Should Jeremy Clarkson be taken outside and shot in front of his family?

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The politically incorrect comedian Bernard Manning once said: "I tell jokes. You never take a joke seriously”. Hmm, I’m not so sure.

Jeremy Clarkson is known to be a right-wing Tory and a personal friend of Cameron in the Chipping Norton set, along with Rebekah Brooks. His so-called humorous attack on public sector workers is typical of the Tory mindset which dismisses nurses, teachers, dinner ladies and cleaners as having “non-jobs”. Of course there’s no such thing as a non-job, except in the financial sector, where gambling has replaced work. Anything which involves a person earning money, paying tax and participating in society is a job.

Clarkson’s comments were directed towards ordinary hard-working people who are worried about how they are going to afford 5% inflation, higher education costs for their children, care for their parents and their own care in old age, all on frozen pay which is declining in real value. His sick humour is designed to draw attention away from the government’s miserable attempts to demonise these strikers.

Clarkson has made a career out of insulting more people than the Duke of Edinburgh has ever managed, but it’s all so boring. We had 'shock jocks' on the radio many years ago, and Bernard Manning’s humour bordered on racism. Clarkson is no better. On global warming, he said: "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?"

Clarkson said that the United Nations should start thinking seriously about abolishing some languages: “What’s the point of Welsh? All it does is provide a silly maypole around which a bunch of hotheads can get all nationalistic”. On a chat show, he placed a 3D plastic map of Wales into a microwave oven and switched it on. He later defended that by saying: "I put Wales in there because Scotland wouldn't fit”. He attacked Gordon Brown by calling him “a one-eyed Scottish idiot”, as well as calling him the ‘c’ word (which is censored on this forum!).

If Tweeting and jokily threatening to blow up an airport warrants an arrest, shouldn't a wisecrack about the mass execution of strikers be similarly rewarded? Or at the very least, should the BBC tell this motormouth to get on his bike? He wouldn't like that either, since he says that motorists should knock down cyclists. Nice chap.

More details have been emerging of the incident which resulted in Clarkson's suspension. It was his own bloody fault that a hot meal wasn't waiting for him at his hotel at 10pm, since he had been sitting in a pub for two hours!

The link below takes you to an article about the so-called 'fracas', and it also includes a list of some of Clarkson's other excesses over the past few years:-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/top-gear/11466312/Jeremy-Clarkson-lashed-out-at-Top-Gear-producer-because-he-wanted-a-steak.html

Give a dog a bad name, but


Sympathy for the devil: why I feel sorry for Clarkson
The Telegraph
By Bill Borrows

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news/sympathy-for-the-devil-why-i-feel-sorry-for-clarkson/ar-AA9DlU2

I have little sympathy for the man - whatever his start in life and disadvantages, he has, like all of us, made choices in adulthood.
He could have chosen not to be an arrogant bully - as he did, perhaps he should be treated like one on the occasions when he misbehaves.
He chose to live in the public eye, so of course people will comment on his public behaviour

boatlady wrote:I have little sympathy for the man ....

He chose to live in the public eye, so of course people will comment on his public behaviour

Meanwhile; Sadie Frost: phone hacking wrecked my life
Giving evidence at high court, actor says illegal eavesdropping led her to suspect her family of selling stories to Mirror newspapers.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/12/sadie-frost-phone-hacking-wrecked-my-life-mirror

I guess what you say and transmit via your phone belongs to the class of private behaviour - hence why it was the subject of a recent court case.

There's maybe a fine line between private behaviour for a person in the public eye - brawling in the public rooms of an hotel possibly counts as public behaviour

Aunty Beeb seems intent upon making a bad situation worse. To discipline Jezzer was not entirely straightforward as technically he is not an employee. A Production Company makes the Top Gear programme for the BBC. Therefore this week's forthcoming edition which had been made, could have been shown. (The viewing figures would have broken all previous records, no doubt).

