Jeremy Clarkson’s annual A-level tweet undermined – by good results and satirical banter
August 10 was A-level results day for thousands of UK students – and TV’s Jeremy Clarkson wheeled out his usual tweet telling us all that he got a ‘C’ and two ‘U’ and did very well for himself.
He was pre-empted by this…
Jeremy Clarkson getting ready to tweet how he received a C and 2 Us. #alevels2021 pic.twitter.com/T0akUCgIpA
— Phil (@Philosophagy) August 10, 2021
… but went ahead and did it anyway:
If the teachers didn’t give you the A level results you were hoping for, don’t worry. I got a C and 2Us and I’ve ended up happy, with loads of friends and a Bentley.
— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) August 10, 2021
But the Clarkson’s Farm star’s annual effort fell on stony ground this year – partly because A-level results were particularly good this year:
Top grades for A-level results for England, Wales and Northern Ireland have reached a record high – with 44.8% getting A* or A grades.
This second year of replacement results after exams were cancelled, has seen even higher results than last year when 38.5% achieved top grades.
There is a major caveat to this, which is that, like last year, the grades are based on teachers’ judgements rather than on the results of exams. As a consequence, the percentage of students receiving A* or A grades has been enormously higher than previous years and this will create its own challenges for students wishing to continue in education, and for those applying for jobs.
The other reason Clarkson’s tweet had a poor reception is that his comment simply isn’t relevant for most people, because unlike most people he was extremely well-placed from the start and didn’t need good results to get a lucrative – and exclusive – career:
Reminder:
Jeremy Clarkson's parents were successful business owners that put him through private schools and his first job was one they gifted to him. His first writing job was gifted to him by a family friend.Ignore his annual exam grades "rags to riches" myth.
— Brendan Harkin 💀 (@brendanjharkin) August 10, 2021
https://twitter.com/David__Osland/status/1425027907769061396
“Posh kids can only fail upwards”… like Boris Johnson?
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Who would have thought that Jeremy Corbyn and Jeremy Clarkson would have so much in common. 🤔
Corbyn did better than Clarkson at A-level! But I do see what you mean.
Yawn right wing sockpuppet pops up and just has to attack JC for no reason. This garbage is why no one cares what your right wing paymasters at the cult of new Labour have to say. They whould be better off writing resignation letters, find some policies or even doing there damn job as MP’s.
No instead they order their sock puppets to carry out these stupid endless attacks against JC FFS he is no longer the leader and thanks to your cult he isn’t even a Labour MP! These dung throwing exercises at our screens from their wonk the pay must be wonderful see how diligent he is! I whould insist on payment up front seeing how they have managed to disappear millions…
It isn’t who you are it is who you know…..in this malverse world.
Surely, the BIG story is that this year probably reveals that lots more pupils should have done well in previous years,as well as in this year, but the exam system deliberately DOWNGRADED pupils so that numbers and quotas for college places etc would not be exceeded.
In reality, before now, many pupils would have done well enough for a University place but ,given a lack of enough places, the exam results were “doctored by algorithm” so that , by some mysterious process, the number of suitable pupils was almost exactly the number of college places available! The remnant 11-plus system in Kent or Glos works in the same way, producing enough pupils to fill the Grammar school places available, but then “failing” many others who, in other years, would have “passed” with exactly the same exam results.
But this year, the teachers just made honest assessments of pupil progress and achievements and did not consider things like deliberately downgrading some results so that college places would not be under pressure.
The big losers are , surely, the thousands of pupils in previous years who did just as well as this years, but were then downgraded to mean that they no longer hoped to go on to University.
Public school kids, like Clarkson, didn’t have to worry about all this as they were set up for life anyway.
Once again, it would have been the working-class pupils, who flogged their guts out to do well, expected some good results, but were then dismayed to find that ,somehow, they hadn’t done well enough.
And, in the way this system always works, the victims end up blaming themselves and wish they could have worked harder or were, “more intelligent” etc.