Post by RedMoon11 on Mar 5, 2015 7:22:34 GMT
From the GQ Archive
2006: Jeremy Clarkson
BY DYLAN JONES 22 JULY 11
From the GQ archive: The cantankerous star of Top Gear is finally being lauded as cool. GQ hails the man who has steered the jacket and jeans look back from style oblivion.
It's written in the stars somewhere that everything becomes fashionable eventually. It happened with Prince Charles, happened with Burt Bacharach, it's even happening with the Tory Party right now. Porn has come back, as has Eton, and Kylie, as well as Al Gore, M&S, Bentley, folk music, Dr Who, JK Galbraith, Hoxton, John Travolta, yoga, fondue and Johnny Cash. And because the sands shift so quickly, because the tectonic plates never seem to stop moving, in the past few years we've been blessed (or lumbered, depending on your point of view) with everything from caravans and soft rock to Ian McShane and flares (and drainpipes, rather confusingly). One minute you're livin' la vida loca, the next you're living the dream.
The stereo in the GQ office is a good weather vane regarding this sort of thing, and not a day goes by without someone or other being dragged back from the precipice of unfashionability. You'll come back from lunch one day to find that - bloody hell, are they serious? - everyone suddenly likes ELO. Or Dire Straits. Or Take That. Or Fleetwood Mac. They've all been played on the Great Redeemer.
But who knew this volte-face would happen to Jeremy Clarkson? Who would have thought that Clarkson would find redemption? That's right, the man with the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers bubble perm, a leather jacket that always looked as though it was borrowed from someone else, and a beer gut you could ski on.
But we've always liked Clarkson at GQ, even if he has regularly topped our Worst-Dressed List. His refusal to listen to anyone else's opinion, his disdain for Labour Party nanny culture and the fact that he has made a virtue out of talking common sense, has certainly endeared him to us. And now that everyone who didn't "get" him has caught up with everyone else who did, JC is now cooler than a cool box full of cool things.
The trenchant pyrotechnics of his Sunday Times columns have made him one of the most famous men in Britain. He is a mean contrarian, and like every good columnist has the innate ability to steer you in exactly the opposite direction to where you thought you were heading. And when he isn't doing this he simply makes very funny jokes about how useless the Government is. Again and again and again.
Not only is Clarkson currently one of the bestselling authors in Britain, with two books - The World According To Clarkson, and I Know You Got Soul - still on the bestseller list, but Top Gear, the TV car programme he has intermittently presented since God was a boy, and for which he is being celebrated by GQ, is just about the best thing on the box.
It has the hermetically sealed confidence that you occasionally find in magazines and newspapers, and one gets the feeling that if the presenters suddenly decided to spend the programme discussing, say, the best way to install a ready-made kitchen, or the cheapest way to put together a cup-winning football team using only players called Kevin, they'd probably get away with it. Even though he has the dress sense of a farmer on gardening leave, Clarkson's co-presenter James May is drop-dead funny (nearly as funny as Clarkson), and even the "Hamster" - co-co-presenter Richard Hammond - has his moments. Even if he does have to use a booster seat whenever he road-tests a 4x4.
Clarkson, meanwhile, is simply very funny indeed. Funnier, in fact, than Funny Jack McFunny (and that's funny). His latest project is MPH 06, which this year takes place in both London and Birmingham. A sort of Top Gear on ice (without the ice), this is proper motoring theatre, "a celebration of performance and prestige cars" brought to life by Clarkson himself. It's an automotive version of Cirque du Soleil, with cars and helicopters flying across the arena to the sound of Pink Floyd and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. It is, and I use his name with a new-found confidence, very Clarkson.
GQ: Are you surprised by the continued success of Top Gear?
Jeremy Clarkson: You know you read all the time about the latest broadcasting sensation, Deal Or No Deal or Big Brother or whatever, and Top Gear, in terms of viewing figures, is crapping on all of them and nobody's noticing. I think people who watch Top Gear think they're the only ones watching it, which I quite like, because it can hopefully last for a long time. Once you start doing spin-off shows the magic's gone. I want to do far fewer of them next year, way fewer of them.
Describe a typical Clarkson day.
