Over the years, our family enjoyed Top Gear immensely, even though we had only a bicycle as our only vehicle.
Mr Clarkson with his cheeky humour carried the show, and he will be sorely missed: TV land will be much poorer for his absence.

Please, BBC, swallow your pride: he may have done the wrong thing, but it will be you who will be biting the hand that fed you.

Give him another go, please.

Mal you said a great deal before getting down to the basics of this case in your last paragraph.

I once employed a number of people, who by the nature of their qualifications, & work involving very long hours, earned 2 or 3 times as much as the duty managers in another area of the business. Those managers hated my blokes, & were out to cause them difficulty if they could.

I might say my blokes returned the feelings, & made things less pleasant for those duty managers. Mutual admiration it was not, rather like the BBC & Clarkson I expect.

I think this is a perfect example of a Clarkson. A highly talented man, whose quick wit made Top Gear what it was. The other 2 are great, but nothing without Clarkson.

Even more nothing are the dozens of funny people in BBC management & production, highly untalented & incompetent in their jobs by the sounds of things. With their egos they could never bow to viewer pressure, & a patrician was probably counter productive in this case.

If the BBC were private enterprise these talentless hangers on would be quickly gone, only the productive can be kept, & Clarkson has been paying the salaries of dozens such people. Being tax payer funded, the whales at the BBC can ignore what is good for the organisation & the paying public, & favour the useless.

If those 3 talents were to start a production company, they would make a fortune, & they could sack incompetents who can't organise a simple meal.

Even a billion petitions can't/won't change BBC's workplace rules!

One just cannot go up to and physically assault/punch out/floor another presenter, because he or she disagrees with him or her!?

If the scuttlebutt can be believed, then it seems Clarkson was always been a bully and frequently drunk?

And perhaps someone relieved him of the keys of the latest new donated toy; because perhaps they thought he could have harmed himself or somebody else's shiny new motor!?

Even so, and no matter the reason, one just doesn't turn on a fellow staff member and attempt to punch their lights out?

So and given that reason, one expects that the BBC had and has no other choice than their deeply regretted action.

Anyway, Jeremy has been offered another job with the Russian military, road testing tanks/military vehicles?

And hard to get into much trouble in a tank, even when fill to the gills with Russian vodka and having a head on confrontation with a tree?

Always providing he doesn't have access to live ammunition; and or, gets into a serious disagreement with Putin, when less than sober!?

And given such an event? It would be J C laying on the floor!
Rhrosty.

I never could stand that show, so I am glad the most arrogant peacock of the lot has got the sack. I assume he will be in court soon for the assault on his employer?

Sometimes these sort of TV show hosts get too big for their own boots, and think that only their views matter, and they are untouchable..
Not so anymore, thank goodness.

One thing people are forgetting is that the BBC have replaced Jeremy Clarkson before! He left Top Gear in early 2001, but Channel 5 subsequently poached the remaining presenters for their Top Gear clone which they called 5th Gear, so the BBC decided to relaunch Top Gear with him as the main presenter.

I'd be quite surprised if Channel 5 don't try the same trick again.

Some interesting - and totally predictable - chat about Clarkson. All very fine of course, but the article itself was about online petitions.

The writer asserts that the pre-condition of a successful online petition is the communication a clearly defined and transmitted, straightforward goal, raised in a timely fashion.

I'd suggest another, more critical requirement: relevance.

The campaign used as illustration, to get a magazine to stop using photo-shopped/airbrushed images of its models, would be relevant to a range of concerned parents. Poor body-image among - especially - teenage girls can have significant health implications.

And the second example, a campaign that raises millions of dollars for cancer research, is its own justification.

But simply venting about a TV personality whom you might happen to find amusing isn't, quite, in the same league. So the fact that the first two were successful, and the last a waste of space, is not particularly surprising.

I have always enjoyed Top Gear, and Clarkson's humour in particular. But I wouldn't "sign" a petition of any kind to help him keep his job with the BBC. If he finds another place to go, fine. If not, fine too. He's just this guy, you know...