by Gwen Russell
That much was highlighted by the latest Top Gear controversy, in which he made a spoof advertisement for the German-owned Volkswagen Scirocco TDI: ‘Berlin to Warsaw in one tank,’ it ran. Up to 100 viewers complained, as did the Polish embassy. ‘We understand that Mr Clarkson often jokes about various European nations, about Germans or the French,’ said embassy spokesman Robert Szaniawski. ‘But we believe that a joke about the Nazi German invasion of Poland is not a proper way to make people laugh. We think the tragedy of the situation – the outbreak of the Second World War – should not be the butt of jokes.’
Jeremy wasn’t the slightest bit concerned, but it did emphasise how mixing politics and humour could be a minefield. Controversy was his métier; diplomacy was not. He was even prepared to be rude about the Top Gear audience, admitting that women often got pushed to the front.
‘We get 500 people coming to our show each week and most of them are oafs,’ he said in an address at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. ‘Who would you rather have in our shots? [But] I think a girl [presenter] would be a disaster, seeing the chemistry we have now. You bring a girl in and you start taking the piss out of her and that would look like bullying. I remember when we were doing the original screen tests and BBC people were insisting we had to have a girl after we had selected Hammond, so we just got James May.’
A BBC spokesman felt moved to comment: ‘Jeremy, James and Richard look like oafs, as do most car blokes, so it’s not like they are separating themselves from the audience,’ he said.
One of the problems with constantly taunting everyone, however, is that sometimes people lash back. In September, as part of an environmental protest called Climate Rush, Jeremy was targeted as a climate change ‘denier’. A group of seven women dressed as suffragettes turned up at the Clarkson homestead in a van fuelled by chip oil, and promptly dumped a load of horse manure on Jeremy’s lawn. They carried with them a banner reading: ‘This is what you’re landing us in.’ ‘I’m dumping dung at Jeremy Clarkson’s gates, so he might understand that his attitude will land us all in the shit,’ said a woman named Tamsin Omond. Jeremy declined to comment.
Nor was he changing his mind about anything else. While praising Vicki Butler-Henderson, presenter of Fifth Gear, as one of the best drivers he knew, he remained adamant that female presenters would still be wrong for Top Gear. ‘The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blond-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian,’ he wrote in his Top Gear blog. ‘Chalk and cheese, they reckon, works. But here we have Top Gear setting new records after six years using cheese and cheese. It confuses them.’
There was certainly nothing wrong with the current line-up. They continued to amuse with their scrapes, the latest being James May coming a cropper in a hot air balloon that veered off its path while he was racing Richard Hammond in a Lamborghini. The fact that the problem was caused by the weather gave particular delight to some.
And Clarkson’s almost pathological desire to offend showed no sign of receding. When Top Gear went to Romania to film, he donned a hat, started talking about ‘Borat country’ and added, ‘I’m wearing this hat so the gypsies think I am one. I’m told they can be violent if they don’t like the look of you.’ The Romanian government complained. Next, the trio appeared on the pitch at Middlesbrough – wearing the shirts of Newcastle United, Middlesbrough’s deadly rivals.
But whatever the naysayers thought, Jeremy and his cronies could do no wrong with the viewers. As the BBC became increasingly po-faced and health and safety regulations closed down anyone trying to have a little fun, they continued to thumb their noses at the rest of the world and get on with what they did best.
A Top Gear special was shown between Christmas and the New Year. In it, the three made their way from Bolivia’s Amazon basin to the coast of Chile in three four by fours bought on the cheap. It was exciting stuff. ‘There were gut-wrenchingly steep drops inches away and no barriers,’ confessed Richard Hammond. ‘I thought I was going to die.’
Fittingly, Top Gear was voted favourite TV programme of the decade. Clarkson had triumphed again.
CHAPTER 14
AROUND THE WORLD WITH CLARKSON
It was a challenge for Top Gear to constantly to come up with new hi-jinks, but it was one to which the show invariably rose. At the beginning of 2010, there was speculation that the programme would be made into some kind of road movie, with our heroes driving around the world in a series of old cars; the film (which never actually materialised) was briefly known as ‘Around the World in 80 Bangers’.
