Jeremy Clarkson

Print gave him the voice and television gave him the car. Born in Doncaster in 1960, Clarkson came to broadcasting out of journalism and has never stopped writing columns alongside the presenting. The delivery is a columnist's, built on overstatement, and it works because the overstatement is usually pinned to a real technical point that a duller presenter would have buried.

Top Gear had existed as a sober motoring magazine programme since the 1970s. The version he fronted from 2002 with Richard Hammond and James May threw out the consumer advice and rebuilt the show around three middle-aged men, an argument, and something on fire. It travelled so well that he is credited as a creator on Top Gear France, and in 2006 the British public ranked him nineteenth in ITV's poll of television's fifty greatest stars. His run there ended in 2015. The Grand Tour, the same trio with a larger budget, ran from 2016 to 2024.

Since then he has diversified rather than mellowed. He has hosted Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? since 2018, a job that suits a man who can be cruel and generous inside the same sentence, and he has starred in Clarkson's Farm since 2021.

That last one is the surprise, and probably the best thing he has done. The format puts him somewhere he cannot bluster his way out of, where the weather, the paperwork and the livestock all get a vote, and being visibly out of his depth turns out to suit him better than being the loudest man in a supercar.