IN PRAISE OF JEREMY CLARKSON

Jeremy Clarkson’s a bit like Marmite. Either you love him or hate him. There’s no middle way! And right now Jezza, as he’s known to his adoring fans, is in serious trouble. The presenter of Top Gear stuck one on the producer of his BBC television show for giving him and his mates a derisory offering of food after they’d come out of a local pub hoping for something a bit more substantial than a Waitrose Scotch Egg and brown bread cheese sandwich. For hard mechanical man Jezza it was the BBC pansy liberal establishment taking the piss in offering up crud to him and his fellow horny handed sons of motoring after they’d already put him on a number of warnings for past indelicate language and attitudes and the snack fodder was now the last straw! Result, he and his program have been suspended while an official investigation is underway.

Meantime a million of his and his program’s admirers have signed a petition of support for the man demanding that he be restored to his rightful place on the throne of television motoring. A million signatures gained in a matter of days. Now I appreciate that the man’s initials are J.C. but really! Is his fame and status really coterminous with the divine? A short answer to this is that in the minds of his many admirers and supporters, possibly yes! So what is it then with Jeremy Clarkson and exactly what does he represent to gain the dedication of such a wide following. I mean, if Einstein, Freud, Leonardo da Vinci or Moses had dropped themselves in the shit by losing it like that would they have got a million people signing a petition on their behalf. Not on your life! What then does the man stand for we should ask?

Let’s look at it coldly. Top Gear is a program dedicated to motoring and cars. To everything about cars from design, engines and mechanics to automotive performance and maybe above all, to speed! It’s a program that combines ideas with the practical experience of driving and testing the various vehicles it talks about and has a close on screen visceral dialogue with both its stage audience and its many millions of viewers. More important than anything else perhaps, it is a program that’s emotionally set in a man’s world and despite its large female following it falls within what is essentially the male prerogative. Motoring, mechanics, oil, dirty hands and speed are manly things. And things that many men think really ought to stay manly. Indeed it is one of the few preserves left in a fast changing world that still remains masculine. A part of the masculine domain. An essential part of what many men might see as their fast dwindling domain!

This I think is the real meaning and importance of Top Gear and the world that Jeremy Clarkson represents. And it is a world that is perhaps full of fear! A changing world where the old certainties of men and their roles are vanishing piecemeal. Being encroached on bit by bit by things that were once alien to that world but not anymore. Machines and speed that were once the preserve of men, working men, are part of a world now facing a challenge. An emotional empire where the old certainties are being eroded, like a man’s place in it for example. It always used to be men who knew about mechanics and machines, about speed and fast driving, not women! It was a conservative unchanging world of old certainties and definitely not women or any liberal lefty values of liberation. A world in which a man’s place was established and where women knew theirs! Women did the cooking and brought up the kids. Men did the work and knew about machines. Simples! Only now the old certainties, the old distinctions are coming to be blurred. Like sexuality no longer being clear cut and strange gender issues pushing their way forward along with feminist pushiness attacking virtually everything male.

Men in general under threat and along with it the man’s role watered down under the influence of liberalism writ large. So much of everything in what was once the accepted world of men being watered down or attacked That being the case, everything distinctly masculine that remains all the more treasured as a last bastion, a last redoubt. This is indeed the world that Top Gear represents and what Jezza Clarkson stands for as its bluff, masculine no-nonsense presenter. Its main man of men. He is its touchstone. The tough forthright hero of this man’s world to millions of men and women who love being part of speed and machines. He is its symbol, especially to his mass audience on television. Its living spirit par excellence. Its counterpoint to a namby-pamby world where men spray themselves with some perfumed stink after a workout at the gym rather than take a cold soapy shower. A place where men the smell of grease and Swarfega is masculine rather than some wretched underarm ladies’ gel.

