Top Gear

Remember the film Falling Down with Michael Douglas?

If you don’t, Douglas goes into some fast food place that resembles the Golden Arches and attempts to order breakfast at 10:31am.

They stopped serving at 10:30am on the dot. Douglas is already having a bad day and is incensed by this.

He then basically goes on a huge city-wide shootout, fuelled by his own hangriness.

He may have also recently been involved in a messy divorce and a custody battle and lost his job, but that doesn’t matter.

The important thing was, he couldn’t get the meal he wanted.

Cut to real life where Doncaster’s largest bigot and professional foghorn, Jeremy Clarkson finds himself in a similar situation.

He was in a hotel and couldn’t get a steak. The kitchen was closed.

Yelling “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” at the poor hotel manager actually prompted him to go into the kitchen and cook him one.

There was reportedly a “fracas” with a producer and some kind of physical assault took place, a punch having been thrown by a boozed-up Jezza.

The alleged allegations that Clarkson allegedly punched the alleged punchee were worldwide news.

The BBC said: “While we have been happy to help perverted DJs fiddle with kids, spent licence-payers money on taxis, booze and drugs and even allowed you to spout smart casual racism with your prick mates, we cannot be seen to support you bitch-slapping a subordinate in a hotel.”

He was suspended. Doubtlessly on full pay and doubtlessly said full pay is at least £20,000 a week.

That should have been case closed.

But no. A petition started by angry automobile enthusiasts demanded: “BRING BACK THE CURLY-HAIRED BUGGER”. The petition attracted over eight times as many signatures as one that is trying to stop female genital mutilation. Priorities, people.

It seems that taking Top Gear off the air is an “outrage”, a “human rights violation” and makes Auntie Beeb “worse than Hitler”.

If they do sack him, it’s only a matter of time before he turns up on ITV with his two sidekicks – the diminutive death-defier and the floppy-haired public schoolboy – in a show about cars called Maximum Revvage, or something equally tacky.

But in the meantime why not stand outside BBC offices burning your TV licences and shouting “NO SURRENDER”?

This country is very clearly doomed.