Taking Offence
The public fall-out from Jeremy Clarkson's fracas has brought out a bewildering array of responses from steadfast support to calls from a Labour MP for the BBC presenter to be 'banned' whatever that means.
In this article for The Sunday Times AA Gill argues that the BBC cannot possibly be all things to all people and that the broadcaster has to make programmes for all of its licence holders, not just those who are sitting all day in front of their screens waiting to be offended by someone or something.
Now I'm not too keen on religious programmes or soaps, for example, but in a live and let live society I've always found the solution to be quite simple: either switch the damn thing off or don't tune in in the first place.
Don't dump my mate Clarkson
The Top Gear presenter has made the BBC a fortune. It should stop treating him as a liability, writes AA Gill
Clarkson is the same off-screen as on, which is why he is so popular, says AA Gill, who has known him for three decades
The first I heard of it was when the editor of Channel 4 News texted to ask if I could go on that night to talk about Jeremy Clarkson.
“What’s he done now?” I tapped back. When you consider what Clarkson might do, there is a brain-clogging Milky Way of possibilities. Played rugger with a hedgehog? Called Cretans cretins? Made hatchbacks have gay sex?
For a moment I thought he might have keeled over, because that is not beyond the bounds either. I looked online, he was still with us and there was the “fracas”.
As a follow-up to declaring war on Argentina, pushing a producer over the temperature of dinner is a bit of an anti-climax. But while the BBC can forgive enraging, sovereign neighbours, frac-arsing about among their employees is a hang-em-out-to-dry offence.
The next day, walking down my street, half a dozen folk — the butcher, the French cheese seller, a couple of lads outside a cafe, the woman in the newsagent — stopped me to ask about “your mate Clarkson”. They spoke of him not in the abstract way of a 12in high clowning character on TV but as a man they liked and felt they knew — and that is a rare thing.
Last time I checked, the bring-back-Clarkson petition was getting close to 1m signatories. That is more people than are signed up to stop female genital mutilation, although I must say that the two things are not necessarily comparable.
I must declare an interest: Clarkson is a mate. We have worked together on this paper for 22 years and known each other for well over 30. So, what should happen next?
JEREMY reported the incident. It was over the absence of hot food at the end of a long and frustrating day with the prospect of another early start in the morning.
The producer, Oisin Tymon, had not made a complaint. Jeremy called Danny Cohen, the director of BBC television, directly and explained he had lost his rag. Sources close to Top Gear say the reasons were that he wanted to apologise and make an amend, not least for the sake of the hundreds of people standing by to carry on with the rest of the show.
Cohen had a choice: to do the right thing or the bureaucratic thing, but at the BBC no good intention goes unquestioned. The complaints procedure is Jesuitical in its sanctimony and Kafkaesque in its complexity.
The BBC suspended Clarkson and called a preposterous and ponderous investigation. A BBC film producer called me to say that if incidents like this on film and TV locations around the world were all reported in the press, there would be no room for any other news. People work long hours with a great deal of stress, and small things — almost invariably food — are tetchy tripwires. Whatever did happen, in mitigation to Jeremy, nobody works harder or under more stress than he.
Those who say, “Well, he’s just a presenter” have no idea how much of Top Gear is down to him. The new format was created by Jeremy and his old school friend Andy Wilman, the producer.
Jeremy does not just present: he comes up with the ideas, he also writes the scripts. All those jokes and that banter are not off-the-cuff wit.
When the cast of the programme’s previous incarnation left to take up a more profitable offer from Channel 5, Clarkson stayed with the corporation. I remember we talked about it at the time. In the end, he just liked the idea of public service broadcasting. The BBC meant something.
Jeremy has, in Wilman’s phrase, had an annus horribilis. His mother died, he has had a number of not entirely self-inflicted health concerns, and he has continued with an absurdly punishing round of public appearances, writing and film making, all of it compounded with the not unreasonable feeling that he is working for the enemy.
