by Gwen Russell
Her subsequent marriage to Stephen Hall, which produced two children, had also broken down. Kate Birchenough, the new partner of the property developer, gave a revealing peep behind the scenes. ‘Poor Steve got caught up in it,’ she told The Sunday Mirror. ‘He would always play second fiddle to Jeremy. It has been very painful for Steve because it was so long ago but Alex still wounded him greatly. This has been hanging over us for a very long time and the injunction being lifted is a huge relief.’
Stephen and Jeremy had ‘no kind of relationship now,’ she said. ‘Regardless what you think of Jeremy, he does not deserve all the dirt that Alex is throwing at him and Steve knows that, too. We only ever talk to her because of the kids and we try to keep her at arm’s length. This injunction has meant her name has been mentioned more often in conversations than we would like.’
It was no one’s finest hour.
Jeremy was clearly keen to move on and was soon up to his old tricks: striking public sector workers should be executed in front of their families; animals should be ‘cute, delicious or magnificent’; trains shouldn’t stop after they’ve hit a person. Twitter lit up, but it shouldn’t have bothered. Jeremy’s job was to create controversy and he did it better than anyone – although that comment about the strikers did elicit a rare apology, after both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition got dragged into the ensuing row. (‘That’s obviously a silly thing to say,’ said David Cameron. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it.’ Boris Johnson, on the other hand, was very supportive.)
The unions were livid and over 32,000 people complained to the BBC. But Clarkson was, by this stage, untouchable. As one wag put it, what he was apologising for had generated a huge amount of publicity for his new DVD. In fact, in the wake of the row sales shot up by 50 per cent. The BBC did, however, postpone an episode of QI in which he featured, but for Jeremy it was clearly water off a duck’s back.
Nor did it stop him. He followed up the comment on train fatalities by writing that people who commit suicide by jumping on the tracks are selfish, provoking yet another furore. This time round though, it was suggested that this wasn’t just Clarkson being deliberately provocative, that his judgment may have been affected by the turmoil in his private life. With his first wife on the attack, his second finally having had enough and a girlfriend sitting quietly in the shadows, even by Jeremy’s standards it was a pretty torrid time.
‘There’s a feeling he’s more vulnerable than he should be,’ fretted one BBC insider. But despite whatever concerns they might have had, he remained both their most popular and profitable presenter. It was in the interests of no one, least of all Jeremy himself, to change that.
But Alex chimed in: ‘Jeremy’s the same now as he’s always been,’ she said. ‘The problem is that now he says these things to an audience of millions rather than to a few friends. He shows no compassion, but then Jeremy doesn’t think about the repercussions of his actions. He never has.’
Many would say it wasn’t really a question of compassion but of an urge to provoke. But with the BBC very sensitive to public ire in the wake of the Ross/Brand/Andrew Sachs fiasco, the message was clear: do exercise caution before opening your mouth.
But Clarkson continued to rise above it all: pictured surrounded by a bevy of beauties in the middle of the Top Gear Live show in Australia while soaking up the sun on a powerboat with James.
The BBC was sticking up for its man as well. ‘I don’t intend to sack him,’ said then Director General Mark Thompson, answering Labour MP Jim Sheridan’s comment that Clarkson was a ‘luxury you can’t afford’ at the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee. ‘Although clearly he’s a polarising figure for the BBC, there are many millions of people who enjoy and support Jeremy Clarkson. That has to be balanced against a couple of flippant remarks. Well over 20 million people watch Top Gear in a given season. It gets a very high rating from the public for quality. People watch that programme expecting often outspoken humour from Clarkson. I believe it is absolutely clear to anyone who watches the clips, perhaps not who reads a section of the transcript, these remarks are said entirely in jest and not to be taken seriously. In my view Jeremy Clarkson’s remarks were absolutely and clearly intended as a joke. I can’t see how anyone could watch that programme and see the comments as a piece of public policy.’
Of course Jeremy had been joking, but the feeling now was that he was pushing his luck. Nor did it stop Ofcom from announcing it would be investigating him – though ultimately he’d be cleared.
