How well do you know Jeremy Clarkson?

New Statesman​

5 days ago

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Jeremy Clarkson contains multitudes. On the rise in 2003 after rebooting Top Gear, he was on three packs of Marlboro Reds each day, and was already calculating how much life he could rip from the time left to him: '600,000 hours, and you're asleep for 200,000 of those…' Now, two decades on, ill health has brought him close to death – those cigs probably didn't help – and he is content not to remember what has been one of the starriest lives in modern Britain. 'I can't remember anything. My memory is shot.' He says he will never write an autobiography. Maybe Clarkson's Farm is as close as he will get. The question is whether, in this adored window to the autumn of his life, we are at last seeing a true Clarkson, or just the new entertaining elusion.
It has been a career of remarkably protean creativity. Ambition and declension, the growling motorhead and the ruminant grandfather-farmer, have both been crafted into the two most popular television shows of their time. Clarkson rose to global superstardom writing and hosting Top Gear, and fresh episodes of Clarkson's Farm's fourth season arrive today. Finn McRedmond called Gary Lineker 'Britain's most talented man' in a snappy column last weekend, and we are used to hagiographies vaunting David Attenborough as the only man to win TV awards in the eras of black-and-white, colour and 3D. But Clarkson has proved himself the most sensitive reader of England's 21st-century soil and soul.
And the most popular. Nigel Farage's bland turn on 2023's I'm A Celebrity prompted a general reflection that there is politics charisma, and there is TV charisma, and that the two are not necessarily the same. Boris Johnson, our most TV-ready leader, shone only as a panel show guest star. Clarkson – who has three million more X followers than Johnson – anchored 400 Top Gear episodes. To be an everyman without being a nothingman is quite something, man.
Britain's love for Clarkson is a complex thing. The familiar refrain you hear is 'I can't believe these words are coming out my mouth, but I love Jeremy Clarkson now!' Superficially, it is easy to see why. On Clarkson's Farm, there are piglets. There's a girlfriend. There are sweeping shots of the countryside. Brexit, not Blair, is the irritant. And now Clarkson cries. Old fans insist the loveable side has been there all along, but this seems to be a greater transformation than switching from car to tractor. More even than during Top Gear, he shows us ourselves. But can he ever show us himself?
Noughties Clarkson ran on a high-octane mix of denial, defiance and distraction. Where he commanded his own studio, column or publishing contract he urged commentators to the primordial: words like neanderthal, troglodyte, and ape were the aim and result of his vulgar lout-act. Across interviews, he insisted to absurdity on the preternatural painlessness of his life. He was fortunate. At one point he claimed that for him there was simply always a parking spot right outside his destination. 'I knew something would come along. Something always comes along. Well it does in my life anyway. Something always turns up.' Melancholy was flatly disallowed. Introducing one Desert Island Disc choice in 2003, he said 'You must never be in a bad mood, ever. And if you do ever find yourself slipping that way, go and dig out your old 45s, and put this on. … Pooft. On. Off. Out. Done. Happy.'
Get out and get busy. At that time, Clarkson said, his life was 'hysterical'; fast lane in play as well as work. Ex-girlfriend Philippa Sage's The Wonderful World of Jeremy Clarkson relays the opportunities for fun that 'the big man' enjoyed. Rather than Hawksmoor lager in a public house, things are more espresso martini in a private member's club. Or something more glittery, indeed. At a private party on Mustique in the mid-2010s with 'many scuttling off to dark corners to inhale some special party magic', Sage finds herself dancing with Mick Jagger. In the summer of 2014, at a media soiree, David Cameron excuses himself from tequila shots to deal with Putin's designs on Crimea.
Sage tries to humanise the 'blustering bombastic orangutan' with an image of him mewling to Supertramp's 'Hide In Your Shell' (lyrics include 'You're waiting for someone to understand you / You've got demons in your closet / And you're screaming out to stop it'). It doesn't quite work. But neither do the man's own attempts to humanise himself, such as the different accounts of his time at school. In the early Noughties, it was all about his expulsion, told as the flowering of a native mischief unwelcome at school but perfect for life. Then three months after his BBC firing, in a quiet car review, Clarkson described school days of being 'made to lick the lavatories clean' and 'all the usual humiliations that public school used back then to turn a small boy into a gibbering, sobbing suicidal wreck'.
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There is an odd moment in Piers Morgan's diaries where Clarkson tries to persuade Morgan not to run pictures of him kissing a woman in a car. He says 'I'm going to tell you something now. I'm not capable of having an affair. You can ask my wife. I'm not physically capable.' Whatever we make of that 'physically', there is a clear anomic trench running through Clarkson.
In the first collection of his columns, you watch the byline dates creep through 2001, knowing that there is coming the century's great moment of unity, to which so many great writers lent their pen. Clarkson claims his writing as his central pride, and has read 'thousands' of books. But then the column five days after 9/11 is 'Learn from Your Kids and Chill Out Ibiza-Style'. The next is about going to the dentist.
If he was ever going to stand for something, the perfect moment seemed to come in November last year. The government proposed farmer-bothering inheritance tax changes. Clarkson was freshly established as a people's hero. There were whispers of Downing Street. He led a march, and spoke on a podium, but the occasion was distracted by a spat with star BBC journalist Victoria Derbyshire, who accused him of buying his farm only to avoid inheritance tax. He raged that the day wasn't about him, but in too many ways, it was.
In another way, though, it could only have diminished Clarkson to become an empty populist. So much as fans feel he knows them, they do also feel that they know him. They respect him as a projection-resistant individual, and quite a gracefully defined one at that. He provides hours of pleasure to their screens while openly asking not to be approached in person. This year, he wrote about how he wanted to live longer so he could see his grandchildren grow up. 'I'm not going to dwell on the joys of being a grandparent because what can be said about it has already been said. But I have decided that it is so wonderful that I want it to go on for as long as is humanly possible.' Those 600,000 hours are running lower and lower.
The least elusive facts about Jeremy Clarkson are that Top Gear was, and Clarkson's Farm is, great television. In a lot of ways, the best British television. There's a reason that friends of mine in their lowest lows watch YouTube compilations of Clarkson laughing. Weeping with him as piglets die is a national ritual. Our most sentimental cynic has turned 65, has smoked 10,000 cigarettes for each of those years, and has stents in his heart. When he dies, it will take quite a lot more than putting on a jaunty old 45 to make us happy again.
[See also: Nigel Farage's political personality disorder]
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