I was a big fan of the BBC show Top Gear. I’m not much of a car guy, but it was never really a car show. It was a comedy show based around cars. Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond make a fun team. They are a Mr. Bean version of the Three Musketeers. Their humor is refreshingly un-PC, which is why some think Clarkson was sacked last week.
I labour the point, chippily, sure – the BBC is still run by the white, liberal, upper middle classes. Not that Clarkson is a horny-handed son of toil, of course, either. But it did occur to me that the BBC has pretty much nothing left which could be considered, uh, Right. Clarkson was an exceptionally brilliant presenter (and will continue to be so elsewhere, one suspects), but whatever the rights or wrongs of this latest ‘fracas’, the BBC was uncomfortable with him. It wanted him out. It was torn a little by the fact that – again almost uniquely for a BBC star – he was genuinely popular, and popular with a section of the audience the BBC normally fails to reach – ie British people who are not PC neurotics. Yes, millions and millions and millions of people. But collectively it loathed his politics. And that is really why he has gone. And so who is left at the BBC who isn’t left?
That’s surely true, but you can’t go around punching subordinates. It is a failing of any man who cannot treat his inferiors with respect. I think big shots can be forgiven for being rude and difficult with the help, but there’s a responsibility to set a proper example. Still, I wish they could have found a way to work it out so the show could continue.
The whining about Clarksons dismissal, however, is a bit much. He punched a guy in the face for no reason. The other guy should have knocked Clarkson on his ass and Clarkson should have been man enough to accept it. It’s how men are supposed to settle these things. But, the star-subordinate thing does cloud the issue.
The relevant facts are these. Clarkson turned on his producer because there wasn’t a hot dinner waiting for him at the crew’s hotel. (Today’s celebrities, like yesterday’s aristocrats, expect their servants to anticipate their every appetite.)
He called Oisin Tymon a “lazy, Irish c***”. The abuse went on for 20 minutes, according to witnesses. Clarkson couldn’t stop, couldn’t leave Tymon alone. Finally he attacked him, and split his lip with a punch that left the 36-year-old with blood running down his face and needing treatment in A&E. The BBC inquiry suggested that Clarkson would have kept on hitting him, if onlookers had not intervened.
Most people – well, most men anyway – would have let the matter rest if Tymon had smacked Clarkson back. They would have been square, and that would have been that. However strong my impulse would have been to hold his coat, how could Tymon throw a punch? He was the subordinate and Clarkson was the aristocratic star. Tymon was too low down the light entertainment hierarchy to think about defending himself. According to the BBC report, Clarkson left Tymon thinking his career was over and he had “lost his job,” as if it was he who had been at fault.
Forgive me. I realise I shouldn’t go on about mere facts. The last thing the right-on PC Right wants you to do is concentrate on what happened. Instead, its propagandists say you should dismiss the evidence and head off into conspiracy theory.
I think the right answer here was for Clarkson to have apologized that the time and for the other man to have accepted it. That would have been the proper way to handle it. The fact that Clarkson preferred to let the BBC management adjudicate the matter suggests he is a man of low character. He was hoping to get away with it, simply because he is a star.
Still, I loved the show and I’ll watch again if it comes back.
I am not a Top Gear fan. I like two of the presenting trio but Clarkson leaves me a tad cold. They may be a threesome but the big man always gets the best car, wins the most obtuse races, makes the most sarcastic points because it is his show. But… he takes the insults as well as gives them. As for the cars, meh: I am unlikely to ever be in the market for a car you can’t drive anywhere but on an airfield and slavering over a rollover double camshaft drop down flanged sputdoddle (yes, I made that up) doesn’t interest me.
