“What do they MEAN, this Sunday’s Top Gear is cancelled?” My daughter stopped, stunned, in the middle of yelling at me about an incomplete French test and answering the frantic beeps of texts from her friends already waiting for her at the bus stop. All the upset of a morning already running late by 7.32am was diverted by the news—third on the Today programme this morning—of Jeremy Clarkson’s latest disgrace and the suspension, possibly forever, of the programme that has been a running strand of pleasure for years in our multi-generational family life.
I offered her a lift in the car, sitting at the kerb just outside the house (although we hadn’t used it for weeks); we leapt in, and for half an hour, while inching ahead of the 27 bus containing one lot of her friends, and overtaken by other friends on bikes, we heard BBC Radio 4 solemnly analyse the case for and against Clarkson for having allegedly “thrown a punch” at a producer on Top Gear. Was he, like some bank, too big to fail? Or was the BBC going to feel obliged to show that it was bigger than the star of the most-watched programme on BBC2, sold to hundreds of countries around the world.
It was only when my daughter had swung the door car shut, with muttered thanks but a louder wail of grief at having missed the fun of the top deck of the number 27, that it became obvious to me. It’s got to be over, even if Clarkson survives this latest collision with the normal rules of professional life. In a last spasm on the story, before the 9am headlines, the Today programme slipped in 30 seconds from the brilliant Ben Preston, Editor of Radio Times. Weren’t the Top Gear presenters, he suggested, with clear affection, now a bit like “a trio of ageing punks”? Weren’t they, you know, perhaps just “staggering on”?
Of course he’s right. But for so many years, it’s been possible to retort: “That’s the whole point!” My mother, claiming an Italian upbringing as justification, has always derived more pleasure than you’d think from pronouncing on how television presenters might improve their appearance. When she was babysitting for my daughter on weekend evenings, the two of them would greet Clarkson’s arrival on screen with immediate satisfaction. “His jacket is too short and shows the seat of his jeans, which are too baggy,” my mother would say. With an early sense of triumph, my daughter would answer, “That’s the whole point.” From Mum: “Jeremy Clarkson is too big, one of the other men is too short, and one has hair that’s too long.” “Exactly.” When my partner would beg us to switch it off, protesting that it was all too bogus and contrived, everyone would chorus that of course it was, anyone who couldn’t see it was missing the joke.
It began when my daughter was six, with instant adoration; you could do things to a car on Top Gear you could never do in real life. You could cut bits off your friend’s car and stick them on your own; you could crash it, come to that, and you could still love it as if it were a friend itself. When my mother’s fading memory gave her new stamina for watching reruns, the two of them would delve deep into the back catalogue; over six years, they must have watched the show at least 300 times.
It bridged all conversational awkwardnesses. Not everyone liked engines, but everyone liked the adventures, and most people have seen at least one episode, once. I found myself caught one time in a television green room with David Davis, the Conservative MP, in that journalistic no-man’s-land when either professional or personal questions could seem equally awkward; having exhausted our small talk about civil liberties, we stumbled with pleasure on to how his daughter, also around the age of 12, had loved the show.
It’s not as if the latest incident is the only one. “Throwing a punch” is a marvellously vague term, implying an incompetent swipe that failed to make contact. Or it may mean more than that. Clarkson has not commented, but if true, it would be pretty damaging in terms of the human resources processes of most organisations. Depending on the details, it might still not be completely at odds, of course, with the cantankerous confrontation at the heart of Clarkson’s charm. As Ben Preston put it, “he was Ukip before Ukip was created.” But there have been other incidents; Clarkson was reprimanded last year by the regulator Ofcom for using "slope", a "pejorative racial term," during an episode filmed in Burma.
Meanwhile, the cloud of licence fee politics has darkened in a way that surely intensifies and muddies all such calculations. Should the BBC jettison Clarkson to show that it is driven by principles not stars? Or should it cling to one of its biggest worldwide stars—and that income—fearing that the licence fee will one day end? There is no easy answer, but that whole tangled set of dilemmas surely comes in the category of “Not good for Clarkson”.
Above all, though, the show is suddenly too dated, and too contrived; it was the sheer kindliness and amusement with which Ben Preston made the point this morning that made it so incontrovertibly clear. The retort that “That’s the point” is no answer at all to those who not only don’t find the joke funny, but need to have it explained.
For those who can’t remember baggy corduroy jackets and jeans and flowered shirts, who weren’t there in the 70s, the look of the show means nothing. The Argentinians were surely right too to see through the limp protests of the trio that their number plates bore only accidental reference to the Falklands—a contrivance too far, I thought at the time, as well as a provocation lost on younger audience who barely know about that conflict. Most of all, however, technology and fashions are changing; cars are being overtaken by the love of cycling, a belief in the virtues of public transport and car clubs, while driverless drones capable of carrying the elderly, the young, the intoxicated (though that’s another declining pastime) are assembling on the horizon, ready to take passengers of the future wherever they want to go.
Clarkson himself has tried to nod to this, calling himself and co-presenter James May “old petrol heads” when describing new electric or hybrid cars. But it isn’t enough to dispel the sense that they’re on the wrong side of history.
There have always been people who didn’t drive, on principle, and wanted to tell you about it. The cycling brigade, of course (and I am now one of them), and a certain kind of conservative young man; I remember Michael Gove (the former Secretary of State for Education) and a former colleague of mine at The Times, expounding to the editorial leader conference on why he didn’t drive (and he was not the only one of that philosophy there). But there is now a generation who doesn’t drive, and feels it has good reason for that stance. If you live in a city, given that the insurance is so ferociously expensive, and the lessons, and the fuel, and come to that, the cars themselves, why choose to learn? Cleaner and greener not to, as well.
Sometimes, when chatting with journalists just starting out, who do their interviews within London or by Skype and have never it felt it worth the expense and trouble of mastering the antique skill, I mentally list all the things you could never do as a journalist if you couldn’t leap behind the wheel: cover an American election, see any of Russia outside the cities, save your own life in some places in the Middle East. Or if that seems grandiose, write about what’s happening in Britain itself outside its towns and cities.
It may, though, be the realities of small children and old parents which make driving at some stages of life seem suddenly imperative. They can make such appreciative use of the family car that you wondered how you ever did without it. In that case, I guess, you might reasonably reckon, without being against driving on principle, that you’d wait until then to learn even if that meant you always drove awkwardly (again, see Gove, and his wife’s accounts of his late-in-life endeavours to learn). Or you might hope that driverless cars will have arrived first.
But the pleasure that Clarkson and team have traded on for so long—the joy of leaping into a car and going just wherever you want—is a retro one. Maybe so retro that it can be preached only to the converted, and at least in a small, crowded country, the religion is now dying. My guess is that even if Clarkson survives, the series is reaching the end of the road.
