[Closed] Top Gear's Clarkson suspended by BBC

As I've said before, they are benefiting from familiarity and pre-installed viewer base on BBC. As you can see by this thread a lot of people who don't even enjoy it watch it because it is Top Gear. On another network under another name, the cracks will be more obvious, the genie will be out of the bottle and they'll die on their arse if they just try and re-hash the same thing.

The BBC on the other hand will still own the name, and can re-invent and relaunch Top Gear. They've done it before several times, they can do it again. Nothing to say a new version of the show won't be much much better, and make just as much if not more money.

Clarksons next move..

Go on holiday I reckon, on holiday with his GF.

Then write up a format for a new programme to present to the highest bidder.

Thats what I reckon.

"Clarkson's next move" will probably be in the direction of the West Yorkshire Police Force on a charge of assault and GBH, by the looks of it.

I'm looking forward to the new format, hopefully it'll have more females presenting and fewer jeans and jacket combos.

I don't wish JC any ill but in the words of James May he's a knob and his time is up as it is for everyone someday.

The BBC should just syndicate the Top Gear format to the highest bidder in the UK, like they do for the rest of the world.

Jezza and the rest can continue to make the show exactly as it is now, but with ads.

The public are happy.

The BBC get their money.

Jobs a goodun. Top Gear without Clarkson won't work as he doesn't just present the show, he writes it as well. So the BBC can try to relaunch but in the end the brand will die, let the brand live on and they still get the money for it and the only issue the 10 hours of tele a year they need to fill with something else. Should be easy to make a ladish factual show that isn't TG. C4 have managed it with Guy Martin stuff.

Any one suggested Guy Martin to take over Top Gear yet?? 🙂

The BBC should just syndicate the Top Gear format to the highest bidder in the UK, like they do for the rest of the world.

Pah, beaten to the Guy Martin suggestion by seconds!!

Kill it off?

There's enough TG on Dave for the next million years, the programme is identical every time, so the fact that they're repeats shouldn't worry anyone. Can't be beyond the wit of clever BBC people to come up with a programme to keep the middle aged man demographic happy for an hour every week can it?

Some people are losing their sense of proportion/good at taking the wee;

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Can't be beyond the wit of clever BBC people to come up with a programme to keep the middle aged man demographic happy for an hour every week can it?

WHAT?

WTveryF?????

Ok, Partridge may be the exception.

Genius Top Tip from Twitter;

[i]EMPLOYERS. Finding out where your staff fall on the Clarkson sacking is a good way of discovering which ones you can hit. [/i]

bit of a bugger for clarkson if he is convicted of ABH, no more US road trips.

West Yorkshire Police Force

South Yorkshire Police

Luckily Clarkson was born in Yorkshire so he won't have to ask directions on here to know which Police Force is responsible for North Yorkshire 😉

Aye. 'appen.

BBC had no choice really. Commercial reality is that Clarkson will get hired somewhere else / start his own production company and get paid much much more money. Top gear will struggle on but make far less money for the BBC.

[quote=molgrips ]Hell it might even be much better - I'd certainly watch it, it's that twit that put me off!

+1 - there's probably not many of us, but I can't be alone in not being a current TG viewer but will certainly watch any future shows.

All those saying it won't be the same without Clarkson seem to be making the mistake of thinking it has to be the same as it was, or even that it will be worse if it's not the same as it was. I'm sure it won't become like old TG (aka 5th Gear), but you don't have to have an offensive Jezza-alike to make the show good.

The BBC are actually suggesting Ant and Dec were mooted for the job 🙄

+1 to aracer and mol.

There's a place on TV for a bunch of people mucking around with cars. If I want to see test drives of the kind of motors I'll be driving, I can look at YouTube. In a way, this could be a good thing to happen. Even die-hard fans (from reading the Sunday evening threads) were beginning to realise it was getting or had got too shit to go on in its present format, even for unreconstructed males. This was as much to do with the presenters becoming caricatures of themselves as the show becoming too formulaic. New faces will refresh it. There doesn't need to be [i]massive[/i] format changes. From what I've seen of competitive formats, no one does the kind of camerawork and production of some of the test drives of awesome cars on the Isle of Man or in the Alps or Dolomites like the TG team can. And no one has the freedom from advertisers that the BBC has to say, figuratively, "this is shit". There's plenty of audience out there to mine, both new and past viewers who just got tired of the same predictable shtick every episode.

Ah well, you can take the man out of Doncaster but...

From what I've seen of competitive formats, no one does the kind of camerawork and production of some of the test drives of awesome cars on the Isle of Man or in the Alps or Dolomites like the TG team can

Assuming Willman also decides to leave (and why wouldn't he? He's the 4th member of the team) then do they really have anything at all left? If what separates TG from the others is writing and production values then it's going to be hard to recreate than when theve lost the writer and the producer.

The writing's poor and the production values are BBC, not TG. The problem will be better now it can move on.

Aracer

Two things suggest you are in the minority

Look at viewing stats and demand for TG versus Fifth Gear
Ditto TG pre and post Clarkson

It's a long time since it pretended to be a car show, for all the misogyny it had a big female following, and rightly to wrongly JC's charicature was central to the show. That may be uncomfortable but then so are the sales figures for national newspapers!!!

The whole nonsense that surrounds the story shows that JC is at the whole heart of this. It would hardly make the news otherwise.

IMHO only time will tell what was the most important part the format or the individuals.

I still think they will both [ Clarkson and his hanger one and the BBC / TG TEAM] be worse without each other

Not sure why everyone thinks he can just leave the BBC and not be harmed by this. Many who leave the BBC for bigger and better things dont thrive Adrian Chiles springs to mind. I also thing Clarkson alone as his chat show failure demonstrated is not the draw his fans think he is without the correct vehicle [ forgive me the pun]

I am more likely to watch it without them than with as well but i am highly unlikely to watch a petrol head type programme and I am about as far from their target audience as you can get.

