#10 Jeremy Clarkson: Fancy a Ginger Beer?

I’m not always the best judge of character, but if someone solemnly assesses that something is “political correctness gone mad”, I can be pretty sure that someone is a bona fide tosser.

Jeremy Clarkson is clearly one of that number, a sort of public-school, lanky Gary Bushell. Sporting a blazer, and a grain-sack gut spilling from suffocating drainpipe jeans, he made his name coochy-cooing at whopping engines, and starting sentences with: “If this car were a bird...” Thereafter he spent much of his time verbally holding his nose and making a flushing gesture, littlejohning on about speed cameras and tree huggers sending this country to the dogs.

For sure, an easy target for whiney, wishy-washy, baa-baa-black-sheep-banning poindexters. So the BBC must brace itself for charges of overreaction as it upholds complaints regarding Clarkson’s description of the Daihatsu Copen as “ginger beer”.

It turns out, he was only following the lead of a Top Gear audience member, who had spontaneously labelled the aforementioned vehicle as “gay”.

But before we go all Barney-Myerson-on-George-Bush, lamenting perspective sacrificed in order to find a stick to beat someone with, let’s dig a little deeper.

Clarkson has form for using “gay”. This is him in the Sunday Times in February 2006. In an article entitled “This is the kind of gay I adore”, he deems the Mazda MX-5 “gay, in both the new and the old sense of the word. The balance, the poise, the gearchange, the exhaust note; they're all spot on."

The old model was "...just a teensy bit gay...you just knew that given half a chance this little car would be off to the gentlemen's public lavatories with its friends George and Michael. That's why we all liked it so much."

So far, so innocuous. But you get the idea. He likes the word “gay” a bit too much. Now let’s slip it down into fourth, put the foot down, and see how this baby really handles: a quote from a few internet sites attributed to Clarkson in January 2000...

“So, they're lowering the age of consent for homosexuals to four ... and the Army is to become a hotbed of single-sex fumbling...How long will it be before we get ‘Gay Lanes’ on the motorway?"

Aha. Now we’re getting somewhere, aren’t we. Tongue-in-cheek, yep, but it’s telling. Forget the daft non-sequitur punchline. Note the homo/paedo connection; the profound blindness to the real issues of equality and recognition. I love the use of “is to become”. Soldiers? Doing each other? It’ll be prisoners next.

So did Clarkson copy the audience member, or did the audience member copy Clarkson?

Here’s another one: who cares? Clarkson made the mistake off veering away from the increasingly diluted “gay” to rhyming slang for the more punitive “queer”. Sussed.

I like my PC world. I dislike Clarkson’s, where it’s okay to openly assume all Hyundai designers are spaniel eaters, all BMW workers are Nazis, and all Americans are dull-witted.

Stereotyping often offends oppressed victims. Political correctness only offends Clarksons.

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