Oafish, antiquated, Right-wing monster or clever actor?

Jeremy Clarkson, star presenter of the madly popular car-bore programme Top Gear, is the biggest name on television, and he can have anything he wants. What Jeremy wanted after a hard day in North Yorkshire was a hot, juicy steak. Instead, he was offered a cheese platter.

There are few excuses for violence – but depriving a chap of his dinner is one of them. It is possible to argue that Jeremy picked on the wrong target, that he should have sought out and duffed up the hotel manager or chef, but someone deserved to pay.

He apparently swore at and insulted the producer during a 40-minute rant, threatening to get him sacked, one witness said yesterday.

But not for the first time, while earning the nation’s opprobrium, Clarkson, 55, has actually done it a service. How many times a night in what is laughingly called the British hospitality industry are the words “Sorry, the kitchen’s closed” spoken? In the US, France or anywhere else that takes its food seriously, you can get a meal when you want it. In Britain, the ill-lit restaurant threshold will be barred by a scowling crone who points to the fact that it’s gone 9pm and tells you the staff have gone home.

The real shocker in the Clarkson scandal is that the BBC apparently now expects producers to double as catering managers, that the chaps we think of as bringing the excellent new series of Poldark to our screens are also serving up the Cornish pasties.

Poor Oisin Tymon, who doubtless thought he had been hired as a key man in Top Gear’s worldwide success story, discovered too late that he was also there to manage Clarkson’s meat cravings. An inquiry is under way, but it is already clear that we must consider several culprits.

Prominent among them is the BBC’s designer-stubbled director of television, Danny Cohen, the man with the itchiest trigger finger in television, whose big ambition in life is to have Clarkson’s head mounted on his library wall. A leading light in the PC-crazed clique of metro-liberal zealots who infest the Beeb’s high offices, it was Cohen who took the decision to pull Top Gear from the schedules.

The show earned the BBC more than £50 million in overseas sales alone last year, far more than any other programme. Couldn’t Cohen have earmarked a bit of that money for a catering unit to follow the team on location? At any other network, Clarkson would get a personal chef and a team of liveried servants.

Only the BBC could treat its most popular show as a guilt burden and its presenter as an embarrassment. Given the Beeb’s fawning and slobbering over the truly revolting Russell Brand, its attitude to Clarkson seems strangely skewed.

Until you think of how Clarkson behaves. And the degree to which the behaviour has been egged on by his belief that he has the corporation over a barrel. Yesterday he hinted that he may be on his way, in an elegiac – by JC standards – piece comparing himself to a dinosaur, “with no place in a world which has moved on”.

The question of whether he is a genuinely oafish, palaeo-Right-wing monster or a clever act remains. Ian Hislop, the television personality and editor of Private Eye, told last week how Clarkson threw a Biro in his face, drawing blood, during the filming of Have I Got News For You.

“We had to stop recording,” said Hislop. “He refused to believe it was blood. He said it was red ink. Then he apologised to me afterwards.”

Clarkson has called Mexicans “lazy, feckless and flatulent”, made fun of the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland, and suggested that the designer of a Korean car “had probably eaten a spaniel for lunch”.

He provides a reminder of how much we now can’t say, and the extent to which the right to cause offence has been curtailed, the expression of indelicate opinion sanitised, and even criminalised. If all this is the upshot of an act, it is one we should perhaps be grateful for.

The real Clarkson was born in Doncaster, where his parents, Edward and Shirley, ran a business selling tea cosies and, later, Paddington Bears. Jeremy was sent as a boarder to Repton, although – in a foretaste of what lay ahead – he repaid the investment by being expelled, and took a job as a reporter at the Rotherham Advertiser.

Clarkson – who passed his driving test in his grand- father’s Rolls-Royce – then bought his first car, a Mk2 Ford Cortina. Later, he co-founded a motoring agency, providing road tests and snippets of interest to petrolheads, and in 1988 was signed by the BBC for its new car show, Top Gear. Today, Clarkson earns a reported £14 million a year and divides his time between a large estate in Chipping Norton and his London flat.

Only nominally about cars, Top Gear is more a forum for blokedom, in which middleaged, middle-class white men – the last minority in society that can be insulted without risk – get together and pine for the things it is no longer possible to do. Such as driving too fast, saying what you think and exacting vengeance on the man who has failed to organise your dinner. Perhaps, as he tends to, Clarkson just went about the right thing in the wrong way.