And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (26 page)

Take Elton John as an example. If he’d become a plumber, would he go around kissing other men on
the lips? I suspect the answer’s probably no. And Angelina Jolie? Would she have painted her husband’s name across her wedding dress in her own blood if her dad had been Reg Arkwright rather than Jon Voight? I doubt it.

So what went wrong? It’s easy to blame money, but do Bill Gates and Richard Branson get together once a week to sacrifice a goat? Can you visualise the Duke of Westminster hurling a potted plant at a waiter because his soup’s not brown enough?

Maybe it’s a combination of fame and money. Maybe that’s what makes a normal person turn into an oddball, insisting that all the blue M&Ms are removed and that everyone on your table at dinner should eat with their feet. Maybe money buys the ability to dislocate yourself from reality; maybe it filters out the criticisms and allows only the warming, gentle rays of adulation to shine on the turbulence of your magnificence.

Maybe that’s Michael Jackson’s problem. He hears only the good things. ‘No, no, Michael. By all means dangle your child out of the fifth-floor window…’

Last weekend, I was backstage at the Live8 event and discovered the answer. The really famous, really global stars walked around like comets, trailing a tail of ‘people’ who had been employed to make sure nothing even remotely real got in their employer’s way.

These ‘people’ were like pilot fish, employed to remove the creases from life and scratch the itches you can never reach yourself.

Snoop Doggy Dog, or whatever he’s called, had an armada of bodyguards, each of whom was the size of a
beach hut. I couldn’t work out what they were protecting him from exactly. Peaches Geldof? Nasa?

Then there was Madonna, who had a hundred bossy women with clipboards whose job, so far as I could see, was to yell a lot and make sure nobody got in Madge’s way. Which was a problem when they encountered Paul McCartney’s entourage coming in the opposite direction.

I tried to take a photograph of the ensuing chaos and was astonished when one of Madge’s secretary birds stuck her hand in front of my camera and shouted, ‘No pictures.’ Apparently one of the public relations pilot fish had decided that Mrs Ritchie could only be photographed with Mr Geldof. So obviously, to enforce this rule, a whole team had had to be employed.

Against this backdrop, even A. A. Gill looked normal, so we went in the beer tent for a drink. And it was here that I encountered David Beckham. Over the years I’ve made fun of his silly wife, his stupid tattoos and argued, forcefully, that if he spent less time at the hairdresser’s and more time at the training ground, he might have been an excellent footballer instead of a one-trick pony. I think that, after he was sent off in a World Cup match, I’d also said I’d like to beat him around the head and neck with a baseball bat.

‘Why are you always so nasty about me?’ he squeaked.

‘Gosh,’ I stuttered. ‘Well, the thing is that, um, sometimes when you’re looking for a metaphor, and er… you’ve got a deadline, you say stuff you don’t really mean.

‘Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think, “What have I done?”’

‘This is pathetic,’ tutted Gill, and walked off to find someone with a spine.

‘But you were really horrid about me on
Parkinson
,’ countered Beckham.

And I had to agree. I had used the poor chap as a metaphor for all that’s wrong with the world, on about a thousand different occasions, in newspapers, on the radio and regularly on television.

This is because we are forever hearing about David Beckham rather than from David Beckham. He employs people to speak on his behalf and, when he does talk on his own, it’s all been carefully choreographed by other people.

The thing is, though, that when you take the people away, you find a very nice chap: friendly, normal, and not as thick as you might have been led to believe (by me).

So now I have a serious problem. Who to hate? I can feel Jade Goody coming into the cross hairs. What do you think?

Sunday 10 July 2005

What with all the bombs and so on, you might imagine that Britain’s environmentalists and health and safety Nazis would give it a rest and stop bossing us all around. But no. While the nation’s normal people observed a two-minute silence last week, the busybodies were working out how much damage is done to the planet by tomatoes.

Yes, you thought
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
was a joke B-movie, but it seems not. Honestly, someone has worked out that less environmental damage is done by eating tomatoes that were grown in Spain and then brought here on a ship than eating tomatoes that were grown in heated British greenhouses.

