SUSPENDED star Jeremy Clarkson is continuing to embarrass the BBC with claims of racism, his views on immigrant taxi drivers and a potential appearance on another of its top-rating shows.
The BBC Trust has just cleared the presenter of racism over his use of the word "pikey" but his career at the corporation remains on hold while claims he punched a producer in a row over food are investigated.
The Trust's decision was criticised by The Traveller Movement and Clarkson is also likely to face criticism over his latest column for Top Gear magazinewhere he complains that London taxis with immigrant drivers smell of "sick".
The BBC Trust report said Clarkson, whose future is in doubt following a "fracas" with producer Oisin Tymon, put up a placard with the words Pikey's Peak on the BBC2 series in February last year.
But the Trust's Editorial Standards Committee (ESC) concluded the word was used to mean "cheap", rather than as a term of racist or ethnic abuse.
A spokesman for the Traveller Movement rejected the decision, saying: "We are horrified by the BBC's green lighting of the use of the word 'pikey' by the Top Gear presenters".
The BBC Trust ruling comes after viewers complained the sign was "grossly offensive and racist" to the "gypsy traveller community", whose children are subjected to the word as a term of abuse in schools.
Clarkson, who is set to host the BBC's top-rating satire show Have I Got News For You, raised more eyebrows with his column in Top Gear magazine.
Written before the incident involving the producer, Clarkson gave his views on immigrant taxi drivers and suggested that the roads were full of immigrant drivers in the north.
"In London, there are two types of driver. You have a chap who's just arrived from a country you've never heard of, whose car smells faintly of lavender oil and sick, who doesn't know where he's going and can't get there anyway because he never puts more than £2 worth of fuel in the tank of his car," he wrote.
"Then you have someone in a suit in a smart black Mercedes S-Class who does know where he's going and is very polite but he charges around £7,500 a mile."