Jeremy Clarkson: middle England's serial offender strikes again
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Version 0 of 1. In 2005, Jeremy Clarkson devoted a Sunday Times column to the shifting taboos of language. "Time moves on," he wrote, "habits change and, as a result, what once would have shocked the nation to its core is now considered normal." His example was the word "fuck", which, he suggested, "according to the last set of BBC guidelines I saw, is still more likely to cause offence than the word 'nigger'." The guidelines, of course, were way out of touch. "'Nigger' is a good case in point," Clarkson went on. "When I was growing up it was no more shocking than 'cauliflower'. You didn't see Bill Grundy being escorted from Broadcasting House [for saying 'fuck' on air] because you were watching Alf Garnett on the other side, roaring with laughter as he peppered the screen with his racist abuse. And yet now, 30 years later, 'nigger' has gone. In fact, it is just about the only word I simply would not let my children use…" Last week, Clarkson found himself at the wrong end of that linguistic history. The unused 2013 Top Gear clip brought to light by the Mirror, which has led to the unlikely vision of Clarkson "begging for forgiveness" on YouTube, saw the presenter, at 54, tripped up by the unthinking nursery rhyme bigotry of his childhood. If there is one thing Clarkson – and his audience – takes pleasure in above all others it is his sense of himself as the perpetual schoolboy, mop-topped, tie askew, stage whispering profanities to his mates at the back of class. The Mirror footage showed a rare occasion when that lucrative persona came into conflict with Clarkson's vigorously suppressed sense of political correctness. The resultant half-muttered phrase, the second line of "eeny, meeny, miny mo", was a clumsy and uncharacteristic attempt at self-censorship. Absurdly, the film clip has been subjected to "auditory forensics" of the kind usually reserved for close calls in a Test match – as if it made all the difference in the world if what Clarkson said was scientifically closer to "ner-ner… just a noise", as he has tried to argue, or to something more explicitly comprehensible. There have been inevitable calls for his sacking – not least from his serial antagonist, and former Mirror editor, Piers Morgan. If the self-styled motormouth were not at the centre of this particular storm, it is exactly the kind of 24-hour news controversy – a manufactured "shock" to liberal sensitivities – with which he might have amused himself on the Top Gear sofa. He has built his extraordinarily bankable career on finding the limits of what it is permissible to say on the BBC; his hangdog confessional to his laptop camera last Thursday was his first admission to perhaps having gone too far, as well as a desperate plea to let his fuel-injected life continue as before. In the past, earnest apologies have not really been Clarkson's style. Usually when there is a row on, and there have been many, his preferred response has been to "cover his ears and hum Thin Lizzy" (no doubt The Boys Are Back in Town). When presented with a photo of himself apparently driving at 70mph down the middle lane of the M4 with a mobile phone clamped to his ear, he came up with: "Er, that's not a phone." The week after Mexico's ambassador to the UK won a BBC apology for the Top Gear's characterisation of his countrymen as "lazy, feckless and flatulent", Clarkson was shown on a road trip to Albania that traded heavily on the idea that it was a nation of mafia car thieves. If the oracle of Chipping Norton were generally in the business of remorse, his last two decades would have been one of perpetual penitence to gay men and "faceless former Greenham lesbos", "beardy environmentalists", the Welsh, the Germans, the Guardian, the disabled, Cherie Blair, Americans, trade unionists, the Greeks, Asia, Africa, John Prescott and people with mental health problems. The irony of his current embarrassment is that it calls him out for a piece of small-minded nonsense he tried not to say (and did not broadcast) rather than for the vast back catalogue of unrepentant slander with which he has made his name. Clarkson, who was sent by his parents to Repton school on the proceeds of their business selling stuffed Paddington Bears, and expelled, as his mother recalled, for "generally making a nuisance of himself", has long tested the patience of BBC executives in a similar manner. The corporation has launched an inevitable "investigation" into the current scandal (one that you can't imagine would trouble Inspector Morse) and Clarkson has been called into the new headmaster's office to explain himself. Top Gear, however, remains the broadcaster's most successful export. Perhaps in the interests of balance, it acts as a kind of anti-World Service, informing a Guinness-record 212 countries that this is still essentially a nation with a vast superiority complex and an adolescent sense of humour, populated by corpulent Boy's Own fantasists in throaty cars. When the corporation paid Clarkson around £14m in 2012 – a big chunk of it to buy out his share of rights deals – it secured a revenue stream worth in excess of £150m a year. He knows, and the BBC knows, it can't yet live without him. One of the reasons that this particular story had such mileage last week was that it has seemed to be of a piece with the "outing" of various bonkers Ukip candidates in local elections. Clarkson and Ukip have long occupied a similar space in public life; or at least it is hard to imagine the rise of the blokeish populism of Nigel Farage had it not been foreshadowed by Clarkson's say-it-as-I-see-it appeal to the English middle classes. Both men make direct claims to that constituency who don't like being made to feel guilty by "the Hoxton Thought Police" of new Labour or patronised by the austerity mongers of the coalition. Reading Clarkson's bestselling books, you could be forgiven for believing that they constitute Farage's manifesto. The soft targets are pretty much interchangeable – foreign aid, gay marriage and wind turbines – and the Ukip leader's delivery owes much to Clarkson's pint-supping plain speaking. There was a time, before Farage, when Clarkson seemed the sole answer to middle England's secret prayers in a world of euphemism and acronym. In 2008, a petition was posted on the Downing Street website demanding that the nation's favourite petrolhead be made prime minister – it had nearly 50,000 signatures – and we would all be allowed to drive Triumph Stags just as quickly as we wanted and not have to live next door to Romanians. You can be sure that every one of those signatories will now be voting Ukip. When he is not doing Jackass for grown-ups, Clarkson is, like Farage, a professional sentimentalist. He gets away with his jokey Little Englander routine in part by presenting it with a dash of knowing irony, partly through the sheer inventiveness of his ranting and, if all else fails, by appeals to flag-waving nostalgia. Though, from his early days at the Rotherham Advertiser on, he has mostly paid his way doing nothing more back-breaking than tapping at a keyboard, or hamming it up to camera, he likes to imagine himself as the last patriot standing, defender of the workshop of the world. This spirit also informs his work as a patron of Help for Heroes. Clarkson's estranged second wife's father won a Victoria Cross, which was the presenter's way into a thoughtful documentary on the history of the recipients of the medal. Given a bit of that arts research funding Clarkson routinely derides, you could probably produce the definitive study of postwar British masculinity and anxiety by watching the Top Gear team building a bridge over the river Kwai in the last series. In another time and place, you imagine Clarkson would have aspired to being Guy Gibson, having taken advice, minus the infamously named dog. (Clarkson's own faithful friend, a shaggy black hound, he recently christened Didier Dogba, and after another predictable Twitter storm, asked: "Why is it racist to name our amazingly brilliant dog after a footballer?") In the absence of opportunity for true heroism, Clarkson will, no doubt, accelerate out the current controversy and return full throttle to his mission to offend in the name of boy racing. Does any unreconstructed male in the western world have a better job? As he mused recently, and with typical grace, to Vanity Fair, when asked if he had any thoughts of calling it a day: "I mean, apart from being Angelina Jolie's gynaecologist, I cannot think of anything I would rather do." |