It’s funny how as I grew, my mum’s ability to buy me Jeremy Clarkson-related tat did, too.
When I was very young it was all about video tapes (remember those?). I have very vivid childhood memories of watching the VHS of Clarkson’s The Most Outrageous on a Bush CRT TV with an inbuilt video player again and again.
My other memories of Clarkson VHSs are a bit hazier, so I Googled them and wasn’t disappointed. His Unleashed on Cars video promises to deliver ‘everything he CAN’T do on TV’, while Motorsport Mayhem actually says ‘Punch Ups’ on the front cover.
Video tapes were replaced by DVDs, and if anything that only spurred my mum on. By this time the reborn Top Gear was really getting into its pomp, and some of the DVDs I received for birthday and Christmas presents technically had the television show’s logo at the top. But the sell was still Clarkson.
I eventually graduated to books. You know the ones – his Sunday Times columns in a shiny hardback cover brought out suspiciously close to Christmas.
If you went and rummaged in my parents’ loft, you would probably find every book he has ever written up there. And more lately Mum has, of course, ensured that I have kept up to date with the goings-on down on his farm, via his latest Diddly Squat books.
Clarkson’s writing, broadcasting and presenting has always appealed to me, and if anything that has only increased over time. Frankly I often read his words and wish I could be quite that good.
He has his critics, though. Throughout popular culture the man has been ridiculed, for his hair, for his jeans and shoes combinations or for just generally being a bit uncool.
In the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show there was a one-episode character who turns out to be a Nazi, and in one scene he can be seen watching Clarkson’s short-lived BBC Two chat show.
Today, the youth poke fun at him via internet memes that mock middle-aged men by describing them as Top Gear watchers and comparing them to Clarkson.
But I really don’t care. How many other people can say they have become larger than the industry for which they work? And his views on cars in his newspaper column still matter and have resonance.
What I appreciate most of all, though, is the fact that he has turned generations of people into car enthusiasts – and that is something that should be welcomed in a time of sky-high insurance prices, low-emission zones and black boxes.
