Latest news with #GreatExplorers
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Top Gear and Grand Tour star James May is coming to Oxford this year
Top Gear star James May is coming to Oxford later this year. The TV host starred alongside Oxfordshire farmer Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond on the hit BBC car show as well as Prime Video's The Grand Tour. This came to an end after over two decades with a final special for the trio filmed in Zimbabwe and Botswana which was released last year. My May is now set to come to Oxford later this year, taking to the stage at the New Theatre on Tuesday, October 21. READ MORE: Top Gear star James May spotted filming new TV show this week 🙌@MrJamesMay joins us as he kicks off his first-ever stage show! Post your questions below 👇 or email theoneshow@ — BBC The One Show (@BBCTheOneShow) April 30, 2025 His show, "Explorers - The Age of Discovery", will delve into the stories of explorers who have ventured into the unknown. The show will use theatrical techniques and May's storytelling to create an evening of intellectual entertainment. These stories will span from Ice Age migrations to space travel, bringing to life the tales of both famous and lesser-known explorers. James May will recount the journeys of those who risked everything in their quest for discovery, including Leif Ericson, John Cabot, Tupaia, Stanley and Livingstone, Gertrude Bell, and the moonwalkers. READ MORE: Hollywood director Tim Burton selling £4.5m mansion in Oxfordshire Stay connected to the heart of Oxford for less! 🚨 Our flash sale is ON: get trusted local news for just £5 for 5 months or 40 per cent off an annual subscription. Don't miss out — subscribe now! 🗞️👇 — Oxford Mail (@TheOxfordMail) April 29, 2025 The show will also touch on the challenges of interplanetary and intergalactic travel. This live theatre show will tour the UK from September and throughout October and visit other cities including Brighton and Southampton. It is not connected to May's TV series, James May's Great Explorers, which was broadcast on Channel 5. Tickets for the show will go on general sale tomorrow (Friday, May 2).
Telegraph
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
James May's Great Explorers, review: Horrible Histories with a Top Gear voiceover
If the TV work ever dries up for James May, he'd make a fun teacher. The kind that the kids love because he makes lessons entertaining and won't automatically haul them to the head if he catches them smoking behind the bikesheds. Although I guess it would be vaping these days, wouldn't it? Teenagers aren't what they used to be. James May's Great Explorers is a new series for Channel 5, beginning with an episode devoted to Christopher Columbus. No-one is pretending the show is terribly academic, but it's the most enjoyable history programme I've watched in ages. It's Horrible Histories with a Top Gear voiceover, a bit of science and some comical cookery demonstrations thrown in, funny but educational if you're coming to this with only the vaguest knowledge of Columbus (discovered North America, didn't he? Well, no). The show isn't aimed at a young audience, because young people don't watch Channel 5. Stick this on in schools, though – maybe with a break, because it's 90 minutes long and children now have very short attention spans – and marvel at how much information sinks in. May presents in his usual, slightly shambolic style, and his key message here was that Columbus was clueless. 'An utterly inept sailor who had somehow crossed an ocean and made it to some mysterious islands that we now know as the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola in the Americas. Try telling him that, though. He was certain he was on some islands just off Japan.' Or: 'His plan was, in scientific terms, b------s.' Any teachers showing this in a classroom should probably cough loudly over that last bit. May messed around in a dinghy to show why triangular sails are effective, and demonstrated the theories of mathematician Ptolemy using a globe, a bicycle light and a plastic camel. The piece de resistance, though, was May making and sampling ship's biscuits. 'It's quite difficult to articulate how horrible that is,' he said, on first taste. 'It's almost wantonly miserable.' He declared the accompanying salted pork and pea stew to be 'delicious, but it might be delicious because I've been eating ship's biscuits. It's a bit like being beaten up and when it stops you think, 'This is nice,' but it isn't nice, it's just normal.' The show touched briefly on slavery – a historian told May that Columbus was 'the largest single trader of enslaved indigenous people during this period'. May looked uncomfortable. 'Yes, very good point, yes,' he said, then got back to the easier business of making jokes.
The Independent
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
James May says BBC 'didn't need' to axe Jeremy Clarkson after Top Gear fight
May first started working with Clarkson and Richard Hammond on the BBC 's motoring show in 2002, and they moved over to Amazon for Prime Video series The Grand Tour after an on-set 'fracas' in 2015, The altercation saw the presenter allegedly punch producer Oisin Tymon, which led to Clarkson's tenure at the corporation coming to an end. An investigation was launched and, in solidarity with their co-host, May and Hammond refused to sign a new contract, which brought the show in its most successful form to a close. May has now reflected on the turn of events, revealing that he didn't think their time on Top Gear 'had to end because of' the fight. 'I thought it was very unfortunate and I don't actually think our Top Gear had to end because of it,' he told The Times. 'I think it could have been patched up and put down to a bit of high stress and flightiness, to be honest. It happened. It's regrettable and it's unfortunate, but it didn't need to lead to the collapse of something very successful.' May continued: 'Maybe these things are ordained and it was time for us to move on. We had been doing it by then for a decade, I think.' Clarkson was reportedly left annoyed that he could not order hot food while he and fellow cast and crew members were filming at Simonstone Hall Hotel near Hawes, North Yorkshire. According to The Sun and Mirror, the hotel's chef had gone home by the time they arrived and the stars were offered cold meat and cheese platters – but Clarkson wanted a steak. 'I mean, without being big-headed about it, we were Top Gear and we were one of the biggest TV shows in the world at the time,' May said. 'It was quite an intense environment and it's not entirely surprising that it occasionally went off the rails.' May recently explained why his TV partnership with Clarkson and Hammond came to an end with the Grand Tour finale. He said: 'The idea was to land the car show format safely and not fly it into a cliff. We only cleared the cliff by a few feet but I think it will survive.' May also said he isn't 'in mourning' as he thinks they 'gave the format a really good thrashing and now it's time to let a younger generation have a go'. The presenter can next be seen on Channel 5 series James May's Great Explorers.
