Richard Hammond sparks outrage by claiming men who eat ice cream are gay

Richard Hammond sparked serious backlash in the most recent episode of The Grand Tour by making the outrageous suggestion that only gay men eat ice cream.

No, really, that’s actually something that he said.

Richard was discussing a Volvo’s cream interior with his co-hosts, Jeremy Clarkson and James May, when he made the tasteless gag – with even controversial rent-a-gob Clarkson being left stunned by the remark.

Talking about the car, Jeremy said: “The only problem is that in one of those, you couldn’t enjoy a chocolate Magnum ice cream.”

To which Richard replied: “It’s all right, I don’t eat ice cream. It’s something to do with being straight.”

Bizarrely, the studio audience applauded the ‘joke’, prompting Clarkson to ask: “Why are you applauding him? What do you mean? You’re saying all children are homosexual?”

Hammond quipped back: “What? What? Ice cream is a bit – you know… There’s nothing wrong with it, but a grown man eating an ice cream – it’s that way, rather than that way.”

Unsurprisingly, viewers of the Amazon Prime show were not happy and took to Twitter to voice their outrage:

Speaking on BBC 5 Live Daily, LGBT campaigner Peter Tatchell also criticised Hammond, explaining: “It’s a perverse world when everyday pleasures like ice cream becomes the butt of homophobic innuendo.

“That Richard Hammond thinks he needs to boast about his heterosexuality is weird and it will get people wondering, ‘Why? Why is he saying that?’

“His pandering to prejudice is bad enough, of course. But the audience applause that he got makes it even worse, and I think it shows that we still have some way to go to end bigoted banter.

Neither Richard Hammond or The Grand Tour producers have responded to the backlash.