And now for the Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan show
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Version 0 of 1. Although he has spent the past five years lurching from crisis to ridiculous crisis, like a bootcut Frank Spencer with iffier political views and a tattered Pritt-Sticked merkin for a haircut, this has easily been the worst week of Jeremy Clarkson’s life. He has lost his show. He faces a possible investigation by the police. And his supporters have largely shown themselves to be people who can’t tell the difference between a crash helmet and a knitted balaclava. Related: Zayn Malik has ruined everything Yet all is not lost. Yes, throughout this week, the paparazzi may have painted Clarkson as a pallid, haunted figure whose own facial tissue now coalesces forlornly in miserable clumps three inches below his jawline. But every cloud has a silver lining. And Clarkson’s silver lining is this: his world is falling apart, but at least he has made friends with Piers Morgan. For those unsure of why this is deserving of mention, allow Lost in Showbiz to remind you that theirs has been the defining feud of our time. It began when Morgan, then editor of the Daily Mirror, printed a photograph of Clarkson, in what appeared to be a compromising position, with a female BBC executive – and continued with thrown drinks, physical violence and endless attention-seeking Twitter bitching sessions; their falling-out became the perfect squabble for bystanders to casually observe. For, you see, Morgan and Clarkson hated each other precisely because they were each other. They were both paunchy, dentally challenged white men born in the early-to-mid 1960s. They had both had complicated personal lives. Neither seemed to know how to dress themselves particularly well, neither of them had a well-calibrated sense of volume control, and it is hard to believe they didn’t lull themselves to sleep at night by playing cassettes of their own voices reading self-penned audiobooks with titles such as Here’s What Gets My Goat and The First One Thousand Things I Would Change If I Was Mayor of the Universe and Humph. And now, they have both gained, and lost, high-profile TV jobs. But, alas, the feud is over. In what was a classy move to reach out to his troubled peer, or a transparently vampiric attempt to piggyback on another man’s misery – you decide – Morgan this week announced that he and Clarkson have buried the hatchet. After receiving a 1am text message offering to “end this”, Morgan revealed that he and Clarkson met in a pub last year, traded niceties ranging from, “I simply don’t have the energy for you any more” to “I’ve run out of vile epithets in the English language to deploy about you”, and then got drunk. Indeed, Morgan then published a selfie taken during this glorious summit, showing the pair beaming in such a gooey fashion that you could probably venture out into Kensington today and find a “PM 4 JC 4EVA” love heart carved into the trunk of a tree with the zip of a Fruit of the Loom fleece. Truly, this is peace in our time. If a pair of belligerent foghorns such as Clarkson and Morgan can find it within themselves to let bygones be bygones, then maybe we all can. Perhaps we can learn from their example and make today the day we call that estranged family member, or the friend we let slip away after a regrettably tense exchange, and tell them how much they mean to us. “Why are you doing this?” they’ll ask. “Because I want to be more like Piers Morgan,” you’ll reply. Then they will hang up for ever, and you’ll know exactly who to thank. |