MANY years ago, when I was just a wet-behind-the-ears motoring reporter, Jeremy Clarkson was still a columnist for a popular magazine called Performance Car.

I’d bumped into him a few times on car launches where he enjoyed ‘big beast’ status among the assembled hacks. Even then, car company press officers went out of their way to make certain he was having a good time. He was outspoken, controversial and funny – in every way (at 6ft 5”-inches tall, literally as well as figuratively) a larger than life character.

One time he wrote a Performance Car column about life as a motoring journalist. In it, he exposed some half-truths many older writers (the ones who’d started writing about cars when the Morris Oxford was still cutting edge) would have preferred to remain unsaid.

Instead of offering sage advice on how to become a journalist, joining a local paper to get a good basic grounding in writing and bombarding magazine editors with ideas, features and begging letters etc, Clarkson wrote about what a pampered lifestyle motoring scribes enjoyed. Worst of all he revealed details of what he called ‘the bribe’.

In the 1970s and 1980s it became routine for car manufacturers to offer journalists a ‘thank you’ gift for attending a new car launch (as if flying you to an exotic foreign destination to play with new cars no one else had seen wasn’t thanks enough). These were usually quite modest (branded umbrellas, pens etc) but a strange – although not entirely unforeseen – thing happened: the worse the car, the better the ‘thank you’ gift became. Hence Clarkson’s reference to it as ‘the Bribe’.

Sadly, I arrived on the scene just as ‘the Bribe’ was winding down. I collected a couple of umbrellas (somebody even liked my McLaren golf umbrella enough to pinch it) but nothing much else, and marvelled at stories of car companies giving away expensive leather goods, fine wines, portable tellies and in one – possibly apocryphal – tale even an entire car to jaundiced journalists.

Clarkson’s column revealed the full details and poked fun at crusty old writers only interested in ‘the freebie’. There was much muttering among the press pack but Clarkson was, for the most part, absolutely right. He dared to write what others only thought - some veteran motoring writers gave every impression of not giving a fig about the cars they had been invited to test - and he's been doing it ever since.

Clarkson got his first Top Gear job when he found himself sat next to a BBC producer on a car launch and convinced him how much better it would be with a young gun in front of the camera.

To start with, the BBC tried to rein him in. For his first Top Gear piece – about a firm which chopped up Bentleys - he had to wear a blazer, tie and beige ‘slacks’ to make himself look smart for viewers but slowly his true personality came to the fore.

Ironically, Clarkson’s straight-talking man-of-the-people image is a fiction.

Although he was born in South Yorkshire, he grew up in the small village of Burghwallis, near Doncaster, in a grade II listed farmhouse with four double bedrooms, two reception rooms, three bathrooms, an entrance hall and a cellar (but only one garage). The Clarksons made a mint by designing and selling Paddington Bear toys in the 1970s and were wealthy enough to be able to send young Jeremy to the exclusive private Repton School. Repton’s roll of honour includes Olympic medallist Harold Abrahams, author Roald Dahl, tennis player Herbert Fortescue Lawford, the actor Basil Rathbone and Clarkson’s pal Andy Wilman.

He landed his first job on The Rotherham Advertiser (after losing a job with the Scunthorpe Telegraph to the editor of this newspaper in a case of mistaken identity) and moved on to The Wolverhampton Express and Star before jumping into motoring journalism and magazines.

There are hundreds of motoring journalists writing about cars but only one Jeremy Clarkson. He is unique.

He loves to generalise (French cars are quirky but unreliable, Italian cars are sexy but even more unreliable, Japanese cars are boring, German cars are even more boring and mass market British cars just plain awful) but some of his writing and his road tests on Top Gear are brilliant. Who can forget the excruciating ‘road test’ of the Vauxhall Vectra, a six minute long piece in which Clarkson demolished one of Britain’s best-sellers concluding it was like “testing a microwave oven” or, more recently, the film which caricatured Peugeot drivers as myopic dolts.

Top Gear only really became the phenomenon it is today when the BBC handed over full control to Clarkson, and old Reptonian friend Andy Wilman, for the re-launch in 2002.

Will the show be able to continue without him? Almost certainly, because the BBC has too much invested in it as an international franchise, but it won’t be the same. The Beeb may tempt Chris Evans into fronting ‘new’ Top Gear but he will never be Clarkson – and nor should he be.

Then there is Clarkson himself. He’s only 54 and other broadcasters will be falling over themselves to offer him a job. Over the past few days there have been rumours of a move to Netflix, the online streaming service. But Clarkson may find he needed the BBC as much as it needed him. Other presenters who have left ‘Auntie’ – Susanna Reid, Adrian Chiles, Des Lynam and Christine Bleakley all spring to mind – have found it difficult to replicate their ‘national treasure’ status elsewhere. Where else can he enjoy a prime time TV slot, a Christmas special and a guaranteed audience of millions? Certainly not at Netflix.

Wherever he goes, Jeremy Clarkson will always be Jeremy Clarkson, calling the shots as he sees them – but how many people will be watching the next time he appears on our screens is very much open to debate.