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Clarkson

I have to admit, I'd assumed that Jeremy Clarkson had long ago jumped his own personal shark, and had been playing an Ali G -style character based on himself on Top Gear for many years. I'm rather saddened that recent events suggest that he was actually taking himself seriously.

Although I've not signed it myself*, I am amused by the fact that the petition to bring back Clarkson was set up on change.org. Judging by the emails I get from change.org, they take themselves rather seriously, and their userbase profile has probably just changed in ways they were really not expecting...

Also, The Stig delivering the petition to the BBC in a ~~tank~~ (or is it a self-propelled gun as I saw some gun nerd complaining somewhere?) was an inspired piece of theatre that I can only appreciate.

* because, amusing though Clarkson and petition both are, when it comes down to it, if he really thumped someone vastly poorer and less influential than himself, or even threatened to do so, that's pretty abysmal behaviour and I'm not sure an online petition to allow him 'freedom to fracas' is in any way an appropriate response.

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It looks like an Abbot self-propelled 105mm gun to me. You can tell an SPG from a tank by the way that an SPG tends to have its turret set well back (where a tank tends to have it more central) and the big muzzle brake on the end of the gun.

Aha! I thought someone would be bound to know...

And that it would probably be king_pellinor ...

I like the idea of a personal shark. Do all "celebrities" have one, do you think? Maybe they're given one when they officially become Famous. I imagine Clarkson's would be quite a scary one, doubtless on wheels and exuding POWER. (Kind of a hard thing for the podgy middle-aged Clarkson to jump over, actually. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe he tried very hard to jump over it years ago, but it got away, so he had no choice but to turn into the part he was playing.) Woolly celebrities like Bill Oddie would probably tame their personal shark and take it for walks - or else ask if they could take it back and swap it for a gerbil.

The shark probably mainlines diesel in Jeremy's case. Or lead-rich four-star petrol, from his secret stash in his Cotswold bunker.

Definitely petrol.

People who have worked with Bill Oddie seems to think he is not the cuddly soul he appears - so maybe his personal shark is ENORMOUS and therefore unjumpable...

I saw an interview with the organisers of the petition (and the tan...SELF-PROPELLED GUN), a bloke from the anti-establishment politics blog Guido Fawkes. He said that the point of the petition was not that Mr Clarkson shouldn't be punished for his behaviour, and that that was a matter for the BBC's HR department, but that the viewers shouldn't be punished for it.

Without the counterweight of Top Gear, it will be harder for the BBC to fend off accusations of only appealing to certain sections of society.

I think that point of view would have a lot of merit if the whole show were filmed in advance - but I believe that only the out-of-studio sequences are, and it does seem like it would be very hard to completely restructure the show in less than a week, particularly if the other two presenters were not cooperative (I saw somewhere that they had refused, although I am not sure how authoritative that information is).

I can't see that they had much option but to at least defer. And I am not sure about Top Gear as sole representative of a demographic either. I like Top Gear, but I don't think that really puts me into a pigeonhole!

I once worked with an offensive loud-mouthed jerk who happened to be very, very good at his job; until the day he landed a punch on a co-worker. The office was a much happier place with him gone.

It's hard to say how much Clarkson fits that mould, without being on the inside or knowing how the rest of the team feel about him. James May says 'he's a knob but I like him' and presumably he has to work with him a lot. I have worked with people like that too, as well as the completely unredeemed arseholes...

To some extent, I feel that a certain percentage of *everyone* is arsehole. :-D

I'm sure a great many people (including a fair few signers of this petition) have harboured occasional fantasies of landing a punch on a co-worker. Most of us don't act on it; and having seen the difference his absence made, I really can't think the world would be a better place if people could punch their colleagues with impunity.

I don't know exactly what happened, so I'm reserving judgement to see what the enquiry says. But I agree that physical violence probably should mean dismissal.

Oh goodness yes.

And although I don't watch Top Gear, I didn't have a lot of sympathy for the anti-Clarkson brigade in general.

But assault is a dismissal situation in every job, I'd have thought.

I guess I am thinking that the views of the assaultee are important, and I don't know what they are, and I don't know exactly what happened.

So I'm not prejudging the enquiry, but I am definitely not signing the petition either!

Having sat in a Union meeting where a Union Rep discussed bringing and assault charge against a member of University admin for placing his hand on her arm, I would say there are a range of sins encompassed under accusations of assault. I imagine the whole point of suspension and then enquiry is to demonstrate that such accusations are taken seriously but then to establish how serious the alleged assault actually was - there is a difference, after all, between a right-hook and a light shove.

I'm also wondering about the implications of Clarkson being sacked for Oisyn Tymon: would he end up with a damaged career as the man that killed Top Gear? Might he *prefer* to go on working with an apologetic Clarkson rather than move on to new projects? That sort of thing seems like it should be taken into account.

Hmm, I don't think producers are generally that much noticed by the general public so after the initial excitement I can't imagine that "the man who killed Top Gear" will do him too much harm in terms of people worrying about how the public might receive a show he produced. On the other hand, internal behind-closed-doors scuttlebutt on the extent to which he may or may not have provoked the situation, and how professionally he handled it afterwards could make a big difference, however one assumes there will be a correlation between the scuttlebutt and how professional he was. If he wasn't being professional then this was certainly a good way to get that widely known inside the industry, but I would say the damage has already been done there, regardless of final outcome for Top Gear.

