Clarkson's Sunday Times Columns

You have to remember that this is Clarkson we're talking about -- his prose style almost always involves a fair bit of exaggeration to drive his point across.

I suspect that he (and his team) want a name that moves as far away as possible from the idea that their show is somehow "competing" with the new TGUK (i.e. offering a similar format like what Fifth Gear was doing). Their move for a motoring-oriented social media platform (which the BBC hasn't done) is evidence of that.
 
I usually post the column on Monday, so you are in luck.
This week's piece is best prefaced with "Deutschland, Deutschland ?ber alles..."

For me, the war is over: let Germany run everything (May 1)

As you may have read, I am keen that we remain in the European Union. But not half as keen as I would be if the European Union were made up of just four countries: England, Denmark, Holland and Germany. That coalition of like-minded peoples would, I think, work well. Especially if we put Germany in charge.

Oh sure, we beat them in two world wars and one World Cup, but after spending last week on a filming trip in Bavaria, I was left with one all-consuming question: how? How does anyone beat this lot at anything? I began the trip in a small, guttural-sounding Alpine town, and as I stood outside the hotel, blowing smoke in the general direction of passing American tourists, I noticed that every single shop was small and privately owned and fantastically neat. There was no German Home Stores hosting a closing-down sale, no charity shops and no gaping holes where Woolworths used to be.

And there was no litter. By which I mean none at all. And because there was none, I had no clue what to do with my cigarette end. Simply tossing it away would have been like taking a dump in the middle of the Somerset House skating rink. I was therefore forced by custom and example to extinguish it in a flowerbed and then put the butt in a passing American's rucksack.

The following morning, however, I received a shock. While having another cigarette, I noticed that in the middle of the perfectly cobbled street there was a discarded plastic coffee stirrer. Later I told our local fixer about this, imagining she would find it funny that I'd noticed. But instead she looked shocked. "Where was it?" she asked in the manner of someone who was going to drive back into town to clear it up. "It was in the street outside our hotel," I replied. There was a long pause as she thought about that. "It must have been dropped by one of your film crew," she said.

We may scoff and roll our eyes at that, but what's so wrong, I wonder, with living in a country where it is inconceivable that someone would drop a plastic coffee stirrer in the street? The next day I pulled onto a grass verge while the film crew waited for the right-shaped cloud to form and, immediately, a local person pulled over and told me that I couldn't park on the grass verge because I'd leave wheel marks and possibly squash a flower.

My natural reaction to this sort of interference is to tell the busybody to eff off and leave me alone, and I was on the cusp of doing just that. But then I thought: "She has a point." So, with an apologetic wave, I moved on. And as I drove away, I looked in my rear-view mirror to discover that, sure enough, I had left marks in the otherwise perfect grass and I had bent a couple of dandelions.

After this I decided to see whether I could find something wrong with Germany. Apart from the wine. And the pop music. It didn't take long. It has a truly lousy mobile phone network. Most of the time there's barely any signal at all, and I never once saw the 3G symbol flash up on my phone. But then, why do you need a fast data delivery service when you can leap into your car and, thanks to the autobahn speed-limit policy, be 200 miles away in an hour? Which brings me on to Germany's drivers, all of whom are excellent and all of whom have up-to-date car insurance, or, as they elegantly call it over there, Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung. Then there are the roads, which are as smooth as the glass they used to make the Hubble telescope. Every repaired section is as invisible as the tucks on an ageing supermodel's face. There is not even a word for pothole.

And nor does the German language cater for "striking junior doctor" or "fly-tipping" or "lying police officer" or "the football ground failed to meet safety standards".

Nor would you be able to say: "It seems that when he was a young man at university, our prime minister went to a party and placed his gentleman sausage into the mouth of a dead pig. So now he must resign in shame."

Because when it comes to this sort of thing, the Germans are a lot more tolerant ...

A couple of years ago, someone posted photographs on the internet that appear to show a younger Angela Merkel enjoying a naturist holiday with a couple of female friends. And nothing happened. There were no strenuous denials from her office. No efforts were made to take them down. Because in Germany everyone knows that they are either fake, in which case so what? Or they're real, in which case people now know their chancellor unlike her incongruous Barbie doll double once sported a 1970s welcome mat between her legs and a pair of excellent breasts. And again, so what? In the past I've mocked German lavatories, which come with a shelf to catch your stool and a supply of lollipop sticks that enable you to examine it for defects before flushing it away. But actually it's simply an early warning system for colon cancer, and what's wrong with that? It's a question that cropped up time and again as my week in Bavaria rolled by. We laugh at the Germans, but why? Because it's nothing more than a country that works.

