Jeremy Clarkson: AA Gill defends 'hard-working mate' from BBC suspension

'If you remove Clarkson you are left with Hammond and May, rather like the Conservative party,' said the columnist

Sunday 15 March 2015 16:51 GMT

Jeremy Clarkson attends A Night Of Heroes: The Sun Military Awards at National Maritime Museum on December 10, 2014 in London, England. (Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images)

AA Gill has said a Top Gear without Jeremy Clarkson will be an “empty coat” if the BBC decides to sack the presenter after an inquiry following a ‘fracas’ on set earlier this week.

The Sunday Times columnist, who has known Clarkson for 30 years, has criticised the BBC’s “preposterous and ponderous” decision to hold an investigation following the incident.

He added that Clarkson was a hard-working and loyal employee of the BBC, who had opted to stay working for the corporation when he was offered a more lucrative deal at Channel 5.

TV producer reveals what it's like to endure Clarkson's tantrums

Gill added that Clarkson has suffered an “annus horribilis” after the death of his mother and suffering from a number of “not entirely self-inflicted health concerns”.

Writing in the Sunday Times, he said: “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 Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

Show all 26

1/26Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"Short people. When you've finished using a car, put the f**king seat back, so humans can use it afterwards," he posted on Twitter. Offensively.

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"Honestly, the burka doesn’t work. I was in a cab in Piccadilly the other day when a woman in a full burka crossing the road in front of me tripped over the pavement, went head over heels and up it came, red G-string and stockings."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

Driving a Jaguar round a toilet in India: "This is perfect for India because everyone who comes here gets the trots."

Getty

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"The only person who looked good in a 4-seated convertible was Adolf Hitler."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

As a Thai man walked over a bridge he had built during a Top Gear challenge: "That is a proud moment - but there’s a slope on it."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On the Ferrari F430 Speciale: "it was a bit wrong ... that smiling front end ... it looked like a simpleton ... [it] should have been called the 430 Speciale needs."

Getty Images

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On the Renault Clio V6 handling bends: "In typical French fashion it just gives up! A bit like the French did with the Germans."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"I'm thinking. If you had gone to the trouble of making a chemical bomb, why would you detonate it on a coach from Preston?"

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On public sector workers in 2011: “I’d have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.”

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"I don't understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?"

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"The only reason the Arabs and Jews have managed to keep their nasty little war going for 50 years is because it never bloody rains there. If the post-war powers had put Israel in Manchester, there'd have been no bloodshed."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"If all the creatures on earth were the same size, it's said a lobster would have the smallest brain. But then someone invented Wayne Rooney."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On the invention of the segway: "They're made in America, of course, so fat Yanks can go to the fridge without expending any energy."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"Supercars are supposed to run over Arthur Scargill and then run over him again for good measure. They are designed to melt ice caps, kill the poor, poison the water table, destroy the ozone layer, decimate indigenous wildlife, recapture the Falkland Islands and turn the entire third world into a huge uninhabitable desert, all that before they nicked all the oil in the world."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"I’m sorry, but having an Aston Martin DB9 on the drive and not driving it is a bit like having Keira Knightley in your bed and sleeping on the couch. If you’ve got even half a scrotum it’s not going to happen."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On a caravaning holiday: “You aren’t allowed to have a party, you aren’t allowed to have music, you aren’t allowed to play ball games, you aren’t allowed to have a camp fire, you have to park within two feet of a post, you have to keep quiet, you have to be in bed by eleven. This is not a holiday, it’s a concentration camp!”

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"Britain’s nuclear submarines have been deemed unsafe… probably because they don’t have wheel-chair access."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

“If we are being honest HIV is a pathetic virus, it can only live in the air for 6 seconds and it does what ebola does to you in 10 days in 10 years.”

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On the Lotus Elise: “This car is more fun than the entire french air force crashing into a firework factory.”

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On actress Sarah Jessica Parker: “People think ‘oh she must be pretty’. She isn’t – she looks like a boiled horse."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On Liverpool: "People up there earn less, die more quickly, have fewer jobs and live in houses that are worth the square root of sod all."

Getty Images

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On the BMW Z3: "And if you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning and think you are an onion, here’s your car."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On the Ferrari 430 Scuderia: “It’s like God having really unusual sex… it should come with toilet roll.”

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

"If you're thinking of coming to America, this is what it's like: you've got your Comfort Inn, you've got your Best Western, and you've got your Red Lobster where you eat. Everybody's very fat, everybody's very stupid and everybody's very rude - it's not a holiday programme, it's the truth."

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

On the N-word row: "I’ve been told by the BBC that if I make one more offensive remark, anywhere, at any time, I will be sacked."

PA

“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.”

He added: “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 him image and Top Gear to promote themselves around the world.”

Gill’s column comes after news that a BBC investigation into the fracas involving Clarkson will reportedly hear that the Top Gear host allegedly called producer Oisin Tymon a “lazy, Irish c**t” before punching him.

The Mirror reported yesterday that the investigation will be told the star shouted the abuse at Tymon, who was allegedly left with a bloodied lip which resulted in him needing hospital treatment during a “40-minute rant” over the lack of hot food at the end of the day.

Clarkson will strenuously deny using xenophobic language when he faces a disciplinary inquiry, the paper claimed.

A change.org petition to re-instate Clarkson has garnered over 900,000 signatures.

Read more: Jeremy Clarkson apologises to Ed Miliband for stealing his thunder
Clarkson 'fracas' was due to 'argument over steak'
Top Gears fans angry after no Sunday night episode

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies