fire
fame, actor Basil Rathbone, no less than three Archbishops of Canterbury and Jeremy Clarkson, who is listed on their website as a ‘journalist’.

In fact, Clarkson has gone on record saying he was bullied in school and that the ‘fagging was brutal’ but he has also pointed out that the baptism of fire applied to all new boys. One fellow pupil was a certain Andy Wilman and it was here at Repton that the two became firm friends and a future television partnership was born. It was their cheeky schoolboy humour, founded here at this fee-paying public school, that many years later would transform them into a household name and a TV production legend respectively. Talking in the
Guardian
, Wilman said that Clarkson at that age had, ‘a massive gob, really bad music taste and massive hair – the full Leo Sayer.’

Clarkson’s rebellious streak that has caused so many
controversies on the set of
Top Gear
was there from an early age: he is reported to have spent much time visiting the local girls’ school as well as numerous drinking establishments around Burton upon Trent. He also enjoyed ribbing teachers and confronting those authority figures with whom he disagreed.

Despite this, the young Jeremy was academically excellent, gaining nine O-levels and easily graduating straight into the sixth form. Some reports suggest that until his voice broke, he even played the part of a pupil named Taplin in a BBC radio adaptation of Anthony Buckeridge’s novels about a schoolboy called Jennings and his friend Darbyshire. The
Children’s Hour
specials started in 1948 and were extremely popular for many years. They made much of the author’s unique schoolboy language, such as ‘fossilised fish hooks!’ and ‘crystallised cheesecakes!’

Unfortunately, just over two months before sitting his
A-levels
, Clarkson was expelled: his mother told
Auto Trader
that the school took a dim view of him ‘drinking, smoking and generally making a nuisance’ of himself. He was allowed back to take his exams but according to his mother, he didn’t pass any (at the time he told her that it didn’t matter as he was going to be a TV presenter). The current school website makes no mention of his expulsion.

Nonetheless, his public-school days were formative. With such an esteemed academic background – even allowing for his expulsion – it was not surprising that once unleashed into the outside world, Clarkson made rapid progress as an ambitious young man, despite having no A-levels. Clearly, there was aspiration in his genes – obviously his parents’ own success proved that, but so too did the recently unearthed entrepreneurial ways of his more distant ancestors.

In a 2004 episode of the BBC’s genealogical programme
Who Do You Think You Are
? Clarkson discovered that his great-
great-great
-grandfather
John Kilner had invented a famous
rubber-sealed
jar for preserved fruit which became an industry standard and was subsequently named after him. He started work in a glass factory and later set up his own glassworks with friends, which ultimately grew into a huge business. By the 1840s, he owned two colossal factories in south Yorkshire and was posthumously granted the only medal awarded to a British glassmaker at the Great International Exhibition held in London, in 1862.

There was a genuine family mystery discovered on the programme too. When John’s son Caleb died, he left millions of pounds to his son George and a son-in-law in his will. However, further probate records show the two died with very little money. So, where had it all gone? One local legend suggested the
son-in
-law liked technology and in 1901, was said to have become one of the first people in south Yorkshire to buy a motorcar.

When asked to go on the historical show, Clarkson admits to thinking it was ‘too boring to bother with’. However, on hearing all of his fascinating personal history, he says that he wanted to know what had happened to the money from this trademarked invention and secretly hoped the programme’s experts might stumble across a piece of paper stating, ‘Jeremy Clarkson is owed £48 billion’.

Fast forward to the 1970s and Clarkson’s first job within the media was on the
Rotherham Advertiser
, but his fierce creative and linguistic streak quickly found the confines of local news media too claustrophobic. According to a later appearance on Radio 4’s
Desert Island Discs
, it was ‘in the middle of an assignment to a vegetable and produce show’ that he handed in his notice. He would also work at the
Rochdale Observer
and later the Wolverhampton
Express
&
Star
but his sights were firmly set on something far bigger: television.

For now, he turned his back on journalism and went to work selling Paddington Bears in his father’s business. Despite this, he realised he’d caught the reporting bug and it wasn’t long before he returned to the journalistic arena. It was during those formative newspaper years that Clarkson had the idea to pen motoring columns and subsequently syndicate them to other local papers so in 1983 he moved to London and started his own business (with a partner) called the Motoring Press Agency (MPA). Nicholas Rufford, editor of
The Sunday Times’ InGear
magazine, told the broadsheet that this intensive journalistic background explains Clarkson’s meticulous approach to writing: ‘He is an old-school journalist who learnt his craft the hard way. He delivers copy on time, word perfect, and can produce stories very quickly, even on a train. His headed notepaper says, “Jeremy Clarkson, journalist” – that’s how he sees himself.’

The MPA led directly to Clarkson writing extensively for
Performance
magazine and his articles consistently proved both popular with the readers and elegantly written. As Jon Bentley has pointed out, it was while on a launch for the Citroen AX researching a piece for his MPA business that Jeremy Clarkson sat next to the-then
Top Gear
producer.

Officially, Clarkson first appeared on
Top Gear
on 27 October 1988 and was to feature on the original incarnation of the show for more than a decade.

I
n the week before Christmas 1969, on 19 December to be precise, Richard Hammond was born into a family steeped in automotive history. Both his grandparents worked in the West Midlands motorcar trade; his paternal grandfather, George Hammond, was a coachbuilder for Jensen, ‘very much in the tradition of crafting cars.’ George also taught Polish airmen to drive during the Second World War while his own father (and namesake) was a stoker on the railways. The previous two generations of Hammonds had been craftsmen, working as glassblowers in the famous Black Country factories in and around Dudley (they lived in Kingswinford, where coincidentally this author was born and bred; my own father worked in precision engineering, making tooling for car manufacturers).

Hammond’s maternal grandmother, Kathleen Shaw, was employed in the Colmore Depot, a part of the Morris Motor Company. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side was a
jeweller but that was the exception, with most other relatives working in industry, mostly in tool-making or a number of brass foundries so the Hammond lineage is saturated with Midlands manufacture.

A young Richard Hammond first went to Sharmans Cross School in Solihull before attending the fee-paying independent Solihull School for Boys. Like Clarkson’s Repton, this school dates back hundreds of years, in this case to 1560. Being a single-sex school, by his own admission the young Hammond was scared of girls. Although he had been ‘great with girls’ at primary, by the time he went to Solihull School for Boys this bravado had vanished and he would actually cross the street to avoid young females. Then, when he was a teenager, his mother Eileen and father Alan moved him and his two younger brothers – Andrew and Nicholas – to settle in the north Yorkshire cathedral city of Ripon.

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 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 …