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Jeremy Clarkson of 'Top Gear' Has Been Suspended from the BBC After a ‘Fracas’

The British incarnation of a midlife crisis is again in trouble for his shitlordery.

Clarky, in his natural habitat, shouting at a car. Photo via Flickr user Tony Harrison

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Jeremy Clarkson, a horrible vision of what your dad would be like if your mom let him buy that Porsche he wanted, has been suspended from the BBC following a fight with a producer. As a result, this Sunday's episode of Top Gear has been cancelled. You're going to have to go somewhere else to watch three walking midlife crises talk smack about an RV, sorry. Going to have to go elsewhere to watch an actor with a film to sell make awkward banter then drive a slow car around a track in the rain.

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Details are thin on the ground at the moment—it's not yet known whether the Clarkson-producer set-to was a fistfight, a mouth fight, or if they both just unzipped their dicks from their pissed-on dad jeans and jousted at each other. The incident could have been a brouhaha or fisticuffs. That could be shenanigans or a good old fashioned dust-up. Maybe they got in a circle of high schoolers, all chanting "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!" and spitting at each other's book bags. Maybe they had one of those undignified old man pub fights, where they both go puce in the face and someone has their shirt pulled up over their head, their palely wobbling back fat coolly jiggling about in front of the BBC headquarters.

In a statement, the BBC said: "Following a fracas with a BBC producer, Jeremy Clarkson has 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."

It's about time Jeremy Clarkson was punished for being a shitlord, to be fully honest, because its something he's been for a while—or, arguably, all of his life. In the last year, though, he's really rammed home the concept of being suspended by the BBC: in the Christmas Special he said a bridge they'd built in Argentina wasn't straight because it "had a slope on it" when an Asian man walked over it, a wink-and-nudge-to-the-camera act of offensiveness that was swiftly punished by OFCOM; he also angered Argentina so much while he was there by driving around with a Falklands-referencing numberplate that the whole crew had to escape to Chile. Also, he only has one way of delivering a sentence ("Going up at the top like this… then growling a really shit simile") and he's friends with both David Cameron and Alex James. He's had this coming for a while.

Still, Clarkson is a BBC institution: this suspension is on a level with them binning Bruce Forsyth for having too big a chin, or putting Wogan out to pasture because his hair isn't real enough.

With Clarkson on suspension, the BBC old guard dwindling down through retirement to death and Radio 1 stalwarts such as Fearne Cotton and Zane Lowe fucking off, what's left for the BBC? Matt Baker and Alex Jones—two curiously sexless presenting robots designed in a lab to keep your nan awake enough to make it through to 8 PM—fronting up every TV show the BBC has to offer? Sue Barker's Generation Game? Shane Ritchie's Robot Wars? Good luck charging us license fees for that, BBC. Apart from the gritty Shane Ritchie Robot Wars reboot, actually. That could work.

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