And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (30 page)

And therefore, with an hour to kill at London City airport last week, I sauntered into the shop and decided to buy some spectacles.

It wasn’t easy. A notice alongside the display asked me to stand 14 inches away and read various lines of print, each of which was in a different size. Right. So how do you know what 14 inches is in an airport shop? Eventually I figured a Berliner newspaper might be about right, so finally I had a very good reason for buying the
Guardian
.

Having used it to position my nose in the right place, I found I could read the entire eye chart, and who made it, and their address, with no difficulty at all.

So on that basis my eyes are fine.

But they’re not. I cannot read
The Spectator
by the 40-watt glow of my bedside lamp. And nor can I read menus in candlelit restaurants. And so, because I didn’t want to go through the rest of my life eating the wrong food and muddling homoeopaths up with homosexuals, I selected the weakest lenses and set about choosing some frames.

Now look. It’s a fair bet that most people who need
spectacles are no longer in the first flush of youth, so could someone please explain why the choice was so universally cool and anti-fit hip. I wanted something from the ’70s, an Aviator perhaps, or maybe a Lennon, but all I was offered was the sort of stuff worn by fierce-looking television executives and Bonio.

None of them, I felt sure, would suit me at all, but for confirmation of this I put a pair on my face and stood in front of the mirror to see what they looked like.

It was hard to say for sure, because all the advertising paraphernalia and health and safety nonsense was hanging like bunting in front of the lenses which, to make things even worse, were covered in stickers. How stupid is that?

After I’d peeled and ripped it all off, I went back to the mirror to find that I was completely out of focus. For all I knew I wasn’t standing in front of a mirror at all. It could have been a huge poster of a space alien. Certainly the creature staring back at me had a face that was about three miles wide.

And it was covered in huge, pustulating spots. Jesus Christ. They hadn’t been there when I’d shaved that morning, and yet now I looked like I’d been attacked with half a pint of VX nerve gas. And there was what looked like a whole tree growing out of my nose.

How come the girl at the check-in desk hadn’t thought to mention this? I always make a point of telling people when they have loo roll sticking out of their trousers, or their skirt tucked into their knickers, so why had no one taken me on one side and explained that there was a giant redwood growing from a moon-sized, pus-filled crater on my nose? Bastards.

Hurriedly I removed the spectacles and felt a wave of relief as everything returned to normal. The spots went away and the tree turned back into a small hair.

Small wonder people with glasses are so irritating. Like vampires they live in a permanent state of fear that they may accidentally catch sight of themselves in a mirror.

They also know that the disintegration has begun. Today it’s the eyes, but soon the ageing process will start to scythe its way through something more important.

Spectacles, then, make
The Spectator
and menus easier to read, but in the process they also bring into pin-sharp focus your own mortality.

Sunday 6 November 2005

Each week on
Have I Got News for You
, a guest publication is used for the missing words round. It could be
Successful Potato Magazine
or, when I hosted the show recently,
Fuel Oil and Tanker Driver News
.

Ho ho ho, we like to think. How amusing that someone should produce a magazine for tanker drivers and those in the fuel oil business. But you know what? Each of these comedic little bi-quarterlies represents the visible tip of a vast iceberg, evidence that below the waterline there is an army of people who want to know about all the latest breakthroughs and management appointments. People for whom fuel oil, and its transportation, pays the mortgage and feeds the kids.

And, like every other industry, there will be an annual exhibition where new stuff can be showcased. This, invariably, will be held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, which means that once a year those who replenish the nation’s boilers will find themselves holed up for the night at the nearby Metropole.

When I checked in there last week, it appeared to be a normal international hotel.

There were revolving doors, lots of plants and plenty of TV pornography in the room. But in fact it wasn’t normal at all. The first clue that I had entered what is surely the weirdest place in the world came as I headed
for my room and passed a middle-aged woman working on her laptop in the lobby while dressed as an elf.

It turned out that a chocolate company had taken over one of the ‘function suites’ for its annual knees-up and, to break the ice, had insisted that the entire staff doll themselves up in hilarious fancy dress.

