Jeremy Clarkson has been sacked

RIP Top Gear

This move is, in equal parts, surprising and not at all surprising.

It's surprising that the bbc would potentially end its most popular worldwide show, but Clarkson should have known that years of controversy, outbursts, and now an assault could only result in being sacked.

RIP top gear, you were always my favorite.

There goes my favorite TV show.

I find him entertaining on Top Gear, but yeah, having his off-camera behavior catch up with him is neither surprising nor undeserved.

He will be back.

Good riddance. No excuse for his behaviour. None.

If the BBCs policy for physical assault of a member of staff by another member of staff is to fire them, then they stick to that policy. It just sucks for the BBC that the guy they had to fire was the head of probably their biggest show and that the two other guys who are on that show with him are his mates who are very loyal to him.

There's nobody they can get in right now that could replace any of the three Top Gear guys and I don't see Hammond or May coming back without Clarkson (they already said as much). And neither Hammond, May or Clarkson are in any sort of financial trouble that they would.

I saw someone saying that Netflix should get on this, citing that if they can afford Spacey they can afford those three. But the thing about Top Gear is it's not just those three. They're the face of it sure, but it's the crew of Top Gear that make that show what it is. The guys who set up the cameras and get the perfect shots add so much to the show.

I enjoy watching Top Gear but after reading the Wikipedia page describing his various antics, it's surprising that it took them this long.

It sucks. I hope Hammond and May resign as the show might as well be dead without him. Hopefully they'll start somethin new.

I watched TG religiously for a long time but drifted off the last few seasons. As much as i like Clarkson there is no excuse for punching a co worker, especially over something as stupid as dinner.

I'm sure he will be back soon. Hopefully he can do some more of his WW2 documentaries as they are always great.

Also i'm hoping this means James may will have time to do another full series of Toy stories. They are always fantastic shows.

May's already indirectly said that he is not coming back without Clarkson, and I imagine it's the same for Hammond.

I'm super bummed out about this. Top Gear has been my favorite show for years. James May is right, this whole incident should have been settled separately but instead it was blown out of proportion and now 350 million people get to suffer for it.

They pretty much made the all three of them or none pact when hammond almost died.

anyway this friggen sucks. TG has been a favorite show of mine since it began. I cant imagine not haveing a new season on the horizon.

Well there goes Top Gear, you will be missed sorely from here. One of the best TV shows out there.

I guess for context to my previous post, here's James May's reaction:

I still like the suggestion of Alan Partridge taking over. I mean the only difference between Alan and Jeremy is that Jeremy was successful while Alan a beautiful failure. I mean they both even have failed stints as terrible talk show hosts! (The worst part of Top Gear, almost every episode was Clarkson getting to resurrect his chat show host dream)

Really, any reasonably charismatic trio can step into the shoes vacated. You just need the loud bully who thinks he's smarter and funnier than he is, the bully's sidekick and really all he needs is to willing to laugh on demand, and a third person who drives slowly. Et voila.

The fact that they won't do that is upsetting because as a format I do enjoy Top Gear. A lot. But I just don't think the shoes are going to be massively hard to fill.

RIP Top Gear =(

Bummer but Clarkson was kinda asking for it for a long time and kept crossing the line to see how far his clout will take him....well he finally found out what the limit was.

THANK YOU!

Also it doesn't seem like the show is over. Jon Stewart wasn't the first host of the Daily Show people.

Weeeeelllllll shit. If May's comments on the three presenters coming as a package means that he and Hammond won't return this looks like the end of the golden age of Top Gear.

Why does every headline say "sacked"?? has the term fired or terminated or let go been removed from existence?

getting sacked for punching the producer of your show into the hospital is well deserved. fuck violence.

Top Gear has been my favorite television show for quite some time now. I'm really bummed that things had to end this way, and I'd hoped that they would at least have had the change to finish the season and say their goodbyes properly.