Well, there isn't one really. If you're writing, it means getting up and writing all day and if you're filming, it's getting up and filming all day. I get up, go to my computer, write, turn it off and go to bed. That is a Clarkson day.
How long does it take to write a column?
Well, if I've got 20 minutes, it's 20 minutes. If I've got all day, it's all day. Column writing is like gas - it fills the available space. I once watched Boris Johnson write a piece in 20 minutes. He turned up at Top Gear to be the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car. Did his lap and I said, "You'll be on in 20 minutes." He replied, "Has anybody got a computer I could use?" and wrote a Telegraph column which I read the next day and thought, "Awesome."
Do you like being loved, do you like the attention?
I like to be loved by my children and I quite like the Guardian hating me. I like it when I read they want me to die painfully. Then I think I've really got under their skin. It's like annoying a teacher. Once they've shown signs of weakness you really can go for them.
You'd suddenly care if people stopped laughing at your jokes, wouldn't you?
I don't think I am particularly funny. In fact, I know I'm not. AA Gill is funny, Steve Coogan's funny. Nobody laughs when I speak in the studio at Top Gear - when I say that the working classes are all ugly and malformed they all just gasp.
You must have realised at some point in your adolescence that you were funny...
What I learnt at school is that if you didn't want to get thrown into the plunge pool every morning, which was the ritual if you were a bit of a tw*t, then you had to behave badly. I was thrown in every morning and it got to the stage where I was getting out of bed every day and throwing myself in. But it quickly became apparent that if you smoked and drank and said things that annoyed the teachers, you stopped getting thrown in. I don't think I've ever been funny, but I've always been prepared to say what some people consider to be the "unsayable".
Do you ever find yourself stuck for a contrary opinion about something?
No, I never think, "I must get my knickers in a twist about AIDS or cricket or the environment or something." You just have to go onto the BBC website and click "Science & Nature". I mean, it's a minefield of rubbish.
What makes a good columnist?
Phrase-making's important. Richard Littlejohn can do it sometimes. AA Gill is spectacularly good when he's on form, as good as anyone in the world, I think. You've got to sit back and think, "How can I make that sentence shorter?"
Being a tough-talking alpha male, what's the most girlie thing you've ever done?
I went into Space.NK recently and asked if they had any headache pills, because I thought it was a chemist, but it wasn't.
What's this year's most overrated car?
By the sound of it I reckon it might be the Ferrari 599. The one that everyone thinks is fantastic is the Porsche Cayenne S. It's a ludicrous car. [Adopts posh voice] "Drives like a sports car." Well, then buy a sports car! Why buy an enormous off-road car and then say it goes like a sports car? It's the kind of wanton consumption I really dislike.
The MPH show seems to be close to your heart.
It's a lot more fun than traipsing to a motor show and spending the afternoon looking at someone's armpit. At motor shows, the car sits there, the security guard tells you that you can't go within 14ft of it and you've just got your face in somebody's arse all afternoon. Where's the fun in that? So sitting still while the cars come and drive past you seems to be more sensible. And this year I'm going to try and get Richard Hammond to throw up on stage again.
Excuse me?
The night before a show he made the mistake of saying to me, "I've never seen you drunk." So I said, "Watch this!" and then it was suddenly six o'clock in the morning. I woke up in Notting Hill about 40 minutes before we had to be on stage and he was on the floor and still in his clothes. I got him to the show but then I saw his shoulders kind of hunch and he walked up to me, holding his microphone down and said, "I've been sick, but don't worry, I swallowed it." This show is a chance to think that even though I can't play an instrument, if I'd been a rock'n'roll star, it would have been like this.
When you were in Iraq would you have taken a bullet for AA Gill?
No, I'd have used his body as a shield. There's no question about it. If that helicopter had been hit when they fired a missile at it and it really was a question of one of us had to be out, I'd have undone his seat belt and shoved him out. "Ah, he's fallen out, that's a shame." Then I'd have got his restaurant column.
*You can read about Jeremy's & AA Gill's Iraq adventure in 2005 here: jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/296285/thread and watch a video here : jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/297573/thread *
Has anything controversial ever been taken out of your column for the Sunday Times?
