by Martin Roach
The presenter has implied that many ‘green campaigners’ are actually former trade unionists or CND protestors whose causes have dissipated and so they need something else to focus on. And quite often on the show, ecological concerns are dismissed almost as an aside: for example, when introducing a feature on life-size remote control cars in Series 7, Richard Hammond points out that the Top Gear office gets lots of letters from boffins, usually about ‘something dreary like global warming.’
Often Clarkson’s newspaper columns are the source of much of the ire directed towards him, rather than his comments on Top Gear. In 2005, he told the Independent: ‘Of course there is no doubt that the world is warming up, but let’s just stop and think for a moment what the consequences might be … Switzerland loses its skiing resorts, the beach in Miami is washed away, North Carolina gets knocked over by a hurricane – anything bothering you yet? It isn’t even worthy of a shrug.’
Top Gear is also unlikely to be on the Christmas card list of road safety campaigners. It’s perhaps inevitable the show will never going to appeal to such people, especially those who may have lost loved ones on Britain’s road network. Although the first generation of the show featured a large number of safety films, the new programme was slammed by campaigners and it’s not hard to see why. Take the very first episode of new Top Gear when a feature was broadcast in which the team attempted to discover if a car could travel fast enough not to register on a speed camera.
The premise was this: a speed camera takes two photos in rapid succession and compares the distance travelled between the two images to calculate an exact speed. However, Top Gear conjectured if the car was travelling sufficiently fast enough, it would have passed the camera lens range for the second photo, therefore no second snap could be taken and no comparative calculation made. In other words, it would be travelling too fast to land a speeding ticket.
The production team are no fools and so the presenters continually stated the feature was ‘in the name of scientific endeavour’. Really, this was disingenuous and always spoken with a slight wry smile. The first car to be tested by the all-black Stig was a Honda Civic Type R doing 129mph but it failed abysmally and was clocked. Next up was a Mercedes CL55 AMG, which reached a mighty 148mph but was still done for speeding. The third and final car was the insanely fast (and beautiful) TVR Tuscan S, which raced to 170mph past the camera. Back in the studio, the team revealed that the TVR was nowhere to be seen on the second photo and therefore it had indeed been going too fast to get a speeding ticket.
Quite how the stunt resonated with swathes of boy racers across the country who might see this as a challenge is unknown. Suffice to say, safety campaigners were appalled and it was not the last time they would lock horns with the show.
Although he has talked of driving extremely fast on public roads at various times, at the time of writing it is believed Jeremy Clarkson has a clean driving licence despite writing on Timesonline.co.uk that, ‘on a recent drive across Europe [in a Bugatti Veyron] I desperately wanted to reach the top speed but I ran out of road when the needle hit 240mph.’ This is selective, though – Jeremy has been a keen advocate of a restricted 20mph speed limit outside schools, for example.
James May insists Top Gear are responsible for the road tests themselves: ‘Top Gear never does anything reckless on a road,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘When we go on a track, we go mad, set things on fire and Jeremy crashes, but that’s what tracks are for. Apart from anything else, none of us can afford to break the speed limit – our careers would be instantly ruined. Remarkably, Jeremy is quite a courteous driver, even though he’s very rude in every other respect.’
The Top Gear crew have done other ‘road safety’ features, too. One investigated that age-old concern about how close you can drive to the rear engine of Boeing 747 without being obliterated by the jet stream – something Clarkson dubbed ‘a public service film.’ These 400-ton monsters of the air have 58,000lb of thrust on each engine and can reach 575mph, yet the man on the street still doesn’t know just how close he can drive without getting killed to death, as Clarkson would say. Well, trusty old Top Gear did the test and the answer wasn’t pleasant: a 1.5-ton Ford Mondeo was blasted 50 feet and ripped to shreds, while for those intrepid hippy-esque Top Gear viewers (now there’s a minority), a 2CV was launched 100 feet along the tarmac and completely destroyed.