And while they were doing that, binmen in Fife were told not to turn up for work in shorts, despite the heat-wave, in case – and I’m not making this up – they scratched their knees or were bitten by an insect. It seems health and safety guidelines are clear on the subject.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace has taken a long, hard look at the world. It has noted the alarming emergence of Islamic extremism and the corruption in Africa. It’s logged the oppression in Burma and the slaughter in the Middle East. And it has decided that something must be done… about your patio heater.

Mark Strutt, a climate campaigner, claims they’re a ‘frivolous waste of energy’, while Norman Baker, the
Liberal Democrat environment spokesman, said the first thing that came into his head. ‘Blah blah blah, carbon dioxide blah blah, heating the earth for years.’

Apparently, there are now 750,000 patio heaters in Britain, and together they produce 380,000 tons of greenhouse gases every year. That’s nearly as much, in case you’re interested, as is generated by the nation’s joggers.

Now, I should explain at this point that my wife bought me a patio heater for our tin wedding anniversary, whenever that was, and I’ve always been slightly nervous about it. Of course, now I know such things annoy Greenpeace, I shall keep it lit 24 hours a day, but still the doubts won’t go away.

First of all, there’s the word ‘patio’, which I dislike. And I especially dislike it because, unlike toilet or settee or lounge, I can’t think of an alternative. I suppose you could call it a terrace heater but a terrace, as I understand it, must be raised. There’s no such thing as a sunken terrace. That’s a patio, whether you like it or not.

The main reason, though, why I dislike patio heaters is that they’re trying to make Britain something it’s not. In Australia you can eat and party outside because the climate is kind and the evenings are balmy. Whereas here the climate is miserable and the evenings are freezing. This is great. In fact, it’s precisely because we were brought up on a diet of drizzle and fish fingers that we had the biggest empire the world has ever seen.

And it’s still going on today. Because there’s almost certainly no such thing as global warming, we still have completely unreliable weather and that’s why we have such a powerful economy. While the French and the
Italians and the Australians are at the beach, we are all sheltering from the rain and the cold, at work. The patio heater undermines all that. It brings the possibility of alfresco dining to our restaurants and ends the caveat at the end of all garden party invitations: if wet, in the village hall.

What’s more, it encourages families to eat outside. And this, in Britain, never works because it’s almost always too cold, and, when it isn’t, it’s far too hot.

And when it’s far too hot, you can’t sit out because you’re English and you’ll burn. Not smoothly either. You’ll end up with strap marks, sleeve marks, a ‘V’ around your neck and a nose like Rudolf’s. At work the next day, you’ll look like a raspberry ripple. You’ll look ridiculous.

Oh, and unless you’re very careful, every single mouthful of food eaten outdoors in Britain will contain a wasp, and every slurp of drink a fly the size of Jeff Goldblum.

I should also explain to those who have no allergies that the four most terrifying words in the English language, if you suffer from hay fever, are ‘shall’, ‘we’, ‘eat’ and ‘outside’.

Then there’s the food itself, which, if you’re outdoors, will have come from a barbecue. So, it will be nuked on one side and wriggling with salmonella on the other. And covered all over in a thin film of ash because, at some point in the cooking process, it will have fallen through the bars and into the charcoal.

Being invited to someone’s house for a barbecue fills me with the same sort of horror and dread as being invited to someone’s house for a fancy dress party.

Especially if they have a patio heater, because then the
guests end up like the food. Heated up on one side to the point where their flesh is starting to melt, and frozen solid on the other.

Greenpeace tells us that it’s ridiculous to try to heat the outdoors and that if we’re a bit nippy we should wear a jumper. But, as usual, I have a much better idea. Go inside and eat food that has been cooked in an oven. It’ll taste better, you won’t be eaten by a mosquito, you won’t die of food poisoning, it’s good for the economy and, if you turn the central heating up a notch or two and eat British tomatoes, you’ll annoy Greenpeace even more than sheltering under a hot tin umbrella.