The only time it ever happens is when they ring up and say [fellow Sunday Times columnist] India Knight's written about the same stuff and she's very busy, would I mind rewriting mine. What the f**king hell is India Knight doing every week that makes her busier than me? I bet she's never had to rewrite hers!
Have your ambitions changed as you've got older?
I've never had any ambitions. Ambition is a very dangerous thing because either you achieve it and your life ends prematurely or you don't in which case your life is a constant source of disappointment. You must never have ambition. The phone rings or it doesn't. Managing lifestyle, that's the only thing you should be careful about. In this job you have a shelf life and if you've built your life up to such an extent lifestyle-wise, that when it stops you can no longer afford to lead that life, then you're in deep sh*t.
Tell me about your social life.
I don't really go to anything. Not the red carpet or pretty-girl-with-clipboard parties. I might do occasionally if I know someone quite well, but the last one I went to was the launch of the Darkness' album [One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back] and that was last November and that was because I like Justin Hawkins. We live in Chipping Norton, remember. I tend to be in London two nights a week and I'd much rather go out for dinner with friends than stand talking to someone from EastEnders for half an hour.
I mean, they had a Formula One party recently but I would rather have eaten my own head than go. You just know that the Hewlett-Packard sponsors from Rotherham will be on table six and it would have been hell.
Were you surprised that the jacket and jeans look was resurrected from style hell and suddenly became fashionable again?
Is it back?
Yeah, big time.
No way!
Yes way. It has been for a while.
So I'm now cutting edge?
Didn't say that. I said you were back.
Christ, I had no idea. I watch what Richard Hammond wears, because he's sort of aware of trends much more than I am, obviously, and I notice he wears a suit jacket with jeans.
He's probably too small to wear anything else.
Quite possibly. Mothercare clothing is not exactly fashionable.
Have you ever had a car-based sexual experience?
What? Sex in a car? Yes, absolutely.
Any details to share?
No, don't be ridiculous. Why would I do that? Everybody's had sex in a car.
What's your current favourite driving music?
The Massive Attack best of album [Collected] which I bought recently. You see, the thing is I have this terrible reputation for liking Focus and Yes and Genesis and I like them very much, but I also like Massive Attack.
What do you think of David Cameron?
I think he's going to be better than Gordon Brown. But mind you, I'd rather have my dog as Prime Minister than Gordon Brown. Never trust a man whose jaw doesn't work.
How excited were you when Tony Blair came to power?
I was bitterly disappointed. Because I knew that behind the grinning Tory smile beat the heart of 1,000 people in high-visibility jackets. I remember saying to Francie [Clarkson's wife], "We will now have a Labour government for our entire working life," and I do believe that. I think Gordon will win the next one.
You don't think Cameron is good enough to win?
I don't think he'll win. And we'll have had a Labour government for the vast majority of our working life. But I dislike the way we aren't allowed to do stuff, the way that they come into every tiny part of our lives and try to interfere and make us pay a bit more. It sounds stupid to say that I don't trust any politician but I don't. I don't believe that any politicians are in it for the right reasons any more. My own experience of that is Question Time. You watch them blabbering and you think, "You don't think that!" There are all these Labour frontbenchers talking about the Iraq war and you know that when they go home at night and turn the light out they don't really believe what they're saying. And you think that if they can't tell the truth about that then what can they tell the truth about?
Question Time is pretty serious gladiatorial television. Were you remotely apprehensive about it?
I crapped myself. I've flown upside down in jet fighters and driven a million miles an hour in drag racing, driven 200mph speed boats, but nothing is as frightening as David Dimbleby saying, "Jeremy Clarkson." Jimmy Carr's approach was to give a very fair-minded, honest, five-year- old's answer to everything, and the audience applauded every time.
One final thing - any message for the GQ fraternity?
Yes, it doesn't matter what you look like. Wear what's next to your bed in the morning. Blue and green do go together.
Originally published in the October 2006 issue of GQ.