Problem with taking it to a commercial station is who wants to advertise a car in the ad breaks when the program might very well pan the car or the brand. e.g. Peugeot. So, they then find they have to temper their reviews and so become watered down that way.

DaveRambo - Member
This whole Clarkson thing is interesting in how it polarizes people.

Good. The bureaucrats should be shaken up a bit more. 😈

Who appoint these bureaucrats on tax payers money anyway?

nickc - Member

Someone on the forum complaint about the term so I just used ZM in order not to offend people

To be completely accurate about these things( and who here doesn't like accuracy, hmmmm? )

The complaint was about the fact that you use the term in every single one of your posts (and appear to continue to do so) thus rendering it dull, repetitive, unfunny, and equally applicable to you..

I cannot remember who asked me not use those words so out of sympathy I changed it ... a bit.

But the fact is that those people are exactly how I described them to be and if you look closely, deep down, they are really as described no matter how you try to rationalise them they are what they are. You might not find them funny but truth is not funny at all sometimes. I use that description because it sums them up nicely IMO.

Klunk - Member
bit of a bugger for clarkson if he is convicted of ABH, no more US road trips.

If he is convicted of ABH then this whole drama is now becoming so stooopid i.e. especially the law and the police trying to stick their nose into uncalled for event, that someone should firebomb those who start this sort of investigation. I don't pay my tax to investigate one bloke throwing handbag at another bloke. If they really are getting nosey about giving the person an ABH. Then someone should start something like Assault on Precinct 13. Makes not sense at all with these ZMs 👿

Does Clarkson even give a monkeys? He's not exactly short of a bob or two so could hang it up and swan about Chippy and be forgotten about in a few weeks when the next celeb scandal breaks?

TG has gone downhill hugely (that Peugeot piece was prossibly the worst thing I have watched in a long time) but like many I still ended up watching it. The format was stale and they had all become charecteurs of themselves - as preseneters they were better doing their own thing. If the BBC want to kepp it going, it needs the kiss of life big time.

I'm sure a number of the competitors will happily snap them up - in the short term at least, they'll get a fair few viewers even if it is just out of curiosity.

The peugeot bit I thought was interesting, as it contained the best and worst of top gear.

The best - talking about something knowledgeably and entertainingly, illustrating a point and telling me things about peugeot I didn't know. (the shorter bit at the beginning, they then spoiled all that with...

The worst - driving about and labouring one point for ten minutes until the dead horse was utterly flogged.

jodie kidd and vicki butler-henderson would be my choice of new presenters.

What did they say about Peugot?

Its all a bit like when Chris Evans left Radio 1, ego gets monstrous and out of control, gets sacked in a blaze of publicity. Goes away then returns to the Beeb and the rehabilitation is complete.

Clarkson had his moments but how a man of his age can act so stupidly is beyond me.

Oh no Clarkson's been sacked, what will happen on Sunday nights and how will I get to watch the same inane drivel that was on last week and the week before and the week before and

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If he is convicted of ABH then this whole drama is now becoming so stooopid i.e. especially the law and the police trying to stick their nose into uncalled for event, that someone should firebomb those who start this sort of investigation. I don't pay my tax to investigate one bloke throwing handbag at another bloke.

He didn't throw a handbag. He hit him in the face and split his lip, requiring a visit to A&E.

If someone did that to me in front of witnesses at work, I'd expect a prosecution. Following instant dismissal.

The rocket powered mini on a ski jump was the high point...it's been on a slow decline since then.

how will I get to watch the same inane drivel that was on last week and the week before and the week before and

Call the Midwife is still running, isn't it? There's never any shortage of inane drivel on the BBC weekend schedules.

The rocket powered mini on a ski jump was the high point...it's been on a slow decline since then.

Nah - the Robin Reliant Space Shuttle launch wins by a mile. And Clarkson missed out on that one.

I can't think of a motoring journalist/presenter who has a personality. All of those mentioned are vanilla blah and will make for a very dull programme. The fact that they were complete idiots was the appeal. For people to come in and play it straight would be.....just a show about cars and would only appeal to car nerds. I watched one episode of fifth gear ever. Tedious.

I'm not saying that the beeb shouldn't have sacked JC, I'd expect be fired if I lamped someone at work. I'm just saying that it is likely that it will be the end of top gear, unless they look around and take some risks on the team. Playing safe will be shit.

C5's Classic Car show seems like it might evolve in an interesting way.

wrecker +1

Call the Midwife is still running, isn't it?

[quote=teamhurtmore ]Look at viewing stats and demand for TG versus Fifth Gear
Ditto TG pre and post Clarkson

Who said anything about TG going 5th gear or back to how it was before Clarkson? If you read my post properly you'll see that is far from what I was suggesting - I made a point of it. To be honest it's a bit of a strawman being thrown around by the pro-jezzas to suggest that's the only possible way to go.

I don't see why it's not possible to make a slightly different light hearted car based entertainment programme with a different set of presenters.

If he is convicted of ABH then this whole drama is now becoming so stooopid i.e. especially the law and the police trying to stick their nose into uncalled for event, that [b]someone should firebomb those who start this sort of investigation[/b]. I don't pay my tax to investigate one bloke throwing handbag at another bloke.

He hit him in the face and split his lip, requiring a visit to A&E.

First bit I agree with totally. And thats inexcusable.

The second bit however, it certainly [i]involved[/i] a trip to A&E, wether it actually [i]required[/i] one is debatable.