A more obvious and very real safety issue broached by the Top Gear crew was the terrible number of deaths on level crossings every year. In Series 9, they teamed up with Network Rail. The initial premise seemed serious, with Clarkson stating that elderly drivers are three times more likely to crash than their grandkids, pointing out how many had driven the wrong way down motorways or even into the sea (sadly, sans May’s sailing boat-car). Pretty quickly, the sombre tone is somewhat undermined by the flaky statistics he offers, such as the number of people involved in such incidents: ‘many people are injured every year.’
They then place a Top Gear perennial, the Renault Espace, on a railway track and hurtle a train right into it (it wasn’t the first time the car had been mangled by the Top Gear team – a previous episode saw them attempt to make their own convertible People Carriers, a feat ‘achieved’ with the use of grinders, cutters and various other somewhat brutal tools!) The slow-motion carnage at the level crossing is genuinely shocking and instant death would have been unavoidable for the driver. It’s replayed several times, with each slower version more appalling to watch. A very clear advert was painted on the side of the train stating ‘Level crossings – don’t run the risk’ and when it was replayed in slow-motion, the message was loud and clear.
What is clever about the piece is that although Clarkson is unable to resist making gags about health and safety (and even ends by saying the real message is ‘Always wear a high visibility jacket’), in fact the viewer comes away from the feature determined never to run a level crossing. Even with this safety piece, complaints followed the screening as the previous week in Cumbria, there had been a train crash with one fatality.
Still, certain groups are not for turning. In 2005, Transport 2000’s spokesman Steve Hounsham issued the following statement: ‘[Top Gear] glamorises speed and fails to make the connection with danger on the roads. Through the use of Jeremy Clarkson as presenter, with his distinctive image, it is in danger of encouraging a ‘yobbish’ attitude on the road … Everyone is talking about how to reduce car use, cut climate change emissions and make the roads safer, but, to quote in perhaps its own language, Top Gear effectively sticks up its fingers to this … If we must have Jeremy Clarkson on the television, let’s give him something useful to do, such as trying out public transport or road-testing new bicycles. Perhaps he would like to drive a bus; he’d find it just as much fun as a Ferrari.’
And it’s not just road safety campaigners who fall out with Top Gear, so do road users. Take that hardy British favourite, the White Van Man. The team are famously hard on this particular species of British driver and regularly poke fun at him. On one occasion, they bought a van for £1,000 (ostensibly a ‘Cheap Car/Van Challenge’) and then had to come up with, and paint their own company name on the side before attempting a series of challenges. The tests included a straight ‘van drag’ race although rather more dragging than racing was going on, as all the vans were so slow (indeed, the Top Gear cameraman was so used to faster cars launching from the start that he swept the camera down the track before the vans even left the line!).
Next up was a cargo drop, with each presenter ordered to load their vans with the usual removal men’s gear such as lamps, mattresses, paintings, chairs and … an illegal immigrant each! The first time I watched this feature, I laughed aloud before thinking, ‘Thank God they haven’t said what country the immigrants come from, they might just get away with it!’ … only for it to be revealed moments later, with spectacular lack of political correctness, that they were Albanian. And it got worse: May was struggling to get his goods loaded and so he ga
ve an immigrant some cash to help. While Clarkson bemoaned manual labour, one of the immigrants just ran off. Undeterred, the three pals then used a laser measuring device to see who could get in their white van and do the closest bumper hogging before attempting – and largely failing – to complete their own door repair.
Quite how the whole sequence was supposed to appease the white van men who took exception to Top Gear’s repeatedly derogatory remarks is unclear. At least on occasion they have ‘celebrated’ the white van such as the time when they tried to lap the Nürburgring racetrack in a stripped-down model in under 10 minutes to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Transit.
Then there’s the lorry drivers: during one feature in the opening episode of Series 12, Clarkson commented that being a truck driver was a really hard job: ‘You’ve got to change gear, change gear, change gear, check mirror … murder a prostitute. Change gear, change gear, murder … that’s a lot of effort in a day!’ Given only two years earlier, five prostitutes had been murdered in Ipswich, the comment was bound to cause trouble. The BBC said it was merely a ‘comic rebuttal’ of a common misconception about lorry drivers and even Eddie Stobart, the name behind the nation’s most famous haulage firm, said it needed to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Clarkson played it down again, saying people shouldn’t worry about what a ‘balding and irrelevant middle-aged man might have said.’ Poking fun at his detractors, on the very next Top Gear he said he had an apology to make about something that had been in all the papers, only to proceed to say sorry for forgetting to put the 911’s lap time on the board the previous week! Later, broadcasting watchdog Ofcom said they would not launch an investigation despite over 500 complaints.
