by Gwen Russell
He was loving it. Sometimes it seemed as though every time he opened his mouth he caused a row, but that, of course, was exactly what Jeremy wanted. He had been a truculent little schoolboy and now he was a truculent adult enjoying nothing more than to upset people, pricking pomposity and getting a rise out of the self-proclaimed great and good. And he was passionate about his job, too. Jeremy might have drawn a lot of attention to himself by taking on anyone and everyone, but he loved cars and saw his role both as a mission to explain and to entertain.
And he countered the motor industry’s many complaints about him with an admirable argument: he was there to look after the interests of the car buyer, not the car manufacturer. He was not there to sell their cars: he was there to decide whether their cars were worth buying. It is amazing, in some ways, that anyone would have thought otherwise, but the fact is that Clarkson was there to stand up for the little man, the car buyer, the consumer on the street. Of course, he would frequently go too far, describing his dislikes in such extreme terms that it was difficult to escape the conclusion that he was simply doing it for dramatic effect, rather than simply to make his point. But if it engaged the viewers’ interest, then what was the problem? No one could accuse Clarkson of failing to get his message across.
And no one was more aware of the full nature of his role than the great man himself. ‘My job is to entertain people on telly,’ he said. ‘I use cars as a prop, and if some car manufacturers don’t like what I’m doing, tough. My job isn’t to prop up the car industry. A car has to have a soul. The Japanese can fulfil the dictionary definition of a car, but they’re as dull as dishwater. A car is not just a means of moving you around; it’s something you can develop a relationship with. A good car talks to you. You should actually enjoy washing a Jaguar. I think people should buy British if they possibly can.’ Of course, in later years, Jeremy was to be accused of having far too much influence over the motor industry, but his creed has always been quite simple: if it’s good, buy it. If it isn’t, don’t.
And anyway, he always point blank denied that his opinions had any real force in the marketplace at all. ‘When the K-registered Escort came out in ’92, I rubbished it on TV; I just annihilated it, I said it was a dog,’ he said. ‘And it went on to be Britain’s best-selling car. And then with the Renault A610, I said this is fabulous, you should all have one, and that year Renault sold six. So you see, nobody takes the slightest bit of notice.’
Renault, incidentally, was one of the many car companies that Jeremy managed to upset along the way, something he wore as a badge of pride. ‘I don’t write for car manufacturers,’ he said. ‘My favourite was Renault, who I once upset, not by something I said, but by breaking an embargo, which is something I do as a matter of course. And they were livid. Renault in France told Renault in Britain to pull all their advertising off the BBC. And, of course, Renault in England had to say, “Sorry, we can’t really do that on account of there being none.”’
But the audience loved it. For every person who got upset by Jeremy’s abrasive manner, there were at least two people who didn’t. As a result, his popularity soared. Some saw him saying things they wouldn’t dare to say; others merely enjoyed the spectacle of seeing someone who wasn’t afraid to cause a fuss. Jeremy knew that, and played on it, too. He was as aware as anyone of his image and whether or not it worked in his favour: on the whole, of course, it did.
‘I’m not bothered by the hate mail,’ he said. ‘If you have an opinion, other people will disagree with it. The alternative is to be grey and brainless and host a game show. I try to maintain a 51 per cent rule – never annoy more than 49 per cent of people at any one time.’ But, he was asked, did he ever mind upsetting people? ‘Oh, of course,’ said Clarkson blithely. ‘Sometimes you think, “Oh dear, I’ve hurt someone and that’s awful.” But then you have a drink and forget about it.’
His popularity was demonstrated in Top Gear’s viewing figures. Pre-Jeremy, the show had a rather earnest air about it; after his arrival, it was frequently as uproarious as the man himself. The ratings rocketed: in the six or so years since he’d been doing the programme, a further 6–7 million viewers were tuning in. As long as that continued to be the case, of course, Jeremy could get away with an awful lot – and he knew it. He understood what made the programme popular, too: the chance for the vast majority of men who would never get to go anywhere near a really amazing car to feel that they were involved in the whole set-up, too.
