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------------1------------- The one with the original fracas
The room was quiet now. The gravity of the situation sinking in heavily. The three of them were alone. Oisin was somewhere else, no doubt being tended to. Iain stepped back out of the room. This was the end. The end of Top Gear as they knew it, there was no possibility that the BBC would let Jeremy hitting a producer go. And if Jeremy went, they would go with him.
James looked horrified and raised his hand to his mouth, sobering up very quickly given how many glasses of wine he had had. He stepped away from Jeremy. Richard returned his weight to the closed dining room door, drawing his phone out from his pocket. Andy. He needed to call Andy. Movement caught his eye and he looked up. James was now moving back towards Jeremy whose complexion had gone grey. Jeremy swayed, just once, and fell face forward.
James swore loudly. He rushed forward to try and catch Jeremy. He didn’t manage to stop the fall but he was able to control the descent, then Richard was there too, helping turn Jeremy on his back.
“Jeremy! Jeremy! Talk to me! What’s happening?” Richard was asking. There was no recognition in Jeremy’s eyes. He convulsed and suddenly he was throwing up blood.
“What the hell” Richard yelled, and together they rolled Jeremy onto his side so he didn’t choke on the blood. Richard realised the phone was still in his hand, and then he was calling 999.
“Jeremy… stay with us… Jeremy!” James was calling his friend’s name, but there was no recognition in Jeremy’s eyes. They were open but he didn’t seem conscious, as he shuddered his way through another round of vomiting, blood soaking into their jeans and the carpet. Richard was giving the details to 999 as quickly and clearly as possible.
James remembered they had medics on the crew. Hoping Richard hadn’t actually locked the door, but unwilling to let go of Jeremy’s shoulder he started shouting.
“Help! We need help in here! Somebody! Please!”
Richard’s voice was getting louder to compensate for James’ shouting. Richard wrapped up the conversation, and used a bloody hand to gently sooth Jeremy’s limp and sweaty hair away from his face.
“It’s okay mate, we’re here, James and I, we’re here, and help is on the way, an ambulance is on the way. They’ll be here any minute I promise.”
The convulsions stopped. Jeremy went still. Blood dripping from the side of his mouth, but no longer flowing. His eyes open and unseeing.
The dread, that had so far been kept at bay by the adrenaline, now flooded to the forefront of Richard’s being.
“Jezza?” He asked, his voice higher and shakier than it had been. Then he pressed two fingers to Jeremy’s neck. Maybe he got the spot wrong? He pressed them again slightly differently. Richard pressed his fingers into Jeremy’s neck in several different places, just in case his technique was wrong, but there was nothing.
“Richard?” James asked.
“No pulse.” Richard said. The words startling him into action. He shoved his hand into Jeremy’s mouth to pull out any gunk that was still in there, before pushing Jeremy onto his back and straddling his friend’s stomach. Richard laced his fingers together in the way he learned in the first aid training refresher every year and started pumping down, counting.
1 2 3 4
The door opened.
“What happened?” That was Iain.
“I don’t know, he just collapsed and started vomiting blood. Now we can’t find a pulse. The ambulance is on its way”
17 18 19 20
Thank God James was here to explain. Richard’s cheeks were wet with tears now but he couldn’t stop.
“I’m getting the medics.” Iain announced. Then the door was closing again.
27 28 29 30
Richard lunged himself off Jeremy’s stomach and pinched his nose, trying to ignore his friends open, blue eyes. He gave two rescue breaths, and then he was back over Jeremy’s stomach, pumping down over his heart again.
7 8 9 10
Richard was fit and active but this was exhausting in a new way. He could taste the coppery sweetness of Jeremy’s blood on his lips from where he had delivered the rescue breaths.
This had to work. It had to.
James could feel his whole body trembling as Hammond focused intently on CPR. He kept his fingers pressed to Jeremy’s neck hoping that he would feel the thump of a heartbeat against his fingers. He found himself praying to a God he wasn’t sure he believed in, bargaining, promising to go back to church, to take an Alpha course, anything, if Jeremy would only live.
There was nothing.
One of their two medics rushed into the room, looking slightly buzzed, but sober enough.
As Richard pulled back from his second round of CPR the medic burst into action delivering the rescue breaths.
“How long has he been like this?” The medic asked. James didn’t know. He looked over at Richard’s phone. The call was still running.
