Yeah, I think the rub for folks (especially how Clarkson portrayed it in the show, I know the council is accusing him of leaving important information out of the edit), is that landowners should of course be able to do what they want with their land. It's theirs! But they are thinking about today, tomorrow, a decade from now, maybe handing it over to their kids. It'll be fine.
The council has to think ahead decades, generations. How much further out will the cities have encroached in 100 years? Will us allowing something today make it easier for someone to bulldoze this wood in a generation or two? I'm not British, but that seems be my understanding.
I live in "rural" Colorado. Less than 10 minutes from town, and our house sits on 50 acres. It's been in my wife's family for 100 years. The folks across the road from us are developing their property and got permission to put nearly 300 homes on it, where up until now it's been one house, cattle pasture, and two wheat fields.
Yeah, I think the rub for folks (especially how Clarkson portrayed it in the show, I know the council is accusing him of leaving important information out of the edit), is that landowners should of course be able to do what they want with their land. It's theirs! But they are thinking about today, tomorrow, a decade from now, maybe handing it over to their kids. It'll be fine.
The council has to think ahead decades, generations. How much further out will the cities have encroached in 100 years? Will us allowing something today make it easier for someone to bulldoze this wood in a generation or two? I'm not British, but that seems be my understanding.
I live in "rural" Colorado. Less than 10 minutes from town, and our house sits on 50 acres. It's been in my wife's family for 100 years. The folks across the road from us are developing their property and got permission to put nearly 300 homes on it, where up until now it's been one house, cattle pasture, and two wheat fields.
We wish someone had told them no.
Yeah the UK is both less libertarian in general than the US and also obviously much smaller. Land is a far more finite resource here than the US, so our planning rules are always going to seem incredibly draconian to someone from middle-of-nowhere Nabraska where land is so abundant and empty no one gives much of a shit what you do with it. The land here has legacies going back centuries and millennia even to protect, so if it's hard for a guy like Clarkson to rock up in a tiny ancient village somewhere and turn it into a hub of industry, that's very much by design. Really the sticking point is his insistence on building his restaurant on his farm itself (which has none of the infrastructure to cope with the increased traffic as demonstrated by the chaos his shop caused) rather than just having the exact same idea of a place selling all his produce but putting it in the nearest major population centre, which being in the UK is probably within 20 miles.
The downside of this total inflexibility is of course that can end up shafting the people who live there since there's really no capacity to grow beyond what the town already is. We're in a particularly rough time for domestic farmers right now so business as usual isn't cutting it. Without substantial help a lot of them will just go out of business in the next few years.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Don't get me wrong, I'm not of the mindset of "it's my land, I can do whatever I want with it". I think there can and should be limits on land usage basically anywhere because the land isn't "yours", it just happens to belong to you right now. You'll be dead in a century and then what happens? Somebody else will be using the land, so it's important that the land not be ruined.
And yes, I was originally of the mindset that the restaurant should just go in the town. However, I think Clarkson has a good point about building the restaurant as to be overlooking the farm, which very possibly couldn't happen in the town. It's not just about eating at a restaurant, it's about seeing the place where the whole meal came from and appreciating it. And the real tipping point for me is the 50+ rural folks that would be employed by this venture. How many farms is that going to keep standing while the British government continues to try and unfuck the Brexit situation?
And then you've got assholes like the one skygazer dude who piped up in the meeting. I can guarantee he wants these surrounding farms to fail because it will mean a cheaper way he and others like him can buy up more of the space and monopolize it for themselves. That guy doesn't care about the local economy or the farmers, all he cares about is piling on more acres in his name to keep the riffraff out of "his" lovely countryside.
Yeah I think there's a lot of ego from everyone involved. It's very likely the council / town does have a vendetta against Clarkson because he's well, you know. It just so happens that the rules are the rules and when you make a nuisance of yourself the folks in charge are less likely to bend for you.
The sad thing is that he is right about farming in the UK. The Co-op was such a good idea I have a hard time believing it was his. They are drowning. Unfortunately that just isn't a problem for the planning council to solve, so I get it.
I'm interested what season 3 brings. I think he is just, so close, to learning something.