‘You might say we lean a little too much towards Aston Martins and Ferraris and TVRs, but then Top Gear’s your one opportunity to find out what it’s like to be inside one of those things going very, very fast,’ he said. ‘That, and the fact that there’s rubbish on the other sides.’
And still he continued in his straight-talking manner, not only when it came to cars but also about car drivers, too. This is Jeremy’s view of people who drive Nissans: ‘They can’t park, don’t understand roundabouts and are not averse, once in a while, to driving the wrong way down a motorway.’ When one interviewer went to visit him and found Clarkson driving, of all things, a Nissan Primera – which turned out to be on loan for testing purposes – Jeremy was quick with a verdict: ‘The most ordinary, depressingly dull corporate junk, although actually there’s an inherent niceness about its steering and its responses.’
And he played up the image of a tough old soul in every area of his life. ‘My wife Francie is very caring, very liberal, and I’m not, which makes dinner times very interesting,’ he explained. ‘I’ll be exploding with rage because some young thug has been sent off to the Red Sea for nicking a car, and she’s explaining he had a deprived childhood.’ There was, though, whether he admitted it or not, a decidedly more sympathetic side to Clarkson when it came to people less privileged than himself. ‘If I was a fourteen-year-old kid brought up on a council estate in Doncaster and stood no chance of getting a job, then yeah, I’d nick cars,’ he said. ‘I’d be reversing into Dixons every night.’
This caused the usual uproar, but it was not a facetious remark. Clarkson himself had come from a privileged background in Doncaster and was, a little unusually for him it must be said, displaying some sympathy for those people who had not had his opportunities or luck. It displayed a depth to his character that was not usually on view. He was as aware as anyone else of the growing social problems in Britain – he was, after all, a father – and the gulf that was developing between the haves and the have-nots. And while he would never be mistaken for a bleeding-heart liberal, neither was he as unfeeling a man as many liked to make out. There was a complexity even at the heart of Clarkson, one of the most straightforward men in society today.
He could never, however, understand environmentalists and had a strong suspicion that they were merely troublemakers. ‘I’d like to take photos of every demo, the M11, Brightlingsea, this lot outside Windsor Castle, and then see how many are the same,’ he said. ‘They’re just professional demonstrators. I’d like to announce we were pulling down the veal farms just to confuse them.’
It went without saying that Jeremy was not impressed with the attempts at environmentally friendly cars. The Sinclair C5 came in for particular scorn. Asked if he’d ever use it, Jeremy replied, ‘Only as an outside toilet. It was never going to work. Sitting in a slipper with a 92-tonne truck bearing down on you. Don’t tell me about pollution. When you charge your electric car, the electricity in your house is coming from a power station – hardly environmentally friendly.’
Indeed, Jeremy was becoming increasingly defiant about his non-PC lifestyle. If the health lobby was for it, he was against it, and he was having no truck with the do-gooders who wanted to influence his lifestyle. Nor was he going to smarten up his image, as everyone was telling him to. ‘I’m not bothered what I look like,’ he said. ‘I don’t own a suit; I wear jeans, I have one tie. These boots have got holes in them. I’m about 16 stone, I’m fat and happy. I like chocolate, so I eat it. I like beer, I drink it.’
Of course, this kind of attitude attracted enemies and even then, more than a decade ago, Jeremy was managing to cause full-scale upset because of the blatant non-PC nature of his remarks. ‘You should never buy French or Spanish cars because the Frogs are our oldest enemies and the Spaniards murder bulls and can’t cook,’ he once said.
France and Spain could take care of themselves, of course, but about this time Jeremy started to cause problems with large parts of England, too. To this day, Clarkson battles against the county of Norfolk – and vice versa – but it all started back in 1995 when he remarked that, ‘Norfolk people are so interbred they don’t know the difference between a Ferguson tractor and a Ford Capri.’ This did not go down well and nor did Jeremy expect it to. Battle promptly commenced.
