And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (29 page)

What I do have a problem with are those who say, ‘Mmmm, yes, count me in,’ and then count themselves out with two days to go.

First to cry off this year was Richard Hammond, the shortish chap I work with, who said he had a corporate gig that night. But when I suggested he gave his fee to the charity, he quickly realised that he could get a helicopter and go to both.

Then James May, the quiet, sensitive one, called to say he suddenly had to go to Scotland. Rubbish. Fighter pilots may find they are suddenly needed somewhere else. And lifeboatmen. But not motoring journalists. And anyway, no one suddenly has to go to Scotland.

No, I’m afraid James now has Jade Goody Syndrome; I worry that he thinks he doesn’t need friends because he’s got fans instead. And if he loses some of those, there are always half a million more queuing up for a slot, in his address book.

I nearly wrote a strong letter of complaint to his website because his refusal meant I had to spend two whole days trying to find a replacement, someone who I knew would say ‘Yes’ and then not show up on the day. If Dimbleby can do this, anyone can.

In fact, the only man in show business who is 100 per cent reliable is Michael Winner. He makes the speaking clock look sloppy.

But I can’t see him in a go-kart somehow. And that left me with Ronnie Winner, who’s also reliable but who is a greengrocer and is therefore not what the paying guests would consider to be a celebrity. As we speak, I’m waiting for Steve Coogan’s brother to call back.

Meanwhile, the caterers keep ringing and asking how many will be there for dinner.

I suggested they got Jesus into the kitchen because it
could be five or it could be 5,000. And it was the same deal with the people supplying tables and chairs, and the taxi service.

Organising a party when you have absolutely no idea how many people will be there, or when they’ll come, or when they’ll go, is like making a salad blindfolded. You don’t know whether you’ll end up with a Niçoise or a caesar, or even if the mystery ingredients have missed the bowl altogether.

But I know exactly what I’m going to do to James May. I’m going to wait until he has a party and then, with 24 hours to go, show him what real rudeness is by taking his entire guest list on a free holiday to Barbados. But only if they all pee through his letter box first.

Sunday 25 September 2005

The job of a newspaper columnist is to find something wrong with everything. To find discord where there is harmony. To sprinkle a little bit of hay fever dust all over the perfect summer’s day.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to find fault with something you love. And, strangely, one of the things I’ve loved most of all over the years is Club Class on British Airways. I love the way that, when you’ve finished working in some godforsaken Third World fleapit, you’re welcomed on board by a homosexual in grey flannel trousers, and you think: ‘Aaaah. We haven’t even taken off but I’m home already.’

I love their scones and clotted cream. I love the way they have back-up planes for when yours goes wrong. And I love the calmness of their pilots, all of whom have abbreviated Christian names and reassuring three-syllable surnames. ‘Welcome on board, ladies and gentlemen. Mike Richardson here on the flight deck…’

Oh, they’ve done their best over the years to shoo me away, ditching the elegant grey-and-blue livery in favour of that terrible pre-Tony multiworld design on the tailfins, and then by buying the tedious and slothful 777 to replace the brilliant jumbos.

Even when I stopped flying quite so much and they demoted me from a card that entitled me to sit on the
captain’s lap to a card that didn’t even get me into the economy class bogs, I still stayed loyal. And what happened when they ditched Concorde? Did I work myself into a frenzy of righteous indignation. Did I rant and rave? No.

I blamed the French.

I chose to fly BA the other day even though I knew the catering staff were on a roundabout in Slough and there’d be no scones. To give you an idea of how devoted I am, the only request I made when negotiating my BBC contract was that I should fly BA whenever possible.

Last week, however, it wasn’t possible, and I was sent upper-class tickets for a flight to San Francisco with the enemy. Virgin.

I’d flown once before with Beardy Airways and, having been told to put on the ‘funky phones’ so I could hear the safety demonstration, I seriously considered opening the door and jumping out. It’s an airline, for crying out loud, not a playgroup.

