TV celebrity Jeremy Clarkson is, I believe, one Pom who is much liked down south.
I hope so, as I really like him up north as well, mainly because the bang-on chattering classes hate him like you wouldn’t believe.
Clarkson, or Jezza as many call him, is the face of brash political incorrectness in Britain.
If you take how much the average South African cricket fan hates Kevin Pietersen and multiply that by a thousand, you will get to a fraction of the fear and loathing that Jezza Clarkson inspires among Brit luvvies.
Jezza has been in the news for the past couple of weeks for punching his TV producer when he arrived at his hotel after a hard day of shooting for the latest Top Gear series and found that his instruction for a large steak served medium rare for dinner had been ignored.
If Jezza had punched the producer for not serving up tofu and lentils, he may have got more slack from the cappuccino quaffers, but probably not as just being Clarkson is enough of a crime.
They can’t stand the fact that TV’s most valuable asset is a right wing, meat-eating, cigarette-puffing, petrol-head celebrity.
The producer concerned ran off blubbing to the BBC and Clarkson was suspended with the left wing media baying for blood.
In fact the story had barely broken when the perpetually outraged peanut gallery started a petition calling for Jezza to be hung, drawn and quartered, or failing that, sacked.
They got 10 000 signatures.
Unfortunately for them, a counter-petition calling for Jezza to be reinstated got more than a million signatures.
It’s hilarious – made even more so by Jezza’s absolute non-repentance.
When asked for a comment by the hordes of reporters following him (the story was bigger than terror attacks in Tunisia), Jezza retorted that at least he wouldn’t miss the Chelsea game on Saturday.
Then some luminary at the BBC bizarrely compared Jezza to Jimmy Savile, a recently-deceased disc jockey who has been outed as one of the most rampant paedophiles in history.
‘Ka-ching’
If you ever heard the ‘ka-ching’ of money jangling, this was it. Jezza’s lawyers are falling over themselves.
Let’s face it, if you or I punched someone at work we would be fired.
But here we have most Brits – including me – rooting for someone who has done exactly that.
However, Jezza has form and it’s even more entertaining than his TV shows.
Once at a shopping mall he went outside for a smoke and several teenage yobs confronted him.
Jezza did the unthinkable – he grabbed the one kid and turned him upside down, holding him by the ankles. Jezza stands more than 2m, and while he’s not exactly rippling with muscle, the yobs ran off screaming.
On another occasion, he punched the then-editor of the Mirror, a guy called Piers Morgan (who’s Kevin Pietersen’s best mate) over a newspaper story alleging Jezza was having an affair.
Again, the general consensus was Morgan deserved it.
However, the point is not really whether Jezza is punchy or not.
This is not just about hitting someone in the workplace; it’s about how to manage your stars.
Clarkson is not a hugely successful TV presenter because he’s a wallflower. It’s because he’s brash and arrogant.
And if you want him to work for you and make you millions, you manage him properly.
If he’s out shooting all day without food, you make sure he has dinner when he gets back.
Anyway, after two weeks of dithering, the BBC finally did what it has wanted to do for the past decade; they sacked Clarkson.
Just as you heard the ‘ka-ching’ when a BBC exec compared Jezza to Jimmy Savile, you could hear the ‘ka-boom’ as the gun went off with the effete Beeb managers shooting themselves in the collective foot.
Top Gear earns the corporation £150-million a year – more than all its other programmes put together.
Don’t worry too much about Jezza.
Rivals such as Sky have been hounding him for years to jump ship.
Indeed, overnight Sky – or whatever other station snaps him up – will get an instant 4-million extra viewers.