“We called for an ambulance six minutes ago. He collapsed and was vomiting blood for a while. Then He just went still and we couldn’t find a pulse. Richard started CPR. That was the second lot of rescue breaths.” James was trying to be factual, but where normally facts and figures and procedures came easily to him, today they felt far away and easy to grasp.
The medic leaned down to give another two rescue breaths.
“I can take over if you’re getting tired, Richard.” He said, as Richard pumped down on Jeremy’s chest again. There was a dull snapping sound as a rib broke.
Richard shook his head and kept counting “14… 15…16…17” before returning to counting in his head.
More and more people were entering the room now. Iain took control, sending out everyone who wasn’t necessary, sending people to the door to greet the ambulance and to the front desk to let them know there had been a medical emergency and to keep people away.
Ten rounds of CPR later, the other medic finally appeared with supplies and a shot of epi was administered. CPR continued. Another shot was administered.
Richard could feel the burn in his arms now but he didn’t dare stop.
A third shot of Epinephrine was administered.
Richard kept pumping.
The paramedics finally, finally arrived and were briefed quickly and efficiently. James couldn’t listen, couldn’t take it in.
Richard didn’t seem to hear them as they asked him to move away, and kept pumping away at Jeremy’s chest. Didn’t even seem to realise they were there. Iain and one of the medics had to lift Richard up and away, holding him back.
Once the paramedics got in, it took them less than a minute to confirm what the medics had known for a while.
Nothing they had done worked. Jeremy Clarkson was dead.
---------------4------------------- The one where James quits
In the privacy of his car, having left Jeremy standing in the car park, James allows himself to start shaking. He forces himself to concentrate on the road, to keep his focus in the present moment, because if he allows himself to dwell too deeply on what he has given up, he thinks he might start to rage or cry or something in between. Either way, hysterics are not conducive to safe driving.
He grips the steering wheel more tightly as he directs his car back towards London. He dithers for a moment at the turning. He doesn’t really want to go home right now. He’s too hurt, too energised, he considers turning north, driving up towards Lincolnshire, or even further, Northumberland perhaps. He can get a hotel room for a few days, lie low, let the adrenaline work it’s way out of his system. He could even turn towards kent and the channel tunnel, drive through the night and get all the way to Italy by tomorrow afternoon. A few days in one of his favourite countries would help matters. But he doesn’t have his passport on him, and the UK isn’t in the Schengen zone. He’d have to go home anyway.
He takes the turning towards London. As impulsive as it is to quit on the spot, he’s better off going home and gathering his thoughts for a while. He tries not to think about how upset Jeremy looked in his rear-view mirror. They’ve all been living in each other’s pockets too much recently. Jeremy has been a nightmare for months. They both need time to cool off. Their friendship is too close and well established to fall apart over something like this. He’ll give it a few days, or longer if need be, then he'll go to the pub with Jeremy, make-up as best he can, but he won’t come back to Top Gear. He can’t.
His mobile phone starts buzzing in his pocket, on silent from filming, but irritating none the less. He glances around for cameras, he can’t be done for using his mobile while driving. He’s cruising at 60 miles an hour down a duel carriageway and traffic is light, he won’t need to change gear for a while so he wriggles the device out of his jeans pocket and glances down at the screen. It’s Richard. Keeping his eyes on the road he goes through the well-practiced routine of answering the call, putting it on speaker and tossing the phone into the passenger seat.
“You’re on speaker.” He says by way of a greeting.
“Are you driving?” Richard asks.
“I’m not coming back. Jeremy went too far this time.” James decides to be pre-emptive.
“Something’s happened, mate, something serious.” Richard’s voice sounds heavy. James glances at the clock on his dashboard automatically, but he didn’t notice what time he left the studio. From his location it must have been at least thirty-five minutes ago.
“What?” James asks.
“I won’t tell you while you’re driving, find somewhere to stop and call me back.” Richard’s voice sounds stubborn, but he hangs up before James can argue.
James feels a frisson of irritation go through his spine. Richard knows he’s a very safe driver, even when upset, and he can’t think of anything that could have happened in the last forty minutes that Richard couldn’t have just told him.
He returns his eyes to the road, and just over a mile later, he sees the Cobham services, so he pulls in, finds a parking space, and calls Richard back.
“Have you stopped somewhere?” Richard asks. He answered on the first ring, he must have been waiting for the call. Meanly, James wondered if he should have delayed calling back just for the sake of it, but he’s here now.
“Yes, what’s going on?”
“Where are you?” Richard asks again.
