MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
During the scene in the show, it went over well enough in that the audience laughed, but even Jeremy Clarkson and James May sort of took him down a peg for his comment and tried to make him feel ridiculous for saying it. In any case, the damage has been done and people have been ripping into Richard Hammond on social media. LGBT campaigner Peter Tatchell spoke with BBC 5 about the comments and was very unhappy about it. Here is what he had to say.
“It’s alright, I don’t eat ice cream. It’s something to do with being straight…there’s nothing wrong with it. But a grown man eating an ice cream, it’s a bit, it’s that way rather than that way.”
Historically speaking, it was Jeremy Clarkson who got the former Top Gear trio in trouble. Punching the producer was just the last straw in a long string incidents that led to him being fired and both James May and Richard Hammond left in a show of solidarity, not because they were fired. At the moment, the producers of The Grand Tour and Richard Hammond have remained silent about the backlash, but they will surely be making a comment at some point.
“It’s a perverse world when everyday pleasures like ice cream becomes the butt of homophobic innuendo. That Richard Hammond thinks he needs to boast about his heterosexuality is weird and it will get people wondering, ‘Why? Why is he saying that?’ His pandering to prejudice is bad enough, of course. But the audience applause that he got makes it even worse, and I think it shows that we still have some way to go to end bigoted banter.”
