Gwen Russell - Clarkson--The Gloves Are Off

J eremy Clarkson is possibly the most popular television presenter and personality in Britain today. You either love him or loathe him; there is no half way. Irreverent, witty, hard hitting Clarkson has caused a revolution on our television screens since first hosting Top Gear in 1988. His popularity is such that in 2008, an internet petition on the Downing Street website was posted to Make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister. It attracted nearly 50,000 signatures.

Men love him, especially men who like fast cars, a stand against political correctness and a man who is prepared to knock the stuffing out of the rich and pompous, even though he sometimes goes a little too far. It is fair to say that feminists and environmentalists are not quite so keen. But it is a misconception to say that women as a whole are not so fond of Clarkson: they are more than capable of appreciating fearlessness and wit. Indeed, in 2008, as a vast majority of people appeared to be trying to get Clarkson into Downing Street, another lot were admitting to secretly fancying him: an online dating site ran a poll of MISAs Men I Secretly Adore. A full 5,000 women responded to this, putting Clarkson in a very respectable third place, after Jonathan Ross and Phillip Schofield, and ahead of Gordon Ramsay, Fabio Capello and Gary Lineker. Jeremy was furious that he hadnt come first. So I beat a man who looks like Shrek (Capello), a man with ears the size of satellite dishes (Lineker), and a man who calls a spade a spade (Ramsay), he grumped. Doesnt say much.

Of course, Clarkson does have a tendency to play to the gallery. Hes created the persona of a petrolhead who is quite happy to drive roughshod over areas of outstanding natural beauty, destroying them as he insults everyone he can think of. But that is not remotely the whole picture. A far more thoughtful and cultured man than he would ever let on, Clarkson is very interested in various areas outside the remit of the car world, like engineering. He presented the series Inventions That Changed The World, which showcased guns, computers, the jet engine, telephone and television, and it was he who championed Isambard Kingdom Brunel as part of a public poll to find the greatest of Great Britons. He went so far as to claim that machines can have a soul, citing Concorde as it was put out of business Jeremy was a passenger on its last ever flight.

Clarkson has also displayed a great interest in military history, and a depth of knowledge quite out of kilter with his bloke-ish persona and pretence that hes really just another guy. In 2007, he became a patron of Help for Heroes, a charity that was founded to help wounded British servicemen, while some of his television work centred on the same theme. Various slots on Top Gear have mirrored his literary interests, including occasions on which he escaped a tank in a Range Rover, an Apache helicopter in a Lotus and a platoon of Irish Guardsmen in a Porsche, on top of which he has used a Ford Fiesta as a military landing craft.

He has also presented a number of other programmes looking at the military, most notably one about holders of the Victoria Cross, not least his father-in-law, Robert Henry Cain, whose own daughter, Jeremys wife, had been in ignorance about the full extent of her fathers heroics, until her husband uncovered the full tale. Another outing along these lines was Jeremy Clarkson: Greatest Raid Of All Time, in which Clarkson told the tale of Operation Chariot, a World War II story about a 1942 Commando raid on the docks of Saint-Nazaire in occupied France. Of course, these are all rather macho preoccupations, but even so they betoken a man who is far more thoughtful than his public image would at times admit.

Ultimately, though, Clarkson is popular and deserves to be because he is a breath of fresh air. He has never been afraid to speak his mind from the start, and as society becomes increasingly po-faced, he reacts against the rest of the world. In 1995, he appeared on Room 101, the programme in which the guests are allowed to dispatch everything they hate: Clarksons choices included caravans, flies, Last Of The SummerWine, golf club mentality and vegetarians. He is fearless and as such has often guest hosted Have I Got News For You, alongside numerous appearances on Question Time. He cannot be tamed and he cannot be put into a mould and the public love him for it, as much today as they ever have.

Perhaps most curiously, and this always goes down well with a British audience, at the very heart of it all lies a very strong streak of self deprecation. Jeremy does not take himself too seriously, and defies anyone else to do the same. Over and again he denies that his is a voice that carries any weight or influence: I enjoy this back and forth, it makes the world go round but it is just opinion, he says. I dont have any influence over what people do, I really dont. It makes no difference what I say. Top Gear is just fluff. Its just entertainment people dont listen to me.

That is not entirely true. People not only listen to him, they adore him even if they disagree with him. And for all the controversy that he is so happy to court, Jeremy has never put his foot in it and rubbed the public up the wrong way as some of his colleagues at the BBC managed to do. Public appetite for him is as strong as it has ever been and shows no signs of abating. Clarkson remains a hero to many, as popular as anyone in the country and even modest with it not that he would admit it. Clarkson is now one of the truly great modern television stars.