I really should hate Jeremy Clarkson. An occasional bigot of the right in political terms, friend of dilettante former TV executive Dave Cameron and a not very good columnist for The Sun. I should hate him, as I usually hate right wing bigots, Dave Cameron and the upper classes he sustains and encourages and the newspaper that lied about Hillsborough and now re-employs the bastard former editor who was liar-in-chief. But I don’t.
I am not sure that I would want to spend an evening in his company, but then I am a reformed smoker, the worst sort of ex-smoker, so they say. Clarkson is an unreconstructed smoker who is happy to live or die as a smoker. Judging by the colour of his teeth, I don’t think I could cope with the tobacco smell. I know, because I used to smell like a smoker and it isn’t good.
This weeks Top Gear was as good a TV show as I have seen in ages. I have long got over myself where cars are concerned. I didn’t learn to drive until early middle age and I know now that I have missed out. I was always a public transport man, until public transport became private profit, and all the fun went out of trains. (There was never any fun travelling by bus and no one could ever convince me otherwise!) Who would not want to drive the Mercedes that James May was driving tonight? Who would not want to drive that incredible hybrid that Jeremy drove to Whitby and moreover eat the cod lot that he was eating? What about Richard Hammond’s ascent of that huge great dam in Wales in an elderly Landrover? It was hold-your-breath stuff from beginning to end. And what can you say about the brilliantly funny Will Smith and drop dead gorgeous Margot Robbie in the ‘Star in a reasonably priced car’? If you hate Clarkson – and many do! – how could you possibly criticise the way he conducted the interview?
Quite simply the best programme on television right now, Top Gear has somehow got even better. Far from being tired and dated, Clarkson and co get it massively right. It’s funny, it’s clever and, with the history of the Landrover tonight, it’s educational too.
I wish Clarkson wouldn’t have such odious right wing views, or started saying ‘Eeny Meeny’ on the telly, or refer to ‘slopes’, or refer to Gordon Brown, the man who really did save the world (economy) as “a one eyed idiot” because he is blind in one eye because of a childhood rugby injury.
It’s easy to be a Clarkson, a Littlejohn, a Hopkins and any of these right wing polemicists. Anyone can write about ‘political correctness gone mad’, even though there’s no such thing. Why, you can even make up stories about Christmas being turned into something non-Christmassy in order to not offend muslims. Slag off a benefit claimant, tarring all benefit claimants with the same brush (the whole idea from Tory HQ, believe me) but never reporting on the terminally ill benefit claimant living in absolute poverty (and there are plenty of these, I know).
If Clarkson put his mind to it, he’d be even more brilliant and, dare I say it, loved. Whilst he wants to give the impression that he’s a loud-mouthed gobshite, there’s real substance too. This is a big player in Help or Heroes, a war historian. That he prefers to be the clown on TV, well that’ll do for now. I don’t think he’s a bad person by any stretch of the imagination, but image is everything.
Clarkson is obviously a right wing Tory – is there another sort of Tory? – with the printed views to support that view. But he has far more to him than the likes of his PM pal Dave, an empty vessel of populism and idle rhetoric.
Top Gear is the best show on TV, Clarkson is Top Gear. I think the public see through all the bullshit and know that behind the mask is a pretty decent guy. If only he’d admit it.
