Former BBC presenter says he was told lump on tongue was cancerous, and though he has lost his ‘baby’ he will create another show

Jeremy Clarkson has vowed he will return to television after saying he feels lost and bored without Top Gear.

Speaking for the first time about the incident that saw him fired from the popular BBC show, the controversial presenter also said he had suffered a cancer scare two days before his attack on Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon.

Writing in his column in the Sunday Times, Clarkson said: “Two days before the ‘fracas’, I’d been told, sternly, by my doctor that the lump on my tongue was probably cancer and that I must get it checked out immediately. But I couldn’t do that. We were in the middle of a Top Gear series. And Top Gear always came first.”

He confirmed he has since been given the all-clear.

The 55-year-old conceded that he had burned his bridges for good with the motoring show, which he had co-presented for over a decade and described repeatedly as his baby.

Clarkson said: “The hole it’s left behind seems to stretch for eternity … you need to have a long term strategy. You need something that will fill the void.”

He added: “I have lost my baby but I shall create another. I don’t know who the other parent will be or what the baby will be like.”

Clarkson’s contract with the BBC was not renewed after it emerged he had launched an unprovoked physical and verbal attack on Tymon which left the producer in need of hospital treatment. The director general, Tony Hall said that a line had been crossed and that Clarkson had failed to maintain standards of decency and respect at work.

The presenter said he had momentarily considered giving up television for good after he was fired, but has since changed his mind.

“Let’s stop being silly and pick up the pieces and start again … I just know I’m going to do another car show,” he said.

It is unclear whether there are any channels currently in discussion with Clarkson about a new motoring show. Sky said it was definitely not speaking to Jeremy Clarkson about any content, while ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 also confirmed they had no plans to work with Clarkson.

Since Clarkson’s contract was terminated by the BBC in late March, he has dropped several hints that this will not be the end of his presenting career. Speaking at a charity auction last week, he said the Top Gear team “could be back somewhere else. Or maybe even not somewhere else, who knows?”

In his Sunday column, Clarkson said he felt sick at the realisation that he had idiotically lost Top Gear. He admitted that in the wake of the death of his mother and the break-up of his marriage the show had been his entire focus and that he now felt an enormous sense of loss.

“It was an all-consuming entity, a many-tentacled global monster that was dysfunctional and awkward and mad but I loved it with a passion. I loved it like my own child,” he wrote.

Clarkson described the day of the incident that caused his downfall as “the most stressful day I had ever had in 27 years at the BBC. It was beyond-belief stressful, everything was going wrong, and then you know … there you go. But everybody has stressful days, and they manage to cope better than I did.”

Instead of cancelling the show, which pulls in a regular weekly audience of around 5 million, the BBC is believed to be searching for a host to replace Clarkson. Hall has said that continuing Top Gear in 2016 on the BBC “will be a big challenge and there is no point in pretending otherwise”.

Clarkson was due to make his first appearance back on the BBC next week as the host of satirical BBC1 show Have I Got News for You but he pulled out.

North Yorkshire police have said that following an investigation Clarkson would face no further police action over his attack on the producer.















