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

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

We caught tigers by the toe in Minnesota, but we also play 'duck, duck, grey duck' there, so...

James May was/is a loathesome cunt re Mexicans too but seems to get even more of a pass than the others

not really a surprise clarkson used the n word (i cant be bothered to find out the context) and i dont really care to hear about him or from him, but he does represent a certain kind of middle class middle england dad archetype who probably thinks ukip are a force for good (i sort of imagine millions of middle aged men across england who feel clarkson says the things they are not allowed to anymore as england has gone pc-mad etc etc).

despite all that, i dont think he should actually get sacked. its just too easy. although the other option is him issuing a 'heartfelt' apology, so maybe the sack is a good idea. all it would mean though is that he ends up on itv or sky next year instead.

I remember it as either tiger or piggy, but my memory's a bit blurred on which it was. Both probably.

BBC's decision is, I guess, partly motivated by the opprobrium that would be heaped on them by the right-wing press, furious at the treatment of their man on the inside. It's only really the Mirror and the Guardian and maybe the Indy that are showing any kind of censure here. The Mail and the Sun would be thundering if, say, Frankie Boyle had done it.

Marina Hyde was pushing back on the Guardian front, too.

According to customer in the queue at my place of business today Clarkson should get a free pass "because those rappers say it all the time" and "anyway that word is part of our heritage and they are trying to take our heritage away".

Marina Hyde was pushing back on the Guardian front, too.

Very much appreciated Musa Okwonga's response in this: http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2014/05/n-word-jeremy-clarkson-has-finally-urinated-live-rail-racism

those rappers say it all the time is common among the comments to his apology video.

Maybe when black comedians stop using it, and saying, “it’s okay, I can say that word”, and Rap stars stop using it in their songs, maybe it will disappear like the other words that were used in the 70’s and 80’s

marina hyde curiously offtm about this

n-word-jeremy-clarkson-has-finally-urinated-live-rail-racism

the n-word version of eeny-meeny-miney-mo was the only one we used when i was a small kid, i don't think i knew what the n-word meant until i was in my teens. not proud of this, just saying backwater 70s England was pretty unreconstructed

i'm pretty sick of all the nuance shit tbh, if i used racist language at work i'd probably get sacked, if i used it out of work and it made the papers i'd probably get sacked, seems pretty simple to me

You don't bring in millions of ad dollars I guess

thats' it, the BBC know they have an audience made up of men like Clarkson. no matter how much we try to hide from it (in the north! on the internet!), this is real england 2014.

the n-word version of eeny-meeny-miney-mo was the only one we used when i was a small kid, i don't think i knew what the n-word meant until i was in my teens. not proud of this, just saying backwater 70s England was pretty unreconstructed
― nostalgie de couilles (Noodle Vague),

My experience. Not wholly surprisin that west ireland runs a good 15 yrs behind ~even hull~ ffs

so y'all don't believe his explanation for this or you just don't care cause he's a jerk anyway

i grew up in the Midlands tbf darragh which is even more fucked up considering that it was much more racially mixed than Hull back then - tho not particularly the little town i was in

lol his "explanation" uh see what happened there was I was trying to not say nigger but then instead I said nigger by accident and that's why if you listen very carefully you can hear me saying a thing that I said

No I'd say I neither believe nor care about this nonsensical bullshit from a racist, how about you granny?

so open minded you lot are

Sounded very sensible to me. But my judgment here isn't clouded by already hating the guy so...

I don't think there's necessarily harm in portraying an unreconstructed wealthy British man who seems to have forgotten the empire ended on television, but doing so in a way where people might conceivably aspire to his role, or see his "humor" in a positive light, is inexcusable.

I don't hate the guy, Granny, but people are non-awkwardly laughing at him and there's a segment of society who thinks his racist uncle act is admirable.

I mean, who gives a shit if he _accidentally_ said a rhyme or if he meant to say something else. Dude said "nigger" on film and thinks it's ok because he grew up saying nigger

I grew up decades later than the guy and there's shit I _apologize_ if I say because, even if I heard those things, I am genuinely sorry that shit came out of my mouth in 2014

I didn't even realize 'tiger' wasn't the original until I heard an 80+ year old woman say it. She got a pass, pretty much, in my mind - but Clarkson is 13 years younger than my father who'd never think to say the offensive version.

me too.

the n-word version of eeny-meeny-miney-mo was the only one we used when i was a small kid

i've spoken with a few people who have said basically the same thing which is AMAZING to me. i come from one of the most racist places in the western world, i.e. rural east tennessee, and had no idea the n-word was ever part of that rhyme. this, in a place where white people casually said the n-word all the time to each other.

I guess it comes down to the fact that outside of legal matters, you can do something on accident and still be very, very wrong. The entire "it was an accident" doesn't make casual racism less wrong. Makes it worse in some ways, because it's the ingrained shit that's insidious.

yeah - i just keep coming back to the vision of clarkson manfully, heroically straining not to say "nigger" in front of a rolling television camera