It was this, in fact, that led to the formation of a club for Jeremy-haters, which made its debut at the 1995 Motor Show. Clarkson was blithely unconcerned. ‘In a way, it’s a real honour,’ he remarked. ‘I think almost the whole motor industry belongs to it now.’ And as for the feud with Norfolk, he was utterly unrepentant, explaining that he formed his view after an attendant at a Norfolk petrol station didn’t know what to do with Clarkson’s credit card and ended up putting it in the till. ‘I thought he was having me on,’ said Jeremy. ‘How can you not know what to do with a credit card?’
But even Jeremy’s friends were not exempt from his takeno- prisoners style. In the Clarkson household, red meat was the order of the day: both in conversation and on the table itself. And woe betide anyone who thought otherwise – not least anyone who didn’t eat red meat. ‘They roll up and announce, “I’m a vegetarian,”’ sniffed Clarkson. ‘They’re really saying, “Cook me something special.” If we’ve got veggies coming round, we’ll make stew and mashed potato. When they say, “We’ll just have the veg,” they get a plate of mash. If you want to be a veggie, fine, eat yer lettuce leaves at home, have a nice time. But don’t come to my house and expect me to make you a nut cutlet, ’cos you’ll be out of luck.’
At the same time, he remained full of surprises. If there was one man in the world you would not have thought of as a ‘new man’, it was Clarkson but, to some people’s amazement, he could actually cook, a talent he had clearly inherited from his own father. ‘Only a complete illiterate buffoon couldn’t follow a recipe,’ he announced. But anyone who thought he was mellowing should think again: ‘Food is really just a prelude for smoking – a bit like sex,’ he explained. ‘You have to go through the whole procedure just so you’ll enjoy a fag more than you would if you hadn’t done it.’
It was vintage Clarkson, and despite all the outrage, his most notable feature was that he continued to amuse. One newspaper got him to go shopping and drew him out on the subject of the shop’s trolleys’ steering capability: ‘They go exactly where you want them to because they have proper rotating wheels,’ he explained. He was equally entertaining on the contents of the trolley, as he piled Budweiser into it: ‘It’s the only thing the Americans can do better than us. They make good cars but great beer. I can’t stand all that real-ale stuff – Old Buttleton’s Bottom or Old Man’s Underpants, the stuff with twigs in it and old soil.’
As his popularity grew, so too did the amount of time he spent on television. By now he wasn’t just presenting Top Gear: other commissions were flooding in thick and fast as well. In 1996, he made Jeremy Clarkson’s Motorworld, a BBC Two programme with a book tie-in, which gave him the chance to visit twelve different countries and subject them to Clarkson-style scrutiny. It was another ratings hit.
One of the many reasons for Jeremy’s increasing success was that his public persona also chimed in with the philosophy of laddism. The mid-1990s were the heyday of lads’ magazines, lads’ telly and a laddish culture that gave many men back their feelings of masculinity, while mixing it all in with a lot of fairly childish fun. Chris Evans was at the height of his popularity and was the biggest lad of them all. The original lads’ magazine, Loaded, was still going strong. BBC’s Men Behaving Badly continued to prove a ratings’ hit, as men everywhere were encouraged to discover their inner lad. The hallmark of the lad was smoking and drinking too much, a vivid appreciation of the female form and a propensity for curries, lager and not settling down.
Jeremy, although married, was the absolute living embodiment of all this: a grown man whose main interests appeared to be cars, sex and smoking, who was not afraid to take on whoever was in charge. He knew it, too. ‘It starts out with a Mild Lad, then Laddism catches on and you get Loaded and Men Behaving Badly, and you’re on the crest of this Lad wave and, in order to stay in front, you’re sometimes tempted to go mad and say stupid things,’ he confessed. ‘But you have to be aware that there are limits. If someone could provide a direct link between something I’d said and someone really getting hurt, things might be different. But until then …’ For now, there was to be no change on Planet Jeremy.