Dylan Jones is Editor of GQ and fashion biannual GQ Style. Follow him on Twitter at @dylanjonesgq.
www.gq-magazine.co.uk/men-of-the-year/home/hall-of-fame/jeremy-clarkson-top-gear-2006-interview
2006: Jeremy Clarkson
BY DYLAN JONES 22 JULY 11
From the GQ archive: The cantankerous star of Top Gear is finally being lauded as cool. GQ hails the man who has steered the jacket and jeans look back from style oblivion.
It's written in the stars somewhere that everything becomes fashionable eventually. It happened with Prince Charles, happened with Burt Bacharach, it's even happening with the Tory Party right now. Porn has come back, as has Eton, and Kylie, as well as Al Gore, M&S, Bentley, folk music, Dr Who, JK Galbraith, Hoxton, John Travolta, yoga, fondue and Johnny Cash. And because the sands shift so quickly, because the tectonic plates never seem to stop moving, in the past few years we've been blessed (or lumbered, depending on your point of view) with everything from caravans and soft rock to Ian McShane and flares (and drainpipes, rather confusingly). One minute you're livin' la vida loca, the next you're living the dream.
The stereo in the GQ office is a good weather vane regarding this sort of thing, and not a day goes by without someone or other being dragged back from the precipice of unfashionability. You'll come back from lunch one day to find that - bloody hell, are they serious? - everyone suddenly likes ELO. Or Dire Straits. Or Take That. Or Fleetwood Mac. They've all been played on the Great Redeemer.
But who knew this volte-face would happen to Jeremy Clarkson? Who would have thought that Clarkson would find redemption? That's right, the man with the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers bubble perm, a leather jacket that always looked as though it was borrowed from someone else, and a beer gut you could ski on.
But we've always liked Clarkson at GQ, even if he has regularly topped our Worst-Dressed List. His refusal to listen to anyone else's opinion, his disdain for Labour Party nanny culture and the fact that he has made a virtue out of talking common sense, has certainly endeared him to us. And now that everyone who didn't "get" him has caught up with everyone else who did, JC is now cooler than a cool box full of cool things.
The trenchant pyrotechnics of his Sunday Times columns have made him one of the most famous men in Britain. He is a mean contrarian, and like every good columnist has the innate ability to steer you in exactly the opposite direction to where you thought you were heading. And when he isn't doing this he simply makes very funny jokes about how useless the Government is. Again and again and again.
Not only is Clarkson currently one of the bestselling authors in Britain, with two books - The World According To Clarkson, and I Know You Got Soul - still on the bestseller list, but Top Gear, the TV car programme he has intermittently presented since God was a boy, and for which he is being celebrated by GQ, is just about the best thing on the box.
It has the hermetically sealed confidence that you occasionally find in magazines and newspapers, and one gets the feeling that if the presenters suddenly decided to spend the programme discussing, say, the best way to install a ready-made kitchen, or the cheapest way to put together a cup-winning football team using only players called Kevin, they'd probably get away with it. Even though he has the dress sense of a farmer on gardening leave, Clarkson's co-presenter James May is drop-dead funny (nearly as funny as Clarkson), and even the "Hamster" - co-co-presenter Richard Hammond - has his moments. Even if he does have to use a booster seat whenever he road-tests a 4x4.
Clarkson, meanwhile, is simply very funny indeed. Funnier, in fact, than Funny Jack McFunny (and that's funny). His latest project is MPH 06, which this year takes place in both London and Birmingham. A sort of Top Gear on ice (without the ice), this is proper motoring theatre, "a celebration of performance and prestige cars" brought to life by Clarkson himself. It's an automotive version of Cirque du Soleil, with cars and helicopters flying across the arena to the sound of Pink Floyd and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. It is, and I use his name with a new-found confidence, very Clarkson.
GQ: Are you surprised by the continued success of Top Gear?
Jeremy Clarkson: You know you read all the time about the latest broadcasting sensation, Deal Or No Deal or Big Brother or whatever, and Top Gear, in terms of viewing figures, is crapping on all of them and nobody's noticing. I think people who watch Top Gear think they're the only ones watching it, which I quite like, because it can hopefully last for a long time. Once you start doing spin-off shows the magic's gone. I want to do far fewer of them next year, way fewer of them.
Describe a typical Clarkson day.
