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Clarkson was also featured on a ''[[What Not to Wear]]'' Celebrity Special T.V. show where [[Trinny Woodall]] and [[Susannah Constantine]] included him in a list of "the world's worst dressed celebrities", and gave him a make-over on the programme.
Clarkson was also featured on a ''[[What Not to Wear]]'' Celebrity Special T.V. show where [[Trinny Woodall]] and [[Susannah Constantine]] included him in a list of "the world's worst dressed celebrities", and gave him a make-over on the programme.
dfsakl


==Controversy==
==Controversy==

Revision as of 07:02, 4 December 2005

File:200inventions clarkson.jpg
Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson (born April 11, 1960 in Doncaster) is a controversial British motoring journalist and television presenter. He is forthright in his opinions in the press and on television, to the point where some viewers consider him entertaining and others bigoted.

Biography

Clarkson was educated at Repton School. He started his work-life as a travelling salesman for his parents' business selling Paddington Bear toys. He then took a job on the Rotherham Advertiser. In 1984 he formed the Motoring Press Agency with business partner Jonathan Gill, which supplied road tests to local newspapers. During the 1980s he wrote for specialist car magazines such as Performance Car.

Television career

File:Topgear.jpg
Top Gear DVD cover featuring Jeremy Clarkson

The television show he is most associated with is the motoring programme Top Gear, which he presented from 1989 to 1999, before devising a format change in 2002. It is now consistently the most watched show on BBC Two with 250 million viewers around the world, and won an International Emmy in 2005 for best non-scripted entertainment show. He also presented other motoring-related series such as Star Cars and Jeremy Clarkson's Motorworld.

Clarkson produced various (mostly car-related) videos:

Besides Top Gear, Clarkson has hosted other car related TV shows, such as:

Non-motoring shows he has starred in include:

Books

  • Jeremy Clarkson's Motorworld (1996)
  • Clarkson on Cars: Writings and Rantings of the BBC's Top Motoring Correspondent (1996)
  • Clarkson's Hot 100 (1997)
  • Jeremy Clarkson's Planet Dagenham: Drivestyles of the Rich and Famous (1998)
  • Born to Be Riled: The Collected Writings of Jeremy Clarkson (1999)
  • Jeremy Clarkson's Ultimate Ferrari (2001)
  • The World According to Clarkson (2004)
  • Clarkson on Cars (2004)
  • I Know You Got Soul (2004)
  • Motorworld (2004)

Other interests

Clarkson is interested in engineering in general, especially pioneering work, as his programmes on Brunel and the Colossus computer have shown. In April 2004, Clarkson appeared on the British talk show Parkinson and mentioned that he was writing a book about the soul he sees many machines as having. He cited Concorde as his primary example: when people heard it had crashed, quite aside from the sadness they felt for the loss of human life, there was also almost a sadness for the machine. The book, titled I Know You Got Soul, was published in October 2004.

Clarkson, being one of the passengers on the last BA Concorde flight on October 24, 2003, paraphrased Neil Armstrong to describe the retiring of Concorde: "This is one small step for a man, but one huge leap backwards for mankind".

His latest book, The World According to Clarkson was at number one in the charts for eight weeks.

Attacked with a pie

Clarkson was awarded an honorary degree from Brunel University in 2003, partly because of his work popularizing engineering topics and partly because of his advocacy of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the 100 Greatest Britons programme. In 2005, the School of Technology at Oxford Brookes University awarded him with an honorary engineering doctorate on the same grounds. This led to protests from various green organisations.

After receiving his honorary degree on September 12, a protester hit Clarkson in the face with a banana meringue pie. He has defended his record on environmental issues, saying: "I do have a disregard for the environment. I think the world can look after itself and we should enjoy it as best we can." His response to the incident was good-humoured, "Good shot!", followed by "Delicious... kind of banana taste but too much sugar."

The 'Jeremy Clarkson Effect'

Draper's Record, trade magazine to the fashion industry, ran an article where Louise Foster highlighted Clarkson's poor fashion image, and his association with "men in middle youth".

