If Clarkson’s Comedy Then I’m A Banana*
I do like a bit of close to the edge humour, but even I was shocked at the truck-driving segment of last night’s first episode of the new Top Gear series.
During a truck-driving challenge segment one Mr J Clarkson made repeated referrals to lorry drivers murdering prostitutes; presumably it was an allusion to Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper and the recent murders of sex workers committed by an Ipswich lorry driver.
Haha, how very droll I thought; no doubt HGV drivers watching are equally underwhelmed.
Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has prompted more than 500 people to complain to the BBC about a joke he made on Sunday’s motoring show.
Clarkson, 48, was taking part in a lorry-driving task, when he joked about lorry drivers killing sex workers.
“Change gear, change gear, check mirror, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That’s a lot of effort in a day,”
he said.
The BBC said the joke had made “ridiculous an unfair urban myth”.
Lorry driver Steve Wright was jailed in February for killing five prostitutes in Ipswich.
Clarkson’s joke, made before the watershed, has now sparked 517 complaints.
But a BBC spokesman said that by Monday morning – before the incident had been reported on by newspapers and websites – there had been 188 complaints.
Sunday’s programme, which aired on BBC Two at 2000 GMT, was watched by around seven million viewers.
In a statement, the BBC said: “The vast majority of Top Gear viewers have clear expectations of Jeremy Clarkson’s long-established and frequently provocative on-screen persona. I think it’s a sacking offence to make light of the murder of anybody, never mind prostitute women who are vulnerable and criminalised .
“This particular reference was used to comically exaggerate and make ridiculous an unfair urban myth about the world of lorry driving, and was not intended to cause offence.”
No, it never is, is it?
This will no doubt be spun as another Ross/Brand-type media-manufactured attack on the BBC, but while not denying there was an increase in volume of complaints following media interest, nevertheless the complaints are entirely justified; Clarkson’s ‘joke’ was crass, puerile and just not funny. Making a joke of murder is bad enough but why pick on lorry-drivers? John Wayne Gacy was a part-time clown; does that make all clowns potential monsters?
Oh. Maybe better not to answer that one.
Nevertheless to traduce women, sex workers and lorry drivers in one brief, dumbass sentence takes a special type of Clarksonian insensitivity – the boorish, classic car driving, act like it’s still 1953 and your kind still rule the empire type of insensitivity. He’s not got very good antennae for modernity or shifts in the zetgeist, has he? Yes, we do expect that of him and it is part of his well-established persona: but that doesn’t mean he gets to be a complete arse on the public’s penny without somebody objecting.
Prostitutes and lorry drivers pay the license fee (and his grossly overinflated 2million in annual wages) too.
[*Why a banana?]
He May Be Leader In Waiting But Can Obama Get My Kitchen Done?
The US’ citizenry may be going to the polls in record numbers today and voting Obama (as well they should, when these are the people they’re up against), but I’m a bit lacking in election fever myself. because this is a fair summary of what’s happening at our house:
Nah, it’s not really – our builders don’t wear hats.
One builder is a South African misanthrope who’s an object lesson in how the colonial Dutch have taken all the worst Dutch qualities, like didacticism and bad manners, and amplified them. The other builder is a miniscule Glaswegian of indeterminate vintage who with his Russian girlfriend was expecting a baby 3 days ago, and who jumps like a scalded cat whenever his phone beeps.
Everything is covered in plaster dust, it’s cold, the water’s off, I’m holed up in the bedroom with an instant coffee because I tripped up over the cat and broke the glass in my cafetiere which is going to be a bugger to replace in Holland and the laundry is piling up and to get clean socks I may have to go and buy some.
But aren’t Bernard Cribbins and Lego absolutely made for each other?
And Still They Come…
How very mysterious: yet another giant Lego figure has washed up on a European beach, this time in Brighton rather than Holland:
The Lego man is 6ft tall in red, yellow and green. It is presumed to have washed up on the beach, but whether it has come from a cargo ship or from across the Channel is not clear.
Brighton resident Gerry Turner, 34, said: “It’s very odd. God knows how it got here but people are saying it’s from Holland because it’s got some Dutch writing on it. It must have fallen off a boat of something. The kids love it.”