It was all grist to the mill, as were the various controversies rattling on in the background: climate change, reckless driving, as well as the fight to close off the land around his Isle of Man home, which Jeremy had by now lost. But he hadn’t lost his talent to create controversy or to amuse.
‘There is nothing quite as joyous as leaving the hustle and bustle of a superheated Third World hellhole and being greeted on the big BA jumbo by a homosexual with a cold flannel and refreshing glass of champagne,’ he said in one bon mot. ‘Take that away from us and we may as well all be Belgian.’
Subsequently asked (by Alastair Campbell) if he was anti-gay, Clarkson vehemently denied it, but then added that he ‘demands the right not to get bummed’ – a comment which drew gasps from the Top Gear audience (it wasn’t broadcast) and condemnation from gay rights groups across the land.
There was more controversy – although, unusually, not of his own making – when Clarkson became embroiled in the row over whether ex-racing driver Ben Collins should be allowed to unveil himself as The Stig. The courts had ruled in his favour when he wanted to publish his autobiography, leading to some caustic comments by Jeremy during a charity auction.
‘As you may know, we’ve had a problem with The Stig,’ he commented. ‘Everyone now knows his real name. It’s The Twat. Actually to give him his full name, it’s The Greedy Twat.’ He was clearly hurt, complaining widely that Collins had come round to the Clarkson household for drinks while, in secret, he was writing his book.
Money had become something of a sore point at that moment. The BBC had been coming under immense pressure to reveal the salaries of their most highly paid stars and Jeremy was one of them. But it was a mark of his popularity that he didn’t come in for anything like the criticism of some of his peers.
Ben Collins was also a bit miffed, not least because Jeremy had called him (and all racing drivers) ‘a bit thick’, before advertising for a replacement with the words ‘he or she [a nice touch] must understand that no one, under any circumstances, should ever rat on their friends’.
‘Calling me greedy is a bit hypocritical,’ Collins retorted in an interview with the Daily Express. ‘One reason Jeremy and his compatriots are going after me is their own financial interest… They’re saying I’ve damaged the brand but I think that’s unfair. I’ve served that brand very loyally for eight years and have helped to build it up. Jeremy seems to show a misunderstanding of what I’ve done for the show. Me leaving is not meant to be me poking them in the eye.’
The very bad blood was not helped by the trio of presenters firing gunshots at a cardboard cutout of The Stig on the show, prompting a spate of complaints. But it’s also possible that Jeremy’s ill humour was prompted by problems in his personal life. For it was now that his marital problems with Frances began to emerge.
It was a little known fact that Frances was actually Jeremy’s second wife. He had been very briefly married once before, to Alexandra James in 1989, until she left him for one of his friends, Stephen Hall, just months into the marriage. He had met Alexandra, who was educated at a nunnery, when she was seventeen and he was twenty-two. They married at a Hampshire church seven years later, something that Jeremy rarely ever spoke about, not least because he had been very badly hurt. As he once said, ‘The worst way anyone can dump you is by going off with your best
friend.’
And that would have been that, were it not for the fact that Alexandra then alleged the pair actually had an affair after Jeremy got married again – which allegedly lasted, on and off, for about seven years. As she tried to go public with the claims, Clarkson promptly took out an injunction to stop her. It didn’t really work. This was the age of social media and, while he might have been able to stop her going to the ‘official’ media at that exact moment, the news that he had taken out the injunction – and why – quickly became widespread. It was an open secret on Fleet Street and after a year, in October 2011, Jeremy dropped all pretence.
‘Injunctions don’t work,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘You take out an injunction against somebody or some organisation and immediately news of that injunction and the people involved and the story behind the injunction is in a legal-free world on Twitter and the internet. It’s pointless. You used to be able to take out an injunction and then just sit on it. But as a result of a recent court case you are now ultimately forced by the courts to go to trial – which is unbelievably expensive. If you win, news leaks out on the internet. If you lose, you then get raped by your opponent’s legal fees.’