He was, however, sometimes bemused by the laddish tag and he was adamant that he had not gone out of his way to cultivate it. ‘I don’t think I’ve changed my style, it just happened to coincide with New Laddism, which I was kind of doing before – I was just being me,’ he said. ‘Then suddenly I had a tag – New Lad. Now there’s the temptation to go further than everyone else, but luckily there are producers on Top Gear who go, “Er, Jeremy, no.” It’s amazing how easy people are to upset. When I said that a car snapped knicker elastic at fifty paces, I couldn’t believe the furore that was created.’ It was, of course, precisely the kind of remark a lad would be expected to make.
And, in 1996, Jeremy scored another coup, by being made a columnist on The Sun newspaper. This, of course, gave him a higher profile than ever before, and his laddish humour was perfect for the readers of the paper. Would he buy personalised number plates? ‘It’s a filthy nouveau thing to do,’ said Jeremy, before adding, ‘I’d like an amusing one such as DEVIL or PENIS or, best of all, ORGASM.’ Did he think cars were as good as sex? ‘There’s no swelling when I climb into a car, unlike if I was, say, climbing into Claudia Schiffer,’ he rather memorably explained. ‘And driving a Ferrari isn’t as good as bedding Kate Moss – but it’s probably not far off.’ Jeremy, incidentally, had a long-term crush on Kate, until she destroyed it some years later.
It was the kind of imagery he frequently used, and to brilliant effect. And when he wasn’t comparing cars directly to women, he was judging them on how they would appeal to the opposite sex. ‘So the question is,’ he once announced, when the Ford Ka appeared on Top Gear, ‘if you drive this, will people want to have your babies or will they laugh in your face?’
But, contrary to popular opinion, Jeremy’s description and analysis of cars did not all revolve around sex. He would use the imagery most consistent with what he was trying to say, and that could be both striking and extremely effective. Indeed, one of the reasons for Clarkson’s longstanding popularity with the public is that his imagery when talking about cars was, and is, so often spot on. Take this exchange about the Jaguar and why he likes them: ‘People say there’s not much space in them, that you’re hemmed in, but I think it makes you feel very cosy and safe.’ ‘Like being in a cockpit?’ he was asked. ‘No, more like b
eing in a little study with a wood-burning stove. There should be a few books on the walls …’
As Jeremy’s profile grew, his wealth also began to accumulate. Despite protestations that he hated the countryside, Jeremy, Francie – who was by now expecting their second child – and Emily, moved out of London to a house in the Cotswolds. Indeed, the family was now acquitting itself with some style: home was a Georgian mansion outside Chipping Norton, which had once belonged to David Sainsbury, a multi-billionaire businessman, peer and Establishment benefactor of art and science trusts. Jeremy might present a laddish image to the world, but that certainly wasn’t how he intended to live. Inside, the house was elegantly decorated with a blue-and-white sitting room dominated, rather bizarrely, by a television Jeremy won in a quiz about trivial facts about Yorkshire.
Of course, as befits any successful young couple working in the media, they also had a flat in London. It was in Fulham and Clarkson maintained that he bought it with the specific intention of watching Princess Diana as she made her way in and out of the Harbour Club, which the flat overlooked. ‘It’s entirely true that I bought the flat so that I could gawp at her,’ Clarkson maintained afterwards. ‘Ask my wife. Why else would I have chosen a flat overlooking the car park when I could have had one with views over the river? I was a big Diana fan. Then, two weeks after I moved in, she got in a car with a drunken Frenchman and that was the end of that. Terrible.’
And his increasing status was also reflected in his choice of car: having until recently motored around in a much-loved Escort Cosworth – which was given away as the prize in a competition – he had traded up to a Jaguar XJ6 and a Volvo 850R. Indeed, there were no limits to the pursuit of new automotive experiences. For example, he readily admitted to having done up to 186mph in a Lamborghini Countach. His verdict? ‘It was absolutely terrifying’ – and with that he vowed to do no more than 150mph in the future. His critics, of which there was a growing number, were unimpressed.