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When Jeremy Clarkson was announced as the new host of the revamped Who Wants To Be A Millionaire , many fans said he was a safe pair of hands for the classic quiz.
It turns out perhaps not.
The former Top Gear host finished his final show on Friday by telling a contestant they had won £32,000 – when they’d actually lost £15,000.
The gaffe mortified viewers and critics alike, although probably not as much as contestant Alan Horsburgh himself.
Clarkson - hosting the show for the week-long series - confidently told him he had answered a question correctly, and was in the money. Only for the computer to show he actually had it wrong seconds later.
Mr Horsburgh, from Kirkcaldy in Scotland, was stumped by the £32,000 poser which asked "What type of wild animal is an ibex?"
The four options were goat, pig, hare and deer. And as the contestant took time to consider, Clarkson declared: "I'm going to really annoy you now – I know the answer."
When Mr Horsburgh finally plucked for deer, Clarkson confidently replied: "I'm not even going to look at the screen. That's the correct answer."
Only it wasn’t. Goat flashed green. An aghast Clarkson slowly realised his error.
Show all 26 1 /26Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "Short people. When you've finished using a car, put the f**king seat back, so humans can use it afterwards," he posted on Twitter. Offensively.
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "Honestly, the burka doesn’t work. I was in a cab in Piccadilly the other day when a woman in a full burka crossing the road in front of me tripped over the pavement, went head over heels and up it came, red G-string and stockings."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines Driving a Jaguar round a toilet in India: "This is perfect for India because everyone who comes here gets the trots."
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Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "The only person who looked good in a 4-seated convertible was Adolf Hitler."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines As a Thai man walked over a bridge he had built during a Top Gear challenge: "That is a proud moment - but there’s a slope on it."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the Ferrari F430 Speciale: "it was a bit wrong ... that smiling front end ... it looked like a simpleton ... [it] should have been called the 430 Speciale needs."
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Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the Renault Clio V6 handling bends: "In typical French fashion it just gives up! A bit like the French did with the Germans."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "I'm thinking. If you had gone to the trouble of making a chemical bomb, why would you detonate it on a coach from Preston?"
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On public sector workers in 2011: “I’d have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "I don't understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?"
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "The only reason the Arabs and Jews have managed to keep their nasty little war going for 50 years is because it never bloody rains there. If the post-war powers had put Israel in Manchester, there'd have been no bloodshed."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "If all the creatures on earth were the same size, it's said a lobster would have the smallest brain. But then someone invented Wayne Rooney."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the invention of the segway: "They're made in America, of course, so fat Yanks can go to the fridge without expending any energy."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "Supercars are supposed to run over Arthur Scargill and then run over him again for good measure. They are designed to melt ice caps, kill the poor, poison the water table, destroy the ozone layer, decimate indigenous wildlife, recapture the Falkland Islands and turn the entire third world into a huge uninhabitable desert, all that before they nicked all the oil in the world."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "I’m sorry, but having an Aston Martin DB9 on the drive and not driving it is a bit like having Keira Knightley in your bed and sleeping on the couch. If you’ve got even half a scrotum it’s not going to happen."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On a caravaning holiday: “You aren’t allowed to have a party, you aren’t allowed to have music, you aren’t allowed to play ball games, you aren’t allowed to have a camp fire, you have to park within two feet of a post, you have to keep quiet, you have to be in bed by eleven. This is not a holiday, it’s a concentration camp!”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "Britain’s nuclear submarines have been deemed unsafe… probably because they don’t have wheel-chair access."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines “If we are being honest HIV is a pathetic virus, it can only live in the air for 6 seconds and it does what ebola does to you in 10 days in 10 years.”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the Lotus Elise: “This car is more fun than the entire french air force crashing into a firework factory.”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On actress Sarah Jessica Parker: “People think ‘oh she must be pretty’. She isn’t – she looks like a boiled horse."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On Liverpool: "People up there earn less, die more quickly, have fewer jobs and live in houses that are worth the square root of sod all."
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Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the BMW Z3: "And if you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning and think you are an onion, here’s your car."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the Ferrari 430 Scuderia: “It’s like God having really unusual sex… it should come with toilet roll.”
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines "If you're thinking of coming to America, this is what it's like: you've got your Comfort Inn, you've got your Best Western, and you've got your Red Lobster where you eat. Everybody's very fat, everybody's very stupid and everybody's very rude - it's not a holiday programme, it's the truth."
Jeremy Clarkson's Top 25 Most Obnoxious Lines On the N-word row: "I’ve been told by the BBC that if I make one more offensive remark, anywhere, at any time, I will be sacked."
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"It isn't... what? It is not a deer? I've seen them in Africa," he said. "Oh no... You've just lost £15,000."
The howler predictably enough caused a social media storm.
Natalie Durrant tweeted: "No matter how awkward a moment gets in my life, at least it’ll never be Jeremy Clarkson telling someone they’ve won £32k awkward."
And Susan Hall said: "You could say Jeremy Clarkson had no I deer."
Mr Horsburgh, for what it’s worth, walked away with £1,000.
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