10 years after Jeremy Clarkson punched Top Gear producer his career has never been brighter
It's been a decade since his dramatic exit from the BBC series.
A decade ago, some might have thought that Jeremy Clarkson’s career was well and truly over.
The man widely regarded as one of Britain’s most controversial TV stars seemed to seal his fate when he literally punched a Top Gear producer in a highly-publicised clash.
Yet 10 years later, his career is still going strong. Even more than that – it seems to be brighter than ever before.
Who knew that it was possible to salvage a besmirched reputation after walloping a colleague square in the face?
It was the year 2015. The revival of Top Gear had been on the air for 13 years and soared to stratospheric heights of success.
In its heyday, it was crowned the most widely-watched factual TV programme in the 2013 Guinness World Records, with 350 million people tuning in from 250 countries across the globe to become the BBC’s most exported programme ever.
Top Gear became a British insitution in itself (Picture: Marbella Photo/Rex/Shutterstock)Making Top Gear wasn’t always a smooth ride. The series received criticism over the years for incidents deemed highly offensive, such as the mockery of different cultures on the show, including complaints of racism over the programme’s Burma special.
However, it remained an enormous success for that 13-year stint, becoming a linchpin of British TV culture despite the controversies it faced.
Aside from its impressive ratings, over the years Top Gear was recognised with multiple high-profile awards, including National Television Awards and Bafta nominations, while it was also hailed the best TV show of the decade in a 2009 Channel 4 survey.
And then, everything came crashing down in 2015 when Clarkson became embroiled in a ‘fracas’ with Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon.
The BBC initially released a statement on March 10 that year announcing that the now-64-year-old had been ‘suspended pending an investigation’.
‘No-one else has been suspended. Top Gear will not be broadcast this Sunday. The BBC will be making no further comment at this time,’ the statement read.
It was the beginning of the end. Or so fans might have thought.