Children helped stand the Lego man up on the beach, but are still mystified as to where it came from. One said: “It’s great, but we don’t know why it’s here.”
A spokesman for Brighton and Hove City Council said it didn’t know the origin of the Lego man, but said it was fine for it to remain on the beach.
He said: “There’s no problem at all. It will be interesting to see how long the Lego man stays there for. We’ll keep an eye on it.”
Here’s the Lego man that washed up in Zandvoort in 2007:
You know what this means: either it’s a PR stunt gone horribly wrong, or there’s at least two (and possibly an entire flotilla) of giant Dutch Lego men bobbing along quietly below the radar off the coasts of Europe, for all the world like unanimated golems waiting for their moment to come ashore and get the magic word and follow their prime directive.
I wonder what the activating command might be?
On The Lam
Re-entry, to the sounds of rain and hammering… election, what election? Is something happening? Sod that, we’ve got a kitchen to build!
Sorry for the sudden drop in posting, but we had to unexpectedly decamp to (what were supposed to be) warmer climes as the builders moved in the boiler went out and the heating and hot water went off.
It was bad enough manoeuvring 2 wriggling catboxes and our bags and baggage on and off high-stepped, double-decker Dutch trains, if only I hadn’t only a day later then managed to let our Hector escape into the scary midnight wilds of Zeeland, not to be seen again for three days.
It never occurred to me that a three-legged cat would make it down several flights of vertiginous, typically Dutch stairs, bumpety bumpety bump, without going totally arse over tip and landing in a tangled heap at the bottom.
I was wrong.
The trouble is, all horribly howling cats look the same in the dark and what I’d thought it was the resident deaf cat doing her usual midnight howl with a bit more gusto than usual was actually a horribly intestinally clenched Hector, determined to do his business in the proper outside and none of your namby namby litter tray business; that’s for girls. Once in the big outside the tempting scent of many tiny, nervous mammals went straight to his head and it was no more Mister Sleek City Cat, hello Hector, King of The Mighty Jungle!
So much for the brief, relaxing break we’d hoped for – instead, we got three days tramping the hedgerows and back gardens of a small market town in the south Netherlands, getting drenched and chilled through to the bone, looking for a cat who was having a very nice time thank you playing the mighty hunter, and who didn’t want to be found at all but only to miaow pathetically now and then from some inaccesssible spot so that we wouldn’t know how much fun he was having.
Glad he did. We had no fun at all. [Point of order: may I also note at this point that it really is bad manners and somewhat insensitive to continually complain like a fretful child (although you are 28) to someone who has a terminal illness, that you have one tiny degree of temperature and a bit of a sore throat?]
Nevertheless, chilled to the bone, exhausted and irritated beyond endurance as I have been, it’s as good a way as any to spend the run up to a presidential election. Better than listening to overpaid and overexposed pundits getting increasingly, nonsensically hysterical.
I should be thankful that at least I’ve been mostly spared the BBC’s Justin Webb, who’s all over the airwaves this morning desperately fighting to have McCain taken seriously, as if he can win now in any other way except by poll interference, a rearguard legal action a la Florida 2000 or the sudden appearance of a barking mad ‘lone wolf’ with a rifle.
You can hear the Republican talking points for the day echoed in Webb’s reports, just as loudly as he must be hearing the echoes of his career as Washington’s foremost British media suckup going down the tubes the closer that Obama’s election gets.
Hmm, I wonder how much of Webb continuing to assure viewers that McCain can still win (despite all evidence to the contrary) we’ll get on tonight’s overnight BBC election coverage?
One thing’s certain, there’ll be no shortage of rubbish spoken by all concerned: even without Webb, the BBC’s election commentary’s has become even more asinine now Lewis Hamilton is the World Formula 1 champion.
Potted R4 Today programme: “Obama is the new Lewis Hamilton! Hamilton is the new Obama! Look, they’re both black! That means something doesn’t it? Not sure what, but we’ll say it anyway!”
Oh God, I just had a horrible thought: once the results are in, how long before Campaign 2012 starts and the speculation over Palin’s potential presidential candidacy begins? I give it less than 24 hours.
I can’t stand it. I think I’d rather go back to the rain and the wet.