At The Sunday Times, he and I work for a big corporation. But there is a sense that if things get lairy then the editor and management would stand by us.
At the BBC, some of Jeremy’s colleagues have treated him as a liability. Not just failed to appreciate him but briefed against him while taking the hundreds of millions his talent earns them and using his image and Top Gear to promote themselves around the world. As some wit texted, if you remove the top guy, you are left with Hammond and May, rather like the Conservative party. The BBC owns the rights to Top Gear but without Clarkson it really is an empty coat.
Of course it is not everyone at the BBC who is embarrassed and ungrateful to Jeremy. I have had a stream of Tristrams call me in the small hours — strictly off-the-record — to let me know that there are fans of Top Gear in the building and that the DG (director-general) is onside. They are ashamed of the BBC’s timid reaction to anything it thinks will upset the Daily Mail or will not sit well with The Guardian.
The biggest, most damaging and telling overreaction is not his suspension or the calling of a grand star chamber inquiry, it is the cancelling of the next three Top Gears.
This confirms how ruinously the corporation has lost contact with its audience. The three remaining shows did not belong to Clarkson. Nor did they belong to the BBC. They belonged to what they would call stakeholders and the rest of us would call “us” — licence fee-payers. We have already forked out for them: it is our money. Not showing them as part of some internal, disciplinary spat is in arrant disregard for the viewers.
All this is down to one man: Cohen, the director of television. This is a bone he cannot stop picking at.
COHEN is a man of committed, right-on, social interventionist, politically precise principles. Everything he stands for is diametrically opposed to everything he imagines Jeremy stands for.
Cohen is one of a cabal within the BBC who think broadcasting has a mission to guide, nudge and encourage society to be better: that it should promote, wherever possible, a broadly homogenous, inclusive, positive, left-of-centre perspective on the world. And, more important, expunge contrary or unsuitable views. No format should be excused being proactively on message.
I would guess that Cohen sees this as new Reithism. That as a nation’s broadcaster the BBC has a duty to manipulate the country through information, education and entertainment.
Top Gear is the antithesis of everything he would want to broadcast. It is white, overweight, middle-aged, banterish, polluting, coarse, middle-class and insensitive.
The funny thing is that television is full of people who are reactionary and incorrect: all of Steve Coogan’s creations; Alf Garnett; half the characters in EastEnders. But they do not mean it. Back in the green room, they return to being nice, Guardian-reading fellow travellers. Jeremy is the same off as he is on, which, in no small measure, is why he is so popular.
Cohen appears not to want to make programmes with Jeremy or for Top Gear’s audience. The BBC has given up on football, it makes no non-metropolitan male programmes. It would like to dismiss this audience altogether as being Ukip voters; dinosaurs who should be left to die out listening to Radio 4. But actually the audience is mostly teenage boys, exactly the people the BBC needs to attract if it is ever to justify a future charter and the licence fee.
The BBC has to make programmes for all licence holders, not simply the ones it approves of. And because of the impending licence fee and charter negotiations, some have suggested it would be better to dump Clarkson and Top Gear. The reverse is the truth: if the BBC cannot show that it is serving the nation as a whole, then it will be told to go and get subscriptions or donations from those who want to watch it, and it will become like PBS in America.
This is a bellwether crisis, not for Jeremy but for the BBC’s ability to manage its talent. I have been told that Cohen rather enjoys the reflected spotlight of his inquisition of Top Gear but he should be in no doubt that its personal nature leaves many in the BBC to doubt his judgment. Clarkson is not the only person whose job is on the line.
What Jeremy does next is pretty much anything that comes into his head which is, again, part of his manifest attraction. But if he walks or is pushed then the only thing Cohen will ever be remembered for is as the man who lost Top Gear.
Cohen once said, pointedly, that no one was bigger than the corporation but the truth is broader than that. Plainly no one person is bigger than auntie but the BBC is only three letters without its people or its audience.
