The Top Gear Story (12 page)

Back at Oxford Brookes in 2008, Clarkson even joked beforehand that he expected flour and eggs to be hurled when he arrived, enough to turn him into a ‘giant human pancake’. And he was nearly right. The incident started when he was in a marquee, while outside waited an environmental campaigner (or an ‘eco-mentalist’ as the presenter sometimes calls them) called Rebecca Lush. When he came out, she ran after him and threw a banana meringue in his face – organic and homemade, naturally. Later she declared that due to his lofty status, getting a direct hit on the face was ‘like playing basketball!’

Clarkson’s response was surprising and very self-effacing: ‘Great shot!’ he said, before pointing out to waiting newspaper photographers that the meringue itself was a tad too sweet for his liking. He later implied that a few of the paps in attendance were aware of what was about to happen and had even goaded him to come out from under the safety of the marquee. ‘I have to say that,’ he continued, ‘at the PR level, it was a fantastic result for the environmentalists. One-nil to them!’

But Lush was not alone in her distaste for Clarkson’s environmental views. Around 3,000 people had signed a petition in the weeks prior to his appearance at Oxford Brookes, asking for the honour to be withdrawn. Transport 2000 even went so far as to ridicule the entire ceremony, saying the decision to honour Clarkson was as if Scotland Yard had paid tribute to the work of Inspector Clouseau. Among the signatories were workers from the nearby Cowley BMW factory reputed to be unhappy with Clarkson’s infamous criticism of MG Rover workers.

Lush herself was passionate in her campaigns and had even
gone to jail for four months in 1993 for her part in an early road building protest on Twyford Down. A self-proclaimed
eco-activist
, in the inevitable glare of publicity after the
meringue-hurling
incident, she was quick to publicise her cause: ‘It’s about the survival of our species, it’s about people, and transport is the fastest-growing contributor to climate change.’ Rebecca had previous form with pies, too – she’d thrown one in the face of an American envoy during environmental talks at The Hague and another at the then-transport secretary, Alistair Darling; she’d also chained herself to diggers and stood in front of bulldozers. Here was a woman of conviction and her tactics of direct action seemed to work. (Note: Lush’s three erstwhile
Top Gear
enemies would later chain themselves to buses at Hammersmith Bus Station in response to Greenpeace’s lengthy campaign against 4x4s).

But she was not alone, not by a long chalk: the list of incidents on
Top Gear
to enrage environmentalists is a long one. When Clarkson tested a Land Rover Discovery on the side of the Scottish mountain Ben Tongue in Series 5, there was uproar amid allegations that he had desecrated precious virgin peat bogs. The piece had simple enough ambitions: review the new Land Rover and decide if it was a genuine off-roader. He began by saying the Land Rover Discovery used to be the car you’d buy if you couldn’t afford a Range Rover (he’d used this damning broadside before, in a devastating blow to Porsche Boxster owners worldwide, saying they only bought the German soft-top because they couldn’t afford a 911). Clarkson claimed this was effectively broadcasting to the whole world the fact that their lives hadn’t quite worked out the way they wanted them to!

Forgetting the environmental rights and wrongs and the
eco-campaigners
’ impending fury for a moment, the actual appraisal of the Disco was a devastatingly simple piece of Clarkson car
-reviewing
brilliance – a reminder, if you will, of his longstanding roots in motoring journalism right back to
Performance Car
days when his writing and extensive knowledge got him noticed in the first place. He discusses the rear folding seats that enable seven people to board the Disco but then he picks up a small child and points out a stunningly obvious flaw: if you are holding a child in one hand, it’s impossible to put the seat down with putting the child down (and onto a potentially dangerous road or car park) first. ‘Someone wasn’t thinking,’ tut-tuts Clarkson. His simple observation must have been devastating for Land Rover designers – harsh, but fair.

Journalistic brilliance is not what this piece will be remembered for, however. As a remix of Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ soundtracks the ascent up a mountain that Clarkson reveals has never been driven up before, you can almost hear the blood pressure of numerous eco-campaigners rising thunderously. He even utters the words ‘peat bog’ and that’s where it all went wrong. Environmentalists were furious at the potential damage they said he might have caused to the landscape, pointing out the fragile eco-systems that survive in such peat bogs and how the emissions and tyre marks could cause irreparable damage. Dave Morris, director of the Scottish Ramblers Association, remarked: ‘We found Clarkson’s stunt highly irresponsible. Driving to the top of a mountain over open ground is inevitably going to cause damage to the countryside. And when viewers see a man like Clarkson doing this it encourages them to try to do similar things. It is wrong for the BBC to promote such hare-brained and reckless behaviour.’

And it wasn’t only the eco-campaigners who were riled by Clarkson: after the shoot, he jumped into a helicopter to head down south for an urgent meeting but mistakenly took the keys to the Land Rover with him. He had to make a hasty about-turn
and hover over the car before dropping the keys down to a frustrated and tired production crew waiting below!

It wasn’t the first time that the show had run into problems with environmentalists either. In 2004, the BBC paid £250 in compensation and issued an unreserved apology to a Somerset Parish Council when Clarkson deliberately rammed a Toyota Hilux pick-up truck into a 30-year-old Horse Chestnut tree in an infamous feature. His response was: ‘The Parish Council is funded by central government, which is funded by me so it’s my tree!’

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 gave 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.