Jeremy Clarkson has revealed that he went into rehab after he was fired from his presenting job on BBC motoring show Top Gear earlier this year.
“Back in the summer it was decided by people with serious faces and stethoscopes that I needed a complete break," the 55-year-old wrote in his weekly column for The Sunday Times.
“And they weren’t talking about two weeks in the sun with a book, and a million cocktail parties every night. They were talking about a whole month in the Stone Age."
Clarkson, who returns to the BBC tonight to present an extended edition of Have I Got News For You for the first time since last March's Top Gear altercation with producer Oisin Tymon, says he was also stressed over the death of his mother last year.
He said: “They said very sternly that after dealing with the stresses of a dying mother and the BBC television chief Danny Cohen and a lost job and a million other things besides, I was about to become a drooling vegetable. I must go immediately to a prison where there would be no contact with the outside world.”
He also joked that yoga was the worst part of his rehab experience. “To fill the yawning chasm between the 5am roll call and 10pm lights out, hours and hours of what I’ve now decided is the absolute worst thing in the world - yoga.”
Since being sacked by the BBC, Clarkson and his Top Gear co-presenters James May and Richard Hammond have signed with Amazon Prime for a new motoring show.
