And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (3 page)

Sunday 1 February 2004

Hollywood’s powerful film and television workers’ union has called for cinemagoers to boycott
Cold Mountain
because this all-American Civil War story was ‘stolen’ by the British and filmed in Romania.

Brit director Anthony Minghella has hit back, saying that he shot the movie in Transylvania because these days North Carolina, the actual location of
Cold Mountain
, is ‘too full of golf courses’.

This isn’t true. North Carolina is a spectacular place with many smoky mountains, frothy rivers and spooky forests. It was the setting for
Deliverance
which, like
Cold Mountain
, needed huge vistas to give a sense of scale. But I don’t recall catching a glimpse of Tiger Woods wandering through shot as Ned Beatty was being asked to squeal like a piggy.

North Carolina was also used as an epic backdrop for
The Last of the Mohicans
, and again Daniel Day-Lewis did not have to worry about the French, the Huron and being hit on the head by one of Colin Montgomerie’s tricky little chip shots.

Nevertheless, Minghella insists that he went to Romania because the Carpathian Mountains more accurately reflect America in the 1860s. It’s hard to argue with that. Certainly the 1,200 extras he hired for the battle scenes were more realistic. None that I could see was to
be found fighting with a pistol in one hand and a £3.99 McMeal in the other.

However, I suspect that the real reason why Minghella went to Romania rather than America is money. It’s reckoned that, because of the cost of living and the minimal fees charged by all those extras, he saved about £16 million. Seems like plain common sense to me, but that hasn’t stopped the Americans crying foul over the location, the Australian lead actress, the British lead actor and Ray Winstone’s amazing Deep South (London) accent.

This is rich. In fact, it couldn’t be richer if they weighed down the argument with five gallons of double cream and two hundredweight of butter. What about
Pearl Harbor
in which Ben Affleck managed, single-handedly, to win the Battle of Britain? I know Tony Blair once made a post-9/11 speech thanking the Americans for standing side by side with us during the Blitz, but then he doesn’t know the difference between a .22 air pistol and a Trident nuclear missile.

In reality, there were some Americans who came over here to help in the early days of the war – 244 of them to be precise. But don’t think they came in a state of righteousness. Most were wannabe fly boys and adventurers who came because they had been turned down by the USAAF for being blind or daft, and they felt that the battered RAF wouldn’t be so picky.

We are, of course, grateful to them, even though the day after the Japanese attacked Hawaii, just about all of them went home, taking their Spitfires with them and leaving us with the bill for their training. This point, I
feel, wasn’t accurately made in the Affleck film, but that didn’t stop me buying the DVD.

Then you have
Shaving Ryan’s Privates
in which the American army won the war despite the British making a complete hash of things, and
A Bridge Too Far
, in which Ryan O’Neal failed to storm though Arnhem thanks to the incompetence of Sean Connery.

Oh, and let’s not forget
U-571
, where Matthew Mc-Conaughey bravely stole an Enigma decoding machine, thus clearing the way for Steven Spielberg to take his Band of Brothers through Belgiumshire.

And why was Steve McQueen wearing his home clothes in
The Great Escape
? What branch of the services allows you to face the enemy in a pair of chinos, a baseball jacket and a T-shirt?

Then there’s Vietnam. Not once, according to Hollywood, did the Americans lose a battle. So how they lost the war is a mystery. This, I suspect, is the main reason why Hollywood didn’t make
Cold Mountain
. Who’s the bad guy when both sides are, er… American?

It’s a good job Britain still had a proper film industry when Second World War films were all the rage. Otherwise we’d have had Captain Chuck Gibson bombing the Mohne Dam with Brad and Tod in tow. And what kind of a name is Barnes Wallace? We’ll call him Clint Thrust.

Hollywood’s record with the truth is simply abysmal, which isn’t so bad if you treat the cinema as a place of entertainment. But in America the multiplex is just about the only place where anybody learns any history. After
Black Hawk Down
the audience left the theatre with a sense that America had been in Somalia fighting the
humanitarian fight. Not simply trying to depose a warlord who didn’t like the idea of US oil companies stealing all the oil.

