How did we ever become so celebrified? Why is ‘celebrity’ the most sought after, the most revered, the most… most celebrated thing in modern society? Whassit all abaaart?
The front page of the Times today, like this one on the Mirror (but I couldn’t find a nice pic of the Times, its too hi-brow to go banding its cover all over the web, or too slow, perhaps), features the winner of the ‘ugliest man in Britain’ competition. Ok, it actually features Jeremy Clarkson. An official ‘national treasure’. But why on the front page of virtually every national paper? When there’s an election coming up in two months time, which is fairly important, when ISIS are using children to perform their executions now, the world has gone to shit, the economy is wavering and Real Madrid lost at home? So why Clarkson? Because he’s gorgeous? A face made for radio would be a good description. No, its because he’s a ‘celeb’ and therefore he trumps all else.
But despite the fact that it should be a little snippet at the foot of page 8, just under the dog-poisonings at Crufts, what is all the fuss about?
Jeremy Clarkson is a great journalist. Who has elevated himself into a pantomime dame of a bad-boy for the sake of the world’s most successful ‘factual’ tv programme, Top Gear. He plays a role. They all do. And Jeremy’s role is the ‘vox populii’ He says the things that we’d all like to but feel restrained by things like ‘decency’ and ‘suitability’ and ‘appropriateness’. Clarkson feels no such constraint in his role. He says what he thinks; gives it straight, calls a spade a spade. Or on one occasion, much worse. And now, buoyed by the rough, raucous, up-market-thuggish persona he has so long cultivated, he punched his tv producer in what the BBC (bless them) called ‘a fracas’. Pretentious tossers. Because the producer failed to provide food on the set for after filming. And Jeremy looks like he’s starving, doesn’t he? But maybe the producer guy is obnoxious, and deserved of a bitch-slap from Le Clarkson, but who knows. Jeremy was already ‘on a warning’ and thus went 3-and-out. Though only suspended as you don’t really want to bite the hand that feeds you, and Top Gear does generate more income than Gardener’s Week or Songs of Praise. Even combined!!!
I actually like the ‘Jeremy Clarkson’ that I read and watch. He’s anti-PC and for that alone he is refreshing. But he also is an outspoken justifier of selfish bastards who drive gas guzzling petrol monsters. And there are far too few of those around. In fact he is the living embodiment of the right of free speech. Though possibly he takes that freedom a touch too far.
This will only make him stronger.
Happy Wednesday
A xxxx
I don’t want to sound like this is just a name dropping opportunity (though you might well think it is) but having first met Jezza long before he became famous and was then merely a motoring writer who had gone into partnership with a former colleague – and having hung out with them both over the course of a year or two when they were both living in Fulham, it may (or may not) come as a surprise, but what you see on TV is pretty much what you get in real life.
He’s funny, clever, opinionated (and never afraid to air that opinion, almost no matter what) and in many ways the archetypal Yorkshire gent (or at least what we think of as being an archetypal Yorkshire gent). Don’t always agree with what he says, but like he gives a monkeys anyway (and that’s just him).
I remember him saying, not long after Top Gear really took off, something along the lines of: I don’t know how long this will last – but I don’t expect it will be very long – so I’m going to make the most of it.
That was almost twenty years ago and I expect that he would be the first to admit that his career has had a longevity and has risen to heights that he could never have imagined. So I (like a great many others I suspect) sincerely hope this is not the end of the Clarkson era but merely a staging point along the way… Now where’s that petition??