Sunday 17 July 2005

Over the past couple of weeks Ken Livingstone has explained over and over again that Britain is now a multicultural, multi-ethnic society. He paints a picture of Polish plumbers helping Nigerian witches to learn the art of welding, and Greek lady-men teaching disabled Iranian dentists how to play the bouzouki.

Of course I’m sure that Ken’s mayoral headquarters in London are a veritable pick’n’mix of ethnical diversity, a rainbow of skin tones and religion. I bet there are a hundred different cultures in there, all working together in right-on perfect harmony.

And naturally, when you work in an environment like this, it’s easy to convince yourself that school playgrounds up and down the land are full of little Jewish boys playing football with little Muslim girls. And that every social gathering looks like the crowd scene from a British Airways commercial.

But in my world things are rather different. Because, with the exception of A. A. Gill, who claims to be Indian, pretty well all my friends are white and well off.

They live either in agreeable Georgian piles or in big, Victorian town houses, and most have two or more blond-haired children at private schools.

Only last week I was at my children’s sports day and, as I lay in the long grass by the river drinking
pink champagne and chatting with other media parents, I remember thinking: ‘God, I love being middle class.’

You may call this sort of existence boring and you may have a point. But what am I supposed to do about it? I live in a town which, according to the most recent census, is 98.6 per cent white. Some 75 per cent of the population is Christian, with the remainder made up of those who say they have no religion at all, or they don’t know, and one Jedi knight. That’d be me.

So when I go to a dinner party, the guests are always white. All my friends have white spouses. And the only diversity in the office where I work is that three of the staff are left-handed. As a result I never meet any black or Asian people. So, in this country at least, I have no black or Asian friends. Not one.

Ken would be amazed by this, I’m sure. I was slightly amazed, too, the other day, when a Jewish friend asked how many other Jews I could count as mates. ‘Oh, loads,’ I said without thinking. But then, when I actually looked in my address book, the correct answer was in fact ‘two’.

Last week in this newspaper Michael Portillo said: ‘Our signature national quality of tolerance has been strengthened, not diminished, by successive rounds of immigration.’ This sounds very noble and very wise. But it’s simply not true. In my case, and I suspect I’m far from unusual, my quality of tolerance has been completely unaffected by immigration, because it has made not the slightest bit of difference.

What I think of Albanians now is exactly the same as what I thought of Albanians when they lived in Albania. Nothing, because I don’t know any.

I’m told things are different in London, and certainly when you look at the photographs of those killed in the bombings two weeks ago it’s an absolute smorgasbord of colour and creed. But, away from the public transport system most ethnic groups tend to stick together just as firmly as we do out here in the sticks. Southall High Street, for instance, is almost exclusively Indian. Brixton is predominantly black. Golders Green is Jewish. And so on.

Only the other day I was looking round a large and well-known public school, and I couldn’t help noticing that the black kids all sat next to one another in chapel.

And, what’s more, we never get mixed ethnic groups in the
Top Gear
studio. Asians come with other Asians. Black kids come with other black kids. Golfers come with other golfers.

In Harrow there’s to be a school for Hindus in the same way that in Yorkshire there’s one for Catholics. And it’s the same story on the internet. There are chat rooms for Muslims, chat rooms for Hindus, chat rooms for Poles. The whole country is full of people carving out a little enclave for themselves. In much the same way that British people living in France tend to eat and socialise with other British people.

Ken Livingstone may have engineered a multicultural environment, but I suspect that Britain isn’t multicultural at all. It’s simply a land mass on which an unknown number of immigrants and indigenous people happen to live.

We co-exist like birds. You don’t find sparrows joining in with a flock of starlings. You don’t see yellowhammers
swooping down on a cherry tree with a pack of fieldfares. But, crucially, you don’t see them fighting either.

This, I think, is the lesson we should learn in these difficult times. Instead of forcing a Pakistani teenager to swear allegiance to the flag and learn English and get some crummy certificate of Britishness from the local mayor, why not let him be a Pakistani who happens to live in Bradford?

Let him go to a Muslim school. Let him support Pakistan when they play England at cricket. Let him be what he wants to be.