by Gwen Russell
Despite the macho image, at this point in his life – which was to change a few years later – Clarkson maintained that he had almost never been in a violent situation and wouldn’t know what to do if he was. Fighter? Not him – or at least, only when he was pushed into it, something the erstwhile Mirror editor Piers Morgan might have had something to say about a few years later.
‘I’ve never been in a fight,’ he said. ‘Except once, when I head-butted a bloke – the only person I’ve ever met who was taller than me. And I only head-butted him out of terror. I was out in America, doing a bit of skiing. We were discussing divorce, and this man’s girlfriend said something I took exception to. I told her she was talking out of her hymen. So he grabbed me by the lapels and thrust me against the wall. He was 6ft 7in, this guy; fucking massive. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to be killed, I’d better get the first punch in.” But other than that I’ve always avoided fisticuffs.’ Clarkson was clearly a pacifist at heart.
Jeremy might not have been a fighter, but he was a very good sport. He was by now good friends with his fellow Sunday Times columnist AA Gill, a man who was as accomplished as Clarkson when it came to upsetting other people. And so Jeremy allowed himself to become the subject of articles written by his friend (he would repay the favour shortly) and, on one memorable occasion, accompanied Gill to Cheshire. Both gave their take on the trip, with very amusing results.
‘For a place where the showroom is a cathedral of pilgrimage and the double garage a family chapel, Clarkson is the Second Coming,’ Adrian Gill wrote. ‘People don’t mob him so much as genuflect to him.’ Clarkson took it in very good part, not least when Gill, while commenting on the number of people who asked him for his autograph, kept whispering to the locals that Jeremy was actually gay; a little leitmotif that ran through the piece.
Indeed, Adrian and Jeremy had some fun ribbing one another. Gill made it clear that Clarkson was by far the more famous of the two, while at the same time teasing Jeremy on any grounds he could think of. After some slight ribaldry at the expense of the Cheshire set’s obsession with nouveau-riche conservatories, lean-tos, ironwork and so on, he quotes Clarkson as saying, ‘You know, it’s worrying. Some of that stuff looked a bit like the stuff I’ve got at home – only a bit, mind.’
He was the butt of some more teasing when Adrian suggested they visit Wilmslow, the epicentre of the Cheshire set. ‘I don’t want to go,’ Clarkson, whom Gill was by now calling ‘Mr 0–60’, announced. ‘You go – they’ll only point at me and tell me about their Porsches and what I said about their Cherokees.’ In the event he did, of course, go along, and, according to Gill, was asked to autograph the thighs of various local girls in mascara. ‘Can you put, “To a 911 driver with love?”’
They completed their weekend with a session on the golf course, which neither had tried before and both sneakily enjoyed. Both agreed, however, that it was an embarrassing sport to admit to having liked. ‘You know, I rather like it as well,’ mused Jeremy. ‘I could take this up, but then I’d have to pretend to the wife that I had a mistress to get away at the weekend and hide my kit at a friend’s house.’ And, on hearing that Gill was preparing to out Clarkson as a secret golfer, he continued, ‘That’s torn it; that’s the end. I’d rather be thought a poof than a golfer.’
Jeremy, incidentally, also wrote a very funny piece about how he had found Cheshire: ‘It’s just like England, only there’s no class system, just the haves and the haves-even-more. Cleaners, I suspect, are bussed in from Moss Side and then shot.’
His family life certainly seemed to be running as smoothly as ever. The Clarksons had been happily married for over five years, and had three children, living – whatever Jeremy might have said in his more bad-tempered moments – an idyllic life in the country. Clarkson valued it, too, and would come out with the usual mix of laddish humour and assertions that it was really Francie who ran the household to back it up. ‘I live in the real world,’ he said. ‘I can see why people split up, but I hope I never do. Make the wife wear metal knickers, ha ha. I have never been sexist. Francie is very keen to pick me up if I try that on – she sends me to do the washing-up.’
Indeed, Jeremy could get quite carried away on the subject of his wife. Theirs was not a small household, and their way of life was a far cry from the early days of living in a small London flat. ‘We’ve got eleven puppies, three children, Francie has me to manage, the builders are in on a major job, and she’s just been on a classic car rally to Sicily and back,’ Jeremy said. ‘Plus, she recently took the kids to Norfolk for a week, and put a big charity thing together. I don’t know how she does it. She is unbelievable at coping. It is an old-fashioned marriage. And now I come to think about it, she does get the bum steer. All I ever do is work all weekend. I do nothing around the house, although I do spend as much time as I can with the children.’
He was growing increasingly wealthy too. Not that he boasted about that aspect of his life: Clarkson actually played down any idea that he was now one of the rich elite; it was probably a good tactic. Asked how many millions he was worth, he replied, ‘One – that’s about the sum of it: one. The million I’m closest to is one. That’s not to say I’m worth a million ’cos I’m not. No fucking way! But people see me on the telly and they think, “He’s fucking minted; he must have his own Lear jet.” Complete bollocks. You’d be amazed to know how little I got paid for Top Gear.’
