Top Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson is in trouble again.  The teevee presenter is no stranger to controversy, fronting a show about motor cars and appearing to hold views as dated as his wardrobe, he has in the past offended hand-knitted environmentalists by brutalising shrubs and so on, offended lorry-drivers by implying that their profession is synonymous with murdering prostitutes and offending, well, just about everyone really, by having Christmas lunch with David Cameron and Rebekka Brooks.
There is no doubting his success and his popularity.  ‘Top Gear’, a show that used to be about reviewing hatchbacks but has morphed into event television that sees portly middle aged men taking on car-themed races across countries and feature-length adventures on other continents strewn with spontaneous hilarious incidents based on the lads hapless lack of understanding of their environment, and which is the BBC’s biggest export.  That’s right, it’s not ‘Newsnight’ that gets flogged around the world, it’s ‘Top Gear’.
Clarkson is also a successful author.  Which is not to say that he writes surprisingly touching novels about life in a home for single mums in turn-of-the-Century Macclesfield under the pen name Delores Whitter, but rather his ‘newspaper’ columns are collected into paperbacks, launched onto the market in time for Christmas, and sell in the sort of numbers that make Martin Amis start each writing day looking in the mirror mumbling ‘must…be…funnier’ for five minutes before wandering out to the pool of his house in LA and dictating the next chapter of his new novel about life in London.
If you are a successful cash cow, you are allowed license.  Especially if the controversy gets you publicity and only annoys a minority that would never watch you show, or buy your books, or DVDs, anyway.
However, if you are successful enough for long enough you will end up pissing people off and one day there will come a point where you’ve pissed enough people off to turn an incident into a media event.
Footage was released of Clarkson apparently n-bombing.
The way this was covered in the media was telling.  Normally, the BBC crucify their own presenters when they screw up but for once, the Corporation was balanced.  I suspect this was not so much out of deference for the presenter of a flagship programme, but rather because so many former BBC presenters are currently behind bars, awaiting sentencing or under investigation that unless the next show you are likely to appear in is the prison panto, it’s hardly headline stuff.
Over at Sky news however, it was a different story.  Sky managed to demonstrate just how much they hated and envied the BBC in general and Top Gear in particular by presenting the story using a ‘lap times’ board similar to the one used in Top Gear, but with Clarkson’s gaffes rated instead of lap times from various cars the viewers will never be able to afford.  I’m not sure if television programmes can actually stalk one another, but I would not be at all surprised if the Sky presenter in question has a mock up of the Top Gear studio in her attic and gets her friends round to play at presenting a successful telly show.
Sky so obviously wanted Clarkson humiliated and off the BBC that you could taste it.  That way, when they give him his own show (any format you want Jeremy) in six months, they can do so at half the value of his so-enormous-you-can-see-it-from-space BBC salary.
What was interesting was Clarkson’s column in the Sun.  He actually is a funny writer, even under, or maybe because of, pressure.  He also revealed that the BBC have a list of ‘forbidden’ words that it’s probably best not to blurt out on air.  Apparently the ‘n’ word is fourth on the list, making one wonder what the hell the top three are, and whether or not anyone will ever manage to get all ten into The Afternoon Play on Radio 4.
The secret of Top Gear’s success by the way?  They review a £150k supercar and conclude that it’s shit, meaning the viewer can turn off safe in the knowledge that they made the right choice with their Astra.

A matter of scale

Do you want your name to still be known centuries hence?  In a good way?  That’s not used to frighten children?  Do you want to be an answer to a question asked in school?  A question that is not ‘who do we avoid if he’s hanging round the gates?’  Do you want to leave a lasting legacy of your time on the planet? 

If you do, then the solution is not, as you might think, to squeeze into a two-sizes-too-small sequinned costume made by your nan, polish up your sad story and humiliate yourself on a prime-time talent show, but to get yourself into the shed and start inventing a unit of measurement.

And here’s the really great part, it doesn’t even matter if there is already a unit of measurement for the thing you are trying to measure.  Distance and temperature for instance both have two different units of measurement, so surely there’s no bar to preventing you assigning a new unit of measurement for something that already has one.

For example, the heat of chillies is measured using the Scoville scale, which goes from ‘no significant heat’ (supermarket chilli con carne) to 2,000,000 (police pepper spray, any spicy food consumed on a first date).  So an alternative and possibly a more useful scale would be to go Beaufort and assign behaviours to the heat, all the way from ‘adding pepper to the dish to make it more exciting’, through ‘blowing out of cheeks’, ‘sweating’, ‘comically reaching for your neighbour’s beer and downing it in one’ to ‘shitting fire’.

A word of warning however.  Do not be tempted to go down the ‘more is better’ route and assign a third unit of measurement to something that already has two.  Nobody in the pub is going to be impressed that you ran twenty-eight Jamteks in half an Astard the other day, or helped by an instruction that for best results, cook at fifteen Quolons for eighty Parps.  Doing this will either leave people baffled, or thinking you are a twat rather than a guy so clever he looks like he’s smoking a pipe…even when he’s not.

So, basic rule of thumb*, try and avoid anything that sounds like it’s lifted from a crap science fiction novel.

For best results then, you need to quantify something that has yet to be attributed a scale.  By measuring the reaction of a cross section of the public to stimulus – let’s say, a BBC news broadcast - then monitoring the flush reaction to the ears, blood pressure, heart rate, frequency of composing furious letters to the editor and so on, it must be possible to clinically measure levels of indignation.

I propose that indignation be measured in units of Clarkson.  The maximum amount of indignation any one person is capable of is One Clarkson and the great thing about the Clarkson Scale is that it can not only measure specific points of indignity (Daily Mail reader learning that his tax money is spent subsidising opera – one eighth of a Clarkson) but is an effective measure of background indignation (Daily Mail reader alone with their crazy thoughts, one seventieth of a Clarkson).

Naturally, The Clarkson is an imperial measurement.  The metric equivalent is The Farage.  

There is a demand for this.  Society is increasingly demanding that, increasingly, things are increasingly quantified in an increasingly simple way for presentation in the media and, increasingly, on social networking sites.  How increasingly I have no idea, but somebody is, I hope, toiling in their shed right now to quantify that.

*You can, if you so wish, seek to quantify the rule of thumb or anything else that has so far gone unquantified.  For instance, while I would not be at all surprised if the perfume industry has a measurement of pungency of aroma (parts per million or something), this may work well for traditional scents like citrus or whatever but has yet, as far as I am aware, to be applied to celebrity scents.  What exactly is the amount of Beyonce in each bottle of ‘bouncy’ or whatever her celeb fragrance is called?  Lasting fame awaits the person who can nail that one.