by Gwen Russell
And then, even more importantly, was the way he sounded. Although he had never done any training for television, Clarkson’s voice was perfect: deep, individual and clear. In addition, he was opinionated and had the ability to make people laugh. It would take a while before Jeremy really got into his stride as far as stirring up rows was concerned – to begin with he was as polite as anyone who was keen to make a good impression – but even then there was a hint of irreverence. He had a certain way with words; a way that made people laugh. And he was also very good at the studied pause, at drawing the sentence out to create tension and putting emphasis on particular words to make a point. All in all, he had exactly the qualities that were needed.
And so he started to appear on the show. It was by no means an overnight success, however. Clarkson joined a rota of presenters and did not immediately start by being rude about the car he was reviewing or even comparing it to a quail’s egg in Julia Roberts’ belly button: in contrast, he was pretty straightforward in the way he talked. And a good deal of this was because the producers of Top Gear did not want to cause controversy; they just thought their presenters should get on and talk knowledgeably about cars.
But this was not an approach their soon-to-be star presenter agreed with. ‘The show was crap at that time,’ Jeremy said. ‘I’ve got no idea what makes cars work. If somebody told me to change the plugs, I’d be looking in the boot. I’m interested in what cars say about you, not what makes ’em work.’ This was exactly the attitude Clarkson took when it came to writing about cars, but for now he was the new boy, so he kept his head down and got on with his work.
By the time he started to appear on television, Jeremy had already met the woman who would become one of the most important people in his life – indeed, he had known her for the best part of a decade. Their initial meeting came about because, soon after he moved to London, he was put in charge of organising a treasure hunt: it was in the course of doing this, when both were with groups of people in the same place, that he met Frances Catherine Cain, known always to her friends as Francie. It was not a particularly auspicious occasion: neither of them was particularly taken with the other.
At the time the two couldn’t have been more different: Jeremy was living in a shabby house with three mates and earning nothing; Francie, meanwhile, was a power-suited executive who worked as a redundancy counsellor, with her own flat and a Golf GTI – the epitome of yuppie, dog-eat-dog motoring. ‘We had mutual friends and ended up in the same restaurant one night,’ Francie recalled. ‘We had an argument about whether it was better to be a woman or a man.’ It would come as no surprise to many that Clarkson’s favoured method of wooing would be to involve his wife-to-be in a heated debate.
But Jeremy wasn’t wooing Francie back then. It certainly wasn’t love at first sight, although they mixed in the same circles for nearly ten years before they started dating. Indeed, they didn’t really take to each other at first. ‘Jeremy terrified me,’ Francie recalled. ‘At the treasure hunt, he was very bossy and noisy. He was terribly loud and very big – he’s more than a foot taller than me. If a group of us went to a restaurant, I’d always be thinking, “Please don’t let the empty seat be next to Jeremy Clarkson. He’s frightening.”’
Nor was Jeremy particularly smitten. ‘And I’d be thinking, “Oh, there’s Francie, a career girl wearing a suit and too much red lipstick,”’ he said. ‘“Please don’t let her sit next to me – I’ll have to be all grown up.”’ Indeed, he said on another occasion, ‘All my friends were bums, just like me, and while she was going to the opera, I was sitting in the pub.’ In many ways, it’s surprising they ever got together at all: Francie appeared to be career-driven, Jeremy anything but, and there were no real feelings of sympathy between either of them either way.
This changed, however, when it emerged that Francie was really one of the lads, too. Clarkson was suddenly able to relax in her company and appreciate that she could be as juvenile as his male friends. ‘Francie suddenly said she wished she was a man because it must be so much easier to get laid,’ said Jeremy nostalgically. ‘And because men can pee off the side of a boat,’ Francie chipped in. ‘I’d once been in Sydney Harbour drinking a lot of beer with some boys and then discovered the loo on the boat didn’t work. That didn’t present any problem to the blokes – most unfair.’ Jeremy continued: ‘At the end of the meal, I remember thinking, “She’s not only successful and pretty, and generously breasted, she’s good fun too.”’ They finally became a couple in 1990.
And, now finally together, the relationship became serious very quickly, with Jeremy showing a romantic streak of the sort that his detractors would never have guessed. ‘Although we never discussed it, I think that both of us must have worried that we didn’t want to jeopardise our friendship by getting involved,’ said Francie. ‘But one night in 1990, we both had a little too much to drink and Jeremy stayed over. I was going on holiday the next day and he said that he wished I wasn’t going. I said that I wished he could come with me to Greece. When I got to Heathrow that afternoon, there he was, waiting at the check-in desk.
‘We had a wonderful week, then Jeremy had to come home. He missed my birthday, so when he came to pick me up from the airport, he was loaded down with presents. He’s very romantic. Our relationship became very close, very quickly. I knew he was the man for me; he made me laugh. In some ways we’re really different, but we have a similar sense of humour and we’re both very, very competitive.’
