Oh dear. Jeremy Claxon, oh dear, oh dear. Deary me.
Poor horrible Jeremy Claxon, failed the anger management course, betrayed by a cold sandwich. Dreadful sensible BBC, making stupid rules designed to protect useless junior employees from massive overreactive bullying by hungry star-turn presenters.
Jeremy Claxon, eh? What is he like! He’s funny, abrasive, witty, fearlessly non-PC. He’s a bigoted, gobby, overbearing racist millionaire. He smells of sick from travelling in foreign taxis. He straightens bent half-shafts with his big hands. Oh dear. Precious victim and bully-boy. Two for the price of one 6’5″ tub of post-teenage guts. But strangely vulnerable. Shy, almost. Curly-haired, talented cherub. A real money-spinning bruiser. Why, without his huge amoral earnings from foreigners the BBC would have to double the licence fee. Treble it!!
And a friend and friendly neighbour of David Cameron! It certainly seems that to be outed by the PM as a ‘friend’ is a career death sentence. Look at poor Andy Coulson. Look at poor Rebekah Brooks. Poor Jeremy Claxon, talented genius and soi-disant blunderhead. Friend of the dangerous Prime Minister. Staring as so often into the abyss, he steps forth miraculously unscathed from the mangled wreckage of his promotional vehicle. He staggers forth from the canyon, dazed and heavily bleeding from words. Bravely tweeting his defiance, he maintains a dignified silence.
It certainly seems that his two jolly pals, one diminutive, one fixated, were pretty fed up after twenty-something series stuck with Claxon and his big naughty bullying nasty fun. But were they really? You can’t tell! What’s real, what’s not real? Top Gear: not so much a popular show about footballers’ cars but an epistemological conundrum! ‘Captain Slow’, eh? James May, ruthlessly bullied for being the OCD one. ‘The Hamster’, Richard Hammond, eh? What a hoot, abandoning him for days in the snow. See his little fists clench with tiny fury!
But did they do that? Really? Staying in big CGI wilderness hotels, 35-man crew. Steak sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and tea. Our Jezza’d have got through lots of steak in Argentina, they’d never heard of vegetables there. Until the Top Gear producer arrived, haa ha!!!
Aside, obviously, from our tax-sheltered billionaire status and personal superyachts, something I have in common with Jeremy Claxon is we both get bored easily, and depressed, especially when we are going through our second and third mid-life crises and can’t find a way out of the trap of a success we don’t really rate. We’re better than that. We’re better than everyone, except ourselves.
We both like to live on the edge – although, obviously, I don’t have the same persuasive relationship with Porsche, McLaren, Ferrari. Or with the bank. I blew my chance with the BBC long ago. But I’ve always chucked my career away too, when I got too bored and mildly insulted by my own success to care any longer. We both like to commit suicide, without the mess and fuss of actually dying. We wouldn’t want to leave before the end.
Push, push, sack me if you dare… ooops.
And, oh dear, Claxon, look, there he goes again, calling Gyppos in crap cars ‘Pikeys’… hoots! Never mind, it wasn’t intended as a racial slur, not like his off-mic use of the vim word (rhyming slang: ‘vim and vigour’, geddit? I’ve just thought of that one, me, myself); detecting ‘slopes’ on bridges in Burma, correctly perceiving the essential torpidity of Mexicans, re-precipitating the Falklands conflict. Yids, spics, wogs, wops, krauts, frogs, boongs…. ya boo! The world is full of little people deserving of piercing Jeremiads plucked from the noble British psyche.
Just slips of the tongue, PR gone mad, whilst standing up for British TV ratings and the right to piss on anyone not good enough to be enormous, flatulent old motoring journalists, fastened trembling with feigned excitement to the arsehole of TV celebrity, despising himself and his ersatz success all the while. Immensely loved by taxi drivers.
Look at the bewildered and vacuous smiles of the Top Gear crowd, deeply drugged and enjoying something, they don’t seem quite sure what, a joke? Standing (no seating, no disabled parking) in the presence of a greatness they cannot fully comprehend, the prettiest plucked from the queue, surrounding the big man and his mouth with a gently throbbing airbag of audience-alikes. See their essential Britishness, their love of screaming metal and hot, smoking rubber, their deep mistrust of foreign taxi drivers, smelling of sick.
Seems it’s the same with poor Jeremy Claxon, oh dear. Nil by mouth. And yet, in some way, the man’s a national treasure. He just connects with ordinary people, like Nigel Farage’s evil twin. Like that business woman off the telly, speaks her mind. Tells it like it is.
How does he do that, eh? Oh dear. Some say… Brilliant! And at 200 mph! You’d like to have a pint or two with Jeremy. You’d want a pint with good ol’ Nige.
Tut tut, tsk tsk. Let’s put this star back in his reasonably priced car, eh? Bring him back, humbled, proud. Penitent.
Jeremy. Oh dear!
– A. Psychologist
Postscriptum
What is it about the name Jeremy? It seems to bring forth bad fortune. This, from Wikipedia, describes the unfortunate career of the original, Jeremiah, the prophet of Judaea:
“And when your people say, ‘Why has the Lord our God done all these things to us?’ you shall say to them, ‘As you have forsaken me and served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land that is not yours.'” God’s personal message to Jeremiah, “Attack you they will, overcome you they can’t,” was fulfilled many times in the Biblical narrative: Jeremiah was attacked by his own brothers, beaten and put into the stocks by a priest and false prophet, imprisoned by the king, threatened with death, thrown into a cistern…. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah
Jeremiah, eh? Oh dear. One can only assume he must have been very, very large and annoying.
The Boglington Post (Incorporating The Pumpkin) 