The controller of BBC2 has said Jeremy Clarkson will return to the BBC in unseen material including footage of three Top Gear episodes shot before he was axed from the show.

Top Gear is a show that I love, I genuinely watch it and I always have done Kim Shillinglaw

Kim Shillinglaw confirmed that material from the final three episodes of the last series of the motoring show, shelved after he was suspended following a “fracas” with a producer, would be broadcast, including appearances by Clarkson.



She confirmed the show would return in a new form next year and said she would look at women presenters to front the new-look show.



But she declined to speculate on whether Clarkson’s former co-presenters Richard Hammond and James May, or the show’s long-running executive producer Andy Wilman, would return.

Clarkson’s contract was not renewed after it emerged in March that he had launched an unprovoked physical and verbal attack on Oisin Tymon, which left the producer in need of hospital treatment.



Tony Hall, the BBC director general, said that a line had been crossed and that Clarkson had failed to maintain standards of decency and respect at work.

Clarkson has since said in his column in the Sunday Times that he had suffered a cancer scare two days before the incident. He has confirmed that he has since been given the all-clear.

Tymon decided not to press charges, saying in a statement in March that he hoped “all parties should now be allowed to move on, so far as possible”. North Yorkshire police announced in early April that it would be taking no further action in relation to the incident.



“Jeremy will be back on the BBC,” said Shillinglaw at a BBC2 programme launch on Tuesday.



“It is serious and unfortunate what happened but there is no ban on Jeremy being on the BBC. It’s a big deal what happened and Jeremy, as any human being would, needs some time out.”



Shillinglaw, the BBC’s former science and natural history chief, said the re-edited editions of Top Gear could be on BBC2 as early as the summer and definitely before the end of the year.



Of the unseen Top Gear footage, Shillinglaw said it would definitely make it on to BBC2 – although not enough had been shot for three full one-hour episodes.



“There is no way I would not want the available material not to be seen by viewers,” she said.

“Top Gear is a show that I love, I genuinely watch it and I always have done.”

Shillinglaw said the task of reinventing the show, which is watched by 6 million viewers on BBC2 and is a global hit generating £50m a year for the BBC, was “a challenge but it’s genuinely creatively exciting”.



“We have got a great in house team that has always made it and will continue to make it,” she said.



On the possibility of a female presenter – Sue Perkins quit Twitter after receiving death threats when she was installed as favourite to host the show – Shillinglaw said: “I am not really thinking about it in terms of gender.

“I have done a lot with female presenters when I used to work in science. That was something that across the piece that I really wanted to tackle. It’s a really open book on that. We will definitely look at women but it is not the driving priority. I have never approached an individual show thinking that is the way you cast it.

“It’s not been an easy year but it’s kind of creatively exciting what we are going to do, what we have to do. We have got to move the show on. That’s what we are going to do.”