British TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson is famous for cohosting Top Gear — and infamous for off-the-cuff comments he’s made on camera and fisticuffs while off-screen. He’s been accused of racism, sexism, and homophobia — and it was his attack on a producer that threw a wrench in the Top Gear production more than a decade ago.
Since then, Clarkson has moved on with new projects like The Grand Tour, the U.K.’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and Clarkson’s Farm. But it can be hard to look past his reputation when he’s made remarks more noxious than a clunker’s exhaust pipe. Here’s a 25-year timeline of his controversies.
1998: Clarkson allegedly makes racist comments about South Koreans
Hyundai U.K. complained to the BBC in 1998, saying Clarkson had made “bigoted and racist” comments about employees of Hyundai, a South Korean car manufacturer, at a motor show in Birmingham, England.
“What was reported back to me was that he said the people on the Hyundai stand had eaten dog, and that the designer of one of our cars, the XG, had probably eaten a spaniel for lunch,” Hyundai UK spokesman Stephen Kitson told BBC News.
2005: Clarkson makes a mock Nazi salute
Clarkson sparked outrage in 2005 when he made a mock Nazi salute in reference to a BMW car on Top Gear. He also said that the car would have a navigation system “that only goes to Poland,” in a reference to Germany’s 1939 invasion of the country, and that the car’s fan belt would last 1,000 years, in a reference to Adolf Hitler’s boast that the Third Reich would last 10 centuries, according to The Scotsman.
David Marsh, a U.K. businessman and a leader of the German-British Forum, objected to Clarkson’s behavior, saying, “As a British person with strong links to Germany, I take exception to this poisonous rubbish carried by a publicly funded broadcasting company. Such actions are out of place in our society.”
2008: Clarkson makes joke about truck drivers killing sex workers
In 2008, more than 500 people complained to the BBC, and Member of Parliament Chris Mole called for Clarkson to be fired from Top Gear after Clarkson made a joke about truck drivers murdering sex workers, BBC News reported. In describing a truck driver’s routine on the show, Clarkson said, “Change gear, change gear, check mirror, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That’s a lot of effort in a day.”
Clarkson responded to the controversy days later in a column in The Sunday Times, writing, “There are more important things to worry about than what some balding and irrelevant middle-aged man might have said on a crappy BBC2 motoring show.”
2010: Clarkson drops homophobic joke on Top Gear
Top Gear guest Alastair Campbell blogged in 2010 that in a deleted scene from the show, Clarkson asserted he did have a sound opinion on gay rights by saying, “I demand the right not to be bummed.” (In the U.K., “bummed” can colloquially mean “engaged in anal sex.”)
“Surely the reason Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t want to get bummed is that he needs somewhere to speak out of,” Ben Summerskill of the gay rights organization Stonewall later told the Daily Star (per Digital Spy).
2011: Clarkson says striking workers should be shot
In 2011, Clarkson offered a scandalous opinion of public sector workers’ then-ongoing strikes over pensions. “Frankly, I’d have them all shot,” he said on the BBC’s The One Show. “I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families. I mean, how dare they go on strike when they have these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living?”
The trade union Unison called for Clarkson to be sacked over the comments, and Clarkson later apologized, according to BBC News.
2012: Clarkson makes Indian jokes on Top Gear
A 2012 Top Gear Christmas special got Clarkson in hot water with Indian diplomats, who lodged a complaint with the BBC over his jokes about Indian food, clothing, toilets, trains, and history.
“We are not amused,” one diplomat told The Guardian. “There was a strong sense of disappointment, not just here in the U.K. but back in India and also among our non-Indian friends as well. We helped them with the program in many ways; we facilitated them in a positive and good-natured way. And now they have run down our history and culture.”
2014: Clarkson makes offensive “wordplay” on Top Gear
In a 2014 Top Gear episode, Clarkson and his costars built a bridge over a river in Thailand. As Clarkson watched a local man cross the bridge, he made a comment using a word that could reference a banked angle or could be an anti-Asian slur.
“When we used the word … in the recent Top Gear Burma Special, it was a light-hearted wordplay joke referencing both the build quality of the bridge and the local Asian man who was crossing it,” executive producer Andy Wilman said at the time, per HuffPost. “We were not aware at the time, and it has subsequently been brought to our attention, that the word … is considered by some to be offensive here and overseas, for example in Australia and the U.S.A. If we had known that at the time, we would not have broadcast the word in this context and regret any offense caused.”
2014: Clarkson’s alleged N-word use resurfaces
Clarkson was yet again embroiled in scandal in 2014, when the Daily Mirror claimed it had obtained Top Gear footage of him uttering the N-word while reciting the nursery rhyme “Eeny Meeny Miny Moe.” For his part, Clarkson claimed he “mumbled” in place of the racial epithet and said he couldn’t apologize for something he hadn’t done.
“I’ve been told by the BBC that if I make one more offensive remark, anywhere, at any time, I will be sacked,” he told readers of his Sun column, per The Guardian.
2015: Clarkson fights with a Top Gear producer and is fired
In 2015, the BBC fired Clarkson from Top Gear following his altercation with producer Oisin Tymon, which left the latter with a bloody lip, according to The Guardian. Clarkson reportedly grew irate after a day of filming when he was told he could not order a sirloin steak, and he allegedly called Tymon a “lazy, Irish c***.”
The following year, Clarkson settled Tymon’s £100,000 racial discrimination and personal injury claim with a payment from Clarkson and the BBC reportedly in excess of that amount.
“I would like to say sorry, once again, to Oisin Tymon for the incident and its regrettable aftermath,” Clarkson said in a statement through his lawyer. “I want to reiterate that none of this was in any way his fault.”
2023: Clarkson’s Meghan Markle column deemed sexist and degrading by press regulator
A record 25,000 people complained to Ipso, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, about a 2022 Sun column Clarkson wrote about Meghan Markle, and Ipso ruled in 2023 that the column was sexist. Lord Faulks, the Ipso chairman, also said the imagery of the column was “humiliating and degrading towards the duchess,” according to BBC News.
In the column, Clarkson wrote that he hated Markle on “a cellular level” and was “dreaming of the day when [Meghan] is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”
Both Clarkson and The Sun apologized for the column — and, as BBC News reported separately, Clarkson’s daughter Emily said she stood “against everything” he wrote about Markle.
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