Speeding no big deal - BBC's Jeremy Clarkson


No apologies at all for republishing this article by the Independent's Johann Hari on the day BBC TV screens a new series of Top Gear.

One afternoon in 2001, my 80-year-old grandmother crossed the road to post a letter - and was smacked by a car "breezing along" at 45mph. She was thrown into the air, tossed over the car, and left haemorrhaging on the asphalt. Her legs were smashed. Her hip was wrecked. Her brain was damaged. Because she is incredibly tough, she did not become one of the 1,000 people killed by speeding drivers in Britain every year - but it took her a year to relearn to walk, and she has never been able to live in her own home, in dignity, again.

So when I hear about the return of a TV show presented by a man - Jeremy Clarkson - who says "speeding is no big deal", a trivial act that shouldn't even be punished with points on your licence, I cannot let out the indulgent chuckle that so many people offer at Top Gear's mop-headed incitements to break the law.

Instead, I think of the dozens more people who will suffer like my grandmother because of his babbling in defence of illegal speeding. Speeding is not an abstract problem or a glib gag. It is a crime. It claims victims every day. And advertising works. If you see a 30-second advert for Coke, you become more likely to buy Coke. If you see a half-hour advert for speeding, paid for with your licence fee and mine, then you are more likely to speed.

And yes, that's what Top Gear is. Clarkson and his co-presenters use this public platform to brag about their ability to find "high octane red-line thrills" on the roads you and I have to cross. He talks about his "sympathy" for the thugs who vandalise speed cameras that - according to independent studies - save over 300 children a year. (The AA begged him to stop). He doesn't even offer the factually wrong argument that speed cameras are merely a way to rake in cash for the Government. No - he boasts: "I don't curse speed cameras because of civil liberty issues. I curse them because they slow me down."


Yes, Jeremy. They slow you down to stop you crippling people like my grandmother. If you hit somebody at 40mph, there is an 80 per cent chance they will die. If you hit somebody at 30mph, there is an 80 per cent chance they will live. But you put your "right" to have a semi-sexual experience in an inanimate lump of metal (a pretty sad comment on your menopausal libido) above the rights of ordinary people to not be killed by you and your anencephalic followers.

Occasionally Clarkson claims he only speeds on private tracks, and it's true Top Gear stunts are staged there. But the speed cameras he hates are not placed on private property and Clarkson has admitted to private speeding by boasting, "I tend to drive fast and recklessly in Lincolnshire. I'm a lout in places that have the topography of blotting paper." Is all of Lincolnshire a private track? Perhaps in his mind.

But on Top Gear, driving at skull-smashing speed is always a big joke. On tomorrow night's show, they are screening the accident in which presenter Richard Hammond nearly died with Boy's Own breathlessness - "the most extreme stunt ever!" The grief and agony of accident victims (including Hammond's family) are washed away in the name of an adrenalin-rush. If you think people don't take Top Gear's ravings seriously, check out the message boards on the web, packed with people who take the presenters' injunctions that it's okay to speed, speed, speed literally.

While the bulk of my sympathy lies with the victims of Top Gear's speedophilia, I also feel sorry for these fans, who are being taken for fools. On the show and in his slurry-columns, Clarkson tells his followers that global warming - already killing tens of thousands of people every year - is a myth and they can carry on buying SUVs without compunction. Yet one newspaper last year reported Clarkson saying in an aside: "I would be absolutely mad to say I don't believe in global warming when we are right bang in the middle of the hottest summer for 400 years. Of course there is global warming, and you would be extremely surprised about my views on other such matters...I lead a surprisingly green life." Yet he has such contempt for his viewers that, to their faces, he brags about leaving on his patio heater to wind up Greenpeace.

Last time I criticised Top Gear, the show's camp-followers called me "a killjoy". No - what kills joy is seeing somebody you love broken to pieces because of "no big deal" speeding. Thanks to Top Gear - and the BBC who have recommissioned it - there will be more people enduring that soon. Forgive me if I can't see the joke.

* Follow this link to the Road Peace website. Google's Ad Sense automatically allocates advertisements to On An Overgrown Path, and performance car ads are currently coming up due to the content of this article. All advertising revenues generated this week will be donated to Road Peace. PLEASE click on the advertisements on the right. It doesn't cost you anything, and every click is money for a fantastic charity.

* Now read, and listen to the music, of one of the many great musicians who have died in road accidents - Sweden's best kept secret, Jan Johansson. Civilized comment and debate about this article is welcome. But, sadly, previous experience shows that fans of Jeremy Clarkson have difficulty with the concept of civilized debate. Offensive comments from either side will be deleted.

Footer image of roadside memorial crosses on Highway 69 South, Arab, Alabama taken by Eric Shindelbower and from The Cross with thanks. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

philsharris said…
Sadly, yesterday I passed the roadside flowers where a bunch of youngsters came off the road in our sparsely populated rural area. This was the same spot a few years ago that an 18 year old driving a car full of classmates was also going to0 fast. Then there was a broken pelvis and limbs, this time a death. There were regular others during the growing up of my own children. The only time I issued a diktat, I think.
Sadly, also, the 'grown-ups' who might decry the boy-racers and Clarkson look-alikes, have flocked to SUVs. These not very safe machines transport cherished infants to nursery and school, while parents oppose proposed windfarm in a bit of fairly nondescript industrial agriculture.
"So it goes", as Kurt Vonnegut might have said.
A civilisation disappears up its own tailpipe?
Phil
10:41 am
Pliable said…
This article on the BBC website today says it all:

Top Gear crash wins ratings clash

Top Gear's peak audience exceeded Celebrity Big Brother's.

Top Gear won the battle of the ratings on Sunday, with more watching dramatic footage of Richard Hammond's car crash than the Celebrity Big Brother final.

