Post by RedMoon11 on Jun 14, 2016 5:28:41 GMT
They made up, drank tea and didn’t talk about their emotions
Top Gear’s former script editor explains how he and Clarkson are now more than reconciled
Mike Wade
11 June 2016
The Times
Richard Porter had every reason to be bitter about Jeremy Clarkson
FRANCESCO GUIDICINI
Six months ago, Richard Porter, Top Gear’s former script editor, described how the curtain came down on the BBC’s most unlikely success story.
“Jeremy had let us down,” he wrote in the memoir he brings to this week’s Borders Book Festival. “The reward for the team’s hard work was a smack in the chops.”
In an absurd, wine-soaked falling out, Jeremy Clarkson had punched Oisin Tymon, the producer, during a row over a steak dinner in March 2015. The incident ended an incredible 13-year run, which turned a nerdy British car programme into a global brand with an audience of 350 million. Porter, the archetypal back-room boy, had every reason to be bitter.
Amazingly, now the two are more than reconciled. Porter, reluctant at first, has become a key behind-the-scenes player again in The Grand Tour, the Amazon vehicle which plays to the world on internet TV this autumn. And the transformation owes everything, apparently, to Clarkson.
“He was the one who was the bigger man about this,” says Porter. “Jeremy sent me a text that said: ‘Shall we go and have a cup of tea?’ So we just sorted things out as British people do: met up, drank tea and didn’t talk about our emotions. It was very nice to hang around together again and we just kept in touch.”
Clarkson even generously praised Porter’s book, And On That Bombshell.
“He was very good about the fact I’d pointed all of this stuff out and called him a bit of an arse,” says Porter. “He sort of acknowledged it was a momentary lapse of reason. We made up without being too emotional about it, and then he said, ‘You should come back and do some stuff with us.’ He didn’t have to do that: he could have told me to sod off forever. I was actually quite pleased.”
Porter, 41, has all the self-deprecating humour associated with the old Top Gear. He wrote, says Clarkson, the only jokes that ever worked on the show, and was in the original crew when the show broadcast in 2002.
Not surprising, then, that he was approached by the BBC to work on the show’s new incarnation, and even spoke with its anchor, Chris Evans. But, he says, if felt strange: “The old office, the old track, the old studio, different people — it would have been like going back to my old school.”
For similar reasons, he at first resisted The Grand Tour. But Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May were remorseless: “They kept ringing me and telling me how much fun they were having.”
He succumbed earlier this year.
The Grand Tour’s format will be different from Top Gear but not alarmingly so. The presenters will be ensconced in a tent, and will travel the world. “It will,” says Porter, “have the feel of a circus, or gentleman explorers of the Victorian age. Either way, it will be distinct from what went before.
“Ultimately it is still three middle-aged Englishmen dicking about in cars. That’s never going to change because people seem to like that.”
Which all begs the question: what does he make of the new Top Gear? Critics suggest a spurious blokeishness has been siphoned in by the BBC to mimic the original, to little effect. In the UK, the audience has plunged since Evans started hosting the show, with Matt LeBlanc, late of Friends.
Porter, though, is sympathetic. He says: “I watch thinking: ‘You poor bastards, you have to hit the ground running.’ We were very lucky — we hit the ground, fell over a couple of times, stumbled to our knees and finally got away with it. We slowly built from nowhere and no one saw us coming.”
LeBlanc, he enthuses, is “really good [with] a warm, laid-back charm”, but curiously, the feedback online suggests American viewers are not convinced.
“It turns out ‘British humour’ was one of the selling points to them,” he says, “which we had never really considered.”
As for Evans, to many British viewers, his personal wealth is perhaps too well known for him to be able to emulate Clarkson’s man-in-a-pub demeanour. It’s a point that Porter accepts.
“Funny that,” he says. “Jeremy hasn’t been short of a few quid for a few years. But Jeremy, James and Richard had that everyman appeal.
“It goes back to a mates thing, and people imagining they could sit in the pub with those three. Though I’ve never seen Jeremy drink a pint.
“Maybe with Evans . . . it’s too late now. He’s got the collection of Ferraris, and the deals he did buying and selling radio stations. People know he is a millionaire. Perhaps that does take the edge off the authenticity.”
And Evans’ floppy ginger fringe looks a bit weird, doesn’t it? Porter chuckles.
“I don’t know what is going on with his hair. You can never have elaborate hair working on Top Gear. There is always going to be a requirement to put a crash helmet on and take it off again on camera. They are very unforgiving to almost any hairstyle. Maybe that is part of the problem: crash helmets.”
If good TV isn’t about appearances, it is definitely about atmosphere. It seems you just can’t bottle that band-of-brothers spirit summoned up by Clarkson, May and Hammond, and their team. “No, absolutely,” Porter agrees. “You can tie yourself in knots by thinking what would the audience want. Even if you looked at Jeremy, Richard, James, and thought, ‘We can synthesise that: a loud bombastic one; a little enthusiastic one and a sort of fussy, fuddy duddy, pedantic . . .’ But it’s more than that. You could find three people like that, but it would still be bloody awful.”