You don't queue for security at the airports. You don't spend half an hour in your hotel room trying to turn out all the lights. The hot water arrives instantly. So does your train. And shopkeepers don't waste your morning with idiotic small talk. That's why I'd put them in charge of a new, slimmer EU. The English would then do the banking and the jokes, the Dutch would organise the parties and the Danes would make the furniture.

And think how good the football team would be, especially when it came down to penalty shootouts.
 
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I usually post the column on Monday, so you are in luck.
This week's piece is best prefaced with "Deutschland, Deutschland ?ber alles..."

Hmmm, not the Germany I live in, especially when it comes to cleanliness and our roads ... the German word for pothole ist Schlagloch

... or maybe I should move to Bavaria
 
I had left marks in the otherwise perfect grass and I had bent a couple of dandelions.
"

Green Peace will complain about this
 
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On to sporting matters:

Footie fans know just how to treat suicide bombers (May 8)

On Monday evening, when Eden Hazard curled the ball into the top right-hand corner of the net to score a dramatic late equaliser, the Spurs team knew that their dreams of being Premier League champions were over. All of that hard work. All of that running about. All that sweat. All for nothing.

The fans, penned into a corner of the stadium, knew it too. Their faces went slack and their shoulders slumped. At halftime their beloved team had been two goals ahead. Not only were they on course to win at Stamford Bridge for the first time in 26 years, but also a victory meant there was still a chance they could beat Leicester to claim the biggest prize in British football. But in an instant Chelsea, a team they loathe, had dashed those dreams. And they were broken.

In any other sport, and indeed any other field of human endeavour, they would have received some sympathy. There would have been pats on the back and comforting hugs. But instead 30,000 Chelsea fans rose to their feet and, to the tune of "Go West" by the Village People, sang so loudly that people half a mile away could hear it clearly "Two-nil. And you f***** it up."

This would have been like Roald Amundsen turning his team back towards the South Pole and gathering around Robert Falcon Scott's tent to sing "I won. And now you're dead." Who knows? Perhaps he did. But I doubt it. Because the Village People hadn't been invented back then. Maybe he changed the "bread of heaven" chorus and sang: "You're in heaven. You're in heaven. You're not exploring any more."

Or the Centre Court crowd at Wimbledon during the 2013 women's final standing up every time the sobbing Sabine Lisicki lost a point and singing, oh I don't know, "The Tears of a Clown."

That sort of thing happens all the time in football. When Rio Ferdinand had a spot of bother with a drugs test and had to watch his team from the sidelines, it must have been very shaming. So the visiting fans decided to make it worse by singing, to the tune of "Rio" by Duran Duran: "His name is Rio and he watches from the stand."

Or what about Steven Gerrard, the former Liverpool player who in effect cost his side the Premier League crown by slipping at a vital moment and allowing Demba Ba to score for Chelsea? He said afterwards that he thinks about this mistake every day and that it will haunt him for the rest of his life. So did he get a sympathetic mug of tea? Nope. What he got at pretty much every game afterwards was the fans singing, to the tune of "Que Sera, Sera": "Steve Gerrard, Gerrard, he slipped on his arse, his arse."

Which made a change from the usual chant sung to Liverpool and in particular their supporters: "The wheels on your house go round and round."

I could fill the entire newspaper with amusing football songs but before I get to the point, I'll give you one more. A player called Bobby Zamora who once missed an open goal by sending the ball high into the stands had to endure, for the rest of his career, opposing fans singing to the tune of Dean Martin's "That's Amore": "When you've sat in row Z and the ball hits your head, that's Zamora."

So how do we feel about that? As human beings we are supposed to be caring and to feel empathy for one another. So by rights we should be appalled. But most of us think it's funny and actually quite clever.

Intelligent people with mad hair and a blackboard full of equations would probably say that it's fair enough to taunt people in a game where, in the big scheme of things, the result doesn't matter. That argument doesn't hold water, though, because your child's performance in the school play doesn't matter either. But you'd still be horrified if the other parents booed her off for forgetting her lines. Or sang, to the tune of Bonnie Tyler's "Lost in France": "She has lost her words."

There's a line towards the end of the film Whiplash when the music teacher tells his brilliant prodigy that the worst two words in the English language are "good job". And he's quite right. Because you say "good job" to someone who's tried and then not succeeded. And if you want to make sure they succeed in future, they should be openly mocked, not praised.