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/ageing-middleclass-rightwing-meet-our-new-lords-of-misrule-10107397.html

But it is unmitigated trash - so nothing was lost

Jeremy Clarkson's Sacking Leads To Horrific Abuse For Top Gear Producer Oisin Tymon

An article by Ryan Barrell:-

The man verbally and physically abused by Jeremy Clarkson has been receiving a torrent of hate online, including death threats for his part in "causing Clarkson's suspension". Oisin Tymon, who was left with a bloodied lip after the 'fracas', spoke out about his involvement in the situation, which occurred after he failed to secure a hot meal for the 'Top Gear' star. Despite being punched in the face, racially assaulted and left with blood running down his chin, the tweets about him are just making us despair for humanity.

Please read on....
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/03/25/oisin-tymon-fracas-jeremy-clarkson-sacked_n_6939644.html

I was following that story a bit yesterday, and would have completely despaired of human nature, but there were I think almost an equal number of tweets and online comments pointing out the essentially puerile and nasty nature of this online bullying. There's still hope for the race, it seems.

However, there's clearly something lacking in the ethical sense or perhaps in the ability to think clearly in those individuals who seem to believe that losing a TV programme which provides entertainment for 30 minutes on a Sunday evening is something worth assaulting a fellow human.

I don't think I'd be that angry even with someone who stole my dinner.

As usual, personal taste is the arbiter. I understand that there are actually people who never watched Mrs. Berry and Mr Hollywood's very popular baking programme, if you can believe such a thing.

Maybe, to his credit, it's worth noting that he 'fessed up to the BBC about the incident - possibly showing some awareness that punching the staff because your dinner's not what you expected is unacceptable behaviour - maybe there's hope for him.

I'd have a bit more sympathy, though, if he'd gone online when the poor bloke was getting the death threats, to defend him

Jeremy Clarkson joins 'Guardian' drive for fossil fuel divestment

Former 'Top Gear' presenter says being sacked by the BBC was a "wake-up call" as he joins host of celebrities backing climate change campaign.

Short video here:-
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/01/jeremy-clarkson-joins-guardian-drive-for-fossil-fuel-divestment

Or, maybe, an April Fool joke?

The guy is a fool..he goes out his way to be controversial and will say anything for attention..I heard the BBC got rid of him?..maybe I'm wrong ?

He has no problem in targeting the poor and sick, just as the Tories do.

..poor sport.

Joy Division wrote:The guy.... goes out his way to be controversial and will say anything for attention....

That's showbiz. Tools of The Trade, so to speak. You can add names to this list if you like: Kardashians; Simon Cowell; Madonna; Paris Hilton, Katie Hopkins and anybody at the Cannes Film Festival.

"There is only one thing worse than being talked about ...." Oscar Wilde

Jeremy Clarkson: like it or not, he is part of Britain, writ large

Extracts from an article by Will Self:-

“The weird racist dog-whistle Clarkson has blown repeatedly over the years is so unbelievably crass and revolting, it calls into question all our assumptions about what it is to be a Briton in the 21st century. I say ‘a Briton’, but what I mean is that moiety of modern Britons who find in Clarkson, whether willingly or with revulsion, aspects of ourselves writ large. Jeremy Clarkson, like it or not, is the archetypal middle-aged, middle-class, white British man: the John Bull ‘de nos jours’; and his success as a journalist and TV presenter is almost wholly a function of this capacity he has to personify a great, indigo-legged mass of privileged pricks, many of whom labour under the delusion, as Clarkson does, that they’re an embattled minority.

In our fervid nightmares, Clarkson is the Little Englander who smirks at us from behind his vast leylandii hedge; the sexist pest who seems to think your name is either ‘darling’ or ‘love’; the saloon-bar bore trumpeting ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ with nary a care for those who always, always will be slaves. Together with Nigel Farage and Richard Littlejohn, he forms a triumvirate of British bullocks who seem always to have reigned over us. Clarkson is comfortable in his skin, comfortable in his arrogant bellicosity, comfortable in stinking up the atmosphere with his self-promotional hot air, and most of all he’s intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich so long as those people are him, May and Hammond.”

For the whole article:-
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/will-self-jeremy-clarkson-it-or-not-he-part-britain-writ-large

I don't fully understand why intelligent commentators like Will Self waste their time with mountebanks such as Clarkson, who need the oxygen of publicity to have any standing beyond that of local pub bore.

Maybe Will Self isn't getting enough attention lately - I guess he's not immune to vanity whatever his good points