Clarkson was still able to laugh all the way to the bank, earning over £2 million in 2011 alone under the terms of a lucrative deal struck with the BBC. Apart from the £350,000 performance fee he earned from the corporation, he also had a stake in a company called Bedder 6, set up on the back of the show’s success, and even that didn’t take into account all his external earnings. Jeremy Clarkson had become an extremely wealthy man.
India became the latest country to receive the Clarkson treatment when a road trip filmed during the summer was broadcast. Everyone had been assured they would be highlighting the ‘beautiful scenery’ and ‘local colour’, and so the Indian High Commission in London was none too pleased when they saw shots of Jeremy driving along in a Jaguar with a loo on the back, talking to locals dressed in his boxer shorts while using a trouser press and pinning signs to trains which ostensibly read, ‘British IT is good for your company’ and ‘Eat English muffins’, but turned into obscene messages when the trains parted. More complaints followed, especially from the IHC: ‘The programme was replete with cheap jibes, tasteless humour and lacked the cultural sensitivity that we expect from the BBC.’
Yet again the Prime Minister got involved. At the start of the programme he was filmed waving to the trio and calling, ‘Stay away from India.’ Now he tried to distance himself as quickly as possible. The PM’s spokesman said: ‘Mr Cameron was leaving for an event when the cameras were there. This is a matter for the BBC.’
But then what did he expect? David Cameron was a personal friend of Jeremy’s as well as a fan of the show, and no one who knew anything about Clarkson would be in too much doubt as to what might follow. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the PM was hoping a little bit of the Clarkson appeal would rub off on him when voters returned to the polling booth.
There was a lot of po-faced tutting along the lines that Jeremy was becoming a national liability, but this time the BBC refused to back down, aware that, for all the furious letter writers, there were millions of amused viewers. The corporation pointed out that the show had not been making fun of India itself, but of the presenters.
Nor did the fact that Jeremy seemed intent on insulting every country in the entire world seem to actually put the entire world off of him. His popularity even survived an appearance by Alex in front of a Commons privacy inquiry, in which she described how the injunction had terrified her. Clarkson’s name was coming up pretty regularly in the House of Commons these days.
A charity called Changing Faces was the next to take umbrage, when Jeremy compared one car on Top Gear to ‘people with growths on their faces’, claiming that people ‘wouldn’t talk to [the car] at a party’. Indeed, it was getting increasingly difficult to find some section of society that Clarkson had not managed to insult. He had sparked so many controversies that his name quite frequently came up in discussions about free speech itself – the point being that if Jeremy Clarkson wasn’t free to make a few harmless jokes (and most were ultimately harmless), then whither free speech?
But for all the controversy he caused, no one denied that Jeremy was an extremely talented broadcaster. In May 2012, he collected the Honorary Rose Award at the Rose D’Or Festival in Lucerne, joking as he did so that, ‘Approximately seven million cars had to be destroyed to win this award.’ In high spirits, he added, ‘This is the best job in the world.’
Shrugging off another controversy as he went – immigration queues in airports would be lessened if
only officials used a bit of racism, he’d joked – he then discovered himself to be subject to a police investigation into the alleged disturbance of protected barn owls. It was becoming surreal: this was the result of an appearance on Countryfile, not Top Gear, in which Jeremy and the completely uncontroversial Chris Packham were shown filming owls at Jeremy’s country home.
But it was quite serious. A Barn Owl Trust spokesman confirmed: ‘We are slightly concerned that the programme gave the impression that flushing pairs of birds from potential nest sites is a common occurrence. If the producers knew that the birds were not breeding and therefore that flushing them out was not an issue, it would have been good to have made this clear at the outset.’
It actually blew up into quite a row. Not to be outdone, PC Josh Marshall, Devon and Cornwall Police’s wildlife crime officer, tweeted: ‘Irresponsible to show that behaviour without warning people watching you need appropriate licences.’
