Much like doctors would hate being asked about ailments while trying to enjoy dinner with friends, Jeremy Clarkson absolutely hates being asked questions by those wanting advice on which car they should buy.
In his latest column for The Sun, Jeremy Clarkson has revealed his techniques for dealing with such questions; “Whenever someone leans across a dinner table and asks me what car they should buy, I always say a Ferrari F40.”
“Then they look a bit exasperated and explain they need something sensible,” he explains. “So I say a 1986 Lada Riva shooting brake. This normally does the trick and they go back to talking about something that is more interesting, such as accountancy or ornithology.”
However, at a dinner party he attended last week, a man sitting opposite was really quite insistent. “He didn’t want a Ferrari F40 or a 1986 Lada Riva shooting brake and demanded that I came up with another alternative,” Clarkson says. “A Bugatti EB 110, I said, hoping that would shut him up. But it didn’t.”
“Come on,” he said, “I’m being serious.” So I told him to buy a Cadillac Escalade. – Jeremy Clarkson
But Clarkson wasn’t finished with him yet. “I asked him ‘are you a racist?’ And, before he could answer, ‘Is your wife extremely fat?’ These are the things that matter when it comes to choosing a car,” Clarkson suggests. And he didn’t stop there. “If your children are prone to explosive car sickness, you don’t want cloth seats. And if you have only one arm, you don’t want a flappy paddle gearbox.”
Clarkson reveals he ended up going to town on Mr Persistent, and asked Will you be having sex on the back seat with your secretary? Before the man had a chance to answer, Clarkson advised that the best car he could possibly buy for that purpose was a Vauxhall Astra van.
“It turned out, however, that he actually wanted an Audi Q5,” Clarkson says. “I told him to buy the Q5 and started talking to the woman on my right.”
The problem is, her question was exactly the same.