The World's Worst Columnist**: Jeremy Clarkson

I love the BBC car fanatic show Top Gear, and my favorite host on the show is Jeremy Clarkson. When it comes to cars, he is witty, wise, and engaging. (My favorite YouTube video of all time, in fact, is here.) Based on these qualities, and a fair degree of writing skill from his original stint as a newspaper reporter, it seems he was given the job of writing a weekly column for The Sunday Times on whatever subject tickled his fancy. Those columns have been accumulated into books, the third fascicle of which is called "For Crying Out Loud!" which I just finished reading, containing 82 weeks' of different subjects that Mr. Clarkson found noteworthy... or, more accurately, annoying.

Among the subjects that annoy Mr. Clarkson are:

Christmas
The Olympics
Sardinia
The word "beverage"
Sunday lunch
Environmentalists
Short people
Gift shops
Private planes
Pubs and darts
Sleeping pills
People on horses
British expatriates
Blue whales
Zippers on tents.

But, mostly what Jeremy Clarkson likes least are poor people. What Jeremy Clarkson likes most is that he is not one of them. He throws in so many countless japes at poor people and fleeting references to his own un-poorishness that it quickly becomes clear that he's just doing it to get attention and get people riled. Upon finding out that Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown was up in recent polls after going to see flood victims in Gloucstershire, he opined, "Are you really saying that we must endure another five years of Labour's bossiness and bullying simply because its leader went to see some fat old crow in Tewkesbury whose ghastly button-backed DFS furniture had got a bit soggy?" (His "Stop real tennis fans from going to Wimbledon because they are all fat, ugly, and poor... wealthy corporate clients only, thank you" column was particularly fetching.)

How the man ultimately comes across is as the school bully who grew up to be very rich and popular, and believes that he should carry on thinking about things and people just the way he did when he was twelve because of that fact. He says the things he says not because he really believes that people should eat pandas, but because it gets him the attention he desires.

I'm guessing that Mr. Clarkson isn't really some wannabe royal huffing his way through life about how difficult it is to tolerate the unwashed masses. What I suspect is he just plays the part of a jumped-up toff in his column for lack of coming up with better things to write about. Indeed, he isn't a bore. His writing style and subject choices are at least not so bad that a few 'graphs into it you just skip forward; however you are left with the impression that for many of these columns, he sat at his desk the night before deadline rubbing his temples, reminiscing his week, trying to think of something to complain about... or at least something that would generate enough angry letters to The Sunday Times to confirm to him that people are actually reading.

There are people who have become much appreciated and beloved through professional complaining: When Andy Rooney manages to put together a 5-minute whinge about breakfast cereal box tops, it's amusing and his viewers eat it up (pardon the pun) and can jive with his zany point of view. When Jeremy Clarkson does it: Not so much, I think.

Well, I'm sure certain people mutter an "amen" as they set down their newspapers after reading Mr. Clarkson's column, agreeing with the fact that only celebrities and royalty should own land in the English Countryside. The rest of us say, "For crying out loud!"

** He's not really the world's worst columnist. He is really, really crappy, but "The Worst Columnist" honor really belongs to Ann Coulter. However, I've discovered that if you start any blog title with "The World's Something-ist", it gets tons of hits. So excuse the (slight) hyperbole.