Well, there isn't one really. If you're writing, it means getting up and writing all day and if you're filming, it's getting up and filming all day. I get up, go to my computer, write, turn it off and go to bed. That is a Clarkson day.
How long does it take to write a column?
Well, if I've got 20 minutes, it's 20 minutes. If I've got all day, it's all day. Column writing is like gas - it fills the available space. I once watched Boris Johnson write a piece in 20 minutes. He turned up at Top Gear to be the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car. Did his lap and I said, "You'll be on in 20 minutes." He replied, "Has anybody got a computer I could use?" and wrote a Telegraph column which I read the next day and thought, "Awesome."
Do you like being loved, do you like the attention?
I like to be loved by my children and I quite like the Guardian hating me. I like it when I read they want me to die painfully. Then I think I've really got under their skin. It's like annoying a teacher. Once they've shown signs of weakness you really can go for them.
You'd suddenly care if people stopped laughing at your jokes, wouldn't you?
I don't think I am particularly funny. In fact, I know I'm not. AA Gill is funny, Steve Coogan's funny. Nobody laughs when I speak in the studio at Top Gear - when I say that the working classes are all ugly and malformed they all just gasp.
You must have realised at some point in your adolescence that you were funny...
What I learnt at school is that if you didn't want to get thrown into the plunge pool every morning, which was the ritual if you were a bit of a tw*t, then you had to behave badly. I was thrown in every morning and it got to the stage where I was getting out of bed every day and throwing myself in. But it quickly became apparent that if you smoked and drank and said things that annoyed the teachers, you stopped getting thrown in. I don't think I've ever been funny, but I've always been prepared to say what some people consider to be the "unsayable".
Do you ever find yourself stuck for a contrary opinion about something?
No, I never think, "I must get my knickers in a twist about AIDS or cricket or the environment or something." You just have to go onto the BBC website and click "Science & Nature". I mean, it's a minefield of rubbish.
What makes a good columnist?
Phrase-making's important. Richard Littlejohn can do it sometimes. AA Gill is spectacularly good when he's on form, as good as anyone in the world, I think. You've got to sit back and think, "How can I make that sentence shorter?"
Being a tough-talking alpha male, what's the most girlie thing you've ever done?
I went into Space.NK recently and asked if they had any headache pills, because I thought it was a chemist, but it wasn't.
What's this year's most overrated car?
By the sound of it I reckon it might be the Ferrari 599. The one that everyone thinks is fantastic is the Porsche Cayenne S. It's a ludicrous car. [Adopts posh voice] "Drives like a sports car." Well, then buy a sports car! Why buy an enormous off-road car and then say it goes like a sports car? It's the kind of wanton consumption I really dislike.
The MPH show seems to be close to your heart.
It's a lot more fun than traipsing to a motor show and spending the afternoon looking at someone's armpit. At motor shows, the car sits there, the security guard tells you that you can't go within 14ft of it and you've just got your face in somebody's arse all afternoon. Where's the fun in that? So sitting still while the cars come and drive past you seems to be more sensible. And this year I'm going to try and get Richard Hammond to throw up on stage again.
Excuse me?
The night before a show he made the mistake of saying to me, "I've never seen you drunk." So I said, "Watch this!" and then it was suddenly six o'clock in the morning. I woke up in Notting Hill about 40 minutes before we had to be on stage and he was on the floor and still in his clothes. I got him to the show but then I saw his shoulders kind of hunch and he walked up to me, holding his microphone down and said, "I've been sick, but don't worry, I swallowed it." This show is a chance to think that even though I can't play an instrument, if I'd been a rock'n'roll star, it would have been like this.
When you were in Iraq would you have taken a bullet for AA Gill?
No, I'd have used his body as a shield. There's no question about it. If that helicopter had been hit when they fired a missile at it and it really was a question of one of us had to be out, I'd have undone his seat belt and shoved him out. "Ah, he's fallen out, that's a shame." Then I'd have got his restaurant column.
*You can read about Jeremy's & AA Gill's Iraq adventure in 2005 here: jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/296285/thread and watch a video here : jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/297573/thread *
Has anything controversial ever been taken out of your column for the Sunday Times?