At eleven o’clock or so, they hit the bar and were joined by 60 public relations girls from an agency up north who’d come in little black cocktail dresses and seemed pretty keen to go all the way with Hiawatha, an enormous fork-lift-truck driver.

The elf, meanwhile, had got off with Tonto.

Those who’d failed to pull decided that the best and most amusing thing they could do was set off the fire alarm. And so there we were at 2 a.m., standing in the hotel lobby in our dressing gowns and our underpants, watching firemen doing their best despite a gang of vomiting Smurfs. It was an eventful and reasonably sleepless night, but no matter, at least tomorrow would be quieter.

It wasn’t. Tomorrow brought some girls from an endowment policy complaints call centre in Scotland and a huge number of men who may, or may not, have been involved in some way with fuel oil and tankers.

The courting ritual began again, but this time there was some celebrity spice. Yes indeedy. Bill Bailey, the bedraggled comedian, had appeared at the NEC that night with Jasper Carrot and was to be found at the bar, fighting off tanker drivers with a hard stare.

The call centre girls had zeroed in on my doe-eyed
Top Gear
colleague, Richard Hammond. At one point he
was wearing about six of them, and two simply wouldn’t let go at all. At 2.30 a.m. I received a call from the distraught midget, saying they were following him up and down the corridor and he daren’t go to his room.

It didn’t matter, though, because at 2.35 a.m. some of the lads beaten off by Bill Bailey decided that the best and most amusing thing they could do was to set off the fire alarm. And so there we all were again, in our underpants, watching the firemen step over the vomit.

Then everyone sloped back to their rooms to finish cleaning the epiglottis of some accounts girl from Rhyl.

Of course, all hotels are an aphrodisiac and all business trips are similarly laced with possibility. So bring the two together, and it’s an inhibition-free zone. You check in to the Metropole as a perfectly decent, perfectly normal human being, but you’ll leave with an itch. God knows why televisual sex is provided in the rooms, because the real thing seems to be freely available at the bar.

Unlike a drink. At most hotels you simply tell the barman your room number and that’s that. But at the Metropole you must provide documents as well, and since my wife had changed my check-in name to try to get me some peace and privacy, and I had no idea what it might be, I couldn’t buy a beer.

I sympathise with the management here, because most of the guests are too drunk to know their name and certainly way too sozzled to remember that, while the bed and breakfast account is taken care of, they’re picking up the extras.

On the third night I couldn’t take any more, so our party went into Birmingham for a curry. We got back at
midnight to find ourselves in the midst of what appeared to be every Christmas party ever held.

You can forget Ibiza or the streets of a provincial town on a Saturday night. For round-the-clock, seven-day-a-week drinking and debauchery, it’s hard to top the Metro-pole. If you’re young, free, married, old, pretty or blessed with the face of a bull elephant, you can have the time of your life. I mean, it was at the Metropole a few years ago that I saw a girl cartwheeling past the picture windows wearing nothing but a G-string. You don’t even get that sort of view at the Carlton in Cannes.

Sadly, though, I’m too old for it now, so on the fourth night I went back to the hotel to pick up my bags and go home. It took a while, because someone had set off the fire alarm.

Sunday 27 November 2005

Sadly, because of a few lunatics at the top end of the show business ladder – the ones who adopt dolphins and drink their own urine and have tantric sex with bits of furniture – we seem to have got it into our heads that all celebrities are completely bonkers.

Well, sorry, but they’re not. You may see Ricky Gervais strolling through London and you may imagine he’s off for lunch with Clint Eastwood, but actually he’s probably trying to find some filing cabinets.

You may see Steve Coogan driving down the M6, and you may wonder how many lap dancers he has in the footwell of his car, but in all probability he’s just spent the weekend at his mum’s house, talking about Mabel at No. 23.

People assume that, because I go on television and shout while driving round corners too quickly, I live in a leopard-skin house, being fed cocaine and peacock by girls in PVC. Whereas, in fact, I spend most of my time picking children up from parties. Just like you.

