Top Gear S.22: Clarkson Fired -> Amazon -> The Grand Tour [Nov 18th]

[LUC1F3R]

If this happened here and NBC carried the show FOX would be airing a spinoff next week…

[theblue]

clarkson already got 10mil opening offer from a rival network.

[JayS]

I just can’t see how it doesn’t come back. Too much money involved when a show is seen in 212 countries by 350 million people. They’re in Guinness for “The worlds most watched factual program”.

A good read:

How Top Gear conquered the world

[Onyx_Z32]

I read somewhere yesterday that affiliate networks which show Top Gear outside of the BBC and in other countries have a legal case against the BBC for lost revenue.

[LUC1F3R]

I just cant believe that they would kill such a great show over this. If I worked in that industry I would expect confrontation to be part of the job.

[JayS]

Yeah, I don’t think people understand the numbers at work here. 350 million people watch Top Gear.

114 million people watched the Superbowl this year, those most ever, making it the highest watched TV event in US history.

[Onyx_Z32]

BBC website taken down by Anonymous:

The BBC website was offline this afternoon days after hackers warned of an attack if bosses don’t reinstate Jeremy Clarkson.

Visitors to the site at 1.40pm today were greeted with an error message that reads “Error 500 - Internal Error” for around half an hour.

Hackers from the shadowy digital protest group Anonymous have waded into the debate over Jeremy Clarkson’s suspension and threatened to attack the BBC unless he is reinstated.

In an open letter published online, a hacktivist threatened to use a digital weapon called a DDoS attack to bring down the BBC website.

The hacker wrote: "Dear BBC, you don’t wanna piss off 300 million people [an estimate of the Anonymous support base].

"You are warned: DDOS cannons will fire if you don’t comply.

“Bring back Clarkson!”

Did Jeremy Clarkson fans hack BBC website as revenge for Top Gear suspension?

Clarkson from the Sunday Times today:

@Jeremy Clarkson

When a fat man gets suspended there’s only one thing to do – get cooking (March 14, 2015)

We read often about active and busy people who die the day after they retire because they simply can’t cope with the concept of relaxation. So as I seem to have a bit of time on my hands at the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to take up some kind of hobby.

I began by watching daytime television, and soon I felt myself starting to slip away. So I turned over to the news and it was all about a not very interesting fat man who had been suspended from his not very important job. But watching the fat man made me hungry and that’s when the penny dropped: I’d take up cooking.

I’ve never really bothered with cooking in the past because it would have meant using a recipe book. And as a man I can’t do that, for the same reason I can’t use instruction manuals or listen when someone is giving me directions; because it means admitting that someone out there knows something I don’t.

And besides, recipe books are full of beautifully shot photographs showing you what your food should look like when it’s finished. No, it won’t, because you haven’t painted everything with varnish and employed a stylist to make sure the sultanas are all in the right place. Recipe books are just cruel.

There’s another problem as well. Anyone who can cook is able to control ingredients using their minds. This means it’s witchcraft. Don’t argue with this because it is. You put butter and flour into an oven and somehow it comes out after a while as a delicious fluffy cake. How? Why didn’t it come out as a yorkshire pudding? Or a profiterole?

And what is the origin of cooking? I think it’s almost certainly sinister because, let’s face it, nobody accidentally stumbled on the recipe for bread. You take the bullet-hard and completely tasteless seed from a sheaf of wheat and grind it into a powder. Right. I see. And how many other seeds did they try before they arrived at that? “Morning darling, I’m trying laburnum today and . . .”

But anyway, they ended up with a powder that is still tasteless and inedible but they kept right on going, adding water until they had a paste. Which is still a long way from yummy. Undaunted, however, our early-days Marco Pierre White then thought, “Hmm. I’m on to something here. I think if I just add the stuff that gathers in my navel if I haven’t washed for a while, this will be delicious.”

The whole idea is as preposterous as the idea when someone one day decided that tobacco wasn’t very suitable as a sandwich filler but that it was lovely when rolled up in a piece of paper and smoked.

Anyway, I decided not to cook bread. Oh no. I decided to get ambitious and cook the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in my whole life: a pho.

A pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup that contains about 128 different ingredients, and unlike bread or smoking, it’s very easy to see how it was invented. Someone who was very poor heated some water and thought, “I wonder if this would taste nicer if I put some weeds in it? And maybe a bit of that cow that has died.”

Today of course the weeds have pretty names such as star anise and coriander and cost more than cocaine. Mostly they are also harder to find than cocaine. But luckily I’m holed up in a part of London where you stand in line behind Alan Rickman, who’s buying half a pound of myrrh, and Jimmy Page, who wants a bag of lemon-infused pistachio nuts.

My greengrocer was full of Damon Albarn, who was buying all the things he needed for an exotic chicken korma, and naturally the place had everything I needed for my even more exotic pho. It was the same story at the butcher, which stocked beef knuckle and bone marrow. And so within minutes my son and I had all we needed to start my hobby.

