One learned the news of Jeremy Clarkson’s prostate cancer diagnosis with the sort of resigned amusement that greets any minor reversal in the fortunes of a man who has spent decades reversing expensive German saloons into ditches for our entertainment. Here was the human equivalent of a V8 engine—loud, inefficient, gloriously unnecessary—being told by his own plumbing that it might, after all, have limits. The prostate, that most undignified of organs, had apparently decided to stage its own farmers’ protest. One pictures the offending gland, red-faced and tweed-clad, waving a placard that reads “No to Woke Waterworks.”
For years Clarkson has been the last unapologetic roar in a culture that prefers the polite electric hum of virtue. He has offended vegetarians, cyclists, Germans, the Welsh, the Scots, civil servants, Remainers, climate activists, and anyone who has ever uttered the phrase 'sustainable development goals' without laughing. Now his own body has joined the protestors. It is the ultimate Clarkson moment: even his internal organs have turned out to be reactionary.
The response from the usual quarters has been predictably exquisite. There were the ritual expressions of sympathy from people who have spent the previous decade wishing him dead in interestingly detailed ways on social media. One can almost hear the grinding of teeth behind the Hallmark-card condolences: “Thoughts with Jeremy and his family at this difficult time,” typed by hands that only yesterday were composing threads about how Clarkson’s very existence was a form of violence. Cancer, it seems, is the one thing capable of briefly silencing the baying of the online hounds—though not for long. Already one senses the hedged bets: yes, cancer is bad, but has he considered the carbon footprint of chemotherapy? Perhaps the NHS could treat him with thoughts and prayers generated by wind power.
This is where one must declare an interest, or at least an affection. I have always enjoyed Clarkson in the way one enjoys a particularly belligerent old pub bore who happens to be right about most things. He is not subtle. Subtlety is for people who write think-pieces about the semiotics of the flat white. Clarkson is the man who looks at an Alpine road and sees not an opportunity for quiet reflection on climate change but a chance to discover whether a Lamborghini can achieve flight. His genius—and it is a genius, however unfashionable—lies in understanding that most people secretly want to drive too fast, eat too much, and say the unsayable without first checking with Human Resources.
His farming programmes, those gentle masterpieces of curmudgeonry, revealed the man more truly than any of the motoring shows. Here was Clarkson discovering that agriculture is not a moral failing but an actual job performed by actual people who must contend with weather, bureaucracy, and the fact that half the population thinks food grows in Waitrose. One watched him struggle with sheep and subsidies and felt the warm glow of recognition: at last, a television personality prepared to admit that expertise might occasionally reside outside Islington.
The cancer diagnosis, like everything else in Clarkson’s life, will no doubt be turned to account. One awaits the inevitable Clarkson’s Cancer special with something approaching glee. There will be a track day at some unsuitable location involving chemotherapy patients in high-performance wheelchairs. There will be a monologue about how the NHS waiting list is longer than the M25 on a bank holiday. There will be an expensive bottle of something unsuitable drunk in defiance of medical advice, followed by a segment in which he attempts to race a prostate cancer awareness ribbon against a Bugatti. The man is incapable of solemnity, which is precisely why we need him.
Modern Britain has developed an almost erotic relationship with solemnity. We have solemnity about the climate, solemnity about identity, solemnity about pronouns, solemnity about everything except the things that actually matter. Into this festival of earnestness strode Clarkson, all six-foot-five of him, complaining that the coffee was cold and the car was German. He was never going to win awards from the Broadcasting Standards people. He was too busy winning the affection of people who still remember that entertainment should sometimes be entertaining.
There is a peculiar English pleasure in watching a man refuse to be improved. The therapeutic culture demands that we all become better versions of ourselves—more mindful, more sustainable, more in touch with our feelings. Clarkson’s response has always been to buy another Aston Martin and drive it through a river. Now the river has come to him, in the form of rogue cells with ideas above their station. One suspects he will treat the disease with the same mixture of irritation and dark humour he applies to everything else. “Not now, I’m trying to harvest beetroot,” he will mutter, before writing another column about how the NHS has all the organisational efficiency of a Top Gear production meeting.
The wider point, which the solemn ones will miss, is that Clarkson represents something increasingly rare: the right to be wrong in public. Not wrong in the sense of being mistaken about facts—though he has been that too, gloriously—but wrong in the sense of holding opinions that offend the prevailing consensus. In an age when deviation from the script can end careers, here was a man who treated the script as something to be used for kindling. That he did so while becoming enormously successful only compounded the offence. The chattering classes could forgive poverty; they could not forgive popularity achieved without their permission.
Cancer, of course, doesn’t care about any of this. It is the great equaliser, the ultimate reminder that biology has not read the Guardian. Even the mighty Clarkson, conqueror of caravans and critic of cycle lanes, must now contend with the frailty of meat. One hopes—fervently, if not solemnly—that he beats the bastard thing. Not because he is a saint (he isn’t) or because his views are correct on every point (they aren’t), but because a world without him would be marginally more boring, marginally more frightened of its own shadow.
In the meantime, one raises a glass—something full-blooded and inappropriate—to the man himself. May his prostate prove as stubborn as its owner. May his recovery be swift, his complaints loud, and his subsequent television output even more politically catastrophic than before. The forces of dullness have enough on their side already. They don’t need to claim this scalp too. Godspeed, you magnificent, impossible sod.