No one can claim that Top Gear is unpopular; on the contrary, BBC’s televised car show is broadcasted in no less than 170 countries (according to Wikipedia)! It generates a ton of income and of course, its hosts are paid handsomely. To no one’s surprise, Jeremy Clarkson has the highest paycheck pocketing a total of £2.14 million (that’s a not-too-shabby US$3.27 million) last year.

Making a whole lot of money, even in this unpredictable economy, is admirable, even if it occasionally makes you unpopular. After all, as they say, you can judge a man by his enemies, right?

In this case, it would be hard to do so, as if you throw a stone in any of those 170 countries, there is a good chance it will land on the head of someone Clarkson has enraged with his comments.

Apart from the December 2011 Christmas show that we told you about earlier today and which nearly caused a diplomatic incident with India, here’s a chronological list of his Top 10 enemies, as reported by The Daily Telegraph:

1. December 2005: The Germans

During the part of an episode where he was talking about BMW, Clarkson caused controversy when he gave a Nazi salute and commented that one of its cars would have a navigation system that “only goes to Poland” – a clear reference to the Nazi regime and World War II.

2. April 2007: Malaysia

He denounced the Perodua Kelisa as “the worst car in the world”. And as if smashing the Kelisa with a sledgehammer, blowing it up and saying that its name resembles a disease, wasn’t enough, he went on to say that the car was manufactured “by jungle people who wear leaves as shoes”.

3. October 2007: The anti-smoking movement

The fact that a high-profile TV show host is a smoker would probably have put him on the anti-smoking campaigners’ black list anyway. He made sure that he would make the list when he lit a Porsche Design pipe during an episode, and thus accused of breaking the law by smoking in the studio.

4. July 2008: BBC’s governing body

BBC might have given Clarkson a lot of leeway, but when he appeared drinking gin and tonic while driving a pickup truck as he and James May tried to reach the Magnetic North Pole, it just didn’t cut it with the channel’s governing body. As a result, he was censored.

5. November 2008: Lorry drivers

Labeling a whole class of professionals as murderers is a guaranteed way to cause trouble. At a segment concerning lorry driving, he described it as follows: “Change gear, change gear, change gear, check mirror, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That’s a lot of effort in a day.” The comment was alluding to Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe – and it certainly raised hell.

6. February 2009: British PM Gordon Brown

While he didn’t call him a murderer, “a one-eyed Scottish idiot” isn’t exactly the proper kind of wording when you are referring to your country’s Prime Minister or the Scots. He later said that he was only talking about Brown’s appearance.

7. October 2009: Black Muslim lesbians

Insulting three different kinds of people using only three words was a feat that could only have been accomplished by the one and only Jeremy Clarkson. It wasn’t on the BBC show, but on the Top Gear magazine, in which he wrote that TV producers are “fixated with having black Muslim lesbians” on their programs to balance out the number of white heterosexual males.

8. July 2010: Muslims

Lesbians and colored people didn’t feature on this one, but Islam did. In a discussion with May and Hammond on the issue that provocatively dressed women are the biggest distractions while driving, he said: “Honestly, the burka doesn’t work. I was in a cab in Piccadilly the other day when a woman in a full burka crossing the road in front of me tripped over the pavement, went head over heels and up it came, red G-string and stockings.”

Since Jeremy is still with us, Iran, Afghagistan, Saudi Arabia et al are apparently not included in the 170 territories where TG is broadcasted.

9. August 2010: Special needs

A month later, when he was describing the 430 Speciale, he said that the car was “a simpleton” and Ferrari should have called it “the 430 Speciale needs”. The remark caused a backlash from the National Autistic Society.

10. February 2011: Mexico

This time the BBC had to formally apologize to the Mexican ambassador after the Top Gear trio made some comments about Mexicans. Hammond said that their cars were just like the people: “a lazy, feckless, flatulent oaf with a moustache leaning against a fence asleep”.

Clarkson replied that those comments wouldn’t result in them not being welcome to the country anymore, since “at the Mexican embassy, the ambassador is going to be sitting there with a remote control like this [snores]. They won’t complain, it’s fine.”

The ambassador wasn’t “snoring”, the Mexican government demanded a formal apology, which it got, and viewers said that the comments were derogatory, cruel, xenophobic, discriminatory and racist.

Story References: Daily Telegraph

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