"For a period in the late Nineties denim became unfashionable," said Foster, "501s - Levi's flagship brand - in particular suffered from the so-called 'Jeremy Clarkson effect', the association with men in middle youth." Helen Martin of the Edinburgh Evening News claimed that denim was 'stone dead' due to Clarkson and Tony Blair who both wear unfashionable jeans.

Clarkson was also featured on a What Not to Wear Celebrity Special T.V. show where Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine included him in a list of "the world's worst dressed celebrities", and gave him a make-over on the programme. dfsakl

Controversy

Jeremy Clarkson has often been the focus of controversy. In October 1998 a letter of complaint was made to the BBC by Hyundai cars in response to what they described as "bigoted and racist" comments Clarkson made at the Motor Show in Birmingham. Clarkson had quipped that the people working on the Hyundai stand had eaten a dog and that the designer of the Hyundai XG had probably had a spaniel for his lunch. Clarkson also allegedly referred to those working on the BMW stand as 'Nazis'. [1]

In the Sunday Times on June 2, 2002 he claimed to have spent the day hunting rats using tennis rackets and croquet mallets. He received a warning from the RSPCA.

Clarkson's views on cyclists and promotion of motoring have caused concern among some cycling and road-safety organisations. Transport 2000 have called for Top Gear to be replaced by a more safety and environmentally aware motoring programme. In February 2004 Clarkson rammed a 30-year-old horse chestnut tree with a Toyota Hilux pick-up truck to demonstrate how rugged the vehicle was. This led to the BBC having to compensate the local parish council who, until they saw the Top Gear broadcast thought that the damage to their tree had been caused by local vandals.

Clarkson has had a long-running and very public feud with Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror. In October 2003, on the last Concorde flight, Clarkson threw a glass of water over Morgan while the two were exchanging insults. In March 2004, at the British Press Awards, Clarkson cursed at Morgan and punched him, apparently angry that the paper had published photographs of Clarkson with a woman who was not his wife.

In September 2005 Clarkson wrote an editorial for The Sun criticising Americans, saying, among other things, "most Americans barely have the brains to walk on their back legs." [2]

Personal life

Clarkson is 6' 4"' tall. He lives in the Cotswolds countryside near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. He married his agent Frances Catherine Cain, 'Francie', on 8 May 1993, and they have three children, Emily, Finlo and Katya. Francie's father, Major Robert Henry Cain VC, was awarded his Victoria Cross for gallantry during Operation Market Garden. When Clarkson presented a documentary about the Victoria Cross he highlighted the story of Major Cain. It was only near the end of the programme that Clarkson revealed that he married Cain's daughter and that she didn't know her father had won a VC until after he died.

He also spends some of his free time at his house in the Isle of Man. In 2004, he road-tested a range of BMWs as well as the BMW Z4, Porsche Boxster and Honda S2000 on the Isle of Man for Top Gear and described the place as "a thorn in the side of Tony Blair's nanny state" because of its lack of an upper speed limit. Clarkson's wife is from the Isle of Man. A Top Gear piece filmed on the Isle of Man in October 2005 pitted a Aston Martin Vantage, BMW M6 and Porsche 911 against each other. The Stig raced all the cars against the clock across the mountain section of the TT course.

On a 2004 episode of the BBC television series Who Do You Think You Are?, Clarkson was invited to investigate his family history, including his descent from John Kilner (1792-1857), of Kilner jar fame and (lost) fortune.

Clarkson and his wife perform charity work, especially in his locale. This includes supporting the Chipping Norton Lido and Helen House, a children's hospice.

Clarkson is idolised by thousands – and despised in equal measure.

Food

During a guest appearance on QI, screened on the 11 November 2005, Clarkson spoke of tasting a wide variety of dishes. He claims that seal flipper tastes "exactly like licking a hot Turkish urinal". After this starter, he then had whale (which he claims tastes like steak but with an iron tang) which was covered in grated puffin. He said, "The waiter asked if I wanted some grated puffin on my whale and how do you say no to something like that?"

In his book The World According To Clarkson, he wrote: "I've eaten snakes, dogs, small whole birds in France and crocodiles, but Tommy Turtle is my line in the sand. I don't care if turtles turn out to be the antidote for cancer, I'm not eating even a small part of one and that's that."

Wikiquote has quotations related to Jeremy Clarkson.
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