Jeremy Clarkson revealed today he hasn’t smoked for four months – despite going through 40 per day for decades – and he has also cut down on his drinking after a near-deadly bout of pneumonia.
The star, 57, admitted he put a cigarette between his lips but ‘couldn’t smoke it’ and has stuck to nicotine gum ever since he was rushed to a Majorcan hospital in August.
He has also been asked to moderate his drinking about getting pneumonia and blood poisoning but will not giving up his beloved rosé wine.
Mr Clarkson also says he won’t go on forever on TV because ‘there’s no such thing as a funny old person’, adding: ‘John Cleese is the classic case’.
Jeremy Clarkson revealed today he hasn’t smoked for four months and has cut down on his drinking after a near-deadly bout of pneumonia
He has also been asked to moderate his drinking about getting pneumonia and blood poisoning but will not giving up his beloved rosé wine
And in another blast for his former employer the BBC, who sacked him for punching a Top Gear producer over the lack of a steak dinner after a day of filming, he believes the licence fee should be scrapped in favour of a subscription service.
The Grand Tour host smoked around 40 cigarettes per day for 43 years and got through nearly 630,000 cigarettes, despite warnings from doctors
Grand Tour will return to our screens this month but its second series was hampered by Clarkson’s illness and Richard Hammond’s high speed crash in Switzerland earlier this year.
Clarkson has revealed how he turned purple and was shaking uncontrollably in Majorca and was admitted to hospital without any tests because doctors were so worried.
He also admits he knew how ill he was because he couldn’t face another cigarette.
He told The Sun: ‘I threw it [his packet of cigarettes] out. And then I was in hospital and I haven’t smoked since.
‘I was very ill but I’m made of wood so it doesn’t take long for me to mend. I’ve never been ill. I’ve never had a day off work, and I’ve not taken an antibiotic in my life, ever.
‘It had become blood poisoning, which is dangerous. So I was shaking like crazy’.
The Grand Tour host smoked around 40 cigarettes per day for 43 years and got through nearly 630,000 cigarettes, despite warnings from doctors.
But after doctors diagnosed him with pneumonia in the midst of his summer getaway to the Balearic island of Majorca in August, he decided it was time to put down the lighter.
‘I was told, by everyone, that I had to stop. Immediately,’ he wrote in a column for The Sunday Times. ‘I had no choice at the time because the blood poisoning was so bad and I was so racked with the resultant rigors that I couldn’t work a cigarette lighter.’
Jeremy Clarkson’s mortality hit home when he fell ill in Majorca and posted this image of his drip in his arm
He joked that people have told him to take up running, or give up drinking as a next step in healthy living.
He advised others trying to quit to go places where it’s near-impossible to smoke, like the cinema, or Australia, where cigarettes are highly priced and banned in many public spaces.
He said that it’s helpful to have a friend willing to quit with you, and the key to staying away from the cigarettes is ‘willpower’.
After his bout of pneumonia, Clarkson said lung tests showed he still had 96 per cent capacity for a person his age and he could ‘breathe out harder and for longer than a non-smoking 40-year-old’.
‘In short, getting on for three-quarters of a million fags have not harmed me in any way. I have quite literally defied medical science,’ he wrote.
He wrote that he had spent ‘three nights spent spasming in my bed’ before a doctor sent him for tests at the hospital.
He was then told he would have to be admitted ‘for at least a week’, which he called ‘impossible’.
The doctor added: ‘If you don’t do as I say you will die’, writes Clarkson.
The TV presenter described his boredom in the hospital as ‘so bad I thought often about killing myself’.
The illness was two months after his co-host Richard Hammond was airlifted to hospital when his car crashed while filming The Grand Tour.
In December 2014, Clarkson admitted that he had let himself go and put on ‘a lot’ of weight – and that a doctor had branded his fitness level as ‘atrocious’.
The presenter, who regularly makes headlines for his on-air remarks, spoke on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show.
During the interview, it was pointed out to him that, even with his usual paunch, he appeared to have to be ‘a bit’ fatter on a Top Gear DVD that had just been released at the time.
Clarkson immediately corrected TV-turned-radio presenter Chris Evans, saying: ‘Not a bit – a lot fatter.’
Clarkson smoked for 43 years but has finally called it a day and appears unlikely to go back
Describing his ample stomach as ‘the product of hard work’, he added: ‘I eat a lot but mostly I’ve cultivated it by sitting down all the time. Literally all the time, I’m now exhausted.
‘Getting to your studio this morning I had to have a 15-minute rest.’ He added: ‘I had to go for a medical the other week. They put me on a treadmill and described my fitness as atrocious.’
The father-of-three has previously painted himself as a man unable to shy away from indulgence.
He has claimed he cannot write his scripts without ample supplies of alcohol, cigarettes and caffeine, adding: ‘The amount you drink when you’re writing, that’s the thing that worries me.’
And in a newspaper column back in 2014, he wrote: ‘I get tired pulling on my socks these days. So, if I want to live much past the end of next weekend [my doctor] says I must give up smoking, drink less, walk more, lose weight.
But in typical nonchalant style, he said of his role on Top Gear: ‘If somebody decides one day that actually you really have got too fat or you really are awful then you do something else.’