Jeremy Clarkson represents mechanical finesse and expertise in a man’s world that unites technology, art and power. We’re talking about traditional mechanical-automative engineering here, not media studies and sociology, or computer messing around with Facebook chatting or texting. We’re talking metal and rubber engineered into power, and beer and pubs where people meet, not dodgy dating agencies. Jezza represents a world of the recent past determined to stay in the present which is what so many men and women emotionally like. The power and strength of all the old certainties that combat a genuine anxiety brought on by corrosive change! It’s a world of barbecued meat, not veggies and Quorn. Inhabited by men with jaws full of meat-tearing teeth! So when Clarkson ruefully casts himself as someone old fashioned, as a dinosaur to use his own word, he’s hitting the nail on the head. A man out of step with his nimby BBC television employers for whom his program earns a sack-full of revenue, enjoying popularity in dozens of countries overseas where men also want to be men!

As for Jezza himself he is a great team leader of his colleagues on the program and certainly brings out the best in them, his efforts being appreciated as a great collaborative effort besides which he is enormously knowledgeable on the subject matter he deals with, bringing with it his own catchy style of enthusiasm and pleasure that creates an instant rapport with his viewers. He’s bluff and immediately engaging. Full of advice and suggestion that viewers know come from his own serious immersion in the stuff he’s talking about. To my mind Top Gear is a portal into the masculine side of the human condition into which women are certainly welcome as long as they’re not pushy or bitchy.

We need to understand Top Gear for what it is not resent the program and its bluff, earnest presenter the way that some do. Those who want us to live in a formless world without definition. Where everything is neutral and neutered and flat. Without color and personality. Where everything is politically correct. Where you can’t express an opinion without having some vile allegation leveled against you because you have an old fashioned opinion and don’t want everything and everyone to be the same. Where Britishness is an offence and where multiculturalism rules and if you don’t like it you’re being abusive! Top Gear is the place where mechanical excellence and design, once among the best things of Britishness is allowed its rightful place and the promoter of so much of this is Jezza Clarkson, friend of Prime Minister David Cameron and a member of the old Tory school.

As I’ve said, you either love him or hate him but to British viewers of Top Gear you still need to remember that you’re living in Britain. A nation with a powerful history and with traditions of industry, design, technology and art that were once great and still are. A part of all of us really whether from what was once Empire or still is home soil. If the BBC are putting the man on trial for an exasperated outburst of temperament, which they now are, then it’s taking to task the visceral emotions of all of us. Challenging the emotions of all of us with what might be described as its own strident liberalism and desire to see anything old and rock solid washed away.

POSTSCRIPT

Despite the million or more signatures to the petition supporting him, Jeremy Clarkson’s BBC employers have decided ‘not to renew’ his contract which expires in a few weeks in view of his recent aggressive physical and verbal behavior towards the producer of his Top Gear show. What that actually means is that they’ve sacked him from the program, fired him or dumped him, whatever way you might look at it! In other words despite his boundless popularity, he’s been given the boot for his unbecoming, inexcusable behavior. Trouble is, as the show’s front man he just plain lost it with some administrative squirt when he really should have known better and bitten his tongue. Didn’t matter if he’d come to dislike what he took to be the BBC’s liberal elitist agenda, and no matter the political issues involved, it was always going to be that liberal elite who had the power to stomp on his head if he gave way to his exasperation and stomped on theirs, something that was always likely to happen! They only needed to wait for another dinosaur to self-destruct and that’s just what he did.

Being gobby at the BBC was always likely to cause trouble and result in various warnings but getting physical was stupid and could only lead him one way, and now the police are getting involved. Stupid and needless over what might have been settled with a public apology over a drink only that was never likely to happen. Not with all the media publicity involved. Too many daggers were drawn.  

So Jezza’s gone and his two co-presenters are likely to go with him, yet the BBC maintains the show will go on. It’s quite likely. Trouble is, his commanding personality was so integral to its antics that it’s likely to be a pale shadow at best and I predict lose most of its once loyal audience. Meanwhile the man himself and his team are quite likely to get another show of their own elsewhere, possibly with Sky. It’s only a hunch but it shouldn’t surprise anyone.