Only a hard-core Guardianista could accuse the BBC of being too right-wing. So step forward Jamie Gough of Sheffield, whose letter in today’s Media supplement rails against the supposed excesses of Top Gear. Here’s just a sample:
‘Jeremy Clarkson and his mates sit on top of an armed personnel carrier to publicise their BBC-financed live show. The tour, as Clarkson so nicely puts it, is for the world to ‘watch us three cocking around’. So subtle: cars = guns = phallus = power = money.
‘As Bea Campbell showed in her book Goliath, programmes like Top Gear encourage poor young men to steal cars and drive them lethally … now Clarkson is encouraging young men to use more guns.
‘But Top Gear’s most extensive, lethal influence is on middle England … buy gas-guzzlers, destroy wildernesses with them, ignore speed limits, and denounce even the pathetically weak measures which the state employs against these behaviours.”
Funny that, but I have to confess that I haven’t seen many accountants toting Kalishnikovs on their way to work. Maybe things are different in Sheffield.
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