Nevertheless none of the three presenters strike me as people who would just go on early retirement because of something like this. I'm sure that Clarkson, Hammond and May are receiving interesting job offers as we speak and they may already have thoughts of creating something of their own. A very logical place for them to go would be Netflix. Top Gear is constantly one of the most watched shows on Netflix, the service has the money and will to produce original content, and through them "the show" could instantly reach an international audience.

One punch is a heated moment, ten seconds is a fight; but a 30-second long physical attack is assault. Not only should he be fired; he should be arrested and go to trial.

If his colleague, James May, actually follows through with his threat that they "come as a package" I would sack him too. Oisin Tymon could be the most evil SOB in the universe, but you don't assault someone. Moreover, you don't back up a friend by condemning his assault or by threatening to leave if he is rightfully sacked. You back up a friend by saying, "...he made a huge stupid mistake" and that,"...I regret he made a huge, humiliating stupid mistake." What you don't do is call his light punishment of being fired a tragedy.

If James May and Richard Hammond won't do it with anyone else - fine. But to use the pressure of their leaving to influence the decision of the BBC to punish Jeremy Clarkson is gross. If James May calls this decision a 'tragedy' he is a reprehensible human being; he shouldn't have a job at BBC either if that is his attitude. What Clarkson did was a tragedy, his being sacked was justice. Like I said, Oisin Tymon could be the most evil SOB in the universe, we don't know, but that does not matter when the fight is over cold-cuts or steak.

It's amazing that it took him hitting someone in the face for the BBC to finally let him go, but better late than never, I guess.

Liked him on the show, but that doesn't excuse his behavior. Glad BBC didn't give in and give him the sack. I've seen allot of hateful comments towards the man who got assaulted.......it's this cult following of celebrities, that's the real shocker. I understand that's always been there, but thanks to Twitter and Facebook it's been heavily amped up.

Really sucks, RIP Top Gear... however, I'd seriously doubt if this was the last of those 3. I think this will spawn another show with those 3, if James' comments are true about them being a package deal.

He's a loose cannon but also GREAT at what he does. He really makes Top Gear for me, even if he's not a great person.

And the PC hivemind mentality wins out yet again; what a glorious world we live in

An NCO punches an officer? Get charged, demoted, maybe even a brief stint in prison but at least you get your job back after

Whatever, maybe it's better that Clarkson doesn't stay with the twonks currently running the BBC and [ruining] Top Gear

@giantstalker: That's some good satire you've written there.

They made the right decision - being somewhat offensive is one thing, but assaulting a colleague is something else entirely. If the allegations are true then he left them with no choice. The show had grown stale anyways, so no great loss.

As a publicly funded organisation the BBC absolutely cannot continue to employ somebody like that, but if another private channel wants to pick him up for a very similar show (which I'm sure they will) then that's up to them.

He's a fucking asshole, and pretty much every English person I follow on Twitter is overjoyed about the news. That's not to say I never enjoyed the show, but it became pretty clear as it went on that he was an absolutely seething bigot.

Well, I see the BBC finally decided whether to evacuate their bowels or get off the porcelain fixture.

Top Gear was one of my favorite shows, but Clarkson's been more and more of an asshat these last few years, so it's hardly surprising to me that it finally caught up with him. I actually wonder, given his obvious contempt for the BBC and the fact that he self-reported the incident, if he wasn't looking to get fired so he could take his act elsewhere.

What I actually find most shocking is that the BBC needed two+ weeks to have their little "inquiry." I just cannot fathom how it took this long. They should have had an answer in about 10 minutes by deciding whether they care more about viewership or workplace environment/corporate policy. If it's the former, they keep him since Top Gear is pretty much the most popular thing going. If it's the latter, they fire him and make a statement. All this dithering about is neither here nor there. Had they just made the decision to fire him immediately, this all would have blown over a while ago. Instead, they managed to make into a big media circus. Hardly brilliance in corporate management if you ask me.

Oh well. Now they can come over to the States and make the show here. Hopefully, they can replace the truly god-awful American Top Gear.

