The jet car crash involving Top Gear's Richard Hammond came as absolutely no surprise to me. Frankly, it was only a matter of time until I was able to use an accident in which someone was critically injured as an excuse to air my sanctimonious views. As soon as I heard about the accident, my first thought was to get straight to my word processor, and I suspect I was not alone. After all, Top Gear has been a success story just waiting to be knocked.
In truth I'm shocked that it's taken this long for a terrible tragedy of the kind that I can exploit for my own self-centred means to occur. Top Gear is quite simply a childish and crass programme and its presenters have for some time been recklessly popular, well-liked and earning more than me. Clearly this couldn't go on; I was bound to ring the Daily Mail and ask if they wanted some thoughtless, pious waffle about them, I'm just glad I had the near death of a man with a wife and two small children to give me the opportunity to air those views whilst he was still in Intensive Care.
Of course, Richard Hammond isn't the first utterly foolish dare devil to make me want to compensate for pathetically wasting my life by writing hollow invective in a newspaper. I'm put in mind of other immature show offs such as Donald Campbell, Richard Noble and of course Chuck Yeager. All of them were gripped with that same childish desire to show off to others, strutting about attempting to further the sum total of mankind's knowledge whilst the more sensible amongst us quietly rolled our eyes and realised that we were has-been hacks who had slipped just below the man from Amateur Pig Breeding magazine in the list of people who manufacturers will lend cars to.
These people were threats to society, just as Richard Hammond and his Top Gear chums now threaten to make me file yet another inarticulate and bile sodden rant to a pathetic facsimile of a 'newspaper'. Instead of trying to show their bravado by going for speed records, the Top Gear team would do well to set a better example by striving for more reasonable records such as 'Least Popular Man In Car Journalism', 'Bitterest Hack Who'll Write Anything For Money', or even 'Most Mean Spirited Old Twat Who Should Know When To Shut His Fucking Trap'. Although I'm happy to report that all those records are currently held by me.