Nothing Clarkson proposed, I felt, actually threatened any natural beauty on a scale to oppose. Of course, I don't live there, and it's up to that council to make the decision, but the attitudes felt spiteful and not constructive. Like that one guy who said he likes to go outside at night and look at the sky. That's great, do you think a handful of security lights on a parking lot (where he does not live) is going to impact his nightly sky gazing?
Except the obvious trap here is that Clarkson whines and goes "but it's just one little parking lot!" and next thing you know, every farm has a parking lot with their glaring lights at night. And in a landscape where you can see for miles because it isn't fucked by advertisements and light pollution, now instead of all the nice houses you're seeing a bunch of ugly super-bright cheapass parking lot lights, drilling photons through your windows all through the night.
The situation is obviously two sets of spiteful assholes with one side getting to deal out all the actual spite but to be honest, I gotta side with the council almost down the whole line here. They aren't giving Clarkson an inch because if they do, he's jam money into that inch and the next thing you know he's putting up a waterpark with floodlights you can see over the horizon.
But I also really really really think if, say, James May was doing this then the story would be extremely different. Even May would probably get annoyed at how stiff-necked some of the rules are, but he would at least start by trying to do things the right way and dealing with the council civilly instead of just ramming ideas through via loopholes. He wouldn't be bewildered at why he's getting fought at every turn because he would bother to understand that he decided to move into an area that looks a certain way and maybe taking a bulldozer to everything on whim isn't the way to handle things.
I'm pretty far-left libby liberal, but even I think there's a line somewhere though where you need to let people make decisions about their own property
I dunno; the whole thing is a bid odd, like I'm super super pro-national parks and conservation, but the UK seems to want this weird middle-ground where 'beauty' is defined as 'looks like it did in the 1920s' and needs to be maintained, but isn't actually willing to, you know, just eminent domain and pay for the land to keep it that way (or compensate farmers for the costs of doing things that way versus what the rest of the world is doing). Even in the US it's becoming hard to maintain a single-family (non-industrial size) farm, but the UK is really an entirely different level with these outstanding beauty areas.
To me that's really where I agree with Clarkson; some of it is obviously him being stupid (e.g. selling pineapples in the farm shop), but I do agree with the general idea that the idea should be a council working with you to arrive at a mutually beneficial final results where you can be successful while still maintaining as much of the landscape as possible; the 'well you can have a dirt lot but you can't pave it' kind of attitude is just uselessly argumentative and doesn't really achieve either purpose (now it's less safe AND looks like shit).
Getting through the end of Clarkson's Farm and a couple points.
The first is that I'm quite astonished that Clarkson formed a coop with the other local farmers. That hews dangerously close to socialism, far moreso that I would've ever thought him capable especially given his pigheaded nature.
I really wonder with Clarkson where his actual opinions lie and what's just a character he's playing; because while it seems like a lot of this is his pigheaded nature, on the other hand he's spent two decades across multiple shows now (all of which he's really led) being fully willing to have himself be portrayed as the pigheaded incompetent buffoon. Maybe he's willing to betray his actual beliefs to have them portrayed that way for $, but I dunno
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
The car park is the thing that annoyed me the most. Get the people on Clarkson's land, off the side of the road. Very simple, and it's not like Clarkson wanted tarmac there, just a large parking area to accommodate the cars, with gravel. Very simple, see it all the time in Texas in small towns with antique shops and BBQ joints, and if he ever sold or closed the shop you scoop up the rocks and crops can grow. But nope, that's not good enough for the Council, because like I said before, they hate the kind of people Jeremy was bringing near the town, don't want Vicky Pollard to be givin' 'em evils.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
The car park is the thing that annoyed me the most. Get the people on Clarkson's land, off the side of the road. Very simple, and it's not like Clarkson wanted tarmac there, just a large parking area to accommodate the cars, with gravel. Very simple, see it all the time in Texas in small towns with antique shops and BBQ joints, and if he ever sold or closed the shop you scoop up the rocks and crops can grow. But nope, that's not good enough for the Council, because like I said before, they hate the kind of people Jeremy was bringing near the town, don't want Vicky Pollard to be givin' 'em evils.
If Jeremy wasn't a giant asshole though he probably could have worked with the council to get something though, is the thing. While I don't necessarily agree with what the council did, Jeremy is used to getting things his way on principle and I can see them taking a stand against that personally. I'd do it.
