Jeremy Clarkson and BBC performances are word-perfect

How high does this Jeremy Clarkson thing stink, and why has nobody pointed out the glaring anomaly in news reporting?

Jeremy Clarkson and BBC performances are word-perfect, as they play out the roles which the Ancients of Portland Place foretold.

It was the mid-1970s. Boys of a certain age were wearing baggies, duck-feet shoes, denim shirts and tank tops. Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe and Harold Wilson vied for power. In Worcestershire, the rural dean of Pershore complained that state schools were becoming ‘pagan wildernesses’ where ‘a mild kind of sociology’ had replaced Christian values. England’s pisspoor 10-wicket defeat in Barbados in ’74 coloured the country’s [lack of] sporting prowess. The charts were giving us Suzi Quatro singing Devil Gate Drive, Tiger Feet and Wombling Wombles. Richard Briers and Sheila Hancock were appearing in The West End in Absurd Person Singular. ITV was airing (among others) the sitcom Love Thy Neighbour with a straight face. Jimmy Savile was untainted, as only a few in Broadcasting House actively felt a chill when passing him in the corridors. And Jeremy Clarkson was selling Paddington Bears door-to-door for his mum’s business in Doncaster.

My father had left Capital Radio (Dickie Attenborough sighing, “Don’t forget to return the empties before you go, Luv.”) to realize his great ambition to ‘crack the Beeb’, and joined Radio 2 as a staff announcer. These were the days before fixed term contracts were plat du jour and broadcasters were not seen by the corporation as ‘the enemy’. But changes were afoot at BH…

Head of Light Entertainment David Hatch (the least well-known of his generation of the Cambridge Footlights Club) was giving a glimpse of the corporate future of Britain’s national treasure, but few foresaw the ghastly future that the next generation of leftie PPH B-listers had lined up for Aunty. The clerical fifth column was well advanced in its plot to downgrade the Beeb’s creative talent to make for an altogether more smoothly-run business and one less susceptible to the peculiarities of its raison d’etre: the people behind the mic.

In 1970 Kenny Everett was sacked for making an offhand remark about Transport Minister’s wife Mary Peyton bribing her driving test-examiner. History doesn’t recall whether the Minister gave any shits at all, but the egregious and self-ingratiating middle-management pleasers at the BBC played Herod to Salome’s spot-prize request for the head of The Baptist, and Maurice Cole’s arse was out the door.

Notes were made by an über-clerk on the 20th floor that for his employer to be held to ransom by some dreadful little oik from the radio block was not to be countenanced, and the plot to bring about Fifty Years of Grey at the Beeb came off the drawing board and onto the charter. The likes of Simon Bates, Dave Lee-Travis, Noel Edmonds were all got rid of in a protracted Night of the Long Knives, so that the Corporation would be less vulnerable to being dictated to by artists when re-negotiating contracts.

More than a generation later it’s a juggernaut work-in-progress. Indeed it’s surprising to see that even two stars survived from those heady days: Steve Wright and Terry Wogan. In my opinion, this is due to their being variously consummate pros, politically astute and kept their noses scrupulously clean… in no particular order.

And in this febrile atmosphere we pull the pin and toss into the room one Jeremy Clarkson Esq.

I resisted any impulse to sign-up – literally or intellectually – to any petition (such as this one  bit.ly/1E7QHiy – currently standing at 650,000 signatures, according to the Daily Mail), because only today have details and eye-witness accounts been made public. While my pro-artiste stance is declared and in-the-open for all to see here, I have to underline that this is a type of unspoken (or sometimes explicit) agreement that in return for being given free rein and creative judgment over what the artiste does, he or she does not behave like a complete bell-end.

It’s still not 100% clear whether Clarkson actually did or didn’t misbehave to the extent that is alleged, with the event being variouslty reported as having occurred in Surrey during filming (The Times Wednesday March 11 Page 5) and at the Simonstone Hall Hotel in the Yorkshire village of Hawes (The Daily Mail Thursday March 12) over a cheese platter.

How high does this stink, and why has nobody pointed out the glaring anomaly in news reporting?

But in all honesty, can one rule out the possibility that he did have a brain fart / genuine prima donna moment. Because in that same Daily Mail report it states: “The production team had been scheduled to take a helicopter to their next location after filming, and return to the hotel at 8pm last Wednesday… However, Clarkson kept the helicopter waiting for three hours while he sat in a pub, Channel 4 reported”.

The same article also relates how Clarkson’s parliamentary representative has waded in (quoted as saying how he “…hoped it could be ‘sorted out’ without the BBC sacking him…’), one Rt Hon. David Cameron MP – having been given time off from trifles like saving the NHS, running the country and saving the country from the Mongol socialist hordes. WTF is going on?

After spending half my working life in PR, I recognize spin and briefing when I see it. I also recognize a rat when I smell one. Someone, somewhere is having a go at being a Machiavellian spinmeister, but these contradictory reports indicate an oversized bollock has been dropped and the wheels are about to come off.

This would-be Max Clifford (remember him?)  is not as clever as he thinks, because in the resulting axing of the rest of the current Top Gear series, he has opened the BBC to potential disaster. BBC Worldwide has sold this to 120 countries; the cost in abandoning the schedules will bankrupt the Corporation if even half those networks sue! You think the fed-up, pissed-off licence fee-payer is unhappy now? Wait until M’Learned Friends from Anchorage to Auckland are briefed, and you’ll hear him squeal like a stuck pig.

And consider this…

The grand, grey masterplan of the BBC management martinets is nothing if not self-preservative. In recognizing the historical threat to its proposed thousand-year Reich at Portland Place, the licence fee-paying public is presented with a full-blown scandal. It’s even pushed the Rona Fairhead / BBC Board scandal off the news pages!!! Is this a paranoid theory too far? Possibly not.

The arrogance of the BBC might be eclipsed by its incompetence, or even by a hissy-fit from its brat-star-in-chief, but I’m fucked if I’ll be frogmarched into signing #reinstateclarkson without knowing what actually happened. And frankly, I’m surprised at an allegedly seasoned old shagger like Guido Fawkes for falling for it.

Any of you out there that fell for it, lose ten house points.

And Cameron, get back to fucking work!