“As you may have heard, the BBC has taken my gun and my badge,” Clarkson begins his Sunday Times article, going on to explain that the better part of the last 12 years has been all-consumed by the famous motoring program. It seems that a confluence of events played a part in his outburst. While he only refers to the “fracas” once, it’s not to explain himself or go into details about what happened, only to use it as a point of reference.
A short time before it happened, Clarkson’s loss of his mother and loss of his home due to marital turmoil was only compounded by the fact that a possibly cancerous lump was found on his tongue. With this, along with the rumors that the BBC wasn’t planning to renew his contract even without a highly public kerfuffle, it’s not hard to see that Jezza had a lot on his shoulders. It doesn’t excuse his outburst, but it does put a few things into perspective.
Clarkson describes Top Gear as “an all-consuming entity, a many-tentacled global monster that was dysfunctional and awkward and mad but I loved it with a passion. I loved it like my own child. Which in many ways it was.” He then goes on about trying to make sense of what to do with this life now that he’s in forced retirement, and that the usual fare of fishing and gardening doesn’t really have the same satisfaction if your former day job was racing Maseratis at 185 mph or being chased by Apache helicopters.
He says that his ages puts him at a state of limbo: too young to resign to retirement but too old to start anything new. Even so, the quietness of the past couple weeks had been all he needed to decide that fading into the background wasn’t for him“…I have made a decision. I have lost my baby but I shall create another.” This sounds an awful lot like a new car program headed by Jezza is on the way.
In a way, this article leaves us with more questions than we started: What will this “baby” be? Could it in fact not be a motoring show? Will the rest of his crew put away the sheep, drop the recorders, and join him in rearing this new bundle of joy? Again, only time will tell, but whatever Clarkson has on deck, we’re sure it’ll be loud and packed with exciting displays of “Powerrrrrr!”
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