That last point was almost certainly true. For a start, it was a BBC programme, and the Beeb is far from being one of the best payers in the land. Secondly, of course, while Jeremy was now a major star that had not been the case when he first started out. In fact, he was a complete unknown when he started on the programme that made his name, and his salary would have reflected it. It is only as time went on and his profile grew that Jeremy really began to have some money to play around with – and even then, as he’d be the first to remind anyone, in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t a huge amount. He was certainly nowhere near super-rich.
Nor would he do absolutely anything to become a member of that particular elite. Asked once if he would ever pose naked, he replied, ‘Quite simply, there isn’t enough money in the world. I wouldn’t care if Bill Gates offered me a thousand million. I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t eat my own shit and I wouldn’t pose with no clothes on. I can’t imagine there’d be much demand for photos of my hairy arse, either. Apart from a few mad old women, perhaps.’
And while Clarkson might not have been presenting Top Gear anymore, his career was going as well as ever. His latest programme was to be called Clarkson’s Car Years, his producers quite clearly having decided that getting their star’s name in the title was a good selling point. No sooner had filming started than there was a graphic illustration of the power of the motors involved: one of the production staff lost control of a £140,000 Lamborghini Diablo to be featured in the programme. It was actually a miracle no one was killed or badly injured as the car careered out of control just after leaving the car park, ploughing across two lanes of traffic in the centre of London before ending up smashed against a crash barrier in London’s Park Lane. Jeremy was not amused.
‘I’m absolutely furious,’ he said. ‘He’s cost us a whole day and we’re on an incredibly tight schedule. I warned the guy to be careful because the Diablo is an animal of a car, but he clearly didn’t listen.’ He then took a slightly calmer line. ‘Perhaps he can be excused because the Diablo is like no other car I’ve ever driven,’ he went on. ‘Diablo means devil and, believe me, there’s hellfire and brimstone under that bonnet. The sheer power must have given him the shock of his life; I’ll bet he’s still shaking.’ The BBC itself was forgiving, deciding not to name the guilty party even though their insurance had to pay for the repairs. ‘It was a straightforward motor accident. We are not identifying the member of staff involved,’ said a spokesman.
Another aspect of work was his continuing mateyness with Adrian Gill. The two were friends outside of
work, but continued to form a sort of double act professionally as well. Their Cheshire jaunt had been such a success that the duo next set off on an assignment to Iceland – a favourite haunt of Jeremy’s – where more larks ensued. A typical snapshot of the shenanigans was this: ‘Things were going quite well until about four in the morning when the two girls we’d picked up started snogging each other and our photographer was punched in the face …’
There was a good deal more on these lines, eliciting the tart comment from the journalist and commentator Julie Burchill that the two of them were acting their shoe sizes rather than their age. Still, it made for a good read, not least because Francie, too, contributed a short piece, revealing Clarkson’s longstanding obsession with Iceland was such that he had managed to be there not just when she gave birth to their first child – but when the dog had puppies, too.
There was a very small hiccup in his domestic life at this point in 2000, one that was ultimately going to lead to a massive feud with the then-Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan. Jeremy, who had just turned forty, was snapped holding hands with and kissing Elaine Bedell, the producer of Clarkson, prompting a certain amount of speculation as to the exact nature of their friendship and an enraged riposte from Clarkson.
‘I am not having an affair,’ he snapped. ‘We are work colleagues who were just fooling around.’ His family also rallied around, with Francie expressing some exasperation about the shots. ‘The paparazzi are a constant nuisance,’ she said. ‘They take photographs out of context and then print them. I phoned friends in case they thought we were parting, but most knew it wasn’t true.’ It was an experience that shook everyone, though. Clarkson was known to be a family man and nothing like this had ever been said about him before.
Rather more seriously, Clarkson was then blamed for the end of the production of Vectras at Luton. In one way, it was a backhanded compliment: it made it clear just how influential Jeremy was in the car industry, even if he himself continued to deny it. For the first time it emerged that, after a slot on Top Gear some years earlier that was unbelievably critical even by his standards – a lot of silent musing, followed by remarks that the car was boring and unworthy and that the only positive thing worth a mention was a device for removing tyre valve caps without getting your hands dirty – workers at Vauxhall staged a walkout, demanding to be told why something that could have affected their livelihoods was being treated as if it didn’t matter. Some people might say that they had a point. ‘We are concerned the BBC trivialised one of the most important entries into the British car market,’ is what a Vauxhall executive said at the time.
But now Vauxhall was to stop producing Vectras in Britain altogether, although the car itself was still going strong. ‘The Vectra is, and will continue to be, very significant for us,’ said a Vauxhall statement. And, indeed, it was not going out of production altogether, merely in Britain. The factories in Germany and Belgium were still to continue producing the car.
It is hard to know what to say about Clarkson’s role in all of this. On the one hand, his comments must have had some effect on the Vectra’s fortunes: people did listen to what he had to say, no matter how much he may have played down his own influence. And it was a fair comment to say that he had perhaps placed too much emphasis on entertaining his audience, and not enough on the better qualities of the car, without realising what the impact of this would be.