Except a pan. I do of course have pans, all of which are easily big enough to handle some beans or a bit of Heinz tomato soup. But to make a pho you need a dustbin, really. We had to resort to a wastepaper basket.

We also didn’t have a rolling pin, which we needed, apparently, to “lightly bruise” the ginger. But I did have a hammer, so we used that instead. It didn’t go particularly well because ginger, it turns out, can’t really be bruised. You tap it and it just sits there undamaged. So you use a bit more force and it falls to pieces.

The instruction manual said that during the four-hour cooking process we should also spoon off the scum that formed as the broth boiled. But there wasn’t any that I could see. This might have been down to the fact that I couldn’t see much of anything at all, or talk properly.

The problem is, when you are cooking, you are near a fridge and fridges have wine in them. Well, mine does, because I haven’t been drinking much for the past few weeks. And with time to kill until the broth was ready, I came over a bit Keith Floydish.

This may explain why I didn’t roast the bone marrow or the knuckle before boiling them to bits and it certainly explains what happened later. I hadn’t really been listening properly when the man in the greengrocer asked what sort of chillies I’d like. And I must have selected some that sat on the Scoville scale just above lava.

I only used one or maybe two but it was enough to ruin four hours of work. The only good news was that my spoilt broth was already in the wastebin.

I went to bed that night hungry, drunk and with an ulcerated, gangrenous mouth from a tasting sip that I’d taken to make sure I hadn’t used too many chillies.

I think, therefore, some people are not born to be cooks. They lack the special powers needed to influence the outcome of what is basically sorcery.

So my new hobby is called “going out to restaurants and letting people who know what they’re doing cook my food”.

REPLACED:

[Onyx_Z32]

lol: The White House

Also:

BBC’s Top Gear slot loses 4m viewers after Jeremy Clarkson suspension

The BBC faces a multimillion-pound bill over its decision to suspend Clarkson with foreign broadcasters eligible for compensation and rival TV companies poised to poach the embattled presenter.

BBC loses 4m viewers after Jeremy Clarkson's suspension from Top Gear

[91MR2]

They better bring him back…

[Onyx_Z32]

I’d much rather see him picked up by Netflix actually.

[bpipe95]

UPDATE: Jeremy Clarkson Quits Top Gear, Show Cancelled for Good

saw this yesterday.

[JayS]

@bpipe95

UPDATE: Jeremy Clarkson Quits Top Gear, Show Cancelled for Good - autoevolution

saw this yesterday.

That thing is the worst clickbait I’ve ever seen. They take a couple references to dinosaurs and old monsters in his weekly column and declare that he’s quit.

[bing]

as much as i want top gear on it makes good sense to punish people for idiocy which i’m sure even Jeremy would agree is an apt way to describe what he did.

you can’t just let the guy hit people no matter the ratings. The BBC is being quite British about the whole thing.

[Onyx_Z32]

@bing

as much as i want top gear on it makes good sense to punish people for idiocy which i’m sure even Jeremy would agree is an apt way to describe what he did.

you can’t just let the guy hit people no matter the ratings. The BBC is being quite British about the whole thing.

We don’t know the details of what he did yet or even if punches made contact so it’s hard to sort out what should be done. Maybe he said this out of duress, but if the object of Clarkson’s “sausage rage” thinks it’s all blown out of proportion maybe it is:

@Onyx Z32

Guy who was involved:

That’s about all the primary source info we’ve had so far.

[SRS_BZNS]

@bing

as much as i want top gear on it makes good sense to punish people for idiocy which i’m sure even Jeremy would agree is an apt way to describe what he did.

you can’t just let the guy hit people no matter the ratings. The BBC is being quite British about the whole thing.

And that is why no one likes the British

[Motocrossx23]

Why is my signature all over this thread?

[JayS]

I wonder if anyone has copyrighted “More Power!” yet. I be ITV is looking into it.

[Coldaccord]

When all this was emerging I followed Oisin Tymon on twitter, the account appeared real and I was surprised he only had ~300 followers at the time.

He had posted a few days prior a photo of him with a fat lip, lower right side.

His twitter account is now nowhere to be found, wish I’d taken a screen shot.

[JayS]

Looks like the BBC wanted Hammond and May to come into the studio to do just a little recording so they could air the remaining two episodes and they said not without Clarkson.

Good for them. I guess unlike in challenges when it comes to production disputes you don’t leave a man behind.

Report: May And Hammond Refused To Film Top Gear Without Clarkson

[Harvey]

I agree, good for them, although I feel like Clarkson would have left either of them behind, then made fun of the situation on air. With the contract renewal and some uncertainty to the direction of the show and Clarkson’s future, it is a smart business move for them even if they give up a little bit in the short term.