This, surely, should worry the Hollywood film and television workers far more than where a movie was shot. In
Saving Private Ryan
the French beaches were Irish. In
Full Metal Jacket
, Vietnam was the London Docklands, and in boxing Lennox Lewis was British.

Who cares? I certainly didn’t mind where
Cold Mountain
had been filmed or how much the extras had been paid. I just thought it was one of the longest films I’d ever seen. Good, though.

Sunday 8 February 2004

Scientists revealed recently that a child born in 2030 will live five years longer than a child born yesterday. So by the middle of this century there will be more people drawing a pension than people going to work.

This will have a catastrophic effect on the economy because simple arithmetic shows there won’t be enough money in the kitty to keep all these old people in hips and cat food.

So what on earth are we going to do? Make people save more so they’re self-sufficient in their old age? Get everyone to have more babies? Or ship in thousands of healthy young immigrants who can run around actually doing some work? A tricky decision.

But then last week along came a report saying we won’t be living so long after all. Thanks to the efforts of McCain with its oven-ready chips and McDonald’s with its McMeals, we’re all going to explode by the time we’re 62.

Now you’d have expected the government to greet the news with a sigh of relief.

But not a bit of it. John Reid, the health secretary, said a big debate was needed to challenge the problem of obesity.

So what’s going on here? One minute we’re told that we’re all going to live to be 126 and that we’ll have to eat each other to survive. Then we’re told that actually it’d be best if we ate nothing at all.

At first I suspected this might have something to do with cool Britannia. Tony likes his art galleries and funky bridges and frankly he doesn’t want the place cluttered up with a load of fat ankles and prolapsed stomachs.

Then I thought it was another bit of me-too-ism with Dubya. ‘Hey, George. We’ve got fat people as well.’

But then a man in a suit went on the television to say the government really ought to tax oven-ready chips, and suddenly it all became clear. They tax us when we move and tax us when we park. They tax us when we earn money and tax us when we spend it. They tax everything we put in our lungs and now they want to tax everything we put in our stomachs.

Well, I have some observations. First of all, the American idea of obesity is far removed from our own. They have people who have moved beyond the point where fat is a problem or a joke and into the realms where it becomes revolting. We do not.

I’ve checked, and in Britain I’d be officially obese if I weighed 18 stone. But 18 stone when you’re 6 foot 5 inches isn’t even on nodding terms with what the sceptics call fat: 18 stone would, in fact, make me Martin Johnson.

Last year, when
Top Gear
was running, life was so hectic that in one week I remember eating supper on a Thursday night, thinking: ‘God. I haven’t had a bite of anything since Sunday lunchtime.’ There just hadn’t been the time and, as a result, in just a few months I lost more than two stone.

Now
Top Gear
’s not on air, I can kick around the house in loose robes all day, looking in the fridge every 20 minutes for cold sausages and filling in the gaps by
tucking into Jaffa Cakes and Penguin biscuits. I’m relaxed and happy and I’ve put on a stone.

So which is the healthier option? Stressy and thin or fat and happy? I’m not a doctor but I know what the answer is.

Plus, think what this fat phobia will do to children. None of mine is what you’d call a waif and I’m genuinely scared that thanks to the nonsense being peddled by these health-obsessed Nazis, they’re going to start throwing up their lunch in the bike sheds.

Perhaps then John Reid could admit that Norman Tebbit was right all those years ago and that we really should get on our bikes. Or maybe he might like to think about subsidising food that is good for us, rather than taxing food that isn’t.

Better still, he might like to address the real cause of misery and stress in this country today. A few years ago I took out an endowment mortgage of £75,000.

There was no mention in the sales patter that the investment company might lose my money, but that’s what it’s done. Last week I got a letter saying that there will not be enough to pay off the mortgage and that I’d better do something about it if I want to keep my house.

That’s why I don’t have a pension. It would be a complete and utter waste of time because you’re entrusting your money to a bunch of suits who are too stupid to get a job in banking or estate agency.

Look at their offices in the City. Big gleaming towers of glass and steel. Who’s paying for them? We are. And it’s the same with their soothing advertisements on the television.