On the other hand, it is not Clarkson’s job to look out for the interests of the motor industry. And the fact that he is prepared to be irreverent and to tell it straight to the audience is one of his enormous strengths. The man himself, needless to say, was completely unrepentant about his role in the affair and refused to retract his comments; it could be argued that if a major car manufacturer could be damaged by the remarks of just one man, no matter how much weight his words carried, then they must also accept some of the responsibility for their product’s fate. But it was a sad little episode and one that left no one involved looking their best.
People often wonder whether there is a darker side to Jeremy, one that broods blackly under all the cheery bonhomie. He may be considerably cannier than he lets on, but as far as anyone can tell, the answer is no. With Clarkson, very unusually in the world of celebrity, what you see really is what you get. And it has stood him in good stead too. He has never seemed overawed by the world in which he now moves, has never let himself get carried away with it and refuses to give in to resentment and bad humour. It is just not him.
‘Well, if I have a philosophy, it’s this: get born, live your life, die,’ he said. ‘And don’t worry about anything in between because it’s a waste of time. My attitude is that if I get up in the morning and I’m still breathing, I’m quids in. You get people who worry about the ozone and stuff like that. But look out the window: it’s all green and clean. What’s the problem? I just can’t see it. 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.’
This was also an attitude that he was keen to pass on to his 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.’
It was an approach to life that was confirmed by his wife. The only time Jeremy was not on form was when work had been particularly onerous, she said, not because he was in a foul mood. ‘Surprisingly, he doesn’t have mood swings, but there are times when he is tired or preoccupied and not quite so much fun,’ she explained. ‘But he is never stroppy for no reason – unlike me, which happens every twenty-eight days or so, he claims.’ Some women, of course, would have risen to this one, but Francie knew her husband too well. She simply ignored it and got on with things. Indeed, if she hadn’t been able to, the marriage might not have worked as long it did: of all the qualities Clarkson needed in a partner, tolerance came very high up the list.
However, even Jeremy had a softer side. He might have denied it, but just occasionally he could be wounded by something someone said – although he would be the first to accept that if you dish it out, you also have to be able to take it. He thus practically never complains publicly about anything anyone says or does (apart from the irritation he expressed about people begrudging him his Ferrari), and so it fell to none other than his mother to let on that Clarkson was actually more susceptible to criticism than he has us believe.
‘People might find this hard to believe, but he does actually get hurt by some of the things people say about him,’ his mother Shirley revealed. ‘He’d never let on, though. It’s as if 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 twenty-four hours a day. Like if he’s taking Francie and the kids out for a meal, there might be someone having a go at him for slagging off their car and he feels he has to join in the fun and be “Jeremy Clarkson from the telly”. He thinks it’s too dangerous to show people his softer side.’
But, as Shirley was the first to concede, it was down to the way he had been brought up. ‘All the Clarksons are like that,’ she confessed. ‘We deal with emotions by having a laugh. It was this rather jolly approach to life that allowed him to make what appeared to everyone else to be outrageous decisions and then express surprise that anyone else was upset. One such occasion occurred early in 2001, when Clarkson decided to buy a 60ft long Lightning jet fighter, which had been made in 1960 – the year of his birth – and decommissioned in 1988, and put it in his front garden. His neighbours promptly complained.
‘My wife Francie hasn’t spoken to me for two days since it arrived,’ said Jeremy, as he confessed it was just a wee bit bigger than he had been expecting. ‘But I love the thing. It is a seriously impressive piece of machinery and is much, much better than a water feature in the front garden. I must confess it looks a lot bigger here than at the airfield
where I first set eyes on it, but I think it’s great. The complaints have come because, although I have a fairly big front garden, the plane is so huge you can see it above the hedges. Sadly, the engines have been removed because it would be very handy to have used it to clear up fallen leaves and other garden litter. It’s also exactly the same age as me – and I plan to keep it exactly where it is.’
He got a little bit more irritable about his new toy as time wore on. Disclosing that he paid less for it than the price of a Ford Fiesta, he continued, ‘The council were around after three minutes, but we’re not overlooked so I can’t see what the problem is. I thought we won the war, didn’t we? We’re in talks with the council. Apparently it’s a grey area of the planning law. But my children love it. They use it as a giant climbing frame and it’s lovely to look out on first thing in the morning. And it’s definitely better than having gnomes on the lawn.’
Could this irritability stem from the fact that he sometimes had problems sleeping? Clarkson did, after all, have an extremely active life and it would be no surprise to discover that the stress did sometimes take its toll. He was slightly grumpy about this too. ‘The worst thing about insomnia is that no one else sympathises,’ he announced. ‘Tell anyone you can’t sleep and they’ll give you chapter and verse on how easily they nod off. When I meet a blind person, I don’t tell him I can see just fine.’
There was another brief hiccup around this time: after three series, the chat show had been cancelled. Clarkson had done a perfectly good job, but it had never really taken off in a big way and he sounded faintly relieved to be out of it. ‘It wasn’t my thing,’ he explained. ‘The first series was pretty awful and I was getting better, but I prefer being outdoors in a pair of jeans.’ On another occasion, he remarked, ‘It’s very difficult to do that kind of show because there are so many. There were some very good guests. AA Gill was good; he didn’t mind making a fool of himself on television.’