At its peak, the BBC Two motoring show was seen by 8.6 million - 1.3 million more than the 7.3 million who watched Shilpa Shetty win the Channel 4 show.

Source http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6309411.stm
1:05 pm
sibadd said…
Are the ads offering services to evade speeding penalties in the right margin deliberately cynical? Or has Google put them there automatically - after picking up the word 'speeding'on your blog page?
9:36 pm
Pliable said…
sibadd, sorry - Google generates them automatically.

I would discontinue them but overall they bring in a little bit of useful revenue.
9:44 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

Does it have integrity and relevance?

Image
Shortly after it was released I bought the young Finn  Klaus Mäkelä's new complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies recorded for Decca. Sibelius symphonies are very well represented in my large CD collection , in fact I have more Sibelius symphony cycles than for any other composer. Yet I have returned to Mäkelä's interpretations a surprising number of times. No, they will not replace the accounts of Sanderling , Colin Davis,  Barbirolli , and others. But they are not worse or better: because subjective dualist judgements of better or worse, like or dislike, good and bad, definitive or otherwise, etc etc no longer mean anything to me . There is no concrete reality in a music performance, only what we individually perceive as reality. A performance is an endless flow of constantly changing conditions. The score is not the performance, and the performance is not the score. Between score and performance lie an infinite number of overlapping variables - tempi, dynamics, performanc
Read more

Why new audiences are deaf to classical music

Image
One important reason why classical music is failing to attract a new young audience is being ignored - today's much sought-after digital natives are fast becoming tomorrow's hearing loss natives. As the Clínic de Barcelona explains , until recently, hearing loss had always been related to age: the older you are, the worse your hearing is. This situation, however, has changed in recent years, as increasingly younger people are suffering from hearing loss. There are many reasons for this widespread hearing loss. There are now high levels of ambient noise - for instance the average daytime ambient noise  without PA announcements inside a US airport terminal is 66 decibels which approaches that of a a washing machine. Then there is the noise from the headphones, earbuds, etc used for long periods with digital devices. In addition the overlooked widespread  use of ototoxic drugs , including macrolide drugs and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), contributes to hearin
Read more

I am not from east or west

Image
The ranking of the Muslim Rumi as America's best-selling poet is, like the embrace of vinyl by a hard-core digital culture, one of the paradoxes of recent times. Rumi's inclusive message of joy and love explains his universal but still surprising appeal , and in populist interpretations by Coleman Barks and others this message resounds in verses such as "I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Zoroastrian nor Muslim, I am not from east or west" and "I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars". Rumi's life-affirming poetry has been set to music by notable figures including Philip Glass , John Tavener , Jonathan Harvey , R. Murray Schafer and Karol Szymanowski , while takes on Rumi by rock musicians have included the 1996 album Three Fish by the eponymous band led by Pearl Jam 's Jeff Ament. All of these settings of Sufi poetry use translations of varying accuracy of Rumi's original vers
Read more

Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies

Image
With 376 million followers Buddhism is the fourth largest belief system in the world. Its core teachings of compassion and non-violence are well-known; but the wider cultural impact of those in the creative community exhibiting what the composer Jonathan Harvey described as "Buddhist tendencies" is underappreciated. Sri Lanka's state religion is Theravada - doctrine of the elders - Buddhism , and it may not be a coincidence that in 1960 elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike , the world's first woman prime minister. The island has been a center of Buddhist scholarship and practice since the introduction of Buddhism in the third century, and the country played a leading role in the preservation of the Pāli Canon of Buddhist teachings. I took the accompanying photos on a recent pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka, and to illustrate the influence of Buddhism on classical music I have juxtaposed them with cameos of music with Buddhist tendencies that provided the iPod so
Read more

The paradox of the Dalai Lama

Image
The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the regional capital of Leh, where I had travelled overland from Delhi in July to observe the Kalachakra teachings given by the Dalai Lama. My accompanying photos capture that intensely moving spiritual event; but they also capture a great spiritual tra
Read more

Nada Brahma - Sound is God

Image
It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b
Read more

Music as a wave of probability

Image
Within yourself, music plays without pause, Vibrating strings are not the cause. This music comes from the Word, says Kabir; It pervades subtly for all to hear. This sound divine makes the seeker free, Then in maya's  clasp he shall no more be. That poem is a free rendering by the Himalayan Yogi Swami Rama of verse by the great Indian poet Kabir. The painting above portrays Kabir; it is by the contemporary Indian artist Arpana Caur ; as are all the other graphics. If my overgrown paths are noted for anything it is for their abstruseness , and this long read takes that dubious distinctiveness to a new level, as it links a medieval mystic to an example of misunderstood 20th century Western classical music, and on through quantum physics to propose that there is no such thing as a music masterpiece Little is known about Kabir's life: both the place and date of his birth are unverified, but it is generally thought he was born in AD 1398 in Varanasi. Kabir's poetry
Read more

Songs of Freedom by Mikis Theodorakis

Image
The role of the artist in a society where human rights are denied is a recurring theme On An Overgrown Path . As I write Maria Farandouri sings To Yelasto Pedi from Mikis Theodorakis’ sound track for the 1969 film Z (poster above). This legendary film was a barely fictionalised account of the assassination in 1963 of the Greek socialist politician Gregoris Lambrakis MP, and the film and its soundtrack, became an international symbol of opposition to the Greek military junta . This dictatorship savagely suppressed human rights until its overthrow in 1974, and brought tanks onto the streets of Athens, as is shown below. The junta was established in April 1967 when right wing army colonels led by George Papadopoulos seized power under the pretence of preventing a communist takeover. The dictatorship received the initial support of King Constantine II , although the King went into exile in December 1967 following the failure of a counter-coup. The King had failed to win support from th
Read more