While there are bewildering, bloated layers of executives, commissioners, blue sky thinkers, strategic planners and compliance officers, their existence relies on a handful of directors, editors, technicians and the talent. And they are all looking to see what happens to Clarkson.
I have never seen a moment when the BBC appeared so riven with false certainties, such paranoid insecurities and a desperate, white-knuckle political righteousness.
The first I heard of it was when the editor of Channel 4 News texted to ask if I could go on that night to talk about Jeremy Clarkson.
“What’s he done now?” I tapped back. When you consider what Clarkson might do, there is a brain-clogging Milky Way of possibilities. Played rugger with a hedgehog? Called Cretans cretins? Made hatchbacks have gay sex?
For a moment I thought he might have keeled over, because that is not beyond the bounds either. I looked online, he was still with us and there was the “fracas”.
As a follow-up to declaring war on Argentina, pushing a producer over the temperature of dinner is a bit of an anti-climax. But while the BBC can forgive enraging, sovereign neighbours, frac-arsing about among their employees is a hang-em-out-to-dry offence.
The next day, walking down my street, half a dozen folk — the butcher, the French cheese seller, a couple of lads outside a cafe, the woman in the newsagent — stopped me to ask about “your mate Clarkson”. They spoke of him not in the abstract way of a 12in high clowning character on TV but as a man they liked and felt they knew — and that is a rare thing.
Last time I checked, the bring-back-Clarkson petition was getting close to 1m signatories. That is more people than are signed up to stop female genital mutilation, although I must say that the two things are not necessarily comparable.
I must declare an interest: Clarkson is a mate. We have worked together on this paper for 22 years and known each other for well over 30. So, what should happen next?
JEREMY reported the incident. It was over the absence of hot food at the end of a long and frustrating day with the prospect of another early start in the morning.
The producer, Oisin Tymon, had not made a complaint. Jeremy called Danny Cohen, the director of BBC television, directly and explained he had lost his rag. Sources close to Top Gear say the reasons were that he wanted to apologise and make an amend, not least for the sake of the hundreds of people standing by to carry on with the rest of the show.
Cohen had a choice: to do the right thing or the bureaucratic thing, but at the BBC no good intention goes unquestioned. The complaints procedure is Jesuitical in its sanctimony and Kafkaesque in its complexity.
The BBC suspended Clarkson and called a preposterous and ponderous investigation. A BBC film producer called me to say that if incidents like this on film and TV locations around the world were all reported in the press, there would be no room for any other news. People work long hours with a great deal of stress, and small things — almost invariably food — are tetchy tripwires. Whatever did happen, in mitigation to Jeremy, nobody works harder or under more stress than he.
Those who say, “Well, he’s just a presenter” have no idea how much of Top Gear is down to him. The new format was created by Jeremy and his old school friend Andy Wilman, the producer.
Jeremy does not just present: he comes up with the ideas, he also writes the scripts. All those jokes and that banter are not off-the-cuff wit.
When the cast of the programme’s previous incarnation left to take up a more profitable offer from Channel 5, Clarkson stayed with the corporation. I remember we talked about it at the time. In the end, he just liked the idea of public service broadcasting. The BBC meant something.
Jeremy has, in Wilman’s phrase, had an annus horribilis. His mother died, he has had a number of not entirely self-inflicted health concerns, and he has continued with an absurdly punishing round of public appearances, writing and film making, all of it compounded with the not unreasonable feeling that he is working for the enemy.
At The Sunday Times, he and I work for a big corporation. But there is a sense that if things get lairy then the editor and management would stand by us.
At the BBC, some of Jeremy’s colleagues have treated him as a liability. Not just failed to appreciate him but briefed against him while taking the hundreds of millions his talent earns them and using his image and Top Gear to promote themselves around the world. As some wit texted, if you remove the top guy, you are left with Hammond and May, rather like the Conservative party. The BBC owns the rights to Top Gear but without Clarkson it really is an empty coat.