And it’s not just lorry drivers who take offence at the show’s choice of words. The phrase ‘politically incorrect’ was virtually invented for Top Gear. As already noted, it’s a fact that Clarkson and Co. have riled numerous ‘foreign guests’ with their comments about Polish SatNavs, dog-eating car executives and illegal immigrants but there’s always more work/offending to be done. In a summer 2009 episode, the presenters were testing saloon cars and summed up which model would suit which type of person. Obviously such broad-brush strokes used to describe a car are bound to generalise but for some viewers, their comments went a step too far. While pointing out that one particular saloon was for businessmen, they also placed a pie and a key on the bonnet of an Audi. Back in the studio, James May then denigrated Richard Hammond as a ‘steak and kidney pie lock unlocker’ and then Clarkson waded in, suggesting the car was more suitable for those whose business was selling pegs and heather. (Incidentally, over the years they had used the word before, calling a hammer ‘the tool of a pikey’ and have variously used the term to insult each other.)
Several viewers complained but the media’s reaction was even more terse. Jodie Matthews of the Guardian was not impressed and eloquently explained why: ‘A typical example of the blokey, exclusive, bullying humour that has made the show so popular? … Isn’t this a good thing? The answer to these questions is a firm no. This old-fashioned racism is not funny and has serious political effects. Its apparent acceptability is a damning indictment of how slowly we as a culture are moving in terms of changing attitudes towards Gypsies and travellers.’ She goes on to lambast the in-joke as a snide way of sidestepping the censors and suggests such verbiage is directly linked to ‘a strategy of racist discourse since at least the 19th century. It was effectively employed by George Smith of Coalville in his anti-Gypsy campaigns of the 1870s, and even by those who sought to romanticise Gypsies in the late 1800s,’ therefore ‘reinforcing ethnic and cultural stereotypes.’
For Matthews, Top Gear choosing to make remarks such as these is ‘unoriginal and boring; we have heard it all before, for centuries.’ Similar criticism followed what some viewers saw as the inappropriate use of the word ‘gay’ or other comments that risk offending the gay community such as use of the rhyming slang ‘ginger beer’ or remarks about being ‘bummed’.
Not all of Clarkson’s enemies or critics are campaigners, though. One of his most high-profile spats was with Piers Morgan, the acid-tongued former Sun columnist, who dominated much of Fleet Street as the Mirror’s editor before a faked military photo scandal cost him his job. Thereafter, he turned his hand to becoming one of the world’s most famous TV personalities on shows such as America’s Got Talent as well as his own chat shows.
Jeremy Clarkson was one of three people that Morgan says he has had a long-standing dislike for (the other two being David Yelland and Ian Hislop). So, why was there such acrimony between the two? Well, Morgan had published pictures of Clarkson with his female producer in a car. Clarkson was livid and, as a happily married man, incensed by the invasion into his privacy and the implied insinuation. The resentment festered for three years and then at a Press Awards ceremony in 2004, Clarkson actually hit Morgan. Thereafter the former Fleet Street man suggested to The Times that Clarkson believed that because ‘he’s a Sun and Sunday Times journalist, therefore he’s immune to the normal coverage of a TV star who might give fancy interviews about his solid marriage.’ He went on to say, ‘I actually didn’t care that much about the Clarkson stuff until he began behaving ridiculously, smacking me round the head. He’s perfectly entitled to smack me around the head, but the idea that smacking editors will help your PR is rather short-sighted.’
