Steve Berry, a presenter on the BBC’s Top Gear for six years, can remember the moment he first rubbed up against Jeremy Clarkson’s ego and ambition. It was the mid-1990s and Berry had a new agent who suggested he should push to be the main presenter on the show.
“And I thought, ‘Yeah, OK, why not?’” recalled Berry, 60. “I just was constantly bombarding them with ideas and I got taken on one side by one of the directors, and he said: ‘You know Jeremy sits there and [he] times how much time he has on the programme’. I said: ‘You what?’ ‘He sits there with a stopwatch.’ I have no idea if this is true, but he says: ‘He’s worked out that in this season you have had this amount of screen time and if it were a title race you are only a few points off where he is.’ So the guy says: ‘So watch yourself.’ Next thing I know, I was dragged into [executive producer] Jon Bentley’s office. He said: ‘Sit down. You are never going to be the next Jeremy Clarkson, you know.’ I was basically being warned off.”