After last weekend's mind-numbingly boring Russian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton was mooching about with a face like thunder because he'd come second. And everyone who went near him was wearing sympathetic eyes and half a smile as they explained how well he'd done. "Good job," said many of them. Well, I'm sorry, but if that had been football, "Go West" would have become: "He's got a Merc and he f***** it up." And that would have been hysterical.

After an election, the winner is invariably surrounded by supporters who've turned up to beam and toast their candidate's victory. But wouldn't it be more enjoyable for all concerned if they went round to the loser's house to poke fun and jeer and sing? Because, come on. Who was your favourite character in The Thick of It? The caring dweebs who did their best or the thunderous spin doctor who let them know, using swearing and an audience, that "their best" wasn't good enough? We should see more of this. People with pensions at BHS shouldn't just let Philip Green and his wife sail off into the sunset. They should go round to their house and sing: "Don't cry for me, Phil and Tina. The truth is, we never loved you."

And the next time a suicide bomber explodes, we should all turn up at his funeral to serenade his family with Andy Fairweather Low's "Wide Eyed and Legless." Or, better still, the chorus from Lulu's Eurovision hit: "My heart goes boom bang-a-bang, boom bang-a-bang." Or what about the Dave Clark Five's immortal: "I'm in pieces, bits and pieces"? I'm on a roll. I'd better stop.
 
:lol:
 
This week, the rigors of life on the road...

Reception? Help, I need a manual on turning the light off (May 15)

On average I spend two or three nights a week in hotels, and until last weekend I hadn't found one that wasn't annoying in some way, or terrible.

The worst, in the tea region of northwestern Uganda, was very terrible. The bed linen had plainly not been washed since Idi Amin went west, so I decided to discard it and sleep on the mattress. Which, when I removed the sheet, turned out to be the most revolting thing in the world. I shan't spoil your breakfast by describing the nature or hue of the unpleasant stains. I'll just say that I haven't retched quite so violently apart from the time when I was in China and I saw half a dog.

Then there was a hotel in Bolivia. I was woken up at 6am by one of the cleaners, who had come into my room without knocking. "Buenos dias," he said as he shuffled past my bed on his way to the bathroom. Where he enjoyed a noisy poo before shuffling back out of my room with nothing more than a mumbled "gracias".

The Thief hotel in Oslo was very different from this. It had a manager of unrivalled professionalism and was equipped with all the things you'd expect in a country where every child's state-sponsored micro scooter has Swarovski crystals in its wheel hubs. My room was fabulous. It even had a fire.

And if I'd been moving in for a couple of years, I'd have been able to work out how all the features could be operated. But I was there for only a short time, and by the time I got to my room at night I was usually a bit too drunk to fathom out all the buttons, which meant I had to try to sleep with some of the lights on and the fire still blazing and the television still playing its "Mr Cluckson, welcome" Muzak.

This is my main beef with hotels. In countries with a smooth flow of electricity and no beheadings, they are all far too complicated. The check-in procedure is too lengthy, and after you've walked six miles to your room, you find the electronic key you've been given doesn't work, so you have to trudge back to reception, with your bags, to check in again. And then when you finally get to your room, it's like finding yourself at the controls of a Boeing jet liner and it's your job to land it. You just sit there thinking: "But I don't know how any of this stuff works."

Take the shower as a prime example. You can see what goes through the mind of the management when it is choosing an attachment and the controls. "We are a good hotel and we must reflect that with a system that offers many jets and a sophisticated temperature-setting device."

What this invariably means is that you turn it on and immediately get a jet of ice-cold water in your face. You know that you must turn the temperature up a bit, but the controls are located behind the jet of cold water, which, by the time you've found your spectacles to see which knob does what, has become hotter than molten lava. And your specs have steamed up and you're blind.

Until last weekend the only hotel I had ever encountered with a decent shower was in Red Deer, in Alberta. That's because there were so many holes in the ceiling, I could just stand underneath one of them and wash my hair there.

Although I almost certainly washed it in mouthwash because I was unable to read the microdot labelling used on miniature hotel bathroom products.

However, operating a hotel bathroom is nothing compared with the problems you encounter when you try to turn out the lights. There will come a point when you think you've cracked it. You've unplugged the lamp by the chair, drunkenly tripped over your suitcase, resorted to smashing the table lamp because it appeared to have no switch at all and then crawled back between the sheets thinking that you had only the bedside lamp to go.