● Richard Porter: Inside Top Gear, Borders Book Festival, Melrose. Sunday June 19, 6.30pm
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/they-made-up-drank-tea-and-didnt-talk-about-their-emotions-mvshmnzg5
Top Gear’s former script editor explains how he and Clarkson are now more than reconciled
Mike Wade
11 June 2016
The Times
Richard Porter had every reason to be bitter about Jeremy Clarkson
FRANCESCO GUIDICINI
Six months ago, Richard Porter, Top Gear’s former script editor, described how the curtain came down on the BBC’s most unlikely success story.
“Jeremy had let us down,” he wrote in the memoir he brings to this week’s Borders Book Festival. “The reward for the team’s hard work was a smack in the chops.”
In an absurd, wine-soaked falling out, Jeremy Clarkson had punched Oisin Tymon, the producer, during a row over a steak dinner in March 2015. The incident ended an incredible 13-year run, which turned a nerdy British car programme into a global brand with an audience of 350 million. Porter, the archetypal back-room boy, had every reason to be bitter.
Amazingly, now the two are more than reconciled. Porter, reluctant at first, has become a key behind-the-scenes player again in The Grand Tour, the Amazon vehicle which plays to the world on internet TV this autumn. And the transformation owes everything, apparently, to Clarkson.
“He was the one who was the bigger man about this,” says Porter. “Jeremy sent me a text that said: ‘Shall we go and have a cup of tea?’ So we just sorted things out as British people do: met up, drank tea and didn’t talk about our emotions. It was very nice to hang around together again and we just kept in touch.”
Clarkson even generously praised Porter’s book, And On That Bombshell.
“He was very good about the fact I’d pointed all of this stuff out and called him a bit of an arse,” says Porter. “He sort of acknowledged it was a momentary lapse of reason. We made up without being too emotional about it, and then he said, ‘You should come back and do some stuff with us.’ He didn’t have to do that: he could have told me to sod off forever. I was actually quite pleased.”
Porter, 41, has all the self-deprecating humour associated with the old Top Gear. He wrote, says Clarkson, the only jokes that ever worked on the show, and was in the original crew when the show broadcast in 2002.
Not surprising, then, that he was approached by the BBC to work on the show’s new incarnation, and even spoke with its anchor, Chris Evans. But, he says, if felt strange: “The old office, the old track, the old studio, different people — it would have been like going back to my old school.”
For similar reasons, he at first resisted The Grand Tour. But Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May were remorseless: “They kept ringing me and telling me how much fun they were having.”
He succumbed earlier this year.
The Grand Tour’s format will be different from Top Gear but not alarmingly so. The presenters will be ensconced in a tent, and will travel the world. “It will,” says Porter, “have the feel of a circus, or gentleman explorers of the Victorian age. Either way, it will be distinct from what went before.
“Ultimately it is still three middle-aged Englishmen dicking about in cars. That’s never going to change because people seem to like that.”
Which all begs the question: what does he make of the new Top Gear? Critics suggest a spurious blokeishness has been siphoned in by the BBC to mimic the original, to little effect. In the UK, the audience has plunged since Evans started hosting the show, with Matt LeBlanc, late of Friends.
Porter, though, is sympathetic. He says: “I watch thinking: ‘You poor bastards, you have to hit the ground running.’ We were very lucky — we hit the ground, fell over a couple of times, stumbled to our knees and finally got away with it. We slowly built from nowhere and no one saw us coming.”
LeBlanc, he enthuses, is “really good [with] a warm, laid-back charm”, but curiously, the feedback online suggests American viewers are not convinced.
“It turns out ‘British humour’ was one of the selling points to them,” he says, “which we had never really considered.”
As for Evans, to many British viewers, his personal wealth is perhaps too well known for him to be able to emulate Clarkson’s man-in-a-pub demeanour. It’s a point that Porter accepts.
“Funny that,” he says. “Jeremy hasn’t been short of a few quid for a few years. But Jeremy, James and Richard had that everyman appeal.
“It goes back to a mates thing, and people imagining they could sit in the pub with those three. Though I’ve never seen Jeremy drink a pint.
“Maybe with Evans . . . it’s too late now. He’s got the collection of Ferraris, and the deals he did buying and selling radio stations. People know he is a millionaire. Perhaps that does take the edge off the authenticity.”
And Evans’ floppy ginger fringe looks a bit weird, doesn’t it? Porter chuckles.
“I don’t know what is going on with his hair. You can never have elaborate hair working on Top Gear. There is always going to be a requirement to put a crash helmet on and take it off again on camera. They are very unforgiving to almost any hairstyle. Maybe that is part of the problem: crash helmets.”
If good TV isn’t about appearances, it is definitely about atmosphere. It seems you just can’t bottle that band-of-brothers spirit summoned up by Clarkson, May and Hammond, and their team. “No, absolutely,” Porter agrees. “You can tie yourself in knots by thinking what would the audience want. Even if you looked at Jeremy, Richard, James, and thought, ‘We can synthesise that: a loud bombastic one; a little enthusiastic one and a sort of fussy, fuddy duddy, pedantic . . .’ But it’s more than that. You could find three people like that, but it would still be bloody awful.”
● Richard Porter: Inside Top Gear, Borders Book Festival, Melrose. Sunday June 19, 6.30pm
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/they-made-up-drank-tea-and-didnt-talk-about-their-emotions-mvshmnzg5