Ah, but he isn't, despite some reports, the show's producer. He's just an associate producer. Or to put it another way, a glorified gofer. A big part of his job seems to have been stuff like sorting out on-location catering arrangements. Since the incident supposedly started when Clarkson arrived back to the hotel after a day's filming to find that they weren't doing hot food, it calls into question how well he was doing his job. That might be why he didn't report the incident.

In which case one suspects the damage is done, irrespective of the outcome.

I fear so. Can't help but feel sorry for the bloke.

I'm sure the public will forget him tomorrow.

But I wonder how it might feel to go from working - presumably long term - on a big successful ongoing production to trying to find another job in an industry where I believe work comes and goes, and where the first question asked by anyone else who hired him would, one imagines, inevitably be about Clarkson.

Yes, I suppose if Top Gear continues he still has a job, albeit possibly in rather unpleasant circumstances.

Oh yes. I don't know what happened, or what the situation was. I'm waiting for the enquiry.

I have no real opinion about Clarkson. I think I've watched Top Gear twice, liked the one where they drove to the north pole, saw him on Who do you Think you Are? and otherwise no of him only through second-hand probably out-of-context reportage of things he said.

I am mildly bemused by the excitement, a lot of which appears to have nothing to do with the alleged offence which, as far as one can tell on relatively little information, the BBC appears to be handling appropriately. A friend was telling me (with dubious reliability, I should add) that Clarkson has been looking for a way to get out of Top Gear without enraging the fans for years, and actually reported himself to the BBC for the assault in the belief that it would give him and out that made him look like the victim. That seems somewhat Machievellian to me, and certainly a rather convoluted plan. But it doesn't sound completely unlikely that he might be tired of Top Gear and looking for an excuse to jump ship.

I think it's raised a stir because Top Gear's popularity (and vast profits) are based at least partly on Clarkson's -what's the word - defiant? deliberately confrontational? opinionated? persona (which I had assumed was at least partly a deliberate construct).

And there have been a series of escalating confrontations - not just with the BBC, but also, people sort of expect him to be confrontational, and so they have started reading confrontation in to things he does, even if he doesn't do them, if that makes sense. So recently he was run out of Argentina by stone-throwing crowds who seem to have read something into the numberplate on his car that was not intended, for example.

So, there is this feeling of heightening tension around him, and mobs love tension and drama...?

It's difficult to imagine the show continuing with its current formula without him, I think it would need quite a bit of reengineering.

If the Machievellian theory is correct, then my 'constructed personality' theory must be right too, because that definitely doesn't sound like the kind of thing a TV Clarkson would engineer.

inamac says that Clarkson writes rather differently for his journalistic stuff than he acts on Top Gear which suggests that even if the persona is not entirely constructed that it is performed with an awareness of the audience. But I can easily imagine that its reached a point where a good proportion of the audience are waiting for him to top the previous outrageous thing and that kind of dynamic often ultimately ends up badly. My mum was telling me some garbled story about him being run out of the Northern US bible belt for driving a car with a banner promoting homosexuality - is that some iteration of the same story or a different incident? Stone throwing was involved there as well IIRC>

It was actually Hammond's car that had the "Man Love Rules" slogan painted along the side. They were taking the piss out of conservative attitudes in the bible belt, and the local hicks didn't like it.

That's what Mum said, though words like "genuinely frightening" and "run out of town" featured in the story. I wonder if she was conflating the two incidents.

That was a different incident, and much less serious - the Argentinian thing was much more recent and rather more alarming, in that the angry mobs were coordinated and working together in different places to intercept the whole production team, and even stormed the hotel where the presenters were staying. They had to abandon the cars they were using and fly out.

The Argentinians thought that his car numberplate H982 FKL was a reference to the Falklands war. Have to admit, it's quite a coincidence if unintentional.

it's quite a coincidence if unintentional.

It's always possible that someone involved in acquiring the car thought it was funny and arranged it even if Clarkson was in blissful ignorance.

I'm only dimly aware of this having seen the hoopla on the internet about it. From what I have read in news media the problem seems to be to do with filiming on location, the presenters going to the pub, then travelling to a hotel to film in another location (someone else driving), and the crew having gone to bed before they got there and the hotel saying no hot food after ...pm. In which case the bloke who stayed up to wait for them should not be held responsible for them getting food when they could have done that before the pub, in the pub, or before travelling.

I don't think it really matters whether he fell down on the job or not. Even if he was specifically tasked with ensuring that there was steak and chips and he blew off the task, attacking him physically was clearly very wrong.

However, I think the situation is complicated by the fact that Top Gear is very much a Clarkson vehicle, so there is a questionmark over whether the show would survive without him. So it's *not* really like sacking another abusive employee.

If the show folds, presumably the entire team are out of a job, and I can see that even if the guy who was (allegedly) assaulted did everything right, and Clarkson did everything wrong he might prefer an apology and a job to revenge and no job.

I assume the enquiry will consider that, or at least I hope it will!

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