More than 20,000 individuals have signed a petition requesting that ITV continue to host with Jeremy Clarkson. Who Would Like To Be Rich?
The 62-year-old former Top Gear host received harsh criticism last month for writing in a widely panned editorial for The Sun that he “hated” the Duchess of Sussex on a “cellular level.”
After receiving criticism for his remarks, including from his own daughter Emily Clarkson, Variety claimed that the streaming service had opted to “break ties” with the Grand Tour host.
The head of ITV, Carlyn McCall, stressed that Clarkson’s views were ‘in no way endorsed by ITV’, while the network’s boss Kevin Lygo added: ‘I would say what he writes in a newspaper column… We have no control over what he says.’
Warwick Davis, who starred in the Harry Potter films and presented the ITV game series Celebrity Squares and Tenable, is among the front-runners to succeed Clarkson, with odds of 8/1.
Fans have started a petition asking Clarkson to stay on the show as a result of this, though.
‘If people make mistakes and then apologise for them, we should give them the benefit of the doubt, not seek to destroy their livelihoods and turn them into social pariahs,” the petition on Change.org said.
‘Finally, we would ask you to bear in mind the price Jeremy Clarkson has already paid for his remarks. Amazon has indicated it will not commission any more seasons of Clarkson’s Farm or The Grand Tour and his Sun column has not appeared in the newspaper again, suggesting he has lost that, too. Is he to be punished even further by losing his only other main source of income? The punishment is already completely disproportionate to the crime, without you compounding his humiliation.’
Meanwhile, Prince Harry and Meghan shared their dissatisfaction over Clarkson’s apology, slamming his ‘pattern of spreading hate rhetoric.’
In a statement, they said: ‘On December 25, 2022, Mr Clarkson wrote solely to Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex.
They continued: ‘While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories, and misogyny.
‘Unless each of his other pieces were also written “in a hurry”, as he states, it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.’