The second series of BBC mockumentary W1A has hit the televisual nail on the head once again with its opening episode featuring a controversial incident involving Jeremy Clarkson and the word “tosser”.
Writer John Morton came up with the plot a year ago, in which the BBC’s beleaguered head of values, Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) has to deal with Clarkson hitting the headlines over his extensive use of the epithet in the hit BBC2 series Top Gear.
As a result, the show features a BBC “damage limitation meeting” during which the narrator David Tennant says, “traditionally the first item on the agenda” is Clarkson.
W1A’s hapless intern Will has to watch four years’ worth of Top Gear in order to count up the number of times Clarkson has said the word tosser to see if it has breached guidelines.
However, as a reaction to the exit of Clarkson from Top Gear – which Morton told the Guardian took place the day W1A was edited – the former Top Gear host’s face has been pixellated from footage of the motoring show that Will watches and his name bleeped out.
Morton said three changes were made following Clarkson’s departure from the the show in March after the BBC decided not to renew his contract over his much-publicised attack on Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon.
As well as the pixellation and bleeping, a line was added in which Tennant says, “since the making of this documentary, certain events have happened as a result of which for technical reasons means we are unable to mention certain individuals by name”.
Morton explained: “I wrote this episode back in July or August last year. The only thing we did [when editing] was to add one voiceover and bleep Clarkson, but not Jeremy, ridiculously, and clumsily pixellate his face. We hopefully made a couple of little jokes out of it.
“We weren’t asked to make any changes at all [by the BBC]. The Clarkson thing is quite a minor strand. It was written six or seven months ago and all we did was a little tweak to acknowledge things that happened in the real world.”
Morton has become renowned for his prescient writing in W1A. An episode of his Olympics comedy Twenty Twelve featured the Olympic countdown clock breaking, which then happened in real life.
“When you create a world that’s in parallel to the real world you feel you sometimes get a feedback loop which you can’t predict or control,” he explained.
The opening episode of W1A also features a royal visit and the threat of the BBC losing the rights to Wimbledon - both potentially contentious issues for the real-life corporation.
Morton said he hoped that the show, which returns to BBC2 at 9pm on 23 April, would be ring-fenced in the BBC’s charter renewal, which takes place at the end of 2016 and which also runs as a theme throughout the programme.
“If (W1A) could become a little part of that conversation it could be interesting and funny,” he said.
Sadly, despite cameos from BBC presenters Alex Jones and Matt Baker, Morton said it was unlikely that the BBC director general, Tony Hall - who is often mentioned but never seen - would appear.