“It doesn’t matter, Richard what happened that’s so serious you couldn’t tell me while I was driving?” James pushes. To James’ alarm, Richard chokes back something that sounds a bit like a sob.
“Please, just tell me where you are?” Richard asks again, his tone even and calm in a forced way.
“I’m at Cobham services on the M25, now can you just tell me what happened?” James feels exasperated and raw from the emotion of the day.
There is a small pause at the other end of the line. He hears Richard pull in a deep breath and for the first time he feels nervous.
“James, Jeremy is dead.”
Coldness shoots through the core of James’ being.
“That’s impossible.” James replies. “He can’t be.”
“I’m sorry.” James can hear the tears in Richard’s voice now. “I’m so sorry, James but it’s true. Jeremy is dead.”
James’ jaw aches suddenly and his eyes are burning. It feels impossible. It feels incomprehensible. He just saw Jeremy, they were fighting, yes, he was upset, but alive and well and Jeremy would never harm himself.
“How?” James manages eventually, into the quiet of Richard’s breathing.
“We don’t know, exactly. After you two stormed out, we left it a while, to hopefully give you some time to cool off and for Jeremy at least to come back, but he didn’t. About a quarter of an hour later I volunteered to go and see what was going on. Your car was gone but his was still there. He wasn’t in the green room so I went looking for him. I found him about a quarter of the way up the drive. He was on the ground and it looked like he had been vomiting blood. He was dead when I got there. I’m so sorry James.” Richard’s voice broke off into a sob.
James thought about it. Vomiting blood. That could be anything. Jeremy could have been poisoned, he could have hidden an illness, he could have an ulcer. It felt like something that belonged in a soap opera, not real life. It didn’t make sense.
“He was fine when I left; he was standing; he was shouting after my car.” James says. He can hear Richard trying to calm his breathing on the other end of the line, too distraught to formulate any comfort. James breathes again. His eyes are stinging and his cheeks are wet but his voice is calm. “What happens now?” He asks.
Richard takes a deep calming breath and manages to reply. “You need to come back. The police are on their way and want to take statements. We can send a driver, I don’t think you should be behind a wheel given, well, everything.”
“Yes.” James manages to respond, wondering where it all went so terribly wrong.
James is a logical man, but guilt is fundamentally an illogical emotion. The inquest reveals it was an ulcer, an ulcer that had been giving Jeremy symptoms for months, symptoms he assumed were signs of cancer. Jeremy had repeatedly delayed and rearranged appointments, and had done until it was too late. The ulcer burst and he bled out in under five minutes. The inquest rules no one is to blame. James knows that ulcers are affected by stress, and the stress (and in fact distress) he must have put Jeremy through by quitting mid-taping must have been considerable.
He spends most of the next three years trying to drink himself to death. After an intervention by Richard, and Jeremy’s now grown-up children, he manages to sober up and get on the road to recovery. He resumes his work as a TV presenter doing shows on wine, on poetry, on toys, on music. He never presents anything related to engineering or cars again. He never again works with a co-presenter.
--------------------5------------------------ The one where Jeremy paralyses himself
They are in the waiting room, Richard, James and Andy. Everyone relevant has been informed and the accident has already hit the papers. They need to manage the media response and discuss what happens next. Jeremy’s sister is sitting with him now. This could be the end of Top Gear. There’s a good chance Jeremy will neither want, nor be well enough to continue it. Richard and James have spent most of the previous nine hours waiting for news and sitting by Jeremy’s bedside, until thankfully, mercifully, he came out of surgery and was declared stable two hours ago. Until he woke up one hour ago and had a brief but lucid conversation with them. Until his sister had arrived and they’d removed themselves to the waiting room to give her some privacy.
Andy had spent most of the previous nine hours on the phone, putting out fires, and trying to manage the fallout of such a serious accident, all while scared to death for one of his oldest friends. He was beyond exhausted and there were many people who needed an answer now in terms of possible pathways as for what could happen next. He wasn’t sure he could delay the response by much more than tomorrow.
It was like Richard’s accident and it wasn’t. Top Gear hadn’t been the worldwide phenomenon it was now when Richard had his accident. It wasn’t halfway through filming the studio shows for a current series when Richard had had his accident. And, the hardest of all to admit for those of them who knew and loved Jeremy, Richard was a less controversial figure than Jeremy and there had been more goodwill when Richard had had his accident. Like it or not, things were different this time.
All this together was why he had very little patience for Richard’s stubbornness.
