Jeremy Clarkson addresses facing gunfire after dinner with Richard Hammond and James May
Jeremy Clarkson has opened up about a terrifying experience he faced alongside former Top Gear co-stars James May and Richard Hammond
Jeremy Clarkson has spoken about what really happened when he, Richard Hammond, and James May travelled to Myanmar in 2014. Whilst the trio were still working on Top Gear,they filmed one of their specials in the region, this included going to the Shan state, home to one of the longest running civil wars in the world.
Jeremy’s comments about the Shan state were made in the context of him admitting that he had no nose for trouble in countries before massive conflicts take place.
This included being in Kyiv, Ukraine ahead of the Maidan riots in 2014, in Damascus, Syriabefore the Arab Spring, Dakar before the riots, and Mozambique before unrest there too.
During their time in the region, the various factions held a welcoming party for the trio, footage of which was included in the special aired in March 2014.
Now, Jeremy has gone into greater detail about what exactly happened that night, and how it ended for the three presenters, including how they tried to calm escalating tensions during the party.
Writing in the Times, Jeremy talked about how, at one point, he, Richard, and James performed a rendition of Bobby Brown by Frank Zappa, an action that he said went “against all the advice proffered by our increasingly nervous film crew”.
He added: “By 11pm, even I could sense that the factions were getting argumentative, so to distract them we decided to move from table to table, raising endless toasts with the Hankey Bannister and it sort of worked.
“In as much as I went to sleep in the back of my lorry that night without any gunshot wounds. There was a bit of sporadic gunfire as the party broke up but none of it went in me.
“The next morning, as I drove away, I do remember thinking that I’d spent the night in a tinderbox and that one day it was all going to end in tears.”
As well as having to perform in front of a crowd of armed military factions, Jeremy also suggested that the crowd may have been agitated before the gathering, not just because of their disagreements, but because they had taken a substance called yaba that he claims made users “extremely angry”.
However, it isn’t just foreign countries that Jeremy has been commenting on in recent weeks, but his own, with the former Grand Tour presenter and Clarkson’s Farm host fighting for the rights of farmers in the UK.
Following the Labour government’s inheritance tax U-turn, Jeremy has claimed that half of farmers will still be affected by a new higher tax threshold.
Writing in The Sun, the Diddly Squat Farm owner warned: “Let’s not forget that half of all farms in the UK will still be hit. They will still have to be sold when the farmer dies, and who will buy them?…So the new higher tax threshold will still destroy the countryside. It’ll affect the country’s ability to feed itself.
“And there are still thousands of farmers out there who are having to deal with the stress of knowing that they cannot pass their farm on to the only people who know how to run it. Their children.”
Jeremy warned that despite the fact Labour’s U-turn will take the stress off for some farmers, he said it wouldn’t do so for all. As a result, he said, the fight “goes on” to get farmers the support they need during challenging economic times.
