It’s the best job in the world, isn’t it? You get paid to drive the fastest cars on the planet, meet motoring legends and then, rather than keep it all to yourself, can brag about it to millions of readers.
Well, yes and no. Motoring journalism, like all jobs, has its high and low points, but there is no doubt that if you love cars there are worse ways to earn a living. At MPH budding young writers will be given the chance to enter a competition to unearth new talent. For those who don’t win, however, all is not lost. Unlike other trades the road to the top is not set in stone. Here five Sunday Times contributors describe how they landed their jobs.
JEREMY CLARKSON
I started as a trainee journalist on the Rotherham Advertiser covering flower shows, weddings, coroners courts, obituaries — all the glamorous stuff. I once phoned someone up whose husband had died. She was such a long time answering the phone that I’d completely forgotten why I was calling. That was tricky.
I really was useless so I tried my hand as a travelling salesman, hawking Paddington Bears to shopkeepers. But I was even worse at that. Mostly I just went to the pub, where every day I tried to think of a new idea to make money. It was in the snug where I had the idea that you could write a car review and syndicate it among regional papers. Each paper would pay you a fee and you’d be a millionaire in a week.
Better still, when you write for the Humberside Gazette, car manufacturers would deliver a new car with a full tank of petrol. At the end of the week a new one would be dropped off, fully valeted. Sometimes they’d even fIy you to exotic locations and give you wine. I had a great time and in my first year of business made £1,950. The next year this went down a bit.
From 1986 to 1993 I wrote a column for Performance Car and then I met a TV producer on a car launch who asked me to do a screen test for a show called Top Gear. I left this in 1998 to do other things. But I made a hash of all of them and ended up back on Top Gear again.
I started writing for The Sunday Times in 1994. I still do a weekly column for The Sun and a monthly for Top Gear magazine. People ask me why I write so much; that’s easy. Writing is more fun than cooking or gardening or doing crosswords. Writing is more fun than anything.
ANDREW FRANKEL