Still, this time they offered to send a car to pick me up, which is something BA has never done. Of course it wasn’t the limo in which Helen Mirren luxuriates in the television commercials; it was more a sort of Volvo, in fact.

But, even so, it took me to a check-in zone at Heath-row where, without even getting out of the car, my bag was checked in and my boarding card issued. That was impressive. And then I was escorted by a pretty, slim girl, which is what airline employees should be like, to the Virgin lounge.

My God. It was like walking into the Design Museum.
The whole place was dripping with the sort of style that means you can neither open nor close the lavatory doors, and the wine’s Norwegian. It was fabulous.

In the BA lounge you get a cup of coffee and a biscuit, and you help yourself.

Here, there was a restaurant, bar staff, a smoking area that wasn’t just a glass box like you get at a zoo, a hairdresser’s, several massage parlours, some steam rooms, and a businessman on a mobile phone in a jacuzzi.

He was unusual. When you fly with BA, everyone has a laptop and they model themselves on those idiots you see in airport poster advertisements for American banks. But with Virgin, most of the passengers looked like the sort of people you might have round for dinner. One was the lighting director for the Eagles. Several were women.

I had a massage, which the girl said was like trying to ease the tension in a fridge door – this is because I’d been unable to get into the lavatory and was in agony – and then I rang the office to find out how much it was all costing. ‘Oh,’ said the girl, ‘it’s about the same as BA business.’

That’s weird. Normally, two similarly priced products designed to do the same sort of thing are roughly the same. A Ford is much the same as a Vauxhall. Evian is pretty much the same as what comes out of your tap. But the gap between Virgin and BA is planetary. And we hadn’t even got on the plane yet.

Superficially, it
was
the same as BA. They even had a homosexual man to welcome us on board, and scones, and seats that move around electrically. But on Virgin you have a girl in stockings and a suspender belt to give
you another massage, and there’s a bar. And I mean a proper bar, on which you can loll.

What’s more, on BA you watch the films when they come on. On Virgin you are the master of your own destiny, thanks to technology that’s bound to break all the time. It certainly did on the way home but, because we were on a 747, the flight took less than nine hours. I therefore didn’t really mind.

So there we are. Finally I’ve found something wrong with British Airways. They’re not good enough. And now it’s time to put a superbug in Beardy’s omelette with a question. If you can make your airline even better than the best airline in the world, how come your trains are such rubbish?

Sunday 2 October 2005

Soon it will be illegal to make derogatory remarks about people from other countries. But it isn’t now. So we begin this morning with an observation. It’s possible, I think, to sum up the people of every nation on Earth with a single word. The Americans are fat, the Spanish are lazy, Germans are humourless, Russians are drunk, Australians are chippy and the Greeks are homosexual.

Fine, but what word, do you suppose, would people from around the world use to sum up the British? I guess, if they’ve been exposed to our football team or some of our holidaymakers, that word might well be ‘hooligans’, but I really do think the vast majority would describe us as ‘polite’.

There’s a sense that we spend all of our time in bowler hats, standing up for ladies and offering our seats to elderly and disabled people on trains. But the perception is far removed from reality because actually, when it comes to politeness, I think the British slot neatly between the Israelis and the leopard seal, a blubbery and vicious bastard that kills penguins for fun.

Last week,
Reader’s Digest
provided some evidence to back this up. Its researchers toured the nation’s biggest cities, allowing drivers out of side turnings to see if they were thanked and deliberately dropping bags of shopping to see if anyone would help pick it all up again.

Each city was then awarded a courtesy rating and, with the exception of Newcastle and Liverpool, pretty well everywhere did very badly. Birmingham was branded the rudest city of them all; drop your shopping in the Bullring and chances are you will be killed and eaten.

Good. Birmingham is what Mr Blair would call a multicultural city and the research shows that the recent arrivals are getting the hang of what it means to be British.

First and foremost it is critical that you do not know the name of your next-door neighbour. Why should you? Living on the same street as someone is no basis for a friendship. In fact, the only time you should be noticed by your neighbours is when you’ve lain dead in your kitchen for nine months.

