Chief lad Jeremy Clarkson has been drawing some fire recently. He called for strikers to be shot in front of their families on the BBC’s One Show.

He said trains should not have to stop when someone commits suicide under one.

The machinery of public outrage creaked into life, press offices issued statements, emailed complaints swarmed towards the BBC inbox . . . the reaction was humourless but inevitable.

Clarkson made qualified apologies alongside the BBC for any offence caused and used the much quoted “I was only joking” defence.

We know his oafish, blokey, television persona so well that we can imagine him sulkily bartering with his press advisors over what he needed to say to make it all go away.

In fact that becomes part of the joke too. We don’t even have to hear the offstage grumbling. We just know it’s there. That’s eerily impressive.

Some people might think Clarkson represents a natural-born antidote to a world in which “political correctness has gone mad”, others might think he is a supreme act of cynical showbiz brand building. That’s the fascinating question about him: is he for real?

If he was for real – and not just saying upsetting things to get attention and money – he might be expected to occasionally stumble across a palatable opinion. Judge that one for yourself.

But saying the unsayable is not such a heroic libertarian concept when the unsayable projectile vomits out of you every time a TV camera is turned on. That’s more like a character from Little Britain has escaped and is running riot through current affairs.

We could console ourselves that it’s a sign of an advanced and sophisticated society that we can sustain a public figure like Jeremy Clarkson.

The trouble is, he’s not much of a reward for having an advanced and sophisticated society.

It’s like some divine being decided that if humanity was going to be clever enough to devise rockets and supercars that somehow out of the greenhouse gasses a Clarkson would spring into existence.

He had a pop at one of our senior police officers in his Sun column this week because she had the temerity to suggest a minor alteration to the drink-drive laws.

Deputy Chief Constable Suzette Davenport would like to see the legal limit brought down so low that basically it becomes legally impossible to have a drink and drive.

She accepts there is an argument for allowing a nominal amount of blood alcohol to accommodate the odd sherry trifle despite Clarkson representing her point of view as “zero tolerance”.

He said she should go back to giving out parking tickets.

I would like to say it’s a battleline drawn up by a dinosaur and that most people don’t give two hoots about being able to have a couple of pints before driving home. They are either drinking or they are driving. Times and social patterns have changed.

But here’s the bizarre thing. The technology exists to create cars that could drive us home from the pub without any input from the driver at all.

We could flop into our computer-guided vehicles barely able to slur the word “home” and modern engineering could get us there (although it cannot yet get our keys in the front door for us).

Our advanced and sophisticated society is shaping a future in which we can be dumber and drunker than ever before and it will seem like Clarkson was right all along . . .