Top Gear faces a fresh controversy after the media regulator Ofcom said it was investigating an episode that used the world “pikey”.
Jeremy Clarkson may have been axed from the show but a programme broadcast more than a year ago could still land the BBC2 series in hot water.
The Traveller Movement turned to Ofcom after its initial complaint about the show, broadcast in February last year, was rejected by the BBC Trust in March.
The complaint followed a race on the show between popular 1980s hatchbacks in which Clarkson put up a sign saying “Pikey’s Peak” as he ridiculed his co-presenter Richard Hammond’s choice of a Vauxhall Nova.
A spokesman for the Traveller Movement said: “We welcome Ofcom’s decision to investigate. The BBC Trust ruling was absurd when it ruled that the Top Gear use of the word ‘pikey’ had nothing to do with Gypsies and Travellers and meant cheap and dodgy instead. We believe in freedom of speech, but with that freedom there must be responsibility. We hope that the Ofcom investigation is thorough.”
A spokesperson for Ofcom confirmed: “Ofcom is investigating a complaint from the Travellers’ Movement that it was offensive to include a placard with Pikey’s Peak written on it in this BBC show.”
Both Hammond and the show’s third presenter, James May, have indicated they will not be back on Top Gear when it is reinvented on BBC2 next year – although the BBC2 controller Kim Shillinglaw has not ruled out their return.
Ofcom would not typically investigate a programme that was broadcast 15 months ago, but there is a window of a few weeks in which people whose complaint is rejected by the BBC Trust can take it to the regulator for possible investigation. The regulator is looking at whether the offence caused by the use of the word “pikey” was justified by the context.
The BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee cleared its use of the word “pikey”, saying it was not racially motivated.
Clarkson said on the show that “All Novas are driven by yobbos who turn them over” and that no one bought them because “it was much easier to steal one”.
The BBC Trust committee acknowledged that “most” dictionaries state the origin of the word pikey is related to Travellers and Gypsy communities. But it said there was no “intended racist reference” in how the word was used in Top Gear. It said it had “evolved into common parlance among a number of people to mean ‘chavvy’ or ‘cheap’” and that “viewers would not necessarily associate it with the Gypsy and Traveller communities”.
Ofcom said it had received one complaint about the show, from the Traveller Movement.
The BBC is currently looking at how it will broadcast the remaining films shot for the final three episodes of the last series shelved after Clarkson’s suspension and subsequent axing.
Clarkson’s contract was not renewed after it emerged in March that he had launched an unprovoked physical and verbal attack on Oisin Tymon, which left the producer in need of hospital treatment.
Tony Hall, the BBC director general, said that a line had been crossed and that Clarkson had failed to maintain standards of decency and respect at work.
Top Gear’s executive producer, Andy Wilman, a long-time friend and colleague of Clarkson who reinvented the show with the presenter in 2002, has also since left the BBC, describing Clarkson’s axing as a “tragedy”.