But no. You've forgotten the wardrobe light, haven't you? And by the time you've figured that one out, dawn is breaking and you discover to your horror that the electric curtains that took four hours to close have been made from tracing paper.

Some hotels helpfully provide one big switch by the bed that turns everything off. Including power to all the electricity sockets. Which means that when you wake up in the morning your phone hasn't charged.

It has always made me wonder: what do people actually learn on hotel management courses? Wear a tie. Stand up straight. And make sure the porn isn't identified on the bill. I'm sure all this is very important. But do they learn that there's no point providing guests with a television remote controller if there are no instructions on how to use it? All of which brings me to last weekend. Everyone in the country, it seemed, was going to a wedding in Winchester, which meant that every room in the city was booked. Apart from one at a hotel called the Winchester.

I arrived and my shoulders sagged.

There was a wedding here too. The sort where all the men turn up in patterned satin waistcoats. Or a kilt, for no reason. The carpets were hideous, and the wallpaper looked as though it had been chosen from Osborne & Little's Liverpool Lottery Winner collection.

But the check-in procedure took four seconds, the electronic key worked -- that's a first -- and the mattress in the room was comfortable. What's more, there were instructions in the bathroom for the extremely simple shower controls, there were light switches by the bed that turned the lights off, the curtains were thick enough to stop shrapnel and, joy of joys, there was no temperature in the room. It wasn't warm and it wasn't chilly. That's another first.

I do not know who manages this hotel, but if you are running the Carlton in Cannes or London's Dorchester you should call them immediately and offer them a job.
 
This week's column is by Clarkson...Emily Clarkson, Jeremy's daughter.

Lady driver on board so deal with it, sexists (May 29)

Byline: Emily Clarkson

A couple of weeks ago I found myself having an argument with my neighbour that was so tempestuous, it was considered newsworthy by several papers, probably because of my famous father. We didn't row because my neighbour had kept us up until three in the morning or because he had left the bins out for four days running. We rowed because I'd discovered that he was a complete and utter sexist.

Since I moved to west London last year there has been the odd wisecrack about my parking ability, or my lack thereof. But things came to a head when he turned his scorn on my mother--a woman whom, by the way, he has never actually met--and her parking efforts.

My neighbour told me that he had had a "right laugh" watching her "trying" to park her car and that he had felt so bad about it that he had wanted to help her.

"You do realise that my mum does rally driving, don't you?" I demanded, knowing full well that he was lying about my mum's parking abilities. He didn't care. To him this was the funniest thing in the world.

I felt enraged, but was prepared to let it drop (we girls are quite good at that sort of thing), until two nights later when I bumped into him again and he started to make exactly the same jokes. Neither of us was in a car and we had plenty of things we could have discussed, but, oh no, he was a man on a mission. It had to be the sodding parking.

So I lost it. "What's your problem?" I asked. "You do realise that if it had been my brother or my boyfriend or my dad 'trying' to park their Aston Martin, you wouldn't have dared say a word? But my mum, a woman? She's fair game?" That shut him up but I was furious that I'd even had to have this fight. Not least because, and I'll say it one more time, my mum is really good at parking.

If this had been a one-off I might have got over it. Had my neighbour been a lone little voice in a choir of men ambivalent about gender and driving, it would have been fine. Unfortunately, he's not.

A woman only has to sit down in a car before she's subjected to chauvinist attacks. Take last week. I went into a garage with a flat tyre and was followed by a guy driving a Porsche. The mechanic told me that he would drive my car for me into the garage. I thought this was nice and was just about to hand over my keys when I noticed that the guy in the Porsche was driving himself into a space, just like mine, one bay along.

So I told the mechanic that I could drive my car in perfectly well myself. He told me that it was a "tricky space". I pointed to Porsche man and asked why he was being allowed to do it himself. The mechanic blustered and said: "I'm just trying to make your life easier, love."

I wanted to tell him where to stick it, but I stopped myself. Patronising though he was, it was a Friday night and he was trying to be decent. I couldn't be bothered to get into a fight. So I gave him my keys and let him feel like the big man he obviously needed to be.

It didn't stop there. That weekend I was having dinner with a male friend who totally unprovoked turned to me and said: "You're a shit driver, but I'll let you off."

It came out of nowhere and I was so confused that I couldn't even conjure up a proper put-down. To my knowledge my friend has only ever been in a car with me once and I drove superbly as I always do. He didn't have a scrap of evidence to back up his assertion.

