Top Gear?
Has Jeremy Clarkson’s’ Celebrity Status Enabled Him to Become an Outspoken, Moronic and Negative Influence on the People of Britain?

Jeremy Clarkson is the presenter of Top Gear: the most watched TV on BBC2.Top Gear is an entertaining show which connects with Britain’s love of cars; the show is daring and adventurous and it’s the relationships between the diverse personas of the presenters: Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May that give the programme an attractive format and a humorous, child-like approach to the motoring world.
However, has his celebrity status enabled him to become an outspoken, moronic and negative influence on the people of Britain? And with this influence and power, have his outspoken and ignorant views been accepted and become accepted?

Jeremy Clarkson thrives on notoriety and being controversial in the media. He writes weekly columns for ‘The Sunday Times’ and ‘The Sun’, presents Top Gear and frequently releases books with names like, ‘The World According To Jeremy Clarkson’, ‘And Another Thing….’, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ and ‘Born To Be Riled’. These books and articles present some of Jeremy Clarkson’s overly-opinionated, ignorant and chauvinistic points of view, which comes across as appealing and relevant due to his articulate way of using the English language and his persuasive manner.

Jeremy Clarkson, admittedly, comes across in an attractive manner to your typical grumpy old man. His viewpoints are over the top, in-your- face and witty and he uses stereotypical statements to back up his non-existent arguments. This manner is popular with the unsatisfied public as in the modern day: where politicians and public figures present current views in thoughtful and fair manners, the grumpy British ‘product of the recession’ needs a familiar grumpy old man who’s in the media to contradict and present an opinion on ‘everything that’s wrong with society’. But it’s a view that a small aggravated percentage of Britain can relate to.

Some of the comments that Jeremy Clarkson has made, when exaggerating his ‘famous personality’, are ludicrous. For instance - “The government should build park benches and that is it. They should leave us alone”, and, on Greenpeace and eco-related groups - “they are the by-product of old trade unionists and CND lesbians”; these comments are both ignorant and uninformed and Jeremy merely presents himself as being the ‘old-fashioned, aggravated, right wing granddad complaining at the dinner table’ and its this backward philosophy of Clarkson’s’ that has turned from being an addition to his controversial personality into a common philosophy of the right wing and the somewhat anarchic section of Britain. A variety of strong opinions spewed from a bristle-haired moron with no solutions to all the problems he’d love to rid us of. Just a variety of over-the-top statements about how everything used to be better before humans realised that fossil fuels from cars are contributing to global warming.

And it’s this which makes Jeremy Clarkson a bane of the media and society.

Jeremy Clarkson has an opinion on everything and it is this which polarises the opinions of him in society. He supports fox-hunting, is anti-smoking ban, believes Global Warming’s effects to be insignificant, believes that people in support of the environment are ‘eco-mentalists’, thinks Britain is ‘losing its national identity’ and most of all detests congestion charges, taxes and the government altogether.

And it’s his arrogant way of presenting opinions which makes him more than just an average celebrity.

Jeremy Clarkson has frequently commented on modern Britain and its ‘national/racial identity’; in one article that he wrote for the Sunday Times he tried to pick out the struggling patriotism of Britain from a football match against Croatia in 2007. He starts by pedantically over-analysing the British football teams ‘mumbled’ rendition of the national anthem and then exaggerating this by complaining about how the way that the football team sang is a representation of how ‘Patriotism’ is non-existent nowadays and even going as far as comparing an, exaggerated point on our imperialist past, to when the Nazi’s invaded Poland:
“…So we must forgive Germany for invading Poland. But I beat myself to death every night because my great-great-great-granddad moved down some chap from a hellhole in Ghana to Barbados”.

The 'fact' that we apparently have forgiven “Germany” (don’t you mean the Nazis?) for invading Poland is incorrect. And then comparing an event of mass genocide to a wrong, loosely based statement about how imperialism worked is just ignorant and bigoted.

This again is where the opinionated personality, which Jeremy exaggerates for his publicity, tries to write an article on modern identity in Britain. But as always it’s just another over-the-top opinion from a man who, it alarms me to say, the great British public would even consider voting as ‘the next Prime minister of England’.

Apparently at least the 49,446 people who signed a petition would

Joe Aybak

Drive over this review on our message boards here