Also as someone from a climate similar to the UK, large gravel lots are a giant pain to maintain in inclimit weather with any kind of traffic. Jeremy would be doing constant maintence. Better than a dirt lot like from the first season, but still a large project.
The car park is the thing that annoyed me the most. Get the people on Clarkson's land, off the side of the road. Very simple, and it's not like Clarkson wanted tarmac there, just a large parking area to accommodate the cars, with gravel. Very simple, see it all the time in Texas in small towns with antique shops and BBQ joints, and if he ever sold or closed the shop you scoop up the rocks and crops can grow. But nope, that's not good enough for the Council, because like I said before, they hate the kind of people Jeremy was bringing near the town, don't want Vicky Pollard to be givin' 'em evils.
If Jeremy wasn't a giant asshole though he probably could have worked with the council to get something though, is the thing. While I don't necessarily agree with what the council did, Jeremy is used to getting things his way on principle and I can see them taking a stand against that personally. I'd do it.
Also as someone from a climate similar to the UK, large gravel lots are a giant pain to maintain in inclimit weather with any kind of traffic. Jeremy would be doing constant maintence. Better than a dirt lot like from the first season, but still a large project.
he gave them his seed, what more do you want?
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited March 2023
I could believe that council was mostly reasonable people except a) they blocked the restaurant in the clear knowledge that actual working farmers would directly suffer and b) the council decided to go completely out of its fucking way to shit on Clarkson and the community following the decision. This is not a group of reasonable people, this is a bunch of wealthy stuck-up assholes trying to "teach a lesson" to Clarkson by blocking off the road for miles to deliberately cause traffic issues and blocking a farm track that would've been denied no other farmer. Even just semi-reasonable people would've invested at least a scrap of their own time to go over compromises where the restaurant happens but doesn't trip over the issues they have. Skygazer McDouche in particular could look on the internet and find out in ten seconds that things like "dark sky" lighting exists and they're just particular kinds of light fixtures that keep light from blasting across the fields and through your front window.
Some of these folks have probably hated Clarkson for moving into the area since long before any incident with blowing up his house or anything like that. He's just some TV celebrity (which they say outright in one meeting) to them and didn't get his money the right way, i.e. inheriting it from wealthy parents who got it by ripping off the working class. His buildings aren't in keeping with the town's rustic aesthetic. He's not even from 'round here!
Completely agree. Clarkson does himself little favor but a and b show the true colors.
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ButtersA glass of some milksRegistered Userregular
Just watched the episode where it got denied and I couldn't help but wonder if the opening restaurants in the UK is anything like the US. The exact statistics are murky, but around half of all new restaurants don't last 5 years in the US and good chunk of those that fail do so within the first year. It certainly wasn't presented in the episode, but reality TV is still heavily edited and I do wonder if anyone mentioned or voted against Jeremy because they doubted his restaurant would succeed anyway.
I also had to wonder how the guy complaining about cheaper EU pork voted on Brexit.
Just an aside, but I'm pretty sure my biggest laugh of the show was Jeremy's griping about Brexit. I can't remember what it was that was broken but I laughed so hard the way he said "If it wasn't for fucking brexit I could just call a Pole who would get here," (Looks at watch) "now and fix the damn thing. Actually, I wouldn't have to because the Pole would have installed it correctly the first time."
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Just watched the episode where it got denied and I couldn't help but wonder if the opening restaurants in the UK is anything like the US. The exact statistics are murky, but around half of all new restaurants don't last 5 years in the US and good chunk of those that fail do so within the first year. It certainly wasn't presented in the episode, but reality TV is still heavily edited and I do wonder if anyone mentioned or voted against Jeremy because they doubted his restaurant would succeed anyway.
I also had to wonder how the guy complaining about cheaper EU pork voted on Brexit.
Even Clarkson is aware of the failure rate of new restaurants being high (he quotes 80%) but here's the rub: Clarkson doesn't need to care if the restaurant makes him any actual money. With the other farmers factored in, as long as the restaurant does a little better than break-even and the other farmers involved get a good payout from the enterprise, then the restaurant is a success. Clarkson has way too much money to care about whether the place is actually profitable enough to extract cash from it to retire on or anything like that.