It's a stereotype as old as time (or at least the invention of the motor car) that women can't drive, that we need bigger parking spaces than men, and that if your car is clipped in London it was probably the fault of some yummy mummy in her 4x4. There's also the spurious notion that women in sports cars are either sexy or ridiculous and that their cars must have been bought for them by a lover or generous husband.

These stereotypes should be long extinct by now but they still stand. In a world where you are far more likely to get to your destination in one piece with a woman at the wheel, men are suffering from delusions of superiority.

The proof that women are "better" drivers lies in every statistic I've found, including ones showing that in fatal car crashes involving teens and drivers in their twenties men are more than twice as likely as women to have been the cause. Men get caught speeding more than women and the great majority of young drivers responsible for alcohol-related accidents are male.

So why is it that women have such a bad reputation as drivers? Are cars "men" things? Are we stealing the damn things? Are we intimidating? Maybe, just maybe, men accuse us of being bad drivers because we allow them to get away with saying it to us. It could be that women are being made to feel that we can't drive properly because we've been told it over and over again.

I think the real problem is that women are bombarded with casual sexism and have come to expect it. The endless "jokes" and "banter" mean that even I find myself, from time to time, "tutting" at female drivers, because, yes, some of us are bad. Only last night I saw a woman repeatedly swerve into the hard shoulder and when I saw the driver, I thought to myself: "Bloody woman, letting our side down ..."

Yet as a Londoner I see examples of terrible driving all the time, and most of the time it comes from (largely male) minicab drivers. It's time to accept that there are good drivers and there are bad drivers, irrespective of gender.

In my relationship, I do all the driving because my boyfriend can't actually do it. That doesn't make him any less of a man it makes him a city boy.

And my excellent parking skills, contrary to popular belief, weren't taught to me by a man. They are something that I can still do any day of the month, and they are not just "good for a girl," they're pretty good, full stop.

Jeremy Clarkson (Emily's dad) is away.
 
:bow:

Not only is that a superb point brilliantly made but there is no doubting her genes when it comes to the written word.

Emily Clarkson, I salute you in a totally non-sexist or patronising way and can't wait to read more.

And there is a pokey motoring show that might be looking for a new lead presenter soon, run by an organisation with quotas of political correctness to fill. You should apply.
 
She's right. However, the majority of small fender benders, bumps, and piddly things that irritate the ever living shit out of you happen more often that I've found. It's not recorded like major crashes are. But, saying "all women suck at driving" is stupid and hasn't gone away because of little things like this I imagine.
 
:bow:

Not only is that a superb point brilliantly made but there is no doubting her genes when it comes to the written word.

Emily Clarkson, I salute you in a totally non-sexist or patronising way and can't wait to read more.

And there is a pokey motoring show that might be looking for a new lead presenter soon, run by an organisation with quotas of political correctness to fill. You should apply.

You can read more of Emily's writing here: http://prettynormalme.com/
 
Jeremy's back this week:

Sex is running riot on TV -- and I fear Countdown's next (June 5)

A new period drama started on the television and while I didn't watch it, I have seen all the coverage about how it was full of grunting Frenchmen playing hide the sausage, and a pretty woman wandering about dreamily in a set of wet net curtains.

This seems to have annoyed large numbers of tweedy people who think that sex is a chore. They dismiss claims that it's natural by saying: "So is defecating and menstruating, and we don't want to see that on the television either."

Or do we? When I was growing up in the 1970s the BBC used to screen something called Play for Today in which there was some talking followed by a huge amount of sweaty sex. Then there was Bouquet of Barbed Wire in which Susan Penhaligon found a variety of different reasons each week to remove her shirt. And on it went. Sex and nudity were so commonplace that I wouldn't have been surprised if Valerie Singleton had turned up on Blue Peter in a peephole bra. And nothing else.

At the cinema, things were even more free and easy. People queued round the block to see Emmanuelle and I wasn't even mildly shocked in Young Winston when a topless woman suddenly appeared in shot for absolutely no reason at all.

Nor did I bat an eyelid when, in the middle of Battle of Britain, Susannah York decided to slip out of her air force uniform for a moment and wander about in her stockings and suspenders.

In every bus stop and every lay-by, there was invariably a large collection of mildly used pornographic magazines, and at the theatre, all the girls had their Seventies welcome mats on display all the time. The first time I saw Glenda Jackson wearing clothes, I was genuinely amazed. Helen Mirren too.

But then, one day, it all just stopped.

