Rise to Fame
Twenty minutes ranting about the Citroen 2CV was his entire screen test. Jon Bentley had found him in the pages of Performance Car magazine and brought him in to try for Top Gear, and Clarkson delivered exactly the kind of opinionated hostility the show didn't know it needed. The program had been pulling a few hundred thousand viewers in its original format. By 2002, he'd reinvented it as a studio show; by 2013, Guinness confirmed it as the world's most widely watched factual TV programme. The secret was hiring someone who seemed to genuinely enjoy annoying people.
In the Spotlight
Getting fired from the BBC in 2015 for punching a producer over a hotel dinner that wasn't ready should have ended things. He settled the resulting racial discrimination lawsuit for £100,000 and walked straight into an Amazon deal. The real surprise came with Clarkson's Farm, which became Amazon Prime Video's most-watched original in the UK, with the Season 3 premiere pulling 5.1 million viewers in its first week. His 2022 column about Meghan Markle drew 25,000 complaints to Ipso, which ruled it sexist. He doesn't read like a man who's learned anything, and that's exactly why the audience keeps showing up.
Side Notes
His parents didn't sell cars. They sold Paddington Bear toys, having received a license from creator Michael Bond when Jeremy was 13. He was expelled from Repton School for 'making a nuisance of himself,' sharing classrooms with Adrian Newey, who became one of Formula One's most successful engineers. His great-great-great-grandfather John Kilner invented the Kilner jar. The man famous for making people angry spent his formative years surrounded by children's licensing deals, prep school hallways, and domestic preserving technology.