Video
Wednesday morning cuteness
Yes, everybody has seen this already, but it’s too adorable not to show again:
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?]
Nice One
Campaign videos are not usually my thing as the voiceovers make me want to put a brick through the screen. I swear, there must be a school where they teach the narrators to sound like that gravel-voiced guy who did all the movie trailers. But this hits every political point without once being obnoxious or hyperbolic, while still tapping into the shared cultural experience of well, just about anybody who ever watched commercial television. Brilliant.
Same as it ever was
Ollie Stone is not half as good a film maker as he thinks he is, nor as politically astute as he likes to be (cf. his JFK movie), but Justin is right: this is one hell of a trailer.
I wonder; will we miss Bush once he’s gone, once the memories not so much fade, as lose their urgency?