On Christmas Eve, as my partner headed upstairs to continue his Spanish lessons, I settled down to wrap presents while watching the New Top Gear – or the ‘The Grand Tour’ to use its official name. In a section called ‘Conversation Street’, in no way a retread of a similar section on The Old Top Gear called rather more prosaically ‘The News’, Clarkson observed that the lightly-coloured interior of a new Volvo S90 was no place to safely enjoy a chocolate Magnum ice cream. Hammond then replied that he didn’t eat ice cream, as he was ‘straight’. This curious statement was met with deserved surprise and was developed via innuendo about men eating chocolate bars in ice cream cones, into an amusing test of which chocolate bar crumbles more onto the upholstery when eaten behind the wheel.
I woke the next morning, however, to learn from social media that I should have been offended. Deeply shocked. Outraged. Indeed, my failure to take offence at this deplorable on-screen homophobia – or #IceCreamGate as it soon became known – was a very real failure; perhaps in itself utterly offensive. Alongside the inevitable interventions of Stonewall and Peter Tatchell, a Facebook post from a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend caught my sanguine, shamefully unoffended eye. Anyone who continues to watch The Grand Tour, he said, doesn’t support gay people or their rights. Seemingly typed with the certainty that simply typing it made it so. Perhaps Amazon could steal a march on the BBC by introducing a kind of on-screen indication that an offensive thing is being said, ideally making clear which minorities ought to be outraged and why. That way, we won’t have to wake up to Twitter to wonder what on earth is going on.
I’ll be certain to bear all this in my self-hating mind come next Friday, and each week with each new episode. Perhaps Amazon sell birch twigs for self-flagellation. At least if they do, I’ll get free next day delivery.
Darren Adam is a presenter on LBC
Comments