Sue Perkins is the favourite to take over Top Gear, to Twitter sexists’ disgust

As you might have heard, Jeremy Clarkson was recently sacked from Top Gear for verbally abusing and punching his producer Oisin Tymon. After being given a last warning for racist allegations, this was the last straw for the BBC and they’re now looking for someone else to front the show that made him famous. Currently, Sue Perkins is in the lead with petrolhead/former model Jodie Kidd also in the running.

That’s according to bookmakers Coral, at least. After ‘a flurry of bets’, they have Perkins at evens to take on the job, with Kidd at 5-2. They’re offering 1-3 odds that a woman will host the show, with other possible candidates including Vicki Butler-Henderson (14-1) and Suzi Perry (20-1). But it’s not all about the ladies: the odds of Chris Moyles, David Coulthard, and Jimmy Carr are all 25-1, with Dermot O’Leary just behind Perkins at 2-1. And that’s what a lot of male Twitter users seem to want: a man.

They’ve been sending tweets to the Great British Bake-Off co-presenter suggesting that being a woman, being a lesbian, and hosting a show about cake all make her a bad fit for the manly man world of Top Gear. (I mean, what if she has to talk about engines or something? The cakes and kittens she has instead of brain cells might explode!)

Typically though, she wasn’t fazed, tweeting, ‘Just back from night shoot in Kolkata sewers to find my timeline busy with middle-aged man-trolls. General gist: Man do cars, woman do cake.’ She does have a lot of supporters, though, including author and science columnist Ben Goldacre, who said that Sue Perkins taking over Top Gear would prompt him to buy a TV.

What would it be like to have someone presenting the show who doesn’t enjoy racist and homophobic slurs? I can’t imagine, but it’d be fun to find out.

Image via the BBC.