Clarkson Unbound

Clarkson Unbound
Nick Rufford Published: 29 March 2015

His loudmouth antics revolutionised TV car shows and cost him his job last week. But it took more than
oafishness to make Top Gear a global phenomenon. Nick Rufford, who has worked with the presenter for 10 years,
reveals a disciplined, country-loving insomniac who shrugs off adversity and could shake up television yet
again.

There was no steak and chips on the menu at the Assaggi restaurant in Notting Hill, west London, on Thursday but
Jeremy Clarkson managed to avoid losing his temper.

Twenty-four hours had elapsed since the BBC sacked him from Top Gear for punching a producer (allegedly over an absent steak and chips). Improbably, despite much more weighty national and international news, Clarkson was at the top of the headlines; the paparazzi were hunting him and the man himself was eating pasta.

With him at the first-floor summit in the restaurant were his co-presenters James May and Richard Hammond and the man often referred to as the fourth member of the Top Gear team, Andy Wilman, Clarkson’s old Repton school friend and executive producer of the show.

There was one item on the agenda: the future of Top Gear. Those within earshot of the conversation report that there was a fair amount of swearing at the table — but it was all in good humour, unlike the rant that had got
Clarkson sacked.

It was the first time the four had met face to face since the BBC had dropped what Clarkson described as “the bombshell”. The question on everyone’s lips: would the award-winning team break up and go their separate ways,
or stay together and launch a new show with the same theme?

According to sources, the discussion started well but quickly descended, with the help of Assaggi’s wine cellar, into a drive down memory lane, as each relived his favourite Top Gear moment. What was clear, though, is that if they could relaunch a new show as a team, they would do so.

“They tried to be serious but it was a bit like an episode of Top Gear staged in a restaurant instead of a studio,” said one observer. “They suggested broadcasters they might approach but they were just guessing. Then they talked about how to draw up a business plan but it was a shambles. Alan Sugar would have laughed out loud.”

They parted cheerfully, according to a source, and “May got a bit over-nostalgic and couldn’t find his way home afterwards.”

Why do four, sweary middle-aged men matter — and who is this Clarkson, anyway? As his editor on the motoring pages of The Sunday Times for the past decade, I know why his antics make the headlines, but I also know the ferociously hard-working insomniac (and surprisingly cautious driver) behind the raucous public persona.

Clarkson has two stand-out traits. One is his work ethic. The other is his ability to shrug off misfortune. He laughed off a custard pie that was pushed in his face when he received an honorary degree from Oxford Brookes University. He was mildly annoyed when protesters dumped a load of manure on his driveway — but only because it delayed him getting to work.

“If I have a philosophy it’s this,” he has said. “Get born, live your life, die. And don’t worry about anything in
between because it’s a waste of time. My attitude is if I get up in the morning and I’m still breathing, I’m quids
in. I hardly ever worry. I don’t suffer from depression, I don’t even have moods. If you’re in a bad mood, you’re
wasting time.”

It’s an approach — born partly from the premature death of his father — that he instills into his own children. “When I was growing up, we laughed at every calamity that struck,” he said. “Now I tell my kids, laughing is the most important thing. You fall over. Laugh. Someone’s nasty to you. Laugh. Life is short and you haven’t time to be stuck in traffic jams or be sad.”

Clarkson has said that if you “dole it out you have to be able to take it”, although his late mother once observed that he wasn’t as thick-skinned as many assumed. “People might find this hard to believe, but he does actually get hurt by some of the things people say about him,” she said. “He’d never let on, though. It’s as though he feels he’s got his laddish image to live up to. To be honest, I don’t think he enjoys having to keep up the image 24 hours a day.”

SPOOL back to the summer of 1996. Lad culture was at its zenith: England were hosting the Euro 96 football tournament, Oasis were the biggest band in the world, Loaded magazine was selling more than 400,000 copies a month and on TV a frizzy-haired loudmouth in bad jeans and a dodgy blazer was holding forth on a BBC2 motoring show.

First broadcast in 1977 as a regional magazine show about cars, Top Gear had a long history of being inoffensive, both in its presenters (Angela Rippon and Noel Edmonds) and its topics (boot space, fuel economy and road building). Clarkson had arrived in 1988 as a co- presenter. With a background in journalism (South Yorkshire-born, he cut his teeth as a cub reporter on the Rotherham Advertiser and had been working for Performance Car magazine), the 28-year-old was confrontational.

He reviewed a Toyota Corolla with foam taped to his head because, he claimed, the suspension was so bad. He declared that “Norfolk people are so interbred they don’t know the difference between a Ferguson tractor and a Ford Capri”. The sexy-looking Ford Probe was, he said, able to “snap knicker elastic at 50 paces”. The industry hated him.

