Don't get me wrong. Jeremy Clarkson is a hugely entertaining broadcaster, whose irreverent, opinionated and colourful style has brought the whole 'motor magazine' format a degree of - well... fun - which has changed it forever.
OK, so the car reviews can get a bit formulaic, but let's face it, there's only so much artistic tension you can bring to a 3-minute segment of "I like it for these reasons, and loathe and despise it for these reasons". And OK, his similes, metaphors and analogies can become as tiresome as reading "The Exhaustive Guide to the Roundabouts of Milton Keynes". And OK, the rhetorical device of making three points on one side of the argument and then reversing your position for dramatic effect is practically a caricature of itself now.
But that's precisely the point.
Ya see, a bit of jokiness helps you make a point intensely without being patronising; sometimes its the only way to get yer point across without looking like you take it all... a bit too seriously. [Sorry, you'll have to do his weird neo-Blue-Peter intonation thing for yourself there].
But it seems Jeremy's latest caricature was a bit counter-productive. The rant in question was about the 'palaver about nothing' over the HMRC data breach. To hammer the point home, Mr C apparently used his column in the [newspaper - interestingly I can't now find the article in question, and I've seen references to The Sunday Times, The Sun and The Telegraph as possible candidates. If you find the original article, please leave a comment with a link... RW] to publish his own bank details, noting that these would only allow a third party to put money into his account, not take it out.
Unfortunately someone was able to draft a Direct Debit mandate sufficiently convincingly for Barclays to set up a £500 monthly debit, from Clarkson's account, in favour of the British Diabetic Association charity. Oops.
Obviously, there are some aspects of this which do not emerge fully from the media coverage. For instance, Clarkson says that the bank "cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act, and they cannot stop it from happening again". As far as I'm aware, the DPA contains no provision to protect the identity of someone committing banking fraud. The Daily Mail observes that the British Diabetic Association is "one of many organisations which do not require a signature to set up a direct debit". That's as may be... but it seems to me that if the bank acts on such an instruction without any reliable proof that it was established by the account-holder, they might have a hard time making the resulting liability stick to Mr Clarkson. Arguably, he had a reasonable expectation that the bank would not allow a direct debit to be set up on the basis of public-domain information alone.
Be that as it may, I will continue to get my 'fix' of Top Gear - whether on the Beeb or on Dave, and will happily take Jeremy's guidance on all matters automotive. If I see a trailer for 'Top Net Gear: Securing Your Identity - The Clarkson Way', that... would be quite another matter.
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