Nevertheless the jibes continued to flow, with Jeremy having a pop at Andy Murray for crying in public – ‘It’s like eating a horse. Something that only foreigners do’ – and the money continued to flow in. Named as the top-earning star at the BBC, it appeared his salary now amounted to more than £3 million a year.
There was, however, a rare case of the biter being bitten when Jeremy tweeted that his pet Labrador, Whoopi, had been put to sleep. He received a tirade of unpleasant remarks in return, which upset him so much that he felt moved to remind everyone the UK was the country that invented concentration camps and the international slave trade. He was only human, after all, and the Twitter sniping had come on top of a turbulent private life.
Still, the Clarkson coffers continued to fill. Jeremy sold his 30 per cent stake in Bedder 6 to the BBC for a cool £15 million in September 2012, at the same time renewing his three-year contract (as did James and Richard).
With interesting coincidental timing, one week later the BBC Trust upheld a complaint against Clarkson for the first time in four years: relating to the jibe about the Toyota Prius van looking like someone with a growth on their face (Clarkson called it the ‘Elephant Car’, in reference to the Elephant Man). ‘Banter such as was broadcast on Top Gear would always be an imperfect science; it would invariably upset some viewers at some point,’ said the show’s executive producer, Andy Wilman. But if Jeremy was concerned, it certainly didn’t show.
There was celebration in some quarters that he’d finally been tamed, but of course he hadn’t at all. The Top Gear Live show turned up at Birmingham’s NEC with larks a-plenty, including Clarkson’s Ford Fiesta sling-shotted into a row of parked cars. Jeremy claimed he was risking death, but in the event got off with a slight gash to the leg. There was also a bubbly appearance on Have I Got News For You, followed by a sighting with Phillipa on holiday in Rome.
As 2012 drew to a close, there was much to celebrate. As bruising as the row with Alexandra had been, at least it was out in the open; he was wealthier than he’d ever been and remained extraordinarily popular. Life was good.
CHAPTER 15
CLARKSON RETAKES THE FALKLANDS
By the beginning of 2013, Jeremy’s ability to cause controversy was such that he didn’t even need to do anything to prompt it. Just being part of the Chipping Norton set, say, ensured that every time it got a mention (and due to the controversy surrounding fellow members David Cameron and Rebekah Wade, it got a lot of mentions) Jeremy’s name bobbed up. Time and age was doing nothing to temper his opinions, either. He clearly enjoyed stirring up controversies, although he was on the verge of one that could have proved personally dangerous.
His importance to the BBC, alongside James and Richard, was highlighted by the fact that in 2013, Top Gear was named the world’s most watched factual entertainment show, broadcast in 244 countries. ‘It’s become one of BBC Two’s channel-defining shows,’ said Chris Curtis, deputy editor of Broadcast magazine in an interview with the Daily Express, ‘not just for its popularity but in the sense that it’s got a personality, a point of view. It’s one of those shows people love, but also love to hate a little bit.’ But they really did love it. The trio of presenters were widely seen to be acting out middle-aged-male fantasies, and as the new series kicked off, viewers were promised a rugby game with the latest Kia hatchback, a voyage to the source of the Nile and an attempt to impress Dragons’ Den with a micro vehicle, amidst much else. This wasn’t just a show about cars – it was a show about doing exactly what you wanted while thumbing your nose at what society demands of your behaviour and being extremely entertaining en route.
Jeremy lost no time in giving the easily offended further cause for complaint (you had to wonder why they actually watched the programme) by using a car to draw a giant depiction of a male member in the Los Angeles desert, which prompted unpleasant comments on Twitter, after which Jeremy’s own account was hacked. This did not stop him from posting a shot of him feasting on rabbits’ ears when in Moscow, prompting complaints from animal rights activists. He was certainly globe trotting: he next turned up in Australia where a group of Ozzie photographers irritated him by snapping him with Phillipa (‘You can take them out of England but you just can’t take the convict out of them’) before moving on to New Zealand, where he upset the Maori community by threatening to drive over a local sacred beach.
