{"id":3709,"date":"2011-04-04T11:37:29","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T11:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=3709"},"modified":"2013-09-19T13:16:04","modified_gmt":"2013-09-19T12:16:04","slug":"a-victim-of-his-own-values","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=3709","title":{"rendered":"A victim of his own values"},"content":{"rendered":"

We should never, of course, condone vandalism. But it was hard not to feel that there was something apt in the news that the fence had been hacked down around the \u00a31.2 million lighthouse holiday home belonging to Jeremy Clarkson on the Isle of Man. The boorish culture which the Top Gear<\/em> presenter celebrates so exuberantly has come back to bite him on the bum.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important not to get this out of proportion. The \u201cgrim discovery\u201d, as one portentous tabloid dubbed it, that vandals had pulled down the cliff-top fencing comes at the end of a six-year right-of-way dispute with local ramblers in the 40 acres of coastland Clarkson and his wife have bought on the picturesque Langness Peninsula. The government of the island has ruled in the walkers\u2019 favour and the dispute is now before the High Court. But clearly some disgruntled locals have decided on a bit of unilateral ramblers\u2019 revenge.<\/p>\n

Clarkson\u2019s wife, Frances, speaking from their family home in the Cotswolds, said she felt they were being targeted. \u201cIt\u2019s not the first time it\u2019s happened. It makes me feel rather sick. It\u2019s upsetting,\u201d she told journalists. But the celebrated wit of the man himself, who has complained in the past about the island\u2019s \u201cmilitant dog walkers\u201d, seemed momentarily to have deserted him. He was reported as being unavailable for comment.<\/p>\n

We see a lot of Jeremy Clarkson in our house. Endless repeats of Top Gear<\/em> appear to be the default option on our 11-year-old\u2019s preferred channel, Dave, \u201cthe home of witty banter\u201d as it calls itself \u2013 in a tag that seems as convincing as those lines in dating magazines which proclaim the advertiser to be possessed of a Good Sense of Humour. Then there is the programme\u2019s latest BBC2 series which is, some weeks, the BBC\u2019s most popular show. Top Gear<\/em> is the most watched programme of the year on iPlayer and is broadcast to over 100 countries reaching 300 million viewers round the world.<\/p>\n

You can see the attraction. You start with the obvious \u201cspeed thrills\u201d premise of driving round Europe in a Bugatti Veyron. But Top Gear<\/em> long ago ventured further into an adolescent-male fantasy world \u2013 destroying its most hated cars by crushing them with a tank, catapulting them with a trebuchet, dropping them onto a caravan or shooting them up with a helicopter gunship. All of which is done against a failsafe formula of races between the programme\u2019s three protagonists in increasingly exotic\u00a0 locations. All that has changed, as the last decade has passed, has been Clarkson\u2019s girth, the ageing of the baby-faced boy-racer Richard Hammond and the length of the hair of the group geek, James May.<\/p>\n

Hammond and May are essentially the straight men to Clarkson\u2019s gagster. He is genuinely funny. But his humour is rooted in the caricature of a loveable saloon-bar rogue. He is a white middle-class male not-afraid-to-speak-his-mind-in-a-world-of-political-correctness-gone-mad. Like Dick & Dom shouting \u201cbogies\u201d in the polite quiet of an art gallery the point of his vulgarian humour is to cause offence.<\/p>\n

So he is rude about cyclists, caravans, vegetarians, women, gays, Health & Safety and green activists whom he dubs \u201ceco-mentalists\u201d and says in a previous life were failed trade unionists and \u201cCND lesbians\u201d. Foreigners, and their stereotypes, are all fair game: Korean car designers eat dogs, Mexican motors are lazy, German cars have their sat-navs set to invade Poland and Malaysian vehivcles are built \u201cin jungles by people who wear leaves for shoes\u201d.<\/p>\n

He suits the action to the words. Rather than enthusing over lower-emission sports cars Clarkson will drive a 4×4 through a Scottish peat bog, wreaking destruction that will take decades to make good. At one point he so resisted the notion that cars, or any other human activity, were accelerating climate change that some MPs wanted to summon him to a select committee to explain his \u201ccurious and misguided attitude to the real and major threat posed by climate change\u201d.<\/p>\n

But this is not the satire of LoadsaMoney or Alf Garnett. Clarkson means it. Thus Gordon Brown, then prime minister, was a \u201cone-eyed Scottish idiot\u201d and, in one unbroadcast warm-up, \u201ca silly c*nt\u201d. There is about him the casual cruelty of the public school bully (he was expelled from Repton). It is the core of his relationship with pretty-boy Hammond and clever-boy May.<\/p>\n

Yet Clarkson is clever too; he plays the misogynist homo-allergenic xenophobic boor with the highest level of articulacy. \u00a0Clarkson\u2019s defence is not satire but irony. In a post-feminist world, he implies, it is now acceptable to say: \u201cYou\u2019d pay half-a-mill to spend some time with a girl who had Mrs Thatcher\u2019s drive, Victoria Wood\u2019s sense of humour and Scarlet Johansson\u2019s body, would you not? Well, that\u2019s what this car is.\u201d But he fails to understand, or perhaps to care, that hundreds of viewers will complain when he jokes about lorry drivers murdering prostitutes \u2013 or says of high taxes on super-cars: \u201cThat\u2019s not taxation. That\u2019s rape\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t believe what I write,\u201d he once said to Alastair Campbell, \u201cany more than you believe what you say\u201d. \u00a0He has different faces for different audiences: the reactionary buffoon in his Sun<\/em> column, the funny gin-and-Jagster on Top Gear<\/em>, the droll raconteur on QI<\/em>. His failing is that as the years pass he has become a caricature of himself.<\/p>\n

None of this would matter were it not for the fact that some people mistake the cartoon for an archetype and take him at his word. There are those who find his lazy humour and casual racism unexceptional. Or think his self-centred dismissal of speed cameras and road bumps is justified. Or are amused by his contemptuous attitude to women or his calling gays \u2018ginger-beers\u2019. Or endorse his use of the playground slang which applies \u2018gay\u2019 to anything that does not work very well. Or admire his insistence on smoking even more cigarettes than usual on National No Smoking Day. Or accept his neanderthal views on global warming as readily as his vocabulary about \u201cbeing a true petrolhead\u201d.<\/p>\n

Having a boy on the edge of pubescence in our house, we understand the lure of The Dangerous Book for Boys<\/em> and the constant need to be climbing up things or swinging off them. We see, too, how Jeremy Clarkson\u2019s self-absorption offers an attractive model to adolescents of defying authority, disregarding rules and trampling carelessly on the sensitivities of others. Perhaps it is a phase through which we all must pass, and will enjoy on the way. But it does not offer a mature destination.<\/p>\n

For it ends with the kind of high-octane self-righteous indignation which Frances Clarkson saw visited on her luxury holiday home while her husband was away on the latest Top Gear<\/em> World Tour. It is reaping a whirlwind of sorts. But when the monsters you have created come round and turn their attention on you and yours, suddenly, it\u2019s not quite so funny. Irony, eh? You\u2019ve got to laugh, intcha.<\/p>\n

\n

from the Independent on Sunday<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We should never, of course, condone vandalism. But it was hard not to feel that there was something apt in the news that the fence had been hacked down around the \u00a31.2 million lighthouse holiday home belonging to Jeremy Clarkson on the Isle of Man. The boorish culture which the Top Gear presenter celebrates so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,40,38],"tags":[294],"class_list":["post-3709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-ethics","category-society","tag-top-gear"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3709"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8009,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3709\/revisions\/8009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}