As for the Brexit vote, polling indicates that farmers moderately favored Brexit so probably at least half of those people getting desperate for help voted for Brexit. I suspect in particular that the farmer complaining about pork prices supported Brexit because, after all, his stated problem was that EU pork was too cheap, not that Brexit had fucked up their market. But the show runners wisely chose to not make the issue about Brexit and just about struggling farmers, which is definitely important because thanks to Brexit the UK is especially fucked if it lets its farms collapse. The citizens of the UK will face a rather sudden and stark reminder of their vulnerabilities as an island nation if they lot a critical mass of farms go under as not only do they lose all that local food, they will also lose all that knowledge. As Clarkson is finding out being a good farmer is a lifetime of experience, not the sort of thing where you can just wing it and do alright through perseverance and a bit of luck.
Ninja Snarl P on
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ButtersA glass of some milksRegistered Userregular
He certainly doesn't need the money and his first meeting with locals that was mentioned by them, but I believe Clarkson's response was something like "The farm needs to be profitable." Jezza is going to do Jezza shit like buy an oversized Lamborghini tractor and slice half his thumb off, but that doesn't mean he'd abide a restaurant that turns into a money pit. That's how rich people go broke and he knows that.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I think it's also likely that, with the coop on board now, the restaurant turning some kind of profit is important to his neighbors even if he doesn't need the money. A profitable restaurant means a sustainable income for them instead of a one-shot long-shot. The place might be his idea, but he openly acknowledges that the results don't belong to him and it took a slew of people for the restaurant to actually happen.
I think it's also likely that, with the coop on board now, the restaurant turning some kind of profit is important to his neighbors even if he doesn't need the money. A profitable restaurant means a sustainable income for them instead of a one-shot long-shot. The place might be his idea, but he openly acknowledges that the results don't belong to him and it took a slew of people for the restaurant to actually happen.
I can't help but wonder if trying to open a "coop" farmers shop in the town might not have done better.
Doesn't seem like the town itself has much in the way of any available property already zoned for commercial use. Just a quick search on a couple commercial property sites shows that there's like 3 places for sale, 2 of them are mixed use and are almost as small as the slapdash restaurant he ended up opening and the other is an office. And these are both over in nearby Chipping Norton, where it seems some kind of co-op franchise?
Frankly the entire thing struck me as "Notable Old Wanker Jeremy Clarkson Upset At Being Treated As Old Wanker"
But I also feel like that should be the headline of almost all Clarkson controversies for years now.
Shockingly it turns out that if you get a reputation as an entitled jackass it tends to follow you.
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
edited May 2023
Captain Slow's cooking show S2 is now up on Prime. I will say from the first 10 minutes of episode 1, it looks like they did the opposite of what they should have and included more production staff and more staff interjections.
edit: the staff aren't that bad in the first episode, not as obstructive as it first seemed. And that Croque Monsieur looked fantastic, gonna try that with a pinch of a kimchi base for a real cheesy spicy treat.
That looks like a lot of fun. It also reminds me I never finished watching the last Grand Tour. Accidentally fell asleep watching it and never got back to it. Not for lack of interest or entertainment. I just plain forgot about it.
The amount of road rage James spread with his little shitbox should require him to be fined and face jail time.
The Mitsuoka is hella classy.
And it probably wasn’t even illegal, maybe on the motorway. There are only a few areas in Europe with minimum speeds, but it’s a small fine for going too slow, and none of the countries they were in do day fines.
Was there a gag that explains why they kept switching to someone elses hands showing the route they were planning to take at the start of the special? Seems like they kept switching to a clip of a ladies hand pointing at the map.
Was there a gag that explains why they kept switching to someone elses hands showing the route they were planning to take at the start of the special? Seems like they kept switching to a clip of a ladies hand pointing at the map.
Not that I know of. It did seem the sort of joke they'd come back to though, I wonder if it got lost in the edit or something.
Was there a gag that explains why they kept switching to someone elses hands showing the route they were planning to take at the start of the special? Seems like they kept switching to a clip of a ladies hand pointing at the map.
I think that just is one of those things they clearly thought would be funny at the time.
My daughter, 5, even commented 'He has pretty pink nails!'
She then asked for me to paint her nails, which I did.
Was there a gag that explains why they kept switching to someone elses hands showing the route they were planning to take at the start of the special? Seems like they kept switching to a clip of a ladies hand pointing at the map.
Probably came about after a long argument with the gang who didn't want to re-shoot the first person map scene.
