I find it disturbing that hundreds of thousands of people are willing to sign a petition to have him reinstated when they don't know what happened - because we don't, yet, do we? To me, that says everything about his 'constituency' - unthinking, uncritical, mob-mentality. Apologies if this includes people on here who signed the petition - no offence meant - but is there something about physical assault that's not serious any more? I wonder what kind of offence he would have to be accused of for people NOT to rush to his defence? He's clever and when I've seen him on things other than Top Gear he has been funny, but he's basically a bully who hobnobs with Cameron at weekends and thinks he's untouchable. And bullies need to be stood up to - whether or not they're physically violent.
Sorry to sound a grump, but I'd feel more positive if I knew that the same 676,000 people were also signing petitions to stop cuts to the local health and social care services I work for. In comparison to those, Clarkson doing wheelies in a Ferrari and burning off thousands of pounds worth of rubber doesn't seem very important, no matter how much money the programme brings to the BBC.