Giles Coren says he understands the pressures Jeremy Clarkson was under that led to his “fracas” with a Top Gear producer, revealing he too has had a culinary-related altercation with one of his production team during filming.
The presenter, whose BBC2 show Eat to Live Forever with Giles Coren starts on Wednesday night, said that he had “a Clarkson moment” during the making of the programme.
He was due to do an interview with a 113-year-old man and wanted to stop for a coffee but a junior member of the production team told him there was “no time”. Speaking on Radio 4’s The Media Show, Coren said: “We had a shouting match and the hotel manager asked us to take it outside.”
Coren said the bit of power a presenter has, plus the pressures of carrying a programme, “can turn you into a monster” . He said: “I don’t really like being told ‘no’ in life.”
Speaking about Clarkson and his alleged manhandling of producer Oisin Tymon over the lack of a hot dinner at a hotel in Yorkshire following a day’s filming, Coren said: “They should have had a hot dinner.” He added: “Of course you don’t behave like that.”
“He’s thinking no-one’s thinking about me”, suggested Coren as to why Clarkson might have reacted like this before the hotel’s manager eventually cooked him a steak.
Coren said there is a “huge paradox when the liberal BBC’s biggest star is rightwing … surely it’s a calamity waiting to happen?”
Dawn Airey, a former Channel 5 and Sky executive, now senior vice president of Yahoo’s EMEA operations, said: “All talent has to be managed, even the most difficult.” She said it was a “storm in a teacup” or, as fellow guest and former ITV executive Dianne Nelmes put it, a “storm in a T-bone”.
Coren has a reputation for speaking his mind, famously letting subeditors on the Times know in no uncertain terms how displeased he was with changes to one of his columns in 2008.
