Former Top Gear presenter Jeremy admitted he was nervous about working in Manchester, but has since come to love it — even if the locals talk like “Liam bloody Gallagher”
Jeremy Clarkson reckons Manchester is better than London — even if the locals talk like ‘Liam bloody Gallagher’. The Clarkson’s Farm host said as a Yorkshireman he was gutted after landing the job of hosting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, because it was filmed in Manchester.
But he said he has overcome the Yorkshire-versus-Lancashire rivalry and now prefers the north-west city to the capital. He said: “When I was offered the chance to host Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, I immediately signed the contract and then ran around in little circles, grabbing my tinkle and squeaking.
“And I continued to be very happy until I found out that it would be filmed in Manchester. It’s true of course that no one is born racist; but that said, it’s also true that people from Yorkshire, like me, are born with an instinctive dislike of people from the other side of the Pennines.
“The wet side. The gloomy side. The miserable side. The side where everyone speaks with that stupid accent. If you’re going to sound northern have the decency to talk like Sean Bean or Mark Knopfler, not Liam bloody Gallagher.”
But Clarkson conceded Manchester has been ‘steadily growing on’ him during the eight years he has been presenting the TV quiz show. “I came to not mind it, and then I started to like it and now — drum roll, please, I think it might be better than London,” he said.
“I still like London too. But that’s mainly because I mostly hang out in St James’s where you bump into friends who suggest a ‘spot’ of lunch and you can get all the way from Fortnum’s to Davidoff (the cigar shop) without being murdered even once.
“But I do understand that other parts of the capital are a bit down-at-heel these days; many shops are boarded up. There are masked youths on electric bikes everywhere. And the mayor spends all of his cash on providing special lanes for people who want to go to work on a child’s toy.
“And that’s before we get to the ramshackle tented villages that spring up around Park Lane from time to time. It’s all a bit tragic really. Manchester is extremely different. Actually, that’s not true. It has crime and issues with immigration too and there are boarded up shops aplenty.
“But it feels different. It has the buzz you get when you are in Manhattan or Hanoi or certain parts of Bombay. It feels alive. Like everyone is plugged into the mains somehow.
”I went to a snazzy Indian restaurant on a wet Tuesday evening and it was rammed. There was one table with 30 people on it, and how is that even possible? Where does anyone find 30 friends who are up for a modern, zingy, expensively lit curry on a Tuesday?
“And you should have seen them. Some were black, some were brown, some were naked (girls in Manchester see clothes as a nuisance) and some were white. To be honest, you rarely see a racial mix like that in London. Not on one table.
”Manchester is booming. More than two dozen mini skyscrapers have gone up in the past five years and 51 are approved or in construction.
“In the past five years, nearly 20,000 new homes have been built, and most of the homes in question are Bret Easton Ellis-style apartments full of Poggenpohl and Smeg. There are 1,300 more hotel rooms than there were before the Covid pandemic and, again, they err towards the Egyptian cotton end of the hotel room spectrum; not all of Britain is falling to pieces.”
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