Of course, not all criticism of Top Gear is aimed at their outspoken views or mad stunts. Sometimes it’s just direct slating of the show itself. One such regular criticism focuses on an alleged repetition/overuse of sequences: for example, the frequency of military hardware. In the last show of Series 1, Top Gear ran a feature that saw a TVR versus a Harrier jump jet; back in the 1960s the Harrier was first tested at Dunsfold airfield, no less. But we have also famously seen Clarkson avoid the bullets of the Irish Guards in an SLK55 AMG. This latter scene was at the Eastmere ‘village’, a replica of a German hamlet that had originally been built post-war to allow Cold War British soldiers to practise fighting the Russians. Of course the Health & Safety bods wouldn’t allow live bullets to be used – not even against their nemesis Clarkson – so he wore a special jacket, which picked up the laser ‘bullets’ that the soldiers fired.
We’ve also seen a Lotus Exige tracked by an Apache gunship, which was very exciting, proving the Norfolk-built sports-car remains the best handling car in the world by avoiding the helicopter’s laser missile lock altogether (there was a fake missile lock and destruction of the Exige at the end of the piece). Yet we’ve similarly seen tanks chasing Range Rovers, also with a fake missile hit at the end of the piece. Too much similarity is an accusation also raised over numerous games of car football, caravan bashing, excessive supercar coverage and so on.
Other critics say even some of the language is repetitive. Clarkson has used the word ‘savage’ to describe several cars’ acceleration: the Enzo, Nissan GT-R and the Ariel Atom being three examples.
Other critics complain about the resources used and some of the statistics for producing Top Gear are indeed mind-boggling. In 2009, the Ministry of Defence attracted a fairly heavy battering of criticism when it was revealed that they had spent 141 days on Top Gear stunts – this at a time when there was frequent demands for troops in combat to be supplied with more armour and other life-protecting equipment. The Top Gear stunts included using specialist military equipment worth billions of pounds. Information was made public following a canny claim by the Press Association, who were then able to reveal that among the MoD ‘appearances’ were: the Apache helicopter trying to get that missile lock on the Exige, a parachutist from the Red Devils display team racing Richard Hammond in a Porsche Cayenne, HMS Ark Royal being used in a film about the Rolls-Royce Phantom, an RAF Typhoon racing a Bugatti Veyron at RAF Coningsby airfield, a beach assault with the Royal Marines while driving a Ford Fiesta, including Lynx helicopters and amphibious landing craft and a game of ‘British bulldog’ against high-tech armoured
vehicles.
The MoD usually supplied this hardware free of charge and argued this was brilliant publicity for a generation who might be considering a role in the armed forces. They further responded to the criticism by pointing out that a 30-second advertisement for the MoD would cost at least £50,000 and that all filming took place during scheduled training hours: ‘Showcasing our people and equipment on popular television programmes is an excellent way to raise public awareness about the work of the armed forces and to encourage support for our troops.’
However, the real problem for the Top Gear producers is this: how do you keep coming up with ideas to fill an entire hour’s worth of TV every Sunday? To date, there have been 15 series of the new generation of the programme, covering 123 one-hour episodes. That’s a lot of TV. Then there are the specials, spin-offs and charity episodes. The crew might spend many days on location filming a piece (and an inconsiderable amount of cash in the process) only for that feature to use up perhaps ten minutes of screen time. There are – unavoidably – a finite number of ways to review cars, talk about them and show them off. Likewise, there are only so many words you can use to describe speed, acceleration, power, handling and so on.
Although it’s understandable that critics raise such complaints, it seems extremely unforgiving and harsh when directed towards a production set-up that is widely regarded as one of the finest in modern television. And that brings me back to being a Top Gear fan: the show’s critics may sometimes be right but I still love seeing the gang do this stuff.
In turn, the Top Gear team is usually pretty thick-skinned about any abuse. Indeed, Clarkson is not about to concede to all the Top Gear haters. He has variously defended his words and the show’s actions, but as we have seen, when he feels he has overstepped the mark then he will apologise. In the face of growing dissent over his brusque approach to so many subjects, Clarkson sounded weary when writing in Top Gear magazine that the criticisms of him were as much indicative of an ever-growing and insidious culture of positive discrimination, which he felt was beginning to suffocate TV and media creativity in general. He suggested in their liberal haste to balance out too many white heterosexual male presenters, TV bosses were obsessed with having ‘black Muslim lesbians’ on TV shows and continued: ‘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.’