The Amazon Priming of Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson’s move to Amazon will, in time, help reveal how much television has really changed, writes Raymond Snoddy.

Until now Amazon Prime has been best known in consumerist circles for the difficulties of getting rid of it. What’s not to like about an absolutely free trial of next day delivery of all your Amazon purchases?

The trouble is, users say, it can be quite tricky to subsequently remove the £80-a-year subscription fee.

The great joy of inertia marketing is rightly celebrated all over the world.

Now Amazon Prime will be forever associated with the illustrious name Jeremy Clarkson, even if you would rather watch paint dry than actually watch a motoring show – whatever it’s going to be called.

For Amazon it might just be a positive development – on balance – and they certainly know by now precisely what they are getting for their millions.

Clarkson and his public school chums will certainly fit well into a stable of programmes that also features remakes of Ripper Street.

We will probably wait a long time to know how well Car Crash, only a working title at present but as good a name as any, does because Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has never been very forthcoming with numbers on individual product lines.

Analysts in the US, however, suggest that Amazon Prime could have more than 40 million subscribers and that they spend at least twice as much on stuff as those prepared to wait three to five working days for free delivery.

Maybe the point of Car Crash, and this would be totally brilliant, is to launch a new used car sales business on the back of it.

Despite the likely lack of comparable numbers coming out of Amazon in future, let’s set Jeremy and chums a base line to aim at.

As Clarkson, with his customary linguistic elegance put it after being dropped by the BBC and moving to Amazon: “I feel like I’ve climbed out of a biplane and into a spaceship.”

As someone who obviously likes targets and likes to win, the goal is very clear.

The biplane managed to reach a worldwide audience of more than 350 million and earned £50 million for BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the Corporation.

Amazon will have to sell an awful lot of used cars – sorry Amazon Prime subscriptions – to match that.

The Car Crash experiment, despite the lack of reliable numbers, will be very interesting for at least two reasons.

When high profile performers leave the broadcaster where they have made their name, albeit enforced in this case, how likely is it that they can replicate their success elsewhere?

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And much more important for students of television, will Clarkson be able to demonstrate that viewing patterns have changed so much that going online alone, and to a form of subscription, represents more than disappearing into a void compared with those 350 million broadcast viewers?

On whether shows and formats trump individual talent on a particular channel, the evidence is mixed.

Morecambe and Wise had so much comedy talent it hardly mattered what channel they appeared on.

Breakfast presenters with larger egos and greed than sense can quickly find out that viewers were more attracted to the programme than their riveting personality.

Clarkson was a large, forbidding Marmite-like television personality who was at Top Gear long enough to stamp his authority on the programme.

Top Gear has, however, been re-invented several times before – successfully – and Chris Evans is the skilfully chosen person to re-invent the programme once again. A less boorish version that reaches out to women drivers and concentrates less on dropping cars from buildings or insulting foreigners might work very well indeed.

On balance the likelihood is that it will be the show that matters and that Evans will be a competent, appealing and authoritative enough figure to make it happen.

Clarkson and Amazon Prime is much more difficult to judge mainly because the multi-billion pound online shopping service is using television-style entertainment to attract attention to sell something else, a bit like the rise of advertising-funded television in the first place.

Arguably, Clarkson, Hammond and May have already earned their first year’s multi-million pound salary by the huge marketing impact their arrival at Amazon Prime has achieved.

The deal will more than wash its face in terms of Amazon Prime subscriptions delivered in the way that Netflix generates huge publicity with a relatively small number of well chosen original programmes.

What of Clarkson the brand and his visibility going forward?

To paraphrase slightly, Clarkson almost certainly doesn’t give a stuff and he will be well-paid for his trouble.

You can also be sure that the Americans fully understand the importance of an endless supply of large hot steaks at the end of a hard day’s filming.

So what does it matter if Car Crash should turn out, to use Clarkson’s own image, to be a spaceship accelerating ever outwards in the direction of the farthest planets.

There is an iron law of subscription and ratings. You take a programme, or a sport, off free-to air television and you can divide the audience by at least 10.

Football is a powerful enough phenomenon to survive the hit.

The Faustian pact that persuades more minority sports such as rugby, cricket or boxing to sacrifice presence for piles of cash is ultimately unwise.

Clarkson is like a minority sport – certainly a minority taste.

So some time towards the end of next year, once the fuss over the first programme and the first outlandish stunt has died down, we will have a good idea how much television has really changed.

Best guess is not all that much but then a declaration of interest, or rather the lack of it.

Wild horses wouldn’t lead to a viewing of a Clarkson programme even if it were to be as projected on the moon.

Chris Evans is unlikely to fare much better with someone who drives a VW Golf with more than 100,000 miles on the clock and a broken window motor which makes it difficult to keep the rain out and will get progressively worrying as winter approaches.

But then each to their own.