Now Alexandra could speak out and people could ‘either believe it or not, it’s up to them’. It essentially heralded the beginning of the end of Jeremy’s second marriage, which was damaged too greatly to come back from all this.
Jeremy shrugged off the speculation about his private life and just got on with things, laughing off reports that almost 50,000 people had signed a new petition calling for him to be made Prime Minister. However, he swiftly prompted more complaints when he and Hammond donned burkas to play a trick on James May. They were laughed off too, as were those after Richard called Mexican cars ‘lazy, feckless, flatulent and overweight’. The BBC apologised to the Mexican ambassador. While the jibe was not actually Jeremy’s, he somehow attracted at least some of the blame.
There was also a row with former Labour Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, although Prezza had gone on the show and managed to hold his own.
‘What in the name of all that’s holy were you thinking when you said, “Let’s put a bus lane on the M4”?’ asked Clarkson.
‘I’m going to introduce you to a revolutionary thought,’ said Prescott. ‘You can go slower and you can get there quicker and that’s to do with flow.’ He certainly wasn’t given an easy ride, receiving boos from the audience and at one point getting to his feet to remonstrate with them. ‘Sit down,’ Jeremy snarled.
The series was followed by the Top Gear Live tour. Then, in April 2011, came the first public sign that something was wrong in the Clarksons’ marriage.
Jeremy was pictured with a leggy blonde called Phillipa Sage, who was working with the Top Gear team; the pictures suggested intimacy, but both point-blank denied an affair. Jeremy hastily took a holiday with his family in the Caribbean, but that was the start of a game of cat and mouse with the press. Phillipa would be out of sight for months and then the two would be pictured again, sometimes kissing. It became obvious pretty quickly that they were more than just good friends.
Phillipa, or Pip as she was known to friends, was to become a long-term fixture in Jeremy’s life, someone he could turn to when matters got a little heated, as they were so often prone to do. Then forty-two years old, with a five-year-old son, Alfred, by ex-partner and leisure company owner Edward Taylor, Phillipa was a former beautician at a Hertfordshire country club. She’d also worked as a masseuse for footballers at Tottenham Hotspur and Queens Park Rangers. Now resident in Woolmer Green, she lived close to her parents and two brothers.
‘She wasn’t common like a WAG,’ a friend observed. ‘She was nicely spoken and attractive. She comes from a good background and her family were well-off. Away from work she liked to socialise and loved fast cars. She once had a convertible which she nicknamed Robbie the Roadster.’ In other words, she had quite a lot in common with Clarkson.
Jeremy continued to laugh off the reports, telling friends that he was a ‘babe magnet’ while reassuring his mother that he hadn’t turned into Tiger Woods. But friends were concerned, warning privately that Frances had contributed a huge amount to his career and that without her he’d be lost. Bizarrely, socialite Jemima Goldsmith (or Khan, as she then was) was dragged into the furore with rumours abounding that she too had had a fling with Jeremy – although this was a by-product of the confusion caused by the injunction, at that point still in place, and totally untrue.
It was around this time that Jeremy started spending more time in London, writing wistfully about what is essential in life after moving into an unfurnished flat. In private, at least, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the marriage was falling apart.
Nor was there a shortage of drama elsewhere. Because of his house in the country, Jeremy found himself a part of the ‘Chipping Norton set’, which also included Rebekah Brooks, erstwhile Sun editor and chief executive of News International, and Prime Minister David Cameron. He was also at the centre of news articles about who he socialised with, said in some quarters to be the elite who ruled Britain. As ever, he laughed it off – although, as this was when the phone hacking scandal got underway in earnest, he can’t have been quite so amused when it emerged that, in 1997, as his career started to take off, private investigators had been hired to see if they could dish any dirt on his public school days.
