The basics of the Clarkson thing are:
He shouldn't have repeated it. A one off comment was fine annd funny but it's when you re-enforce it people will remember it and be annoyed about it.
In the current bbc climate you have to question wether or not it would have been smarter to edit it out of the programme. Saying that i don't know how they'd do that because he made the comments in long dialogue pieces.
If the BBC are worried about the complaints they are recieving, wouldn't it be best if they withdrew the programme from the public domain. i.e. BBCi player.
They didn't do that. In fact when i was reading about the story on the bbc news website, soon after it broke they actually had a link to the incident so you could watch just the offensive bit. Abit brainless as far as i'm concerned.
The BBC must be going abit off the rails at the moment because there have been two of these incidents over the last couple of weeks (admittadley Brand/Russel was alot worse) and in a time of economic and social insecurity the beeb don't need us to be questioning why we pay the £135 license fee year in year out, yet they continue to make mistakes like this. More heads will roll in the coming months you can be sure of that.