[caption id="" align="alignleft” width="300"] Jeremy Clarkson, suspended from “Top Gear"[/caption]
The Chronicle’s strict profanity policies, as I explained last year, bar mentioning offensive or obscene words, even in linguistic discussions where the details are crucial. Asterisk-respelling tricks are unapproved under the New York Times style guidelines that we follow. But let me try, despite having my linguistic hands tied behind my back, to tell you a bit about the latest high-profile free-speech crisis in Britain’s media.
Jeremy Clarkson is the lead presenter on the British version of Top Gear on BBC Two TV. It features test drives of fast cars, trips to exotic locations, and chats about cars with celebrity guests. And frequent crude and offensive speech.
Among the many ethnicities and communities Clarkson has managed to offend are Germany (jokes about Nazis), Romania (“gypsy land”), India (he proposed building a toilet into the trunk of a Jaguar because everyone who visits India gets diarrhea), Mexico (he approvingly concurred as a co-presenter babbled on about the typical Mexican being “a lazy, feckless, flatulent oaf with a mustache, leaning against a fence asleep”), Asia (watching a Burmese man walking across a bridge over the Kok River he remarked that the bridge had “a slope on it”), truckers (“What matters to lorry drivers? Murdering prostitutes?”), and homosexuals (the Daihatsu Copen is “a bit gay"; the Jaguar XKR-S, when cornering, “will get its tail out more readily than George Michael”).
For the newspapers, Clarkson is a continuing scandal of the type they love. He skirts the edge of overt racism, and they try to catch him going too far. One paper got hold of some unused out-takes in which Clarkson chose between two cars using the rhyme “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe / Catch a tiger by the toe,” but it wasn’t “tiger” in the second line; he appeared to be mumbling a racially offensive word beginning with “n” (decide for yourself from the footage released by the Daily Mirror; I’ve listened several times, and I don’t think the matter can be decided phonetically).
Clarkson’s mostly male and conservative fans love him. He called the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown “a one-eyed Scottish idiot” (and worse than that); asked about gay rights, he was happy to “demand the right not to be bummed” (in British English that means anally penetrated); he despises the BBC leadership’s obsession with diversity (“television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blond-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian”).
There are frequent calls for him to be axed. Currently it’s because he took a swing at a TV producer, Oisin [pronounced “osheen”] Tymon, who had arranged a cold supper instead of a steak dinner after a chilly day of outdoor filming. But being Clarkson, he didn’t just swing at Tymon, it had to be ethnic: He called him “a lazy Irish” (+ excessively vulgar noun quite unmentionable here).
For that he was suspended. The trouble is, Top Gear is said to be the most widely watched factual TV program in the world, and the BBC pays Clarkson a salary of $1.5 million to anchor it. He makes much more from other sources: in 2014 he pulled down roughly $20 million. He wins awards, he writes for newspapers, he publishes books. He’s big. What’s a BBC director-general to do?
The problem is quite general. We want a free society with unfettered rights to voice controversial or even obnoxious opinions. We want a friendly society where a black Muslim lesbian can feel she will not suffer prejudice or hostility based on her personal characteristics and offensive remarks will not be heard on TV at dinner time. And these desires are not simultaneously satisfiable.
Similar issues arise for college presidents every day. The Muslim Society wants to host a firebrand apologist for ISIL; the LGBT Circle plans to stage a show by some performance artists who mock Islam and have sex on stage; the Christian Union is bringing in a speaker who says gays and lesbians will burn in hell and so will Muslims; a state legislator proposes a huge cut in the university’s budget if an outspoken faculty member is not muzzled.
I’ll tell you honestly, I don’t know if I would fire the presenter of the world’s most popular factual TV show for a few provocative uses of casually racist, sexist, and homophobic humor of a sort widely tolerated in British culture. The moral issues surrounding free speech are fascinating, but I’m very glad not to be a BBC executive or a state college president right now. So don’t ask, I’m not available.
[Update, March 30: Five new relevant facts should now be noted. First, it wasn’t just a few harsh words about being a lazy Irish something-or-other plus a half-hearted swing of a fist; it was a 20-minute towering rage which must have been terrifying, followed up by a punch to the face bad enough to split Oisin Tymon’s lip (he drove himself to the emergency room of the nearest hospital to get it treated). Second, on learning this, the BBC finally made its decision: Clarkson is out, at least for now. Third, while I said above that I did not know what I would do if I were the director-general of the BBC, I now have enough information to say that I too would have sacked Clarkson; his penchant for violence makes him a real danger. Fourth, Clarkson’s fans seem to have learned plenty of his bigotry and tendencies toward violence, because they have been online attacking Oisin Tymon and even threatening him with death or hoping that he will die; there has also been a death threat against the director-general. And fifth, the police force in the area where Clarkson carried out his assault has been investigating the incident, but it seems there will be no criminal prosecution because of a refusal by the victim to press charges.]