“Look, he’s going to recover. He might not regain the use of his limbs, but his mind is a sharp as ever, and he would hate us making decisions for him. I’m not saying delay forever, but surely you can buy us a couple of days until he’s well enough to start speaking for himself.” Richard was saying.
They were interrupted by a doctor, summoning them to his office.
It wasn’t good news. There had been a secondary bleed. An ulcer in his stomach, that had probably been there for months. It hadn’t been detected in the previous surgery, and while it was under investigation in case it was cancer, no one had known it was an ulcer.
“I realise this is small comfort, but I don’t believe he was in any pain when he passed. He had woken, briefly to speak to his sister, but he was back asleep quickly and didn’t regain consciousness. Combined with the painkillers he was on he wouldn’t have felt a thing, it would have been just like falling asleep.” The doctor said.
Maybe it would be comforting at some time in the future. But in the here and now it just hurt.
----------------------6------------------ The one with the food poisoning
When they found him rigor mortis had already set in. He had been dead for hours.
Half the crew had come down with food poisoning, so a one-in-the-morning text had been sent round delaying call time from 8am to noon.
Jeremy was late. This was extremely unusual. He wasn’t answering his phone either.
“He was quite poorly last night.” James had commented. A runner was dispatched to knock on Jeremy’s door. They had no luck, so Richard volunteered to go and see what the problem was. When Jeremy was in an awful mood, Richard was the one least likely to be on the end of anything truly vicious.
Richard tried knocking first. No response.
“You better be decent in there, mate, because I’m using my key.” He called out as he unlocked the door. The bed looked as if it hadn’t been slept in, which was odd. Insomniac that he was Jeremy usually at least attempted to get a couple of hours, especially on filming days. The door to the bathroom was open.
Richard found his steps slowing as he approached it. When he could see inside he saw Jeremy laid out on the floor next to the toilet, in his clothes from the previous evening. He was incredibly still, the side of his face in a puddle of thick red blood. His eyes and mouth were open in a grotesque mockery of Jeremy when he was on one of his rants.
Richard tiptoed around Jeremy’s back and pressed two fingers against Jeremy’s neck. The coldness and stiffness told him what he didn’t need the lack of a pulse to confirm. His friend was dead.
There was a strange detached calmness as he rose and walked out of the room, not looking back, but not closing any doors behind him. He arrived in the lobby where the rest of the crew was waiting expectantly.
“Is he coming then?” Oisin asked, “Or do we need to delay even more?”
These words, from someone Jeremy had fought with the previous day pulled Richard closer to the surface, and all at once he became aware of the wetness on his cheeks.
“Jeremy’s dead you insensitive bastard!” Richard growled, and aimed a swing at the shocked producer’s face, only to be held back by someone as some people ran from the room to check and others asked him questions he couldn’t comprehend about what had happened.
---------------------17----------------- The one with the helicopter crash
The information comes through in fits and starts. Garbled. Confused. Different messages. Different people asking Andy for more information.
It isn’t until he arrives at the sight of the helicopter wreck that it sinks in.
The first he knows of it is a phone call from the production team up in Yorkshire. The presenters haven’t arrived, were they delayed again?
He checks the flight plan and discovers it unchanged.
He contacts Air Traffic Control and works his way through an agonising thirty minutes of redirects. It’s after hours, they’re understaffed, and nobody really seems to know anything. Finally he gets through to someone who confirms that the helicopter had been in distress.
It is another series of redirects before he can find out the location of the wreckage.
He drives for two hours to the site, thankfully somewhere rural rather than over a city or a town, and when he arrives the site has been closed off.
There are fire engines and ambulances and police. Andy shows his BBC credentials and what proof he has of the people who were in the helicopter and finally he is allowed through.
He speaks to the sergeant on duty, and a senior fireman and eventually is brought into a tent to see two body bags.
Two. Not three.
His heart shatters.
But, for the first time, the hope that he had guarded away from reality so that he could function, the hope that maybe the situation wasn’t as complete as it seemed sparks a fire in his chest.
He asks about the third passenger. Had he been taken to hospital maybe?
Andy wasn’t brave enough to look inside the body bags and see who was contained within them. He wasn’t strong enough right now to know for certain who was dead, but he chose to focus in on the possibility that someone had survived.
No third body had been extracted. A series of search parties were dispatched to search the surrounding fields and paddocks. Some firemen lingering to try and put out the still burning wreckage, and Andy was taken to the back of an ambulance, and wrapped in a blanket. Apparently, he was in shock.
