It is hard to define the gravity of a “fracas”. That is the word the BBC used as it announced that the last three episodes of Top Gear, its phenomenally successful programme about cars and blokes, will not appear and that its main presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, will be suspended. If it does turn out that a hungry Clarkson hit a producer for not having dinner ready, he really has no defence. The public petition in his name has gathered 300,000 names but that may not be enough.
It would, all the same, be a shame if that were the case. It is odd that three middle-aged men talking about cars should make for a compelling and funny show but it does. The secret to Top Gear’s globalsuccess is that they are not really talking about cars at all. That is, so to speak, just the vehicle. The real subject is friendship, masculinity and middle-age.
It is a refreshingly unfashionable show and the presenters are unapologetically in love with the cars that are not its real subject. The programme in which Mr Clarkson and James May welcomed back their co-presenter Richard Hammond after his accident in one of the show’s set-pieces, was a masterpiece of inarticulate male bonding.
Sometimes, though, the attitudes on display on Top Gear have failed the test of public courtesy, let alone public service broadcasting. The regulator Ofcom ruled last July that a Burma Special, in which Clarkson used a racial term, broke broadcasting rules. In October of last year, the Top Gear team were chased out of Argentina after driving round in a car whose number plate (H982 FLK) appeared to refer to the Falklands conflict.
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Clarkson himself was on a final warning. He has in the past been in trouble for describing the Mexicans as “feckless” and was caught on video appearing to utter a racist epithet in a mock nursery rhyme. He may have run out of road at the BBC but this is surely a life with a second act.