The British Broadcasting Corporation, which supported a TV host who made racist anti-Indian jibes, has now suspended him over a fight he had with a producer.
BBC announced on Tuesday that Jeremy Clarkson, the host of Top Gear programme, was suspended “following a fracas” with a producer.
The terse statement said “no one else has been suspended” and that Top Gear, a show about motoring, will not be aired Sunday. BBC gave no further details but the Guardian reported that Clarkson threw “a punch at a male producer” during a filming last week.
Besides racist taunts against Indians, Clarkson’s history includes using ugly terms for people of African descent and for Southeast Asians. He also made offensive jokes about Mexicans and Chinese drowning-victims on BBC broadcasts.
All along, BBC had not taken any action against him for racist slur.
In a show broadcast in 2011, he installed a toilet in the trunk of a Jaguar and drove around slums where he took off his pants in public, claiming to show Indians how to press pants with a device that he said he used to make chapatis.
The Indian programme used railway carriages in a segment to display obscenities. A banner reading, “Eat English Muffins,” was strung across the carriages in a such a way that when the carriages separated an obscenity showed up. The other, “The United Kingdom promotes BRITISH IT FOR YOUR COMPANY” turned into a jibe about excreta.
The Daily Mail reported that Indian diplomats had agreed to making the programme in India after its produces wrote to them that it would be a “light-hearted road trip”.