He stared at his phone. He knew he should call people, that there were families and colleagues waiting for news. But it was a signal dead spot and he couldn’t bring himself to search for the facility to call anyone until he was certain.
It was well after midnight when the police officer appeared to break the news they had found the third body.
A few days later he sat in a police station in London, listening to that last call with Air Traffic Control. Richard’s panic, the way James took over.
“Sit down and get your seatbelt on” James snapped, before returning to conveying information and asking for aid.
Richard’s screams that Jeremy was gone, had fallen from the aircraft.
The horrified realisation that they were going down and there was nothing they could do to stop it.
The sudden crackling of static as the recording cut off, presumably as the engine exploded upon impact to the ground.
Over the next weeks there would be an inadvisable incident that Andy would never remember first hand, blind drunk as he was. The video would go viral sparking an outpouring of condemnation on one hand and sympathy for his grief on the other. Ambushed by a paparazzi outside his house, after drinking heavily for most of the afternoon, he had gone into a tirade criticising both the BBC and the company in charge of Top Gear Live for putting so much pressure on the trio it killed them. Had Andy been just a little more sober he would have managed to stop short of actually accusing the institutions of murder. Unfortunately in reality that accusation was not only thrown but also backed up in a guilt-ridden tirade of convoluted reasons.
In the aftermath, Andy offers his resignation to the BBC.
A shame-faced and guilty Danny Cohen manages to persuade him against it. Instead Andy is offered a six month leave of absence on half-pay. If he still wants to leave at the end of the six months then his resignation will be accepted, no questions asked.
Six months later Andy returns to the BBC, but not as a producer. Instead he heads up a new department, whose responsibility it is to oversee schedules, and deadlines and make sure that no show is ever so hectic as to lead to a similar tragedy. He drinks a toast to his mates in the pub and laughs at the irony that after all those years making fun of them, in the latter part of his career he has become a version of Health and Safety.
Andy’s principals come before his pride though. Principals forged in grief and taught in the cruellest way possible. He cannot turn back the clock and bring back his friends, but maybe he can save other people from experiencing the same tragedy.
----------------18-------------- The one where Jeremy has a breakdown
After hours and hours of attempting to contact Jeremy. After Richard, James and Andy show up at his door hoping to drag him from whatever depressed pit he is in long enough to film the show this afternoon, knocking and knocking to no avail, a neighbour appears.
“I’m glad someone’s checking on him, I woke to him screaming his head off for about twenty minutes this morning, he said he had a nightmare.”
James is the first to issue the words “welfare check”.
The emergency services are called, meanwhile, they keep trying to get Jeremy to respond.
Eventually a fire fighter uses their axe to smash though the front door of Jeremy’s flat. They cannot open the door, Jeremy is lying on his hall floor in boxers and a t-shirt. He is grey-faced, glassy eyed, covered in vomit, he looks catatonic.
Richard jumps through the hole in the top half of the front door and gathers Jeremy into his arms. Suddenly Jeremy is provoked into life. He bursts into tears and starts speaking far too quickly. He had thought Richard and James were dead, that they had been killed in a helicopter crash. He has been living the same day over and over again.
They can’t get any sense out of him.
Somehow they manage to get the door open (or chop it into pieces, no one is quite clear on that) and Andy and James are also around Jeremy, who seems to have gone completely mad.
They had all heard about people having a breakdown but this was not what they had pictured. And after all, shouldn’t Jeremy, larger than life as he was, be immune to such things?
The next difficulty comes when the paramedics arrive. Jeremy screams and screams and clings on for dear life when they start to separate him from his friends. It is devastating to watch and in the end the paramedics sedate him for his own safety.
Andy watches his friend be taken away in the ambulance and then swiftly gets on the phone to enquire about places available in discreet, expensive, private clinics so Jeremy can recover.
James drives them to the hospital where Jeremy is being transported.
Jeremy never arrives. His body does. But an ulcer in his stomach, probably something that had been there for years, bursts enroute and the paramedics are not able to get the bleeding under control. He bleeds out before he reaches the hospital.
The news is delivered by a sympathetic doctor.
The silence in the aftermath is broken by Andy’s phone ringing. It is one of the private clinics calling him back to confirm that yes, they do have a space available and when would they like to arrange the transfer for?
Andy hangs up. He knows it’s rude, but his voice catches in his throat at the thought of explaining why the transfer is no longer needed. It will hit the papers soon enough anyway.