This was the start, as it were, of the domestication of Jeremy and the period in which he grew up. He had been living in convivial squalor for years now, but he was growing up and time was moving on. The 1980s, with all its excitement, was giving way to the slightly quieter 1990s and, as Jeremy and his friends entered their thirties, everyone was beginning to settle down. After all, living like a student is one thing as a very young man, but Clarkson was getting to an age where if he continued to live in such a way, it would have been a bit tragic. It was time for another change.
And Francie was just the woman to bring it about: she immediately set about introducing some order into his life. ‘He didn’t do a lot of washing before I met him,’ said Francie. ‘Didn’t do a lot of eating, either. The first things I bought him were a roll of loo paper and a tin of Complan.’ Not that Francie herself had planned on the relationship becoming more serious. ‘I was very committed to my career,’ she said. ‘I never thought I’d get married and have children – I was a hard-living single girl.’
Of course, by now Jeremy had started to appear regularly on Top Gear, another development that was going to take him from being just another motoring hack to one of the most successful broadcasters in the country. But he was still at the very beginning of his career and he still had the same penniless lifestyle he had had before he got together with Francie, which meant that, when he moved in with her, as he did shortly afterwards, she was very much the main earner. Clarkson was not, at that point, a very good proposition at all.
‘Francie was keeping me,’ Jeremy recalled. ‘We were living in her flat and I was up to my ears in debt. I didn’t dare tell her how bad my finances were and how I was so hideously overdrawn. It wasn’t until a new production team came into the programme in 1992 and told me to go for it and say what I believed, that my career really changed. But I’m very happy that we met when I was penniless and that we were able to grow together and share the pleasures of it. What we’ve done, we’ve achieved together. We’re very much a team. I certainly couldn’t do this on my own. But then she’s just as interested in making it work as I am.’
In time, Francie was to become Jeremy’s manager, which gave her the chance to look after her family and yet still stay close to her husband’s career. Back then, though, marriage was not the obvious next step – for Francie, at least. It was certainly beginning to seem like a good idea to Jeremy, not least because he wanted children, and so he made the proposal a memorable occasion: asked once what the most romantic gestur
e he’d ever made was, Clarkson replied, ‘Proposing to my wife in San Francisco on a trolley car. I had the time and place all planned, since we both like the city.’ Francie said yes.
The couple married in Fulham in 1993 and even there Jeremy couldn’t resist a laddish moment, although with an extremely stylish twist. ‘I was driven to the wedding in a London taxi because I wanted a few beers,’ he said. ‘A Dodge Viper took us from the church to the reception.’ That was it: the deal was done. Lad-about-town Jeremy Clarkson was now really entering the world of grown-ups: he was a married man.
He was an increasingly successful one too. His early years on Top Gear may not have been particularly notable but, by 1992, Jeremy was really beginning to establish a style that was his own. It was making him stand out and the producers were delighted. For the first time in its history, Top Gear was becoming must-see television. But not everyone was pleased.
Jeremy had now started to be brutal about some of the cars he was reporting on, so much so that car manufacturers began to kick up a storm. After announcing that Toyota Corollas were one of the worst cars ever made and that they had been designed like a washing machine, Toyota banned him from test driving its cars, a move emulated by Vauxhall after he savaged the Vectra (something he was to do again years later). ‘Both companies have almost forgiven me now,’ he said in 1995. They might have done, but that didn’t stop him from laying into as many other cars as he could think of.
‘Then I was fortunate enough to get on Top Gear and say what I liked,’ he said of his move from writing a motoring column to fronting a television programme. ‘There have been so many crap cars, but the FSA Polinez shines as a beacon of awfulness. It was just ghastly. Poor old Poles in the middle of the Communist thing; there wasn’t much in the way of competition. All it could do was physically move; it didn’t steer or stop. But it would move. It would get you to wherever you were going, provided it was in a straight line away from you.’
The motor industry was shocked – but the viewers weren’t. They loved it. Clarkson began to stand out from the other presenters because of the fact that he was often colossally rude. But the ruder he got, the more the viewers tuned in. Top Gear had always had low ratings: as Jeremy increasingly exercised a rather deft wit alongside his willingness to upset, more and more people began to tune in. People began talking about Clarkson, this immensely tall television presenter, who was not afraid to take on the giants of the car industry. They loved it, and they wanted more. And so, of course, seeing what was happening to the ratings, the producers encouraged Jeremy to be as beastly as he liked. He duly obliged.
Life was beginning to change in other ways too. Clarkson was becoming a celebrity. People were recognising him in the street. He was getting commissioned to other programmes as well as Top Gear, although at that stage everything he did was in some way related to the motor industry, and this paid. Jeremy was beginning to earn some proper money for the first time: Francie had been told years earlier about her husband’s dreadful financial situation, but now that, too, was thankfully a thing of the past. They were beginning to live in some style, because with Francie also still working, they had quite an income between them. Both of them liked the good life and they were happy to live it to the full.
And as they became wealthier, their family began to grow, too. Their first daughter, Emily, was born in July 1994. Jeremy, naturally, was abroad, filming Motorworld in Iceland, and so could not be present at the event. He was, however, utterly delighted and celebrated in his own inimitable way. ‘She rang when I was on a glacier and said, “Thank you very much, I’ve just driven myself to hospital!”’ Jeremy recalled some months after the event. ‘I got Emily a baby walker after Christmas, her first set of wheels.’