Pausing briefly to upset George Michael, Salford and Birmingham (as Richard Hammond is a Brummie), Jeremy then proceeded to cause outrage by confessing to eating what appeared to be about half the endangered species of the world. ‘I absolutely love trying unusual delicacies when I am abroad. I have eaten alligators, ostrich and a thrush,’ he said. ‘I’ve also eaten the flipper from a seal, a shark cooked in urine and the still-beating heart of a snake, washed down with vodka. In this country we eat overpriced rubbish. And we have a stupid, narrow-minded approach to anything that doesn’t moo, baa, oink or cluck. We should expand our horizons. We should eat more things.’
Cue People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: ‘Clarkson may be clever with cars, but he’s a buffoon in other areas. When it comes to showing compassion for others, from animals to foreigners, he makes the Duke of Edinburgh’s remarks about farming leopards for their pelts seem tame.’
He was also extremely good at winding people up. As was pointed out at the time, even when he wasn’t actually doing anything he still managed to make the news. Nor did the man – or rather woman – in the street seem to hold any of this against him, with one poll claiming women over forty visualised their ideal man as a cross between Jeremy and Hugh Laurie.
Yet he still managed to provoke outrage wherever he went. Very many noses were put out of joint when Jeremy and James were seen parking in disabled bays whilst testing electric cars, provoking harsh words from Disabled Motoring UK and a more placatory response from the BBC. Then Nissan protested that Top Gear had staged an incident in which the electric car Jeremy was driving ran out of power.
He did later admit he knew the charge was low, but mounted a furious defence of the show in the wake of claims that professional drivers faked the difficult stunts. ‘It’s complete rubbish,’ he said. ‘If I say I drove a Lamborghini and got to 207mph, then that’s what I did. I was in the car.’
Behind all the bonhomie, however, there were hints of a certain sadness in his personal life. Jeremy publicly bemoaned the fact that he couldn’t use a washing machine, earning the reprimand of ‘dimwit’ from James, but the fact that he admitted he had to use one indicated a big change in his circumstances.
Although it was not yet publicly admitted, he and Frances were now mostly living apart. They continued to make the odd joint appearance, but they were increasingly rare and it was at around this time that the injunction was lifted over Jeremy’s relationship with Alexandra.
That particular matter was now beyond repair, not least when Alexandra hotly denied claims that she had tried to blackmail Jeremy to t
he tune of £300,000 in order to stay quiet. It was an ugly twist, and there was certainly no love lost between them now. ‘He was too big for his boots even back before he was famous,’ said Alexandra. ‘At parties he craved attention and was fat and opinionated. I had no idea how famous he’d become. He chain-smoked and was just a fat slob. But he was very smart and anyone who couldn’t keep up was doomed.’
But while his private life was becoming ever more complex, he was as popular with the public as ever. The Top Gear satnav, the TomTom, of which 54,000 were made, was voiced by Jeremy; in the longer term, however, BBC bosses decided it breached internal guidelines which specified the show’s presenters shouldn’t endorse motoring products. Instructions included, ‘Turn left, then go straight on until I have to shout at you again for ignoring me’ and ‘Keep right, then take the motorway. You can’t miss it – it’s a big lump of tarmac full of caravans and traffic cones.’ Almost inevitably, as soon as the ban was announced the TomTom sold out. One newspaper ran a competition to win one and was inundated with entries. Everyone wanted to be shouted at by Jeremy.
There was one possible exception, though. Now free from the injunction, it seemed that no one could prevail upon Alexandra to be quiet either. She appeared in an interview on ITV with Adrian Chiles. ‘Four months after I left him I realised I’d made a mistake and it’s had a huge impact on my life and has affected me hugely for the rest of my life,’ she said. ‘Having Jeremy Clarkson as my ex-husband has had a huge influence on my life. I had no idea how great an influence that was going to be. I had the courtesy to tell him that I wanted to write a book and his reaction was to slap a super-injunction on me. I had no intention of writing anything nasty about him; I was going to be completely lovely about him. I wasn’t going to mention the affair… I was going to do my book, my life and the impact his fame has had on my life. There wasn’t that much to do with him, I wanted to write my story. He’s shot himself in the foot. If he hadn’t wanted any mention of the affair then he shouldn’t have taken the injunction out.’