Jon Bentley

Jon Bentley’s career has been dominated by two passions – cars and technology. The addiction to cars led to his first job, at the European headquarters of the Ford Motor Company, working out how many parts like windscreen wipers, radios and ashtrays were required every day at the company’s European plants.

In 1984, after two years at Ford, he joined the BBC’s Top Gear programme as a Researcher. He went on to become Producer and Editor of the show between 1987 and 1999, where he was responsible for launching the TV careers of well-known presenters such as Jeremy Clarkson, Quentin Willson and Vicki Butler-Henderson, and for turning the programme into required viewing for petrolheads. He also produced many other motoring shows for the BBC at this time, including the classic car series The Car’s the Star and coverage of the World Rally Championship.

After this he took a short break from automotive subjects, producing programmes at the BBC’s Natural History Unit in Bristol; not an entirely new area since he had managed a nature reserve while at university. But in 2002 he returned to cars, launching Fifth Gear for Five and producing the show until 2004 after which he continued to work on the programme as a presenter. He has also written articles about cars for a variety of publications, including the London Evening Standard and Top Gear Magazine.

Jon has always been enthusiastic about gadgets; at school he had a business mending and selling televisions and later he became very interested in photography, contributing work to various magazines while at college. When Five launched The Gadget Show in 2004 he was delighted to be asked to present it. His favourite gadgets include his camcorder, a selection of digital and film cameras and a seemingly ever-expanding collection of headphones. He is not partisan when it comes to computers – currently the household has machines running on Windows Vista and XP, Mac OSX and the Ubuntu version of Linux.

For the record, Jon was born in 1961 and educated at Millfield School and Oriel College, Oxford, where he read Geography. He is married with two bilingual daughters, lives near Birmingham and enjoys reading about business and economics, the radio, music, visiting art galleries and hill walking.