By now living in a house in Battersea in London, Jeremy was increasingly in demand. He once described a typical day as getting out of bed by six, smoking a host of cigarettes while the coffee was on the boil and leaving the house by seven to avoid the traffic. This meant that he also, inadvertently, avoided Emily: ‘I like to be out of the house, not because I don’t like her, but because if you leave it any later the traffic is just too awful,’ he explained. He also went on to profess a hatred of the countryside, an attitude that he was later to change. Days when he was not filming, according to him, were spent smoking and writing in the basement conversion, a scene he merrily enhanced by explaining how his cigarettes would sometimes set the accumulated faxes on fire.
But despite the abrasiveness, Jeremy was also beginning to display an odd sort of calm. That can certainly be the only explanation for him managing to insult Noel Edmonds and simultaneously getting him involved in his work. ‘We were filming in a Ford GT40 and we found out that I was 9 inches too tall to get into it,’ Clarkson recalled. ‘So I rang Noel Edmonds and said, “You’re a short-arse, so can you do this for us?” And he did.’
He was also extremely self-deprecating. There is no better way of deflecting personal criticism than by getting in there first yourself, and Jeremy certainly managed that. Take his description of himself: ‘My stomach is the size of a Spacehopper, I weigh 16 stone and my teeth are yellow from smoking far too much,’ he announced. It took the wind out of his detractors’ sails before they even had the chance to utter a word.
And those detractors were beginning to gather. Anyone who has a strong personality and isn’t afraid to speak their mind will attract attention, and not all of it positive. Not only was Jeremy becoming famous in some quarters, he was becoming infamous as well. Right from the start, environmental groups were never going to make up a big part of his fan base for obvious reasons, but his point-blank refusal to concede that any of them had so much as an iota of a point about anything merely served to enrage them all the more. Car manufacturers themselves were also none too thrilled by a lot of the banter (and it takes quite some personality to get environmentalists and motor manufacturers up in arms about the same thing) and Clarkson’s many and varied prejudices were also beginning to make themselves felt.
But why should Jeremy care about any of that? His television bosses were thrilled by the impact he was having on Top Gear, while the man himself was rather enjoying the fact that he was increasingly becoming a focal point for controversy. It was a trait that was to grow, and grow.
CHAPTER 4
STRAIGHT TALKING
Right from the start, Jeremy had proved himself capable of causing controversy and provoking a sometimes irate if not over-the-top response to his forthright style and, by the mid-1990s, he had established himself as one of the nation’s leading controversialists. His range extended far beyond the car market: he could chat about a huge variety of topics and was strongly opinionated about most of them too.
And there were already signs that his career was going to be a lot bigger than that of most television presenters: although he’d only been on television for a few years, he was already becoming a household name. He seemed to be everywhere: not only on television, but in all the papers and magazines, too. Young men, in particular, loved him: his favourite subject – cars – was theirs too, which meant they were fans from the off. On top of that, they loved his macho style of reporting, his fearlessness and his refusal to countenance any form of political correctness. If truth be told, Clarkson was the man his fans wanted to be.
Nevertheless, he was already getting his fair share of detractors, too. Given that he started having a go at various interest groups, nationalities and who knows what right from the start of his career, it is hardly surprising that not everyone was a mad keen Clarkson fan. But, love him or loathe him, you couldn’t ignore him, and for that reason, one group of his fans – his BBC employers – simply adored him. Every time Jeremy got some publicity, his television programmes did too.
And he showed that not only could he dish it out, he could also take it. On one occasion, he received a letter from a doctor after saying that motorway speed limits should be raised to 130mph. Jeremy related: ‘He said he was looking forward to my dau
ghter being killed in a road accident. Nice chap … My serious point was that it isn’t speed that kills, otherwise Concorde would be the most dangerous form of travel – and to date the number of people killed on Concorde is a big fat zero. [This was, of course, before the tragic Concorde crash over the Parisian suburb of Gonesse in July 2000, which led to the plane being decommissioned – indeed, Jeremy was to be one of the passengers on its last flight.] The problem is that people aren’t concentrating because driving is too easy at a low speed. Go faster and they’d concentrate more.’
Jeremy would go on to celebrate the invention of the jet engine in his 2004 BBC series Inventions That Changed The World, offering his own opinionated take on the benefits of the jet, as well as the computer, the television and the gun. ‘My go faster comments were tongue in cheek – but, apparently, now I am going to get a letter from an MP. Oh no! I’m quaking … I don’t have much respect for MPs.’
Of course he didn’t. Members of Parliament, after all, represent authority figures and Clarkson was building his career on standing up to them. It was the truculent schoolboy inside him coming out again but this time round, the qualities that made him so difficult as a teenager were standing in his favour. Truculence, obstinacy, a refusal to kowtow to anyone, allied with a grown man’s authority, were the perfect traits to make him stand out. And while a troublesome teenage boy is simply irritating, a troublesome grown man, who is willing to prick some of the most over-inflated egos in the land is something else entirely. Clarkson was still causing trouble, but now it was trouble worth causing.