James was complaining non stop about having to do those on his cooking show.
That was probably my favourite one of them since the Vietnam tour back in the day, which I watched late one night and the next morning my parents asked what I'd been laughing at for so long
The cinematography was stellar - I went "Ooo" at least three times
These shows are probably the best way to show off a 4k television
That was probably my favourite one of them since the Vietnam tour back in the day, which I watched late one night and the next morning my parents asked what I'd been laughing at for so long
The cinematography was stellar - I went "Ooo" at least three times
These shows are probably the best way to show off a 4k television
fuck that last location they went to was fucking beautiful.
I'm sure James would agree that it was even better in person.
The BBC has reached “an agreement” with Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff after he was involved in a crash while filming Top Gear, the corporation has said.
The former England cricket captain, 45, appeared with facial injuries in public for the first time in September, nine months after he was taken to hospital after he was hurt while filming the BBC motoring show at its test track at Dunsfold Aerodrome last December.
The Sun reported on Saturday that the settlement is worth £9m and both Flintoff and the BBC are “satisfied” with the agreement.
A BBC Studios spokesperson said: “BBC Studios has reached an agreement with Freddie that we believe supports his continued rehabilitation, return to work and future plans.
“We have sincerely apologised to Freddie and will continue to support him with his recovery.”
BBC Studios is a commercial company which does not use BBC licence fee income.
Article includes a photo of Flintoff when he appeared in public in September. His facial injuries are readily apparent.
TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
Wow I just completely tuned out TG proper after Leblanc left, didn't even know about this, looks like the guy really got hurt looking at those photos. I guess when the three musketeers left they took all the proper safety crew too.
Accidents happen, I doubt it had anything to do with lack of safety crew. The settlement does make me wonder what sort of liability there was though. It was clearly a very bad accident though.
TG after Leblanc left and they went to the line-up of Flintoff, McGuinness, and Harris was easily the best it had been since the days of Clarkson, Hammond, and May. Not to say it was as good as but the show was back to good watchable fun.
Wow I just completely tuned out TG proper after Leblanc left, didn't even know about this, looks like the guy really got hurt looking at those photos. I guess when the three musketeers left they took all the proper safety crew too.
Yeah the last couple series did seem to be unnecessarily dangerous in places, plus Flintoff isn't exactly the safety conscious type.
Edit: Did Hammond ever get a settlement for any of his numerous crashes?
DanHibiki on
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ButtersA glass of some milksRegistered Userregular
Wow I just completely tuned out TG proper after Leblanc left, didn't even know about this, looks like the guy really got hurt looking at those photos. I guess when the three musketeers left they took all the proper safety crew too.
Yeah the last couple series did seem to be unnecessarily dangerous in places, plus Flintoff isn't exactly the safety conscious type.
Edit: Did Hammond ever get a settlement for any of his numerous crashes?
James had a pretty bad accident in Gran Tour as well in a stunt that I would argue was much more dangerous by design than Hammond's. Whatever those guys took with them it wasn't higher safety standards.
Wow I just completely tuned out TG proper after Leblanc left, didn't even know about this, looks like the guy really got hurt looking at those photos. I guess when the three musketeers left they took all the proper safety crew too.
Yeah the last couple series did seem to be unnecessarily dangerous in places, plus Flintoff isn't exactly the safety conscious type.
Edit: Did Hammond ever get a settlement for any of his numerous crashes?
James had a pretty bad accident in Gran Tour as well in a stunt that I would argue was much more dangerous by design than Hammond's. Whatever those guys took with them it wasn't higher safety standards.
James had a couple of bad ones in the TG days, the Middle East special where the tow rope knocked him down and split his head open on a rock comes to mind. James and Richard have both come off horses, etc etc...
Wow I just completely tuned out TG proper after Leblanc left, didn't even know about this, looks like the guy really got hurt looking at those photos. I guess when the three musketeers left they took all the proper safety crew too.
Yeah the last couple series did seem to be unnecessarily dangerous in places, plus Flintoff isn't exactly the safety conscious type.
Edit: Did Hammond ever get a settlement for any of his numerous crashes?
James had a pretty bad accident in Gran Tour as well in a stunt that I would argue was much more dangerous by design than Hammond's. Whatever those guys took with them it wasn't higher safety standards.
