How could the BBC have done anything else? If any one of us had attacked a junior colleague during a verbal lashing and then gone on to call our bosses “fucking bastards” after a phoned-in apology wasn’t considered ample, we would be sacked.
Yet Tony Hall was right not to take this decision lightly. His decision not to renew the contract of one of the BBC’s best-known presenters was his first big public test since he took over as director general. Not only did he have to set the damage from workplace bullying against the potential loss of £50m a year in Top Gear revenue. Or as Hall put it: “There cannot be one rule for one and one rule for another dictated by either rank, or public relations and commercial considerations.”
But he also had to weigh up the cost of criticism from those who believe the BBC is everything Clarkson is not – politically correct, leftwing, sanctimonious and humourless. Clarkson, with his laddish humour and dodgy jeans, appealed to a demographic who feel left out by calls for diversity – angry white men who somehow believe this fabulously rich, white, privately educated man made it against the odds at the BBC. It could almost be funny – though not in a Clarkson way – that the BBC, that bastion of white middle class men, is somehow considered antipathetic to a well-connected millionaire who makes jokes at others’ expense.
Yet with the BBC’s charter – the very document that commits the corporation to providing information and entertainment for the ‘broad church” in Tony Hall’s words – up for renewal by the end of next year, Hall’s handling of Clarkson was crucial, as he recognised in his “more in sorrow than in anger” speech. Clarkson’s fans were not just represented by the 1m who signed the petition created by Guido Fawkes but by the prime minister himself. David Cameron’s young daughter Nancy has even threatened to go on hunger strike unless he returns to the show.
Fortunately, Hall’s decision passes the “Nancy test”. It’s relatively easy to tell a child that their favourite TV character has been punished for fighting, especially if the other side didn’t fight back. Isn’t that what we teach them at school? That fighting and violence is bad. Telling them that someone they like is in huge trouble for making a joke – while not exactly impossible in the scheme of parental trickiness – would be a tad harder.
It also explains how Hall can hold his head up in front of anyone who feels a bit queasy at the use of the N-word or in front of burka-wearing women, striking workers, those with disabilities, Mexicans, Indians, Asians, Argentinians, black lesbians and gay men to name just a few of those people allegedly ridiculed by Clarkson.
For would anyone want to be physically attacked and called “lazy” and “Irish” in a tone so loud other hotel guests could hear it inside for failing to persuade a hotel to provide some hot food for a tired and overwrought boss?
It seems that the BBC’s director of television Danny Cohen, now a Daily Mail hate figure, was right when he said no one individual can be bigger than the team. Even Jonathan Ross, the last really high-profile presenter to leave the BBC after a suspension (in his case 12 weeks) only lasted to the end of his contract.
Last May after the N-word controversy, Clarkson admitted: “If I make one more offensive remark, anywhere, at any time, I will be sacked.” Yet he has appeared unrepentant since, seeming surprised that his confession about the “fracas” with a junior employee didn’t get him off the hook and badmouthing the BBC at a charity event. In his latest column for the Sun on Saturday, Clarkson even reminded readers that “the late great James Hunt” once urinated on a female BBC staffer and he “wasn’t fired”.
Nor was Jimmy Savile, of course, and what he did was far far worse. Coming close to comparing Clarkson to an evil paedophile, which an unnamed BBC executive apparently did according to the Mail on Sunday, is awful and wrong. But it is fair to say that times have changed at the BBC. It cannot give its most famous men carte blanche to behave as they think fit. Hall’s remarks in support of Oisin Tymon, the victim of an unprovoked attack who took himself to A&E but still feared he would be the one to be sacked, shows how much the BBC needs to do to position itself as a supporter of the little people.
Urinating on women who annoy you is wrong. So is physical assault. That’s not political correctness, it’s the law. And Tony Hall did well to stick to it.