Of course it is not everyone at the BBC who is embarrassed and ungrateful to Jeremy. I have had a stream of Tristrams call me in the small hours — strictly off-the-record — to let me know that there are fans of Top Gear in the building and that the DG (director-general) is onside. They are ashamed of the BBC’s timid reaction to anything it thinks will upset the Daily Mail or will not sit well with The Guardian.
The biggest, most damaging and telling overreaction is not his suspension or the calling of a grand star chamber inquiry, it is the cancelling of the next three Top Gears.
This confirms how ruinously the corporation has lost contact with its audience. The three remaining shows did not belong to Clarkson. Nor did they belong to the BBC. They belonged to what they would call stakeholders and the rest of us would call “us” — licence fee-payers. We have already forked out for them: it is our money. Not showing them as part of some internal, disciplinary spat is in arrant disregard for the viewers.
All this is down to one man: Cohen, the director of television. This is a bone he cannot stop picking at.
COHEN is a man of committed, right-on, social interventionist, politically precise principles. Everything he stands for is diametrically opposed to everything he imagines Jeremy stands for.
Cohen is one of a cabal within the BBC who think broadcasting has a mission to guide, nudge and encourage society to be better: that it should promote, wherever possible, a broadly homogenous, inclusive, positive, left-of-centre perspective on the world. And, more important, expunge contrary or unsuitable views. No format should be excused being proactively on message.
I would guess that Cohen sees this as new Reithism. That as a nation’s broadcaster the BBC has a duty to manipulate the country through information, education and entertainment.
Top Gear is the antithesis of everything he would want to broadcast. It is white, overweight, middle-aged, banterish, polluting, coarse, middle-class and insensitive.
The funny thing is that television is full of people who are reactionary and incorrect: all of Steve Coogan’s creations; Alf Garnett; half the characters in EastEnders. But they do not mean it. Back in the green room, they return to being nice, Guardian-reading fellow travellers. Jeremy is the same off as he is on, which, in no small measure, is why he is so popular.
Cohen appears not to want to make programmes with Jeremy or for Top Gear’s audience. The BBC has given up on football, it makes no non-metropolitan male programmes. It would like to dismiss this audience altogether as being Ukip voters; dinosaurs who should be left to die out listening to Radio 4. But actually the audience is mostly teenage boys, exactly the people the BBC needs to attract if it is ever to justify a future charter and the licence fee.
The BBC has to make programmes for all licence holders, not simply the ones it approves of. And because of the impending licence fee and charter negotiations, some have suggested it would be better to dump Clarkson and Top Gear. The reverse is the truth: if the BBC cannot show that it is serving the nation as a whole, then it will be told to go and get subscriptions or donations from those who want to watch it, and it will become like PBS in America.
This is a bellwether crisis, not for Jeremy but for the BBC’s ability to manage its talent. I have been told that Cohen rather enjoys the reflected spotlight of his inquisition of Top Gear but he should be in no doubt that its personal nature leaves many in the BBC to doubt his judgment. Clarkson is not the only person whose job is on the line.
What Jeremy does next is pretty much anything that comes into his head which is, again, part of his manifest attraction. But if he walks or is pushed then the only thing Cohen will ever be remembered for is as the man who lost Top Gear.
Cohen once said, pointedly, that no one was bigger than the corporation but the truth is broader than that. Plainly no one person is bigger than auntie but the BBC is only three letters without its people or its audience.
While there are bewildering, bloated layers of executives, commissioners, blue sky thinkers, strategic planners and compliance officers, their existence relies on a handful of directors, editors, technicians and the talent. And they are all looking to see what happens to Clarkson.
I have never seen a moment when the BBC appeared so riven with false certainties, such paranoid insecurities and a desperate, white-knuckle political righteousness.