You want my advice? Spend your spare cash on chips and chocolate because that way you’ll die the day you stop work with a smile on your face.

And being carted off in an enormous coffin at 62 is better than lingering on for 40 more years, hoping for a handout from the next batch of immigrants the government has shipped in to keep the country’s average age below 400.

Sunday 15 February 2004

For a while now, things have been going badly for Scotland. The shiny new parliament building is 10 times over budget and already three years late. The economy is stuttering, and all’s not well under the kilt either because the birth rate is almost elephantine.

Last week things got worse. The Welsh beat them at rugby and then again at football, and now we hear that the Glenshee Chairlift Company has lost £1 million in the past two years and must sell its two Highland ski resorts.

Apparently, global warming is to blame. In the olden days, the Scotch people got some respite from the weather every winter because the ceaseless rain turned to snow, which was at least pretty. But now it just rains all the time.

Good. I never really saw the point of skiing in Scotland. The tourist board says in its bumf that heading north of the border with your planks is a ‘really good way for novices to try out the sport before committing to a high-cost holiday elsewhere in the world’.

Really? I would imagine that anyone who tried skiing for the first time in the Cairngorms would come away from the experience with frostbite, hypothermia, iced-up hair and a passionate resolve to give up the sport for good. Learning to
ski in Scotland is a bit like learning to scuba-dive in a quarry. You get the basics, but not the point.

Of course, I don’t much care for the act of skiing itself. As I’ve said before, I never understand why people ski down a slope to a bar and then go on a lift so they can ski down the same slope again. That’s like walking to the pub on a Sunday, then going home and walking to the pub again. Madness. I ski to a bar and then go inside for a drink.

This part of a skiing holiday I like very much. The crystal skies, the jaggedy mountains, that pin-sharp air and all those pretty girls in salopettes. It’s a fun-filled blizzard of primary colours and you get a tan.

Even the Val d’Isère doctor’s surgery – where I go, having fallen off my skis on the way back from the bar – is full of wondrous new injuries. I once saw a bloke in there who had a ski pole sticking out of his eye.

And then in the evenings you can drink wine until it’s coming out of your ears, knowing that the mountain crispness will zap your hangover in the morning. Lovely.

This, however, is not how I imagine a skiing holiday in the Highlands might pan out. I’m not sure anyone would get much satisfaction from executing a nice parallel turn on sheet heather. So, Scotland has to rely entirely on its après-ski activities and, er… Well, quite.

Sure, Val d’Isère is full of people called Bunty and Rupert who throw bread rolls at you and enjoy debagging one another, which can be wearisome.

But what do you have for company in Glenshee? A family of weird beards from Tipton and a pint of McEwan’s. Skiing is supposed to be sophisticated, and Scotland just isn’t.

Of course, you might say that Scotland is only 500 miles away and is therefore easier to get to than Val d’Isère, but actually both are an hour or so away by plane. Yes, it’s easier to drive to Scotland but you should be aware that if there is any snow on the hills, it will have blocked the roads. So you won’t get there anyway.

If you do make it, you’ll certainly find good access to the top of the mountains, thanks to the new Cairngorm funicular railway, which seems to have cost the taxpayer nearly as much as the Scottish parliament. And now isn’t really needed because, according to
The Economist
, the number of McPasses sold since the 1980s has halved.

The Glenshee Chairlift Company does believe a buyer can be found for its two resorts, but unless they can find someone who has the business acumen of an otter, I wouldn’t hold your breath. With cheap air fares and no sign of a recession, France and even Colorado are always going to be less wet.

This might be sad news for those who worked there but it’s good news for the rest of the world because John Logie Baird was Scottish. Alexander Graham Bell was Scottish. Alexander Fleming was Scottish. James Watt was Scottish. Charles Macintosh was Scottish. John Dunlop was Scottish. Scottish people invented everything: the kaleidoscope, paint pigment, carpet cleaners, the US Navy, adhesive postage stamps, hypodermic needles, anaesthetics, golf, paraffin, radar, hollow pipe drainage, breech-loading rifles. This list is simply endless.