Off With Their Heads

[Jeremy Clarkson put his foot in it on BBC1's The One Show by calling for striking public sector workers to be taken outside and shot in front of their families]

 If Jeremy Clarkson had called for strikers to be beheaded, rather than shot in front of their families, he would have provided a perfect link to my story of how I nearly decapitated him. During the first series of Robot Wars, an errant blade flew off a robot at hundreds of miles an hour and embedded itself in a concrete wall directly behind Clarkson’s enormous head. The slow motion replay showed it missed his scalp by inches.

Had my robot been a little more accurate, there would have been nothing for 21,000 people to complain about to the BBC last week. Nor would the massed ranks of ramblers, health and safety executives, lorry drivers, Mexicans, families of train suicides and other Clarkson targets have had to suffer his ill-considered outbursts over the years. So to them I sincerely apologise. Given another chance, I will try harder next time. And I’ll make sure his family is watching.

The argument over public service pensions has produced lots of misinformed rants. If I hear one more outraged private sector employee complaining that they resent paying for the gold-plated rewards of our nurses and teachers I shall scream. Most people in the private sector, which, statistically, is most people, don’t understand the issues, because the majority of them have never made a pension contribution in their life. They’ve paid their national insurance contributions, of course, but that isn’t the point. This is about saving for your retirement, which most people have never bothered to do. Now it’s catching up with them and they’re looking for a scapegoat.

Here are a few statistics to get your Weetabix spluttering. 29 million people make up Britain’s workforce. Of these, only 6 million work in the “public sector”. 87% of these have been doggedly paying some of their salary into a pension scheme. Their employer has been contributing too: it’s in their contract of employment. Now they’re being asked to pay more and get less. Their employer is reneging on the deal. So they’re cross. I would be too.

Why there’s such a fuss is because that employer is me and most of you, and all the public sector workers themselves: all of us are taxpayers.

Of the 23 million workers not in the public sector, just 3 million or so pay some of their wages into a pension scheme to which the employer also contributes. These are good employers that care about their staff, like the employers in the public sector. Most companies don’t bother anymore. They treat their workers as temporary residents in the business, generating wealth for the owners in good times, before being thrown onto the scrapheap of redundancy when times are tough or when they are too old to continue. It’s the way the world was in Victorian times and it’s become the norm in our 21st century.

6 million other people, including self-employed workers like Jeremy Clarkson, are building a safety net with a personal pension scheme. Anyone over the age of 21 would be mad not to contribute something to one, however little they earn, but very few do. My children refuse to, much to my frustration. In this consumerist world, saving for retirement is considered a pointless dilution of scarce funds. Most people would rather have an iPhone 4S now than worry about the electricity bill in their old age.

Well under half the people in the private sector have no pension at all, preferring to spend all their income now with no thought to the future. It is many of these who are now complaining about the nurses and teachers.

They’ll be the ones badgering for an increase in the old age pension when they’re 70. And, without consideration for those who’ll be paying tax on income from their private and public sector pensions till they die, some of these people will selfishly carry on living till they’re 110. Just imagine what Jeremy Clarkson will be saying about them then.

Death of Jeremy Clarkson (almost)

Lord Goldsmith's proposal last week that the words of our national anthem should be changed to make it more “inclusive” has led to a spate of suggestions for national anthem replacements on the Downing Street e-petition website.

Although there is predictable support for Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem there are some radical proposals, including a spirited campaign for the theme from The Archers. At least we’ll all remember the words: “Rum te tum te tum te dum”.

The e-petition site is supposed to be a way of connecting our government with its electorate. I see that a few thousand people have signed an e-petition calling for the upgrading of the A1 north of Morpeth and a few more want the widening of the Western by-pass.

However you question the site’s value to the democratic process when you see that the sixth most popular proposal is “Make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister”. Why 26,000 people would waste their time voting for a man who single-handedly killed the jeans industry is beyond me.

Ten years ago, I very nearly killed Jeremy Clarkson. I’d created a television series called Robot Wars and Jeremy was the first presenter.

I knew the robots were dangerous. They had real axes, saws and other weapons of mass destruction and they were given names like “Panic Attack”, ”Razer” (sic!), and “Chaos”. Because members of the public had built them from second hand wheelchair motors and radio-controlled toy cars, they were notoriously unreliable. So, in order to stop stray robots running into the audience, we put up some Perspex screens round the stage.

I asked Jeremy to host the first series because his support for motorized metal mayhem was pretty close to the Robot Wars ethos. So he stood high above the carnage on a rostrum, making facetious comments about the little boxes below, which had taken grown men months to build, and less than two minutes to destroy.

The first day of shooting went fairly well, despite the fact that a lot of the robots had technical problems and we had to pull them onto the stage with fishing wire.

The second morning, just as we were getting into our stride, disaster struck. A robot being driven by a tearful eight year old was being carefully carved into tiny pieces by one of the house robots. Suddenly a circular metal blade (from a robot appropriately called “Dead Metal”) flew into the air at more than 200 miles an hour and embedded itself deep in a solid concrete wall just behind where Jeremy was standing.

When we studied the recording in slow motion, we found that the blade, rotating at a more than 6000 rpm, had missed the Clarkson scalp by less than two inches. With only a slight adjustment to the trajectory, the person now being proposed as our country’s leader would have been decapitated.

Of course within minutes the entire show had been shut down and it took a week for us to find enough bulletproof Perspex to seal off the auditorium from danger. The rest is history, except that Jeremy wisely decided his life was more valuable than our second series, and went back to abusing Skodas.

Clarkson’s profile has grown over the years, but somehow I can’t see his fan club getting far with their campaign. In fact, I doubt that Downing Street takes any notice of its e-petition site at all, certainly not enough to listen to a few thousand people trying to get the North East a decent motorway to link it with the rest of the world.

But here’s a solution. Instead of wasting valuable time on the government’s site, people who want us to have a road infrastructure for the 21st century might do a lot worse than to send a petition to Jeremy Clarkson himself. After all, with six million adoring Top Gear fans, he’s probably got more clout than the real prime minister.