However, the BBC does not reach the people they supposedly serve and secretly despise. The BBC is not for the plebs, who tend anyway to watch Sky cable or the somewhat lame ITV with its endless commercials. The BBC is essentially a left-wing organisation. Has to be so as they are sustained by the public purse and are backed by a draconian law. You have to have a TV licence to pay the BBC its billions and failure to have one is punishable by imprisonment, which is a penalty more effective than applies to say the water, gas and electricity suppliers. Take much of the Beeb’s automatic revenue away however and put it to a pay-per-view model and whole chunks of it simply wouldn’t be made.
The argument of course is that the automatic revenue enables Al-Beeb to make the sort of strange program that no one else would. A documentary on the lives of insects in the gardens of abandoned stately homes is entirely possible under the BBC remit, and in fairness they tend to do them well.
My biggest objection to the BBC is their tone on the news. Once they simply delivered the facts, but now they have ‘opinions’ and worse, seek out the opinions of people on the street. It isn’t that people can’t have views, but their ill-informed views aren’t really news. But the direction of the news is painful: when the Tories announced fall in inflation the BBC swiftly sent a camera crew on to the streets to ask people if they ‘felt any better off’ and revelled in the general answer that no, they didn’t. I doubt they would have done that stunt with Labour making the announcement.
I always say with the Beeb that if you listen to their news you can detect the slight sneer about anything the Tories may or may not do. Labour on the other hand (and interestingly, Obama, who surprisingly frequently gets top billing on BBC news shows) tend to get excused. When Gordon Brown made one of his terrible decisions as Prime Minister the Beeb immediately reported that he promised ‘to do better in future’ but never mentioned the reason. You may too have heard the story that the morning after Labour won the 1997 election and ended 17 years of Tory (mostly Thatcher) government the the BBC offices were littered with empty champagne bottles. A story by the way let slip by a BBC reporter afterwards.
There are lots of ‘comedians’ on the Beeb who are often nakedly left-wing, some of who still offer jokes about Thatcher and Bush but never mention such lunatics as socialism can and does produce. In this respect Clarkson was more of the bulk of the people: he was conservative with a small ‘c’ and dismissed the airy-fairy lightweight schemes of the chattering classes. While he may not, with his income and lifestyle, be like them he at least understood how the man in the street thought and what they wanted.
I have no idea if Clarkson should have been fired and if what he did was true it may well be deserved, irrespective if the producer had swung a punch back. But, left-leaners like Al-Beeb would have been watching for him to make an error and thus ‘make an example of him.’ He really should have been smart enough to know that he didn’t have friends in high places.
UKer, the Beeb is just like our PBS. They live off tax money and government grants funneled through universities. They repay this generosity by waging jihad against traditional America. Unsurprisingly, they air a lot of content from the BBC.
I have BBC World News and it looks and sounds a lot like Al Jazeera. But, the Beeb did give us the all-time April Fool’s prank:
https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU
The spoof done by the Beeb (back when it was Auntie to many) was hilarious and unexpected because it was done on a solidly unfunny, current affairs program called Panorama. It was anchored, and the film voiced, by Richard Dimbleby who no-one would ever in a million years expect to have any sense of humour(humour) at all.
Dimbleby’s offspring continue the family name on BBC but they aren’t up to the great man’s grasp of the world or, I would suggest, his ability to astonish the population the way he did in that memorable April Fools Day jape. So much so that people actually believed for years that spaghetti grows on trees.
Er, including me, though I was but a mere sprog at the time…
Off topic, Z, what’s your take on Grey Enlightenment, your frequent commenter?
Is he trolling or is everybody else just overly pessimistic?
A fine example is his latest post: We Solved Everything
&
A comment for Grey Enlightenment himself, how comes you don’t have comments enabled on your site, considering you are a heavy commenter yourself?
Like the Full Metal Jacket quote, no goddamn common courtesy to give a comment reach-around!
I’m a biological realist and traditionalist so libertarianism has little appeal. But, I do think libertarian economics provide a nice anchor. If we measured our economic success by the distance from the libertarian ideal, we would avoid many of the problems looming over us today.
Clarkson went to the producers house to apologise in person, he refused to answer,clarkson is a gent.