The only time it ever happens is when they ring up and say [fellow Sunday Times columnist] India Knight's written about the same stuff and she's very busy, would I mind rewriting mine. What the f**king hell is India Knight doing every week that makes her busier than me? I bet she's never had to rewrite hers!
Have your ambitions changed as you've got older?
I've never had any ambitions. Ambition is a very dangerous thing because either you achieve it and your life ends prematurely or you don't in which case your life is a constant source of disappointment. You must never have ambition. The phone rings or it doesn't. Managing lifestyle, that's the only thing you should be careful about. In this job you have a shelf life and if you've built your life up to such an extent lifestyle-wise, that when it stops you can no longer afford to lead that life, then you're in deep sh*t.
Tell me about your social life.
I don't really go to anything. Not the red carpet or pretty-girl-with-clipboard parties. I might do occasionally if I know someone quite well, but the last one I went to was the launch of the Darkness' album [One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back] and that was last November and that was because I like Justin Hawkins. We live in Chipping Norton, remember. I tend to be in London two nights a week and I'd much rather go out for dinner with friends than stand talking to someone from EastEnders for half an hour.
I mean, they had a Formula One party recently but I would rather have eaten my own head than go. You just know that the Hewlett-Packard sponsors from Rotherham will be on table six and it would have been hell.
Were you surprised that the jacket and jeans look was resurrected from style hell and suddenly became fashionable again?
Is it back?
Yeah, big time.
No way!
Yes way. It has been for a while.
So I'm now cutting edge?
Didn't say that. I said you were back.
Christ, I had no idea. I watch what Richard Hammond wears, because he's sort of aware of trends much more than I am, obviously, and I notice he wears a suit jacket with jeans.
He's probably too small to wear anything else.
Quite possibly. Mothercare clothing is not exactly fashionable.
Have you ever had a car-based sexual experience?
What? Sex in a car? Yes, absolutely.
Any details to share?
No, don't be ridiculous. Why would I do that? Everybody's had sex in a car.
What's your current favourite driving music?
The Massive Attack best of album [Collected] which I bought recently. You see, the thing is I have this terrible reputation for liking Focus and Yes and Genesis and I like them very much, but I also like Massive Attack.
What do you think of David Cameron?
I think he's going to be better than Gordon Brown. But mind you, I'd rather have my dog as Prime Minister than Gordon Brown. Never trust a man whose jaw doesn't work.
How excited were you when Tony Blair came to power?
I was bitterly disappointed. Because I knew that behind the grinning Tory smile beat the heart of 1,000 people in high-visibility jackets. I remember saying to Francie [Clarkson's wife], "We will now have a Labour government for our entire working life," and I do believe that. I think Gordon will win the next one.
You don't think Cameron is good enough to win?
I don't think he'll win. And we'll have had a Labour government for the vast majority of our working life. But I dislike the way we aren't allowed to do stuff, the way that they come into every tiny part of our lives and try to interfere and make us pay a bit more. It sounds stupid to say that I don't trust any politician but I don't. I don't believe that any politicians are in it for the right reasons any more. My own experience of that is Question Time. You watch them blabbering and you think, "You don't think that!" There are all these Labour frontbenchers talking about the Iraq war and you know that when they go home at night and turn the light out they don't really believe what they're saying. And you think that if they can't tell the truth about that then what can they tell the truth about?
Question Time is pretty serious gladiatorial television. Were you remotely apprehensive about it?
I crapped myself. I've flown upside down in jet fighters and driven a million miles an hour in drag racing, driven 200mph speed boats, but nothing is as frightening as David Dimbleby saying, "Jeremy Clarkson." Jimmy Carr's approach was to give a very fair-minded, honest, five-year- old's answer to everything, and the audience applauded every time.
One final thing - any message for the GQ fraternity?
Yes, it doesn't matter what you look like. Wear what's next to your bed in the morning. Blue and green do go together.
Originally published in the October 2006 issue of GQ.
Dylan Jones is Editor of GQ and fashion biannual GQ Style. Follow him on Twitter at @dylanjonesgq.
www.gq-magazine.co.uk/men-of-the-year/home/hall-of-fame/jeremy-clarkson-top-gear-2006-interview
