Jeremy Clarkson in “Figure of Speech” whoopsie…
After that, you’d have thought the world had ended – it seemed that every columnist, journalist or blogger worth his salt (you can now add my name to that list) had an opinion on it, and nobody was prepared to say, in public, that they’d found it mildly amusing.
To me, the only thing I could find shocking about the whole debacle was how shocked everybody was that Jeremy Clarkson had said something shocking.
In time-honoured tradition, much of the interview was edited to show just that one line and its subsequent, Clarksonian embellishment, and very little was written about the context it was used in; therefore the self-appointed jurors felt justified in their demands for his sacking.
Last Wednesday’s episode of The One Show has even been removed from the BBC iPlayer service, presumably in an effort to not cause any further offence, but also stopping many from seeing what was actually said.
Everybody thinks that he did actually mean to line strikers up and shoot them and this means that now, what was actually often a widely used figure of speech, can never be used again. Which is a shame. Whatever happened to freedom of speech?
Ever since I was a little boy my mum’s been telling me I’ll get myself shot. When a friend and I attempted, as nine year olds, to hijack a JCB with the keys still in it she told me I’d get shot.
Smashing my Etch-a-Sketch over my brother’s head to see what really made that little grey screen work was apparently going to result in my dad shooting me.
And on the day I had to confess to using a Brillo pad to remove dead flies from the windscreen of her Saab 900, she said: “your step-father is going to shoot you for that.”
Of course, it wasn’t really going to happen, it was just a turn of phrase, and one I’ve used myself many times over the years. “You’ll get me shot.” “You’ll get yourself shot.” It’s something people say in order to express a frustration at somebody they think has been a bit of a numpty.
Naturally, because it was Clarkson that said it, the world is up in arms, but that’s kind of what people love to hate about him. He’s used his digital soap box to express an opinion that the rest of us can only express around the bar… and I haven’t yet had anybody stand in my pub and say he was wrong.
As ever, the pub is a great place to have a debate about such topics and, so far, everybody who I’ve had a conversation with about this over the bar has said it’s a situation blown utterly out of proportion; of course, very few have written to the BBC – or the newspapers – and said that.
Such positive apathy is something we’re quite often familiar with in the pub trade – or any service trade for that matter. Get it right, do something absolutely spot on and few will actually praise you for it.
Customers who’ve enjoyed their meal or their evening out will leave happy and content, but often don’t say anything; if you’re lucky, they’ll leave a generous tip.
Users finding iDraught useful, for example, or those content with their tied contract are prone to staying quiet and getting on with their day. They have little or nothing to complain about, so they don’t. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
But if somebody’s unhappy, they’ll shout much louder than the many that are – which leaves me wondering how many of those 20,000+ people who complained to the BBC would have done so had Jeremy Clarkson said that the people throwing concrete blocks from bridges on to cars should be shot…
