Originally posted by xoggoth
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Ah, but he does not. One or two rise to the bait, occasionally, but the majority see the schoolboy desire to shock as exactly what it is and leave him alone to entertain his chosen constituency.
As to carrying on I think the most expensive fallout from the drunken rant will be the separation of Boy Jeremy from his beloved Top Gear brand, a brand he has dedicated a lot of time to developing, with great success.
For Top Gear is a global brand, made up of the name(brand identity), the format and the team. As I understand it, BBC Worldwide own the name and the format and Jeremy has pretty much burned his bridges there by the simple expedient of trashing the principle that an employee has a reasonable expectation of getting through the working day without being punched in the face.
I see there are moves afoot to rescue the TG Live shows by 'debranding' them. Clarkson Top Gear Live tour could run without BBC branding | Media | The Guardian. Heh.
Bridges having been burnt, where will JC, May and Hammond pop up next? An advertising-supported commercial channel may be unlikely to take the risk. A contrived, faked-up hatchet job on the Nissan Leaf or Tesla Roadster is unlikely to go down well if Nissan or Tesla happen to place large amounts of advertising … (I wonder how many of the signatories to the Bring Back Jezza petition were also scrap the licence fee and privatise the biased BBC types, not realising that it was precisely the licence fee that enabled the chums to be as irreverent as they were)
Netflix have been mentioned as a possibility for this valuable property. Maybe. The business model works but, outside the States, does Netflix have the penetration of BBC worldwide? I am sceptical.
And maybe some will be slightly less sanguine about ignoring the 'assault thing' …
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