James had a couple of bad ones in the TG days, the Middle East special where the tow rope knocked him down and split his head open on a rock comes to mind. James and Richard have both come off horses, etc etc...
The last GT special o think when they race down th dark tunnel with periodic lights and have to stop in time led to one of the most obvious crashes when James slams into the wall at the end.
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The council has to think ahead decades, generations. How much further out will the cities have encroached in 100 years? Will us allowing something today make it easier for someone to bulldoze this wood in a generation or two? I'm not British, but that seems be my understanding.
I live in "rural" Colorado. Less than 10 minutes from town, and our house sits on 50 acres. It's been in my wife's family for 100 years. The folks across the road from us are developing their property and got permission to put nearly 300 homes on it, where up until now it's been one house, cattle pasture, and two wheat fields.
We wish someone had told them no.
Yeah the UK is both less libertarian in general than the US and also obviously much smaller. Land is a far more finite resource here than the US, so our planning rules are always going to seem incredibly draconian to someone from middle-of-nowhere Nabraska where land is so abundant and empty no one gives much of a shit what you do with it. The land here has legacies going back centuries and millennia even to protect, so if it's hard for a guy like Clarkson to rock up in a tiny ancient village somewhere and turn it into a hub of industry, that's very much by design. Really the sticking point is his insistence on building his restaurant on his farm itself (which has none of the infrastructure to cope with the increased traffic as demonstrated by the chaos his shop caused) rather than just having the exact same idea of a place selling all his produce but putting it in the nearest major population centre, which being in the UK is probably within 20 miles.
The downside of this total inflexibility is of course that can end up shafting the people who live there since there's really no capacity to grow beyond what the town already is. We're in a particularly rough time for domestic farmers right now so business as usual isn't cutting it. Without substantial help a lot of them will just go out of business in the next few years.
And yes, I was originally of the mindset that the restaurant should just go in the town. However, I think Clarkson has a good point about building the restaurant as to be overlooking the farm, which very possibly couldn't happen in the town. It's not just about eating at a restaurant, it's about seeing the place where the whole meal came from and appreciating it. And the real tipping point for me is the 50+ rural folks that would be employed by this venture. How many farms is that going to keep standing while the British government continues to try and unfuck the Brexit situation?
And then you've got assholes like the one skygazer dude who piped up in the meeting. I can guarantee he wants these surrounding farms to fail because it will mean a cheaper way he and others like him can buy up more of the space and monopolize it for themselves. That guy doesn't care about the local economy or the farmers, all he cares about is piling on more acres in his name to keep the riffraff out of "his" lovely countryside.
The sad thing is that he is right about farming in the UK. The Co-op was such a good idea I have a hard time believing it was his. They are drowning. Unfortunately that just isn't a problem for the planning council to solve, so I get it.
I'm interested what season 3 brings. I think he is just, so close, to learning something.
I'm pretty far-left libby liberal, but even I think there's a line somewhere though where you need to let people make decisions about their own property
I dunno; the whole thing is a bid odd, like I'm super super pro-national parks and conservation, but the UK seems to want this weird middle-ground where 'beauty' is defined as 'looks like it did in the 1920s' and needs to be maintained, but isn't actually willing to, you know, just eminent domain and pay for the land to keep it that way (or compensate farmers for the costs of doing things that way versus what the rest of the world is doing). Even in the US it's becoming hard to maintain a single-family (non-industrial size) farm, but the UK is really an entirely different level with these outstanding beauty areas.
To me that's really where I agree with Clarkson; some of it is obviously him being stupid (e.g. selling pineapples in the farm shop), but I do agree with the general idea that the idea should be a council working with you to arrive at a mutually beneficial final results where you can be successful while still maintaining as much of the landscape as possible; the 'well you can have a dirt lot but you can't pave it' kind of attitude is just uselessly argumentative and doesn't really achieve either purpose (now it's less safe AND looks like shit).
I really wonder with Clarkson where his actual opinions lie and what's just a character he's playing; because while it seems like a lot of this is his pigheaded nature, on the other hand he's spent two decades across multiple shows now (all of which he's really led) being fully willing to have himself be portrayed as the pigheaded incompetent buffoon. Maybe he's willing to betray his actual beliefs to have them portrayed that way for $, but I dunno
If Jeremy wasn't a giant asshole though he probably could have worked with the council to get something though, is the thing. While I don't necessarily agree with what the council did, Jeremy is used to getting things his way on principle and I can see them taking a stand against that personally. I'd do it.