Clarkson is entertaining in a dick-ish kind of way as a TV personality, but he seems pretty lacking as an actual person. I like Top Gear, and I always kind of chose to believe he played things up for the camera a bit, but that's not really the case. If anything, he probably toned it down on camera. I don't know if he's genuinely mean-spirited, but he's brash and arrogant enough to where it's fair to draw that conclusion. My personal line of getting offended at things is probably well-past your average person, and even I found several of his antics questionable or worse.

As for May and Hammond, I think it's unfair to ask them to "pick a side", so to speak, nor is it really fair to label them as supportive of all Clarkson's antics if they choose not to do the show without him. It always seemed to me like May and Hammond are generally cordial, decent people who were maybe at their best when juxtaposed against Clarkson generally being his obnoxious self, and both seem bright enough to acknowledge the fact that without Clarkson's larger-than-life personality, the show wouldn't be the same. I imagine that they shook their heads at his behavior on many occasions, but tolerated him as that wacky guy most people keep around to make things more interesting (or professionally, as someone who could take them further than they might get on their own). And in doing so over the years, perhaps they got to know him well enough to see a side of him few ever see. Still, this isn't surprising. Not Clarkson getting in trouble again, and not the BBC finally getting tired enough of it to pull the plug.

It's sad for car guys (I mean, petrolheads) like myself that Top Gear will no longer be a thing. The American version is barely watchable, and any attempt the BBC comes up with to try to keep it going would probably be even worse. As @jesus_phish mentioned, my tears will be more for the Top Gear crew than anyone. The cinematography of that show has consistently been incredible, as have some of the locales and show ideas they've come up with. That will be missed. At least the show had a pretty good run.

@lawgamer: It doesn't make sense for Clarkson to have used this to try and get fired because his contract expires at the end of March anyway. If he wanted to quit, this was his best time to. And if he didn't have this incident he'd be in a fantastic position to argue for a better contract that would keep him happier working for the BBC (or a position to ask for a better position on another network).

Also, if you think two weeks is a long time for this kind of inquiry, you have a very foolish and shortsighted view on what an inquiry is: this actually looks rushed. They have to look at what exactly happened and why. Legitimate arguments could have been made in certain circumstances that the segment they were filming that day was specifically designed to rile him up (which they have done on the show before) which they could use to choose to not fire him. There's also legal information and criminal charges working with the police that they would need to look into. Take with the talks with the other people on the show (Hammond's and May's contracts also expire at the end of March) and it's a wonder they managed to get any of this sorted out before April.

By the way, here are a couple of recommendations for people wanting to fill a Top Gear sized hole in their entertainment calendar.

Chris Harris on Cars (formerly of /DRIVE fame) is produces some of the most beautiful and detailed car reviews of out there. He gets really technical, and sometimes films separate videos focusing on the technical aspects of cars. At the same time he's brilliant at communicating how the car feels and behaves. As a pure car reviewer I'd rate him higher than any of the Top Gear trio.

Regular Car Reviews on the other hand scratches the itch of a humorous car show. As the title suggests, he usually focuses on "regular cars" provided to him to test by the people who own them. His gonzo-style may be an acquired taste, but even through all the shit jokes he usually provides an interesting angle to every car he tests.

I genuinely love your colorful word choice in this comment.

I'm with you, he should probably have been fired years ago from the things he's said but my guess is for every controversial moment where they've lost viewers, they've gained more (or at least louder) fans of the show defending it. At some point the earlier issues have been economical: "does he make us more money to deal with his questionable attitude and comments?" but this was closer to a moral or legal issue of "can we let physical outbursts slide?". I wonder if they were already in talks about not resigning his contract (which would end at the end of March - i.e. the end of the current series) after his past antics - maybe they hadn't fired him earlier specifically to wait until this latest renewal to see if he could keep it together until then (which he clearly didn't).

"Sacked" is actually a pretty common way of saying it in the UK. It's essentially equivalent to "fired" for those of us in the US.

