Clarkson's Calm

It’s been a splendid week in the English countryside. In the field to the east of me the hay bobs were spinning away. The first cut silage is finished. The combines are ready for the winter barley. In the field to the south, the store cattle have been munching contentedly - Belted Galloways, as it happens, like Newcastle United supporters, though rather less vocal. Last year’s weaners are gone, the ewes are resting, and the hoggets are eating everything they come across, like greedy teenagers.

And if any of that means anything to you, I suspect it’s thanks to Jeremy Clarkson.

For years, he was the enfant très terrible of Top Gear. Before he screeched onto the screen, it was a moribund TV motoring show which featured men (they were always men) driving around in sensible clothes saying sensible things about sensible cars.  They actually eulogised dashboard ergonomics. It was the televisual equivalent of driving gloves, those stringy things that fathers wore in the sixties, thinking they made them look racy. Which they did not. Launched on BBC Television in 1977, the show shared with the British cars of that period, the Morris Marinas and Austin Allegros, a certain fuddy-duddy lack of style. It was television for earnest people who thought about fuel economy before making a buying decision, then plumped for a family vehicle with an AM radio and incipient rust on the wings. It was the bland driving the bland.

Then Clarkson happened. He had already made some appearances on the outgoing show, doing pieces to camera and speaking with a weird voiceover cadence that he later admitted was caused by all the cigarettes he smoked - he could not get to the end of any sentence without gasping for breath. Result; the Clarkson style. Working with Andy Wilman, a Producer he’d known at Repton boarding school, where he spoke of being horribly bullied (presumably not by Wilman, unless in a vehicular version of Stockholm Syndrome), they developed a zoo format which transformed the show. 

The new Top Gear launched in 2002 from an aircraft hanger and soon found the right, er, gear, opinionated, funny, unashamedly by and for petrolheads. Out went the predictably-shot reviews, in came exhilarating camerawork, loud soundtracks - glamour. The show was obsessed with absurdly expensive supercars, and unafraid to say so. It was fabulously edited, taking inspiration from fashion television, where one of its Exec Producers, a friend from my own days in TV, had cut his teeth. It hit the nation with the force of a head-on collision, becoming instantly popular, unexpected - something to talk about over the water cooler.

As the reinvented show settled down, the presenting team solidified; James May, the nerd, smart, relaxed, the butt of the jokes, which he took with good humour; Richard Hammond, the pretty boy, also pretty short, who played the fool and did all the dangerous stuff; and in control, the head prefect, the capo di capo, Clarkson. They brought personality (though mainly childish bickering) in their constant attempt to outdo each other. When the studio-based shows were augmented by distant and usually ludicrous challenges, always involving an implausible journey in old bangers in beautiful countryside, it brought yet more fame.   

Clarkson, the self-appointed leader, had a monstrous ego, and wasn’t afraid to use it. He always had to win every competition, and delighted in foolish pranks – the kind of borderline-cruel practical joke that would have had him whimpering in a corner at school. Do unto others as other people once did unto you, seemed to be his informing (lack of) principle. It was good telly, but he did not seem a chap you would want to sit next to on a three-hour train journey. Probably not even for ten minutes. I was once editing something in the bowels of BBC Pebble Mill and Clarkson was in the next edit suite, smoking and shouting a lot. Urgh.

Then his influence widened to a column in The Sun (which obviously I never read) and The Sunday Times, which veered from cars to prejudice. And, as the BBC sold the Top Gear format manically around the globe, the cash rolled in.  

And so he bought a farm. Not just any farm – and certainly not the one next to me, which sits on a windswept Northumbrian ridge, rented for 109 years by a family of perennial strugglers. In all that time, it never occurred to them to plant any trees. No, Clarkson got himself 1,000 acres in the Cotswolds, lovey-dovey countryside, Just So Handy For London, Darling. It’s the Hamptons of the UK, and similarly tenanted by glitterati. Actually not tenanted at all – owned. They acquire houses as many people buy food, hoovering them up like Beluga, pushing up prices for the locals whom they try to befriend in the pub, before irritating them with their noisy opinions and braying talk of a lifestyle no local could imagine, still less desire.

And boy did Clarkson have opinions. Over the years, as he left the BBC in (not enough) disgrace for petulantly punching a Producer for failing to control time or a pub kitchen, his elbows grew sharper, ventilated in interviews as well as his newspaper columns. The inevitably lucrative Amazon contract for The Grand Tour, a straightforward copy of Top Gear but with much bigger budgets, exacerbated the problem. He just seemed to be everywhere. And noisily so. Soon, the schtick became tiring. Brits switched him off.  

And then there was that appalling article about Meghan. You know the one. He hated her ‘on a cellular level’ and wanted her paraded in the streets, naked. I’ll save you the rest of it. He apologised, but became not so much cancelled as ignored, thought of mainly with disgust.

So it was with considerable scepticism that I tuned in to the first series of Clarkson’s Farm. I don’t think I would have watched it at all, if I did not myself live in the country, such is my disdain for its host. But in it we find an entirely different Clarkson; self-deprecating, ready to be ridiculed, taking criticism, admitting his mistakes. Kaleb and Charlie never pass up an opportunity to call him an idiot. (It’s hard to imagine that staying in the edit for any previous Clarkson show). The series is dramatic, poignant, laugh out loud funny, and tender. Having myself moved from the city without knowing the difference between hay and straw, I respected his own vertical learning curve. It is good-humoured, the TV equivalent of a pub chat with good mates. I have now watched all the series, and think it is some of the best factual television I’ve ever seen; full of human interest and character, overflowing with comedy and warmth, but at its heart, profoundly educational – radical, even, in its desire to explain the difficulties of farming to an ignorant world. I was chatting to a neighbouring farmer and his wife last week, who said ‘we never liked Clarkson - but you have to admit, he’s done huge amounts for farming’. I have recommended it to numerous friends, who all start with ‘but I hate Clarkson’ and end up loving the show, and ruefully tolerating him. Kind of. Thinking of him in a different light, anyway.   

It leaves us all a bit unsure what to think of him. Should we deprecate him as the bigot who says appalling things? Yes, obviously. But what of his passion, commitment, never-say-die attitude, and willingness to look a fool? How do we rationalise the inconsistencies? The strange thing is that four years before the disgraceful comments about Meghan, he wrote an article with exactly the same Game of Thrones reference, but used it to defend her, deprecating the vehemence of the criticism to which she was already subjected by others. He already knew it was wrong. Then he wrote it himself. Was this a sudden lapse of judgment, or a true revelation? Who is the real Jeremy Clarkson? Either? Both?

I wonder if this is a case of a man who has never known failure, suddenly having it stare him in the eye in his sixties, in the form of a dead piglet and a failed crop. And I think the dilemma of Clarkson beast or Clarkson benign raises quasi-religious questions. Can people make mistakes and atone? Do we believe in forgiveness? In redemption? When someone does or says a stupid thing, for which they immediately apologise, should the idiot be forever cast out (with our without excrement being thrown at them)? Or can we accept that people are frail, make mistakes, admit them, feel ashamed, and change? Every church in Christendom preaches forgiveness. But in a world of instant social media cancellation, does anyone practise it?   

I shall now head out and reflect on these eschatological questions on my tractor. Got some hay to bale. It’s not all cut and dried yet.