Yellow card; red card – or three-card trick? Jeremy Clarkson punches a hapless producer and, after much chewing of the cash cow cud, gets ceremonially dumped from Top Gear, his stint on the current series cut artificially short. Except that it isn’t, quite, because the controller of BBC2 says he will be showing Clarkson scenes recorded earlier – and anyway, Clarkson will be back: “It is serious and unfortunate what happened, but there is no ban on Jeremy being on the BBC.”
But if there is indeed no ban, and if indeed new chunks of unseen Clarkson in Gear can and will be shown anyway, what on earth is the point of looking around for someone else to front the show? As his whole team of mates quits, you have to wonder, nay shriek: why?
One more columnist in search of an idea …
And the 2015 Federico Fellini prize, awarded annually to the writer or director most self-referentially mired in the problems of producing something, goes already – nem con – to Tim Key on the Indy mag. “I’m running out of things to write about in this column”, he informs us. “I’ve been knocking it out for two years now and I’m starting to notice that the good ideas, the real zingers, are becoming harder and harder to come by.” He suffers from weeks when, “no matter how you slap your forehead, nothing will come”. He thinks “it might be time for me to move on. Give someone else a go.” Ah! good morning, Signor Pirandello …
