Happy news at last for beleaguered television presenter Jeremy Clarkson, still reeling from claims that he conducted an affair with a 43-year-old female colleague during a Top Gear world tour. An online dating service called Ashley Madison – which claims to be "the biggest dating website in the world for married people, who want to have discreet affairs", founded by a fragrant-sounding Canadian who styles himself the King of Infidelity – has offered the Top Gear host a £1m contract to be the "British face of our business". "What he has or hasn't allegedly done isn't important, he has made discreet adultery a major talking point," offered a spokeswoman.
Lost in Showbiz wouldn't pretend to be an expert on conducting illicit liaisons, discreet or otherwise, but it's fairly certain that if adultery gets found out by reporters from a Sunday tabloid, makes the front page complete with photographs and blow-by-blow eyewitness accounts of Clarkson's restaurant-based seduction technique ("he was spotted feeding her lettuce with his fingers"), subsequently gets reported around the world to such an extent that typing "Jeremy Clarkson affair" into Google now yields 457,000 results, it doesn't, strictly speaking, count as "discreet".
Indeed, while not wishing to nitpick the Ashley Madison spokeswoman's argument, it's fairly certain that becoming "a major talking point" is essentially antithetical to the notion of "discreet adultery". LiS awaits with interest to hear what Clarkson would have had to do in order to count as an "indiscreet adulterer" in the eyes of the people from Ashley Madison. Organise an annual Jeremy Clarkson is Having an Affair parade down Oxford Street featuring the massed bands of the Coldstream Guards, a 50-strong deputation from the London School of Samba, a flypast by the Red Arrows, and, at its centre, a float upon which the portly Top Gear presenter actually has it off with someone who isn't his wife while Richard Hammond and James May egg him on through loudhailers by suggesting – with the inimitable brand of non-PC Top Gear humour – that he might be a homosexual?
