Jeremy Clarkson's "The World According To Clarkson" is one of Penguin's "best books of its kind to be published in recent years"

obvious, tiresome stuff is often the MOST likely thing to push my buttons

It's worth looking at the role Clarkson plays and asking who it actually represents, if anyone.

Saying he represents the motorist or tabloid readers or unilads or people who have barbecues isn't a good answer to this, because all those groups are themselves stereotypes, themselves as fictional as 'Clarkson'.

yeah stevie i'm so wrong to find someone like you who despises him humorless and hypersensitive

yeah i choose not to be insulted by someone who was suckered in by "luna" tbh but keep pretending your sharper than the game yeah?

forgot about oops

He's a prick who loves cars and can talk about them entertainingly and write about them very well -- I grew up around these people (except for the writing part) due to my father's work in the automotive industry, thus I can find him funny and loathsome AND be dismayed by UK Lefties getting their panties in a bunch about such a harmless dude.

http://sharetv.org/images/posters/renaissance_man_1994.jpg

He's a prick who loves cars and can talk about them entertainingly and write about them very well -- I grew up around these people (except for the writing part) due to my father's work in the automotive industry, thus I can find him funny and loathsome AND be dismayed by UK Lefties getting their panties in a bunch about such a harmless dude.

This is true if you emphasise the 'cars' part, but I dunno, doesn't he appear more often and to more people as a newspaper columnist/talking head than as a Top Gear presenter?

... because there are all sort of people who are good at one thing - obviously people in music but also actors, comedians, etc – who you find more or less lovable for that one thing, whilst knowing that you would not vote for them, agree with what they would write if they had a column, or even really want to be in a lift with them or spend any time with them personally.

But they mainly do the one thing they're good at/that you like them for, so yeah, you don't sweat the things you don't or wouldn't like them for. Not that big of an issue.

But with Clarkson, with all these columns and books, surely he's long since branched out from just being an entertaining car guy whose opinion you might value if you were buying a car?

Most of his books are about cars. Why read the other ones?

Dom-worthy off-topic meta ad-hom itt, n'est pas.

no greek pls dmac

have no practical use for car journalism personally but 'got into' PJ O'Rourke age 17 or so, when (iirc) Clarkson was still basically a motoring journo who peppered his columns with the odd right-wing quip, and from reading the former's writing about test drives etc it seemed immediately apparent to me that the latter was the mere inelegant Britisher knockoff. obv this has kind of atrophied in the 15 years hence but that's still p much how I think of Clarkson

all flippancy aside, the comment i made to oops earlier is possibly the shittiest i've made on ilx, and i apologise unreservedly for it. it was uncalled for, and spiteful, and i regretted it almost the moment i made it.

such compassion - would it have been so difficult to say "terrible timing, sorry"?

https://twitter.com/JeremyClarkson/status/448099234290864128/photo/1

@JeremyClarkson
The oxygen masks have deployed. Goodbye everyone. pic.twitter.com/AjqxckFgln

@villaforrent
@JeremyClarkson pretty poor timing! Will give you the benefit of doubt that you didn't know about the recent announcement

‏@JeremyClarkson
@villaforrent Right. And you thought it had been flying around for the last 3 weeks?

all for an all out war between these two

‏@piersmorgan
Utterly shameful > RT @JeremyClarkson The oxygen masks have deployed. Goodbye everyone. pic.twitter.com/IaYEop7UcJ

‏@JeremyClarkson
@piersmorgan If you don't shut up, I shall start to reveal details of your past life that would make you VERY unhappy.

would be happy if they both disappeared off the face of the earth tbh

he is a complete and utter berk

when Piers Morgan is making you look bad, you have a problem

I wonder if this might finish him off

Jeremy Clarkson N-word shame: Top Gear presenter caught on camera using racist rhyme

literally no surprise that he's that type of racist who actually uses the n word

i dream of seeing him destitute and publicly humiliated and this gives me so much hope that i might get to one day see it

Clarkson is torn between a Toyota and a Subaru would be an acceptable end

the sort of ppl who normally bombard the BBC with complaints won't want to be infringing on a man's right to use racial slurs on unaired footage and the sort of ppl who want Clarkson off the air won't want to be seen acting like the former group so I strongly doubt this will blow up enough to come to anything

dude just won't eat the magnetic bird seed

I did not use the n word. Never use it. The Mirror has gone way too far this time.
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al and felix from hot chip overhear the tweet alan yentob dealing with this on a flight back from berlin
https://twitter.com/aldoyletweets
https://twitter.com/_felixmartin

ahaha, nice work boys

Begs forgiveness, did "everything in his power" to avoid using that word he loathes.

http://twitpic.com/e2mc8b

lols at the partridge-ness of this

can somebody start remixing that vid pleasE?

Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson says the BBC has told him he will be sacked if he makes 'one more offensive remark, anywhere, at any time'.

Fingers crossed etc

the bbc are beneath contempt as ever

if this country gave a shit about any of this then they would have let him go after the slope thing even before he fairly clearly enunciated the word nigger, and he can barely enunciate at the best of times through his scarified larynx and blackened serrated little teeth

the plausible deniability of faultlessly insincere and 'knowing' public school bantz and droit de seigneur lets his ilk get away with this shit relentlessly, can remember this sort of playful ethnic dehumanization as a continuous backdrop throughout my formative years

'racism' is understood as the preserve of unhinged provincial ukip councillors and the subliterate plebs on twiter who get prosecuted for it

the thick of it was quite incisive on this sort of distanciation procedure, cf this exchange between the steve hiltonish policy guru and his minister --

We just need a policy flavour, Peter.
So, why don't you start thinking about it?

Fine.
It's just that I have always been consistently way ahead of the party on this.
I have always welcomed immigration, the economic benefits.
It's JB and his Eton clique who are always texting each other about "dune coons" and "nip in the air".
Do you remember him laughing at Frank's party at the one about the Pakistani guy being thrown off the train?

Yeah.
JB has got some very progressive views.
But I think we'll find what he was doing was ironising, Peter.

There are some elements of early TTOI I don't like but that isn't one of them.

I hope Clarkson dies.

The BBC will never let Clarkson go until he outlives his economic usefulness. He's a massive draw internationally and until his behaviour jeopardises that properly, he'll continue to get away with it. Cannot imagine Penguin Random House will drop him either.

that his shit is so lucrative is exactly the reason why firing him might count for something, the right side of history and all that

Maybe this stuff will damage him in the US market? Here he will remain a "legend" despite (or maybe because of) what he says.

"It's inevitable that one day, someone, somewhere will say that I've offended them, and that will be that."

He's a massive draw internationally

Is this really true? Obviously I know Top Gear is the BBC's biggest export but I'm struggling to imagine why anyone outside of Britain and maybe the US or Australia would give a shit about Clarkson, as opposed to just wanting to watch some features about fast cars.

He's kinda big here, bt in a "clogging up opshops w his books" type way

His books are massive all over the world, not just Top Gear.

Clarkson books are popular with People Who Don't Read Books, if you know what I mean. I hadn't ever heard of the term 'slope' before the earlier incident, so the guy's clearly a connoisseur of racist epithets and makes a game of slipping them under the radar.

Yeah that took craft, of a kind

I hadn't ever heard of the term 'slope' before the earlier incident, so the guy's clearly a connoisseur of racist epithets and makes a game of slipping them under the radar.

Going to hazard a guess here that Jeremy Clarkson has seen more Vietnam war films than you have. In fact he's probably seen every one ever made and 'slope' is pretty common in them.

Gonna hazard a guess that I probably know more non-cinema Vietnam vets than Clarkson does, while growing up in a place full of Vietnamese refugees, and not a single person ever - even people who used plenty of other epithets - used the word 'slope' to describe an Asian or Vietnamese person.

Wonder if he's behind this movies4men channel on freeview..

I've never heard it used outside of a film, and to an extent that doesn't matter as it was fairly widely used within cinema and as you point out he's clearly the sort of person who enjoys throwing around racial epithets for lolz. There was another comment about Mexicans that I can't quite remember.

Growing up in London in the 80s I heard the eenie meenie rhyme hundreds of times and never with an N word in it, I'm not sure I heard it in that context until adulthood.

I think I always heard it or was 'taught' it as 'nicker' (maybe I thought it meant thief?) Or 'nickel', neither of which are exactly much better

The insults against Mexicans on Top Gear were horrible. Actually Hammond was worse than Clarkson in that instance. Clarkson tried to pass it off as nbd - he said that "we went to the Mexican embassy and we all laughed about it and drank tequila"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhsMGDuU8tA