That's a shame, I've always found him to be funny and I don't get offended by the stuff he says. I felt that Top Gear was kind of tired this current season, as dumb as it sounds there was too much car stuff for me. They spend 20 minutes talking about these super expensive cars that I will never drive and could be saying literally anything about them and I would never know. I mostly tune in for the challenge stuff and even that is kind of the same format each time. I look forward to seeing what he does next though and if the other guys follow him, I can't imagine many other channels have the budget to run a show like this so it will be interesting to see what happens. I walked passed Clarkson on the street one time so my opinion is the most important.

I was already falling off the Top Gear bandwagon by the time this great tribute was aired there. Can't believe that was five years ago!

The same show in a different name will probably be picked up by another station (there's like 5 stations in England right?). I think Clarkson is entertaining but from what I've heard he sounded like a real jackass. And a dumbass for getting involved in any type of drama knowing that he was on watch. I would have fired him too.

Eh, the trio will have a show on another channel. Top Gear will be canceled in a year when a BBC nothing like Chris Evans takes the show on. Wax on, wax off.

Clarkson was an ass, but I also feel he played that up because it is what people liked and thus what producers wanted. That is not en excuse for his behavior, just an observation. The BBC will most certainly try and keep its most popular entity alive, but I will never watch it again. May and Hammond have changed their Twitter profiles to former TV presenters, and have been using the "unemployed" hashtag. I don't think they endorse Clarkson's behavior. They just realize, as I do, that the show doesn't work without all of them. Such a shame. Top Gear has consistently been one of my favorite TV productions for a decade.

If 350 million people can't watch a tv show anymore because an employer decided to uphold their employee to the same scrutiny as all other employees of the company, no matter how successful they are, then I know theres just a sliver of justice left in the world.

I loved Top Gear as well and found Clarkson really humorous. That said, you absolutely should not get special treatment in this situation just because you head a super popular TV show - Clarkson is an adult accountable for his actions just like everyone else. You think if an intern punched Clarkson, the BBC would settle this "separately" and on the side? No they would fire the fuck out of that intern. I'm staunchly against people of influence getting special treatment in these situations, even if it does mean that I lose one of my favorite TV shows so be it.

I love the show, but he seems like a real jackass and deserved to be fired. I'm fine if the show ends over this. They've had a long run. If I go into work tomorrow and punch a co-worker, I deserve to be fired. He shouldn't get a pass. He's already received plenty of passes because of how valuable he is.

Unfortunately he'll probably just start a new show that gets picked up by Netflix or something and will learn nothing. He'll continue being his ignorant self with no actual consequence, even after an assault and being responsible for ending a beloved show. Fans will blindly support him no matter how shitty a person he continues to be. They don't see it as "this guy killed this show I like". They only think "He's on this show I like, so he can do no wrong". He would crush it if he launched a kickstarter right now for a web series or something.

I hope BBC convinces May to stay and work on some smaller programmes on his own. I really enjoyed the ones he's done already. As for the other two: good riddance. Clarkson was able to hold the programme hostage for the last couple of years thanks to his cult following consisting solely of contemptuous bigoted beta-male type twats. And Hammond... he's not even a real hamster, is he?

BBC should now give this Chris Harris guy quarter of the show's budget and he'll do a much more interesting programme. Granted, they won't be able to get as much money by selling it abroad, but that money is gone anyway, so why not at least make something interesting and educational.

Good

@humanity: Those things are not mutually exclusive. You can object to Clarkson's behavior while realizing you have no interest in the show without those personalities. I doubt Hammond and May approve of what Clarkson did, but they also realize the show had been working so well because of their personalities together and not because of cars. My wife doesn't give a crap about cars and loves the show. I care more about their antics than cars. And even when it comes to cars, it is their individual often sarcastic take that matters more than raw data. So yes, 350 million people can object to someone's behavior and refuse to watch a show if that person and his colleagues are gone.