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TFI Friday: Chris Evans clings on to Top Gear dream in awkward sketch with Jeremy Clarkson

Recently departed Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson did not appear impressed

Rose Troup Buchanan

Saturday 13 June 2015 20:51 BST

Jeremy Clarkson and Chris Evans in the car (Channel 4, via YouTube)

Chris Evans refuses to let go of his ambition to present Top Gear.

Presenting Channel 4’s ill-advised resurrection of TFI Friday on the show’s 20th anniversary, Evans appeared to use the show as a platform to give an audition for Jeremy Clarkson’s old job.

The 49-year-old Radio 2 host told Formula One World Champion Lewis Hamilton: "I did say 'never,' but I downgraded it to 'never say never'," regarding speculation surrounding his application for the seemingly coveted role.

Later in the show - which overran and was widely panned by critics and social media users alike - Evans and Clarkson, 55, are shown in a car together with the radio presenter driving.

"You're not going to get my old job," Clarkson tells Evans.

"Don't want it," the ginger presenter claims. "I ruled myself out!"

To which point Clarkson – who throughout the segment can only be described as looking spectacularly bored – replies: “You haven’t been asked.”

It was probably the most exciting moment for many in the overly long anniversary episode of the once controversial Britpop classic entertainment.

Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines

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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."

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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."

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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."

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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."

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It also cleared up speculation from earlier this week when Evans appeared to suggest he was filming a “Top gear sequence,” which many fans took to mean he was being lined up to present the BBC show.

Former Top Gear presenters Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, were quick to ridicule his remarks, parroting him on social media and leading to Evans issuing a denial and ruling himself out of the job.

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