Also as someone from a climate similar to the UK, large gravel lots are a giant pain to maintain in inclimit weather with any kind of traffic. Jeremy would be doing constant maintence. Better than a dirt lot like from the first season, but still a large project.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
he gave them his seed, what more do you want?
Some of these folks have probably hated Clarkson for moving into the area since long before any incident with blowing up his house or anything like that. He's just some TV celebrity (which they say outright in one meeting) to them and didn't get his money the right way, i.e. inheriting it from wealthy parents who got it by ripping off the working class. His buildings aren't in keeping with the town's rustic aesthetic. He's not even from 'round here!
I also had to wonder how the guy complaining about cheaper EU pork voted on Brexit.
Even Clarkson is aware of the failure rate of new restaurants being high (he quotes 80%) but here's the rub: Clarkson doesn't need to care if the restaurant makes him any actual money. With the other farmers factored in, as long as the restaurant does a little better than break-even and the other farmers involved get a good payout from the enterprise, then the restaurant is a success. Clarkson has way too much money to care about whether the place is actually profitable enough to extract cash from it to retire on or anything like that.
As for the Brexit vote, polling indicates that farmers moderately favored Brexit so probably at least half of those people getting desperate for help voted for Brexit. I suspect in particular that the farmer complaining about pork prices supported Brexit because, after all, his stated problem was that EU pork was too cheap, not that Brexit had fucked up their market. But the show runners wisely chose to not make the issue about Brexit and just about struggling farmers, which is definitely important because thanks to Brexit the UK is especially fucked if it lets its farms collapse. The citizens of the UK will face a rather sudden and stark reminder of their vulnerabilities as an island nation if they lot a critical mass of farms go under as not only do they lose all that local food, they will also lose all that knowledge. As Clarkson is finding out being a good farmer is a lifetime of experience, not the sort of thing where you can just wing it and do alright through perseverance and a bit of luck.
I can't help but wonder if trying to open a "coop" farmers shop in the town might not have done better.
But I also feel like that should be the headline of almost all Clarkson controversies for years now.
Shockingly it turns out that if you get a reputation as an entitled jackass it tends to follow you.
edit: the staff aren't that bad in the first episode, not as obstructive as it first seemed. And that Croque Monsieur looked fantastic, gonna try that with a pinch of a kimchi base for a real cheesy spicy treat.
Edit: they could have taken a minute or two to remove all the times James very audibly sucks air in at the end of each sentence.
The Mitsuoka is hella classy.
James
Not that I know of. It did seem the sort of joke they'd come back to though, I wonder if it got lost in the edit or something.
I think that just is one of those things they clearly thought would be funny at the time.
My daughter, 5, even commented 'He has pretty pink nails!'
She then asked for me to paint her nails, which I did.
Probably came about after a long argument with the gang who didn't want to re-shoot the first person map scene.
James was complaining non stop about having to do those on his cooking show.
The cinematography was stellar - I went "Ooo" at least three times
These shows are probably the best way to show off a 4k television
fuck that last location they went to was fucking beautiful.
I'm sure James would agree that it was even better in person.
Article includes a photo of Flintoff when he appeared in public in September. His facial injuries are readily apparent.
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TG after Leblanc left and they went to the line-up of Flintoff, McGuinness, and Harris was easily the best it had been since the days of Clarkson, Hammond, and May. Not to say it was as good as but the show was back to good watchable fun.
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Yeah the last couple series did seem to be unnecessarily dangerous in places, plus Flintoff isn't exactly the safety conscious type.
Edit: Did Hammond ever get a settlement for any of his numerous crashes?
James had a pretty bad accident in Gran Tour as well in a stunt that I would argue was much more dangerous by design than Hammond's. Whatever those guys took with them it wasn't higher safety standards.
James had a couple of bad ones in the TG days, the Middle East special where the tow rope knocked him down and split his head open on a rock comes to mind. James and Richard have both come off horses, etc etc...
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The last GT special o think when they race down th dark tunnel with periodic lights and have to stop in time led to one of the most obvious crashes when James slams into the wall at the end.