Back in Blighty he blamed jetlag on the Ozzie outburst (the locals hadn’t taken the reference to convicts too well) but it was a mark of the fact that he now moved in the highest echelons of the establishment when it was revealed that he was on the guest list for Lady Thatcher’s funeral. The current prime minister was a friend, after all, so it was no surprise when he was included among the great and good to say goodbye to another. (‘We sang some hymns and listened to a Labour Party political broadcast from a bearded man in a frock’ – this was a reference to the Right Rev. Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, who gave an address some felt leaned a little to the left.) And he was, after all, a Conservative himself, something else which marked him out at the BBC.
Clarkson’s next target was Puerto Rico and by association Sir Bruce Forsyth, whose wife came from the island – ‘It may be a bit chilly in Britain but at least there’s a chance of getting to the post office without having your watch nicked and your head cut off ’ – but given that it was now estimated that Jeremy had made about £14 million from deals with the BBC he could afford to ignore the aggro. Pausing only to infer that caravanners were ‘doggers’, Clarkson got his knuckles rapped when it turned out that restaurant diners soaked by Clarkson in a passing vehicle on Top Gear were in fact actors. Nothing abashed, he issued a fierce criticism of the BBC for running a documentary celebrating the German motor industry straight after an episode of Top Gear praising British cars. (Richard Hammond was pretty irritated, too.)
Politics were at the forefront again when Clarkson suggested he might take on Ed Miliband in the general election, although he later claimed he’d only tweeted about it because he was drunk, before speculation arose that he might stand against Nick Clegg instead. In truth, although many voters would have loved him, there was no way Jeremy could really be a politician – the fact that he was so capable of insulting large swathes of society without even thinking about it would have seen to that. Nor did his complicated personal life help – he had just been spotted with Phillipa in Greece.
He was better off doing what he did best – namely, broadcasting. And for all the Top Gear laddishness, Jeremy remained only too capable of tapping into public emotion and paying tribute to serious issues that chimed with the public. In December 2013, he made a documentary about the Arctic convoys between 1941 and 1945, in which about 3,000 Merchant and Royal Navy sailors were killed delivering supplies to the Soviet Union, which was fighting against Germany in the Second World War. ‘I genuinely believe that the bravest men who ever lived are those who served on the convoys in the Second World War,’ he said. ‘To be shot at anywhere is scary but to be shot at hundreds of miles from land with no cha
nce of rescue, amid mountainous waves, is really something quite different. These veterans are the bravest of the brave.’ It was a sentiment with which many viewers could wholeheartedly agree and yet another illustration of the fact that Jeremy had an innate understanding of and bond with many Britons that was simply unmatched elsewhere on the BBC.
But Jeremy wouldn’t be Jeremy without the ability to cause offence. When Michael Schumacher had a skiing accident that put him into a coma, Jeremy couldn’t help himself. ‘The worrying thing about brain injuries is that you can recover only to find you’re a midget with a marked Birmingham accent when drunk,’ he tweeted. This was a clear reference to Richard Hammond and his accident. Twitter went mad.
* * *
It was when Jeremy was in the middle of the ‘eeny, meeny, miny, moe’ controversy, in which there was intensive speculation as to whether had used the n-word, that he received the news that every child must dread. He was in the middle of a Top Gear Live tour in Russia when he received the news that his mother Shirley had died on 24 March 2014, aged seventy-nine, and it affected him badly: the two were very close. Shirley had had cancer. For all the bluster, Jeremy has a considerably softer side than he liked to let on and he later revealed that what he wanted to do on hearing the news was weep, because he had been very close to his mother. But if he’d done so, he said, the Daily Mirror would have run the pictures and claimed they were tears of shame. ‘It was a gruesome time.’
And so, in what had been a very turbulent couple of years, Jeremy lost his surviving parent, the rite of passage that so many of us dread. There has been speculation that it was the breakdown of his marriage that sent him a little off the rails in recent times, drinking very heavily and finally going too far in punching his producer, of which more anon, but it is just as likely to have been the passing of his mother.