“In the early days I frequently took calls from the upper echelons of the British motor industry to complain about Jeremy’s comments on this road test or that,” said Tom Ross, the editor who hired him. “The calls soon stopped and car companies realised that the old style of largely bland car tests had gone for ever.”

The BBC’s offices at Pebble Mill, in Birmingham, where the show was made, received sackfuls of angry letters but there was no doubting the Clarkson effect. The ultimate accolade came in the summer of 1996, when Top Gear was officially banned from attending the annual industry love-in that was the British motor show.

In 2002 the series was relaunched with Clarkson as the star, after a format he was said to have worked out with Wilman in a pub. Clarkson’s old school friend — a habitually unshaven straight-talker — was a TV veteran behind the camera.

According to Wilman, the new Top Gear manifesto was simple. It would have a news section so “important but boring” cars could be dispensed with quickly. It would be filmed before an audience in an old aircraft hangar that would become “an oasis for people who like cars”. It would have an all-male line-up. And, perhaps most importantly, “it would always be an unfair show”.

Its catchphrases and in-jokes became almost as famous as Clarkson himself. There was the “cool wall” for vehicles designated too desirable — or not; the Reasonably Priced Car driven by celebrity guests ranging from Joanna Lumley to Tom Cruise; and the masked mystery man, the Stig, revving some of the most expensive machines in the world around the racetrack. Even Clarkson’s delivery style became famous (he blamed his long pauses on the fact that, as a smoker, he had to get the lines out without appearing out of breath).

The presenters’ characters were also solidifying: Clarkson, the oaf who walked through a door rather than opening it and fixed cars with a hammer; Hammond, the cheeky chappie with a generally sunny disposition; and May, the sensible one mercilessly ribbed for being boring.

The formula worked — and not just among car fans. In 2005 the show won an Emmy in the non-scripted entertainment category, prompting Clarkson to joke he was unable to go to New York to receive the award because he was busy writing the next script.

The single event that propelled Top Gear away from being just another TV show was the rocket-car crash in 2006 that almost killed Hammond. The footage of the near-300mph smash was spectacular, his survival was treated by the press as miraculous, and 8.13m viewers watched the team welcome him back to the show.

Suddenly the presenters were household names, and the digital age made their fame global. BBC Worldwide, once a small operation that produced videos of the corporation’s popular shows, sold the programme to more than 170 nations. There were spin-off magazines, books, DVDs, toys and, famously, a Stig-on-a-rope soap.

Companies started producing their own versions of the show (under licence), in Russia, France, America, Australia and South Korea.

And as the programme grew, so did Clarkson’s notoriety. His trip to Patagonia last year in a car with a numberplate — H982 FKL — supposedly chosen to inflame Argentine sensibilities over the Falkland Islands and the 1982 war, caused a diplomatic incident.

Today Top Gear claims to have a global audience of 350m, and its formula of studio comedy and wacky challenges — Wilman describes them as “crap men adventures with crap cars” — is as popular in India, Iran and Indonesia as it is in Isleworth. Top Gear is the most illegally downloaded show on the planet and is also the BBC’s single biggest earner.

The three badly dressed, middle-aged men who present it are global rock stars. Clarkson acknowledged as much, saying recently: “The great thing about going on the road is that we never got the opportunity to be rock stars when
we were young. And now we have.”

By rock-star standards, Clarkson’s fracas with the Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon was a minor tantrum. Clarkson, however, does not have rock-star immunity — and the BBC is a publicly funded institution steeped in political correctness, as Clarkson has all too frequently pointed out on Top Gear. When Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the BBC’s director-general, announced last Wednesday — in regretful tones reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war — that Clarkson was out, the news stunned fans across the globe. Clarkson too was shocked. Yet I predict he will quickly recover.

Whenever people ask me what it’s like to work with Clarkson, I say, “He’s the easiest journalist I deal with”. People assume that his laddish public persona extends to being a chancer in private but he is incredibly disciplined. As well as writing scripts for Top Gear he does weekly columns for The Sunday Times and The Sun, and one for Top Gear magazine. He suffers from insomnia. When he’s pacing around in the early hours he’s scribbling down ideas.

There are a few other things about Clarkson that the critics who have turned him into a cartoon hate figure — he has been accused of misogyny, “casual racism” and destruction of the planet through reckless addiction to cars — won’t recognise.

His biggest fans are not white, middle-aged British males. Top Gear’s audience is predominantly overseas and largely young. The show is dubbed into eight languages, among them Farsi. Mozaffar Shafeie, an Iranian actor living in London, voices Clarkson for BBCPersian TV, beginning with a shout of “Emshab!” — Farsi for “Tonight!” — and faithfully translating phrases such as “gentleman sausage”.