Normally, of course, the misconception is no big deal, but once a year I’m dragged round the nation’s radio and television stations to promote my Christmas DVD.

Called
Full Throttle Power Hell Megablast
, or something.

Most of the big-name stars know the game and it’s all very jolly. You rock up, tell a short, amusing anecdote,
they mention your new DVD/book/play, you talk about it without trying to sound like you’re plugging, then you get in the car and head off for your next appointment.

On Thursday last week I began at LBC, then moved to
This Morning
with Fern and Phillip, which is like spending 10 minutes in a warm, pink bubble bath, and then it was off to Simon Mayo on Radio Football.

Unlike anyone else in the business, Simon, who is normal and drives a Volvo, has actually read your book/watched your DVD/seen your play, so the chat is quite intelligent and pertinent, and then on the way out you bump into Ellen MacArthur, who’s dropped by to talk about her latest boat.

At Radio 2 you pass Gordon Ramsay, who’s doing the rounds plugging his hundred great football cock-ups video. Interestingly, he’s not hurling four-letter insults at the coffee machine. And then you’re on to Steve Wright, who’s genial and cheeky.

And you try to be genial and cheeky too, but it’s difficult because you have to remember it’s next Wednesday.

It really is next Wednesday in the mind of Danny Baker. Being interviewed by The Man is like having four million volts fed through your hair. Halfway through ‘Highway Star’ he winds down the volume, announces to his listening public that Franz Ferdinand are not fit to grease the tank treads of Deep Purple, and then explains why he hasn’t got a mobile phone and why pilchards have monocles and then, whoosh, you’re back on the street, back in the car and on your way to meet someone called Colin and someone called Edith who appear on something called Radio 1.

So, what’s the problem? Well, I’ll tell you what the problem is. Simon and Edith and Danny and Steve know you’re normal and that you’re just doing a job. But, at some point in the day, you have to be interviewed by provincial radio station disc jockeys and junior reporters on lads’ mags, and they think you live in a big house with Angelina Jolie and Harrison Ford and Kofi Annan, and you while away the hours shooting tigers and taking heroin.

So they try to humiliate you with idiotic competitions and stupid questions. I was interviewed over the phone by a boy from… Mars, I think… who wanted to know how homosexual I am. This involved answering some phenomenally personal questions about my sex life and, I’m sorry, but I ran away.

And straight into the clutches of some girl fresh from a
Guardian
-sponsored media studies course who didn’t want to interview me so much as lecture me on the evils of being male, having a car and wearing shoes. It was all she could do to stop herself actually calling me a bastard man-pig live on air.

One breathy chap from some godforsaken station in the north announced with the tape machines rolling that he was going to ring a local business at random and I’d have to use ‘my fame and celebrity’ to blag something from them.

Imagine that. Imagine the hilarity of getting Jeremy Clarkson to name-drop his way into getting four yards of plumbing or a photocopier for nothing.

I calmly explained that I don’t do blagging. The DJ would have none of it, though. Because he has a Rover
200 with his name, and the name of the dealer that gave it to him, emblazoned in foot-high letters down the side, he was adamant that I wouldn’t even buy my own milk. No, really, I explained…

But it was no good, I heard the phone ringing and knew that pretty soon I was going to be speaking with some hapless shop assistant who, in all probability, would have no clue who I was and no intention of giving me a rotary washing line for nothing.

I could see nothing but embarrassment for her and nothing but humiliation for me.

So I’m afraid I removed my headphones and ran from that, too. And now the radio station has flogged the story to the local paper. Which will doubtless say I stormed out and ran back to my moated castle, where I keep bears and have a hallway full of stuffed German soldiers. If only they knew.

Sunday 4 December 2005

Environmentalists, it seems, can’t argue like normal people. You may remember, for instance, back in the summer, that a vegetarian girl, whom I’d never met before, leapt from some bushes and plunged a huge banoffee pie right into the middle of my face.