If ever there was a time for Liverpool to engage a low gear and park an issue it’s the blown-up-out of-all proportion spat with Top Gear’s top man Jeremy Clarkson.
He came, he saw, he ate (possibly) and he conquered, and his motor mouth will go into overdrive in a town or city near you sometime soon.
Mayor Joe Anderson has now jumped on the Clarkson bandwagon, calling the TV presenter an oaf and a buffoon and threatening to buttonhole his boss, Peter Salmon, about it. The BBC top man is currently in Liverpool and hosting an international sales bonanza for BBC Worldwide.
'Buffoon': Joe Anderson
says he will be having
words with Clarkson's bossAnd that’s the point. BBC Worldwide has been coming and seeing for several years now and has once again picked Liverpool for the annual global showcase where it sets out its stall. Programme buyers from every continent are converging on the BT Convention Centre this week to see what Auntie B has on offer.
The story starts – and possibly should have ended there and then - with The Sunday Times and a column written by Jeremy Clarkson as he prepared to visit Newcastle. It reflected on his recent Top Gear Road Show event at the Echo Arena but was mostly about the stark differences between the north and south, metered with some self depracation.
Yes, he pompously took the St Michael out of a couple of things that happened in Liverpool, a waitress who had never heard of kippers, a rubbish Caesar salad and the failure to be served a bottle of “lah-di-dah” Whispering Angel rose. But that’s what he does.
I defy anybody to read Clarkson’s column and not hear his actual voice reciting it. I defy any of those same people with a sense of humour (which we Liverpudlians are supposed to be famed for) to take serious offence.
But most of you probably won't have the opportunity to read what it actually said, just the reports of what it said. The ST is not the big seller it once was, and, now hidden behind a paywall, has but a select audience prepared to take out a subscription to access its online content.
In the second paragraph of Clarkson’s dispatch from the waterfront he writes: “…I went to Liverpool last weekend and it was all very agreeable. There was a lot of post-modern urban-chic architecture and many museums, hotels and waterfront cafes.”
It doesn’t help when the report of the column-behind-the-paywall is selective to over-emphasise what is perceived to be a guerilla attack on the city and everyone in it.
Writers and comedians – even some of our own – have often used jokes about the Pool, and there are occasions when an official response is understandable, though very rarely necessary.
Nobody reading Clarkson’s piece will be ringing the Liverpool Tourism Bureau to cancel their summer hols on the banks of the Mersey, the people at the arena won’t be dreading, with bated breath, the calling off of major conferences.
Nevertheless, some might wonder, as the accounts of it go global, if we are so thin-skinned we can’t take such things on the chin.
But we are better than that.
Look around Liverpool on most days and the place is crawling with UK and foreign visitors, coming here because of what they have heard and read about the born-again city.
This weekend Clarkson and his team were over in Newcastle where, like in Liverpool, an extra road show was organised to meet demand. In the ST piece Clarkson has a playful pop at the Geordies and their coveted Newcastle Brown.
In the blurbs for their UK tour Top Gear’s James May says: "In the past, we've taken Top Gear Live all over the world, but this year we're taking it to Newcastle, Liverpool, Belfast, Sheffield and London. That way we'll remember how lucky we are to live in Britain.”
Ironically in that same blurb Clarkson comments: “Our Top Gear Live UK Arena tour is coming and I literally cannot wait. We’ll have supercars, stunts, explosions and The Stig. Come and see Top Gear, but without the editing. What could possibly go wrong?”
What, indeed, could possibly go wrong?