It is on record that Clarkson is a huge fan of Genesis and the Who, but few know he is also a pretty good drummer. He has had help from Alex James, the Blur bassist, who is a near-neighbour in Oxfordshire.

Clarkson may be a fast driver on track (as a holder of a motor racing licence, I can attest to this) but on public roads he is a bit of a dawdler; his job relies on him keeping his licence, plus his critics would crow all the louder if he were caught speeding. He was flashed by a speed camera last year near Whitby, North Yorkshire, and got his first ticket in more than 30 years.

People imagine he is all for concreting over the planet but he loves the countryside. He owns 173 acres of Oxfordshire, a farm he bought in 2009 and christened Diddly Squat. He’s planting new hedgerows there to attract butterflies and birds, and he is a paid-up member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

He is on record as saying that if vegetarians come to his house, they’ll get nothing except mashed potato: “I certainly won’t be cooking them a nut cutlet.” But I can reveal (sorry, Jeremy) that I’ve had a very nice mushroom risotto Chez Clarkson.

He doesn’t hate cyclists. A side effect of the TV coverage of the past few days has been to reveal Clarkson out on his bike. This isn’t a fad; he has cycled about town for as long as I can remember.

He is most closely associated with cars but he has shown he can turn his hand to anything. He contributed to the BBC Great Britons series with a profile of the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He has done history documentaries about the Victoria Cross, Arctic convoys and an allied attack on U-boat pens. He also wants to make a series about the perils and pitfalls of a self-confessed townie starting a farm.

If all this is true, why does he divide opinion unlike any other television personality? One reason is that he has long bitten the hand that fed him. In one Top Gear episode he drove a tiny Peel P50 microcar into a supposed BBC staff meeting. The sign on the door read: “How to reduce the carbon footprint of our ethnically diverse disability access policy for single-parent mothers.”

Inside, sitting at a table strewn with copies of The Guardian, a woman said: “I believe we’ve already made significant inroads into the implementation of an open and inclusive policy for the ethnocentrically homogenous objectives of this department.”

“Sadly the meeting went on for so long that there was no time left in the day for programme-making,” narrated Clarkson.

He has mercilessly made fun of Radio 1 and Radio 2, especially the Jeremy Vine show, which he described as “a soapbox for the weak and the stupid to moan and groan about those who have been more successful in life”. After being accused last year of mumbling a racist term — which was never broadcast — during filming for a Top Gear episode, he was forced to apologise and said he was on a final warning.

“I’ve been told by BBC chiefs that I’m drinking at the last-chance saloon,” he wrote in The Sunday Times. “From now on I shall arrive at work on a bicycle with a copy of The Guardian under my arm, and at lunchtime, instead of moaning about how everything on the menu is vegetarian, I shall cheerily ask for extra lentils in my nuclear-free peace soup. Also I must remember when I’m in a lift to not goose Mary Beard.”

One commentator wrote last week that Clarkson’s sacking was an “opportunity to refresh and reinvigorate the show he leaves behind. Top Gear as we know it is Clarkson — brash, blokish and politically incorrect — but there’s no
reason it has to be so.”

Perhaps, but it is also an opportunity for the non-PC Top Gear to resurface elsewhere. What’s certain is that Clarkson won’t be retiring.

May, the only presenter to have so far spoken publicly since the decision, said the BBC’s Top Gear would no
doubt carry on. But he added the three existing hosts came as a package, hinting he and Hammond were unlikely to carry on without Clarkson. Hammond tweeted it was the end of an era.

Both Hammond and May are freed from their BBC contracts this week. With Clarkson and Wilman, they could yet launch a show with a different title (friends have jokingly suggested Change Gear), distributed around the world by another broadcaster with equal or greater reach.

Wilman has said in the past that Netflix, the online subscription TV service, could be the ideal partner for a new-format Top Gear. It doesn’t carry advertising so would be free from the kind of commercial pressures that might otherwise force the show to be less risqué or outspoken.

Will it be the same without the BBC to lampoon, though? Did Clarkson feel happiest blowing a raspberry up Auntie’s skirts and getting away with it?

Despite his derision for its management, Clarkson remained loyal to the corporation whenever he was in trouble and, according to friends, assumed until the day he was sacked that he would work there until he was carried out in a coffin.

“When I’m abroad, I am filled with pride when I tell someone I work for the BBC,” he once wrote in this newspaper. “I still get a shiver of excitement every time I walk through its doors. I think the concept of commercial-free broadcasting is a good one and — whisper it here — I think it’s good value too.”