That is a uniquely British tradition: the ability to rot in peace. In Italy, you wouldn’t even be cold before half the town was beating down your door to see what was wrong.

And I’m not just talking about cities. From my office window I can see half a dozen houses dotted around in the countryside, and I’m proud to say I don’t know who lives in any of them. And according to Bill Bryson, things are no different in Yorkshire, which is always billed as a friendly place. He’d lived in the Dales for years before someone from the village wearily waved a hand to acknowledge his presence.

Disagree? Well, just try walking your dog through a field full of sheep and see if you like the rural welcome – which will come steaming towards your pooch from the barrel of a 12-bore shotgun.

If any tourist wanted to experience, first hand, a typically British exchange, they should head for the Grab’n’Go
shop at the BBC. Here I am able to buy a bottle of Diet Coke, some cheesy Quavers and a Picnic chocolate bar without exchanging a single word with the cashier. She takes the products, scans them into her machine, points lazily at the amount on the till, takes my money, and I go away.

Think how much time this saves.

It could be argued, in fact, that Britain conquered a quarter of the world simply because no one was wasting their lives telling everyone they met to ‘have a nice day’.

This brings me neatly on to my postman. I see him every morning, come rain or global warming, and the only thing I’ve ever heard him say is, ‘Can you sign here?’ Actually, nowadays we’ve moved on from that. Now he just points at his form, I write my name on it, and he gets back into his van. Brilliant.

It’s said that true silence can only be found these days in a desert, but that is simply not true. If you want to experience absolute peace and quiet, just step into a crowded British lift. I did just that, yesterday, in Birmingham in fact, and not a single sound was made, even when the doors closed and the damn thing failed to move.

And where else in the world do you read in the newspapers about neighbours going to war over a hedge, or a borrowed hosepipe that was not returned? Can you imagine anyone in Switzerland getting road rage?

They say New York is a rude place but compared with Britain it’s just a very tall, noisy version of Lucie Clayton’s.

Is there any city outside Britain where young men, and quite a few young women, go out at night specifically to have a fight?

Where else can you have your head stove in for looking at someone, or have a pint glass rammed into your neck for spilling someone’s drink? Nowhere I’ve ever been, that’s for sure.

What’s more, this is almost certainly the only country in the world where a major newspaper would carry a piece that began by calling the Americans fat, the Spanish lazy and the Greeks homosexual. So, on that basis, Birmingham should be proud to be voted the rudest city in Britain. Because that makes it the most British city of them all.

Sunday 23 October 2005

My eye was caught recently by a photograph in a magazine called
The Spectator
. It showed an old man in a nineteenth-century setting, and underneath it read ‘Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homosexuality’.

This seemed odd, partly because the old man in the photograph, with his mutton chops and his frock coat, looked about as gay as Sean Connery, and partly because I thought homosexuality had been invented long before the 1800s.

I therefore plunged into the lengthy story that accompanied the photograph and pretty soon my curiosity turned to bewilderment. Because it just went on and on about alternative medicine.

Only when I reached the end and turned back for a better look at the old man did I realise my mistake. Samuel Hahnemann was not the founder of homosexuality. He was the founder of homoeopathy.

For some time now I’ve suspected that my eyes are beginning to fail and that some spectacles might be a good idea. But I’ve always been nervous about coming out because of a simple truism. Not all people who wear glasses need a poke in the eye. But all people who need a poke in the eye do wear glasses.

Sadly, contact lenses are not an option, because if your eyesight is broken how are you supposed to find them
when you drop them on a brightly coloured hotel carpet? Or at a football match? I’ve seen too many people on their hands and knees, shouting, ‘Nobody move.’

There’s something else, too. Regularly I appear on television with bloodshot eyes because I can’t use eye drops, and I feel physically sick at the thought of having a retinal scan. I can’t even watch a close-up of someone’s eyes on
Casualty
. So, given the choice of putting in a pair of contact lenses or having my scrotum eaten by a pack of wild dogs, I’d have my trousers off in a jiffy.