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Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson (born April 11, 1960) is a British motoring journalist and television presenter. He is known for his physically imposing presence, and ebulliently robust manner. The television show he is most associated with is called Top Gear. This is a show which puts all cars, present, past and future through their paces. He has an image of not pulling any punches, but acknowledging up-front any and all biases the reporters have.

He also "starred" in a series called Jeremy Clarkson's Extreme Machines where he rode all manner of machines, including a plane, a submarine and an airboat.

In 2002 Clarkson championed Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the BBC's search to find the 100 Greatest Britons.

Clarkson, being one of the passengers on the last BA Concorde flight on October 24, 2003, played around Neil Armstrong's famous saying: This is one small step for a man, but one huge leap backwards for mankind.

He lives in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

Recently (April 2004) Clarkson appeared on the British TV talk show Parkinson and mentioned that he was writing a book about the 'soul' many machines have. He cited Concorde as his primary example: when people heard it had crashed, quite aside from the sadness they felt for the loss of human life, there was also almost a sadness for the machine. He also recently punched Piers Morgan, former editor of The Daily Mirror, a UK newspaper for printing some unflattering photographs of him. This was generally considered fairly out of character.

Clarkson lives in the Cotswold countryside near Chipping Norton with his wife Francie (who is also his agent), and their three children, Emily, Finlo and Katya. Clarkson regularly refers to his family on Top Gear or in his newspaper columns, often with humour, in particular noting how resitant to damage the trim in demonstrator cars is once his children are let loose in the back. This information is of great value to parents shopping for a new car. He has a talent for sardonic prose style as well as television presentation, and his newspaper columns in The Sunday Times invariably begin with what seems to be a massive red herring before somehow arriving at the car that is being reviewed that week. He has honed this journalistic talent and converted it into a style of television presentation that is arresting for it instantly demands you to either love, or hate him. His wife has probably helped him with this, but it endures because underneath a very genuine man comes across, whose (often political) opinions are often shared by a silent majority of viewers or readers in Britain, and vociferously challenged by a substantial minority. As a result, most people in this country know who he is and have an opinion on him. The opportunity has existed, in recent times, for Clarkson to over-expose himself, to move from being the most well-known motoring journalist in Britain on to a full-blown media type. But he has resisted, even cancelling his talk show vehicle in favour of infrequent well-chosen appearances on the BBC series Great Britons and Who Do You Think You Are?, both of which endeared him to the public further. It seems apparent that Clarkson and his wife carefully choose his appearances, but crucially, to British people, he never seems conceited. Clarkson and his wife do quite a bit of charity work, especially in his locale, that often goes unnoticed. The future, at this time, looks bright, with the exception that Clarkson recently found out that he will need a hip replacement in some years. The go-ahead has just been given, in spite of objections by local people, for a new facility to film Top Gear to be built just five miles from his home on an old airfield.

External links

• BBC World biography of Jeremy Clarkson
• IMDb entry

• 1960 births
• British journalists
• British television presenters