We had Dallas and Dynasty and EastEnders and there wasn't even a whiff of rumpy-pumpy in any of them. We got so used so quickly to actors and actresses wearing clothes that we all ran around in a tizzy during Baywatch because Pamela Anderson nearly wasn't.

What happened is plain for all to see. Television audiences began to decline. Newspaper circulation figures fell off a cliff. Nuts shut. Theatres began to close. And all the while, sex on the internet was becoming more and more popular. I read the other day that one of the most visited sites in the world right now is Pornhub. That's why no one is going out to play, because they're all at home, playing with themselves.

Plainly, television executives have noticed this, which is why, all of a sudden, the nipple and the lady garden are back with a vengeance. We have Game of Thrones, which is just rampant candlelit lesbianism interspersed with some light murder. And Orange is the New Black is much the same, only with different lighting. Ray Donovan is a favourite of mine and the second series opened with a lengthy sex scene, just to make sure fans stayed hooked.

House of Cards saw a threesome involving the president and the first lady. Breaking Bad had public masturbation. Transparent took it even further, and as a result, television is once again keeping people glued to the screens.

The only way mainstream television can keep up with this festival of indecency is to join in, which explains why the BBC drama Versailles was so full of couples making the two-headed beast. There will be more of this kind of thing, I can assure you. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Rachel Riley doesn't do Countdown in the altogether fairly soon. Or is that just me? The big question, however, is this: should we be alarmed? Is the rise and rise of sex on television a bad thing? Well, you may be surprised to find that actually, I think it could be ...

I'm not the sort of person who gets hot and bothered by the glimpse of an ankle and I have absolutely no problem with the sort of sex you saw in Versailles or even the House of Cards Kevin Spacey threesome. It's a bit awkward if you're watching with your kids, but these days we're told before any show starts how much swearing and hitting and flashing lights there will be so no one can claim they were surprised by the sudden appearance of some breasts.

However, television is perhaps more competitive now than it has ever been. Which means that soon, normal sex won't be considered enough of a pull. So it'll have to become abnormal. And where will that end? There's no point relying on censorship because that's impossible these days. It'll be governed only by public taste and decency, and that's a worry because generally speaking the public doesn't have much of that. Hear at the office water cooler that some beautiful young starlet is to be seen in the latest box set making love to a snake, and people will find an excuse to go home early for a gawp. Which means the next beautiful young starlet will be forced to make love to a goat, and so on.

We have seen this happen with violence. James Bond used to get by with a small pistol and a rudimentary knowledge of karate. Whereas now, he gets tied to a chair naked and has his privates mashed to a pulp with a knotted rope.

In video games, the action used to be cartoonish but players now are invited to stroll through an airport, armed to the teeth, and shoot realistic-looking innocents. And that's the sort of the thing that encourages fools to hop on a plane to Syria to try it out for real.

That's what will happen with sex. People will try out things they've seen on the screen, and that's a worry. Especially if you are a goat.

I have to disagree with Jeremy. James Bond's genital torture, for example, isn't new. It was taken from the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, back in 1953. And I doubt that actresses making love to goats will catch on, for the simple reason that most people aren't turned on by bestiality. You'd have better luck with incest.
 
Jeremy's back this week:


I have to disagree with Jeremy. James Bond's genital torture, for example, isn't new. It was taken from the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, back in 1953. And I doubt that actresses making love to goats will catch on, for the simple reason that most people aren't turned on by bestiality. You'd have better luck with incest.

Well, as always things are comically exaggerated, but in principle he's right. Nobody wants to see 'American TV' where even married couples sleep in beds with L-shaped sheets, so that she can be covered up to the neck. But European TV gets oversexed to be honest. There is no need to see bare boobs in childrens programmes at 2pm and that's where we're headed.
 
I don't agree with the 'this inspires idiots to hop on an airplane to syria' bit.

I know Jeremy is smarter than believing videogames cause violence, let alone terrorism....
 
But European TV gets oversexed to be honest. There is no need to see bare boobs in childrens programmes at 2pm and that's where we're headed.

At the risk of sounding perverse, I don't think there's much harm in kids seeing boobs, or even willies (fornication is a different issue). Nudity was not taboo for the Greeks and Romans (or several Eastern cultures) and we'd probably be a healthier society if we junked our hang-ups on that subject. That said, no one should have to see Clarkson nude.
 
Most children have already seen breasts at a very young age. In fact one might even say that's what they're meant for.
 
So how many sex scenes are there going to be in The Grand Tour?
 
All of the sex scenes. Every single one.
 
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