Top Gear host Richard Hammond in race row after using the word 'pikey' in magazine column

Offensive term use blasted by Irish traveller group

Race row: TV Presenter Richard Hammond has angered travellers with his use of the word 'pikey'

Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond has been embroiled in a race row after he used the word 'pikey' in a magazine column.

An Irish traveller group slammed the 42-year-old television presenter and journalist, saying the word was the equivalent of calling a black person a 'n*****'.

Hammond used the word in his regular column in this month's Top Gear magazine while writing about how much money he had spent on his Land Rover.

He wrote: 'I have, over the 10 years I've owned it, spent way too much money on my Land Rover. I've documented on this page before some of the car's many stages of evolution.

'It's spent time as a blinged-up street cruiser with chrome wheels, blue neon underlighting, straight-through dragster sidepipes and a pumped-up stereo that could damage your pelvis on loud.

'A lot of my little touches have been fun, innocent and pretty harmless. I have fitted chromed accents on the dash and commissioned back seats bearing my daughter's names.

'Yes, I am a pikey, and it is important that my Land Rover reflect that.'

A spokesman for the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain said: 'He has to understand that pikey is the equivalent to the n word.

'You could make a joke with the n word in but if you did it wouldn't be funny. It would be offensive. It is the same with pikey.'

Top Gear magazine's editor Charlie Turner said: 'We're sorry this term has caused offence. That was never the intention.'

Pikey is a highly-offensive word to Irish travellers and gypsies, who consider it derogatory, and its use has landed other celebrities in hot water.

Four years ago Formula One commentator Martin Brundle used the word in a television broadcast and ITV had to apologise to viewers after complaints.



Favourite wheels: Hammond used the word in this month's Top Gear magazine while writing about how much money he had spent on his Land Rover (above)

PIKEY: A TOLL ROAD TERM THAT TURNED RACIST

The term 'pikey' can be traced as far back as the 16th Century when it was derived from the word pike, which meant a road on which a toll is collected. As such, it is strongly associated with a transient lifestyle. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its first use in print was in the Times in 1837 to refer to strangers who had come to the Isle of Sheppey island to harvest.

Later that century, it meant a 'turnpike traveller' or vagabond. In 1847, the Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words recorded the use of 'pikey' to mean a gypsy for the first time. In more recent years, however, it has become a term of abuse and can been deemed a racist offence, given its association with Irish travellers and Roma Gypsies.

The previous year celebrity chef Marco Pierre White used the word on ITV's Hell's Kitchen amid another race storm.

Hammond himself has previously been accused of racism after he made an insulting parody of Mexicans to describe a Mexican sports car.

He suggested the vehicle reflected the national characteristics of people from its country of origin - to wit, ‘a lazy, feckless, flatulent oaf with a moustache, leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus, with a blanket with a hole in the middle as a coat’.

He also described Mexican food as ‘refried sick’. Co-presenter James May ventured it was ‘like sick with cheese on it’.

Clarkson predicted they would not get any complaints, suggesting that the Mexican ambassador would be holding a remote-control and snoring in front of the TV.

But the Mexican ambassador, Eduardo Medina-Mora Icaza, was furious. He described the comments as 'offensive, xenophobic and humiliating' and the BBC was forced to deliver a personal apology.