Lucky dad’s on mend from killer pneumonia, says Clarkson’s girl

JEREMY Clarkson’s daughter yesterday announced that her father is “on the mend” after suffering life-threatening pneumonia.

Emily Clarkson added that her family felt “lucky” the former Top Gear presenter had been diagnosed quickly by doctors.

The 57-year-old Grand Tour host fell ill in Mallorca earlier this month and was rushed to hospital.

Emily said: “We didn’t realise it was pneumonia. We were there on a family holiday and I flew home on the Friday morning.

“By Friday afternoon he’d been admitted to hospital, so I went back to go and be on nursing duty.”

She said her father was recovering and confirmed: “He’s on the mend now,” adding: “The hospital was amazing. We’re so lucky they caught it early and he’s going to be alright.”

Clarkson himself said doctors told him he could have died and joked that his boredom in the hospital was “so bad I thought often about killing myself”.

The controversial presenter said he had spent “three nights... spasming in my bed” before a doctor sent him for tests.

He was then told he would have to be admitted “for at least a week”, which he called “impossible”.

“The doctor added: ‘If you don’t do as I say you will die’,” Clarkson wrote in his Emily Clarkson, left, told how she flew back to Mallorca to nurse her father Jeremy, right, back to health after he suffered a serious bout of pneumonia newspaper column. He added: “I’m sure many of you will have found yourself in hospital, not having planned to be there. But for me it was a new experience. And a weird one.

“I was in a room with nothing on the walls except wallpaper, and most of that was coming off.”

He said he got so bored that he “thought often about killing myself”.

Emily, 23, who has just released her first book, first came to prominence with her blog, Pretty Normal Me. Initially it was written anonymously but she explained that, far from being embarrassed about her surname, she had not highlighted her family name because it was “irrelevant”.

Clarkson’s illness comes just weeks after his Grand Tour co-host Richard Hammond was airlifted to hospital when his car crashed in Switzerland while filming the Amazon Prime series.

Clarkson has now left hospital, but reportedly faces months of recuperation.