And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (7 page)

Dido’s warbling on Radio 1, and now what’s this?

Oh, Concorde’s gone.

I’m a celebrity and I want to get out, have your face altered, get a trout pout, be famous for doing nothing at all, get called a hero for kicking a ball. While you, dear reader, are out chopping logs, the whole damn country’s going to the dogs.

You like to think in your middle-class home that all is well, apart from the dome.

But the whole place is wounded and the wound’s starting to swell.

The Band-Aid’s failing and it’s beginning to tell.

I therefore have a message for you, if you’re arriving here to begin anew:

France is wonderful, France is best, from Alsace in the east to Brest in the west.

Their wine and fizz are second to none and remember the footie they’ve recently won.

Their cheese is completely out of sight and St Tropez’s a lot better than the Isle of Wight.

They’ve sunshine and châteaux and tits on the beach.

When you’re down in Provence, life’s really a peach.

Go there instead and leave us alone.

We’re rubbish, you know it, we’re pared to the bone.

If you don’t believe me, consider this tome:

We may have ID cards – but we’re fresh out of bards.

Sunday 2 May 2004

Making
Top Gear
used to be easy. I would drive a car round some corners, spin its wheels on the gravel, make a couple of cheap sexual metaphors and then garnish the result with a spot of Bruce Springsteen. Today, though, things are very different.

The new series returns to your screens tonight, but in Tony Blair’s weird world the sheer effort of getting it there would have defeated Hercules.

You see, the problem is that, while we weren’t looking, an insidious coup has taken over all our main institutions: schools, government, television stations, the police and even the army. Yes, it’s not the head teacher or the general who’s in charge any more; it’s that quiet little man (or woman) in the bad jumper, the one nibbling away at his (or her) one-world, fair-deal polenta crisps.

As a result, the gallery at a modern television studio is like the bridge on an old Soviet submarine. Even the director is now under the direct control of a political commissar whose sole job is to make sure that nobody falls over, trips up or says anything which might possibly cause offence.

So, during the recording on Wednesday, when one of the presenters used the phrase, ‘taking the mickey’, the lights went up, the shutters came down and the cameras were turned off. With klaxons blaring, we surfaced, special
forces took the presenter away and now he, and his family, are living with Ron Atkinson and Robert Kilroy-Silk in a Siberian gulag.

Why? Well, we’ve known for some time that n***** is the fourth most offensive word in the English language and, of course, saying all Arabs are terrorists is as silly as stripping in front of a webcam. But now someone has decided that ‘taking the mickey’ might upset the Irish.

In fact, the Mickey in question has nothing to do with Micks in general. It’s an abbreviation in cockney rhyming slang for Mickey Bliss. Taking the mickey is therefore an inoffensive way of saying taking the piss.

But there we have the problem with political commissars. They are not bothered about truth or accuracy: they’re there to right the wrongs perpetrated by Oliver Cromwell and General Dyer at Amritsar, and to find all the little problems that Health and Safety have missed.

Ah yes. Health and Safety. For one programme in the new series, each presenter bought a car for less than £100. We filmed a series of tests to prove they were roadworthy and reliable. As a finale, we decided to show their integrity by driving them into a brick wall at 30 mph.

Can you see a problem with that? I couldn’t. It’s not as if we were asking black or Irish people to have the accident on our behalf. But that didn’t concern the political commissar, who called in Health and Safety, who thought we were taking the mickey.

We promised we wouldn’t sue if we were injured. Our wives promised they wouldn’t sue if we were killed. We produced letters from the head of safety at Volvo, saying there was no danger whatsoever, and we talked to James
Bond stuntmen, who agreed. But Health and Safety were not interested. They knew, because they’d read about it in the
Guardian
, that crashing a car into a wall at 30 mph was dangerous, so they insisted that we spent £8,000 – of your money, I hasten to add – moving fuel tanks, employing paramedics and buying neck braces.

Great. If we abandoned the project, we’d have wasted the money already spent. If we went ahead, we’d be wasting even more on ludicrous safety features that every expert said were simply not necessary.

I offered to stage the crash in my free time and to employ a camera crew myself. I said that I would give the resulting footage to the BBC for nothing. But the political commissar referred to his little red book, smiling that cruel KGB smile, and said, ‘No.’

In the end we went ahead, crashed the cars on his terms and, as a result, had no money left to make any more items. Result: a show where nobody was hurt. But a show that nobody wants to watch.

It gets worse. Before anything can be transmitted these days, you have to fill in a compliance form which makes sure that you’re complying with every single piece of PC nonsense, no matter how stupid or trivial. The trouble is that, by the time you’ve done this, and the health and safety form, you have no time left to film the programme.

Actually, you don’t even have time to fill in the forms because usually you’re away on a course, watching safety films of Anthea Turner catching fire. I thought that it would make the cornerstone of a great show –
When TV Stars Combust
– but apparently it’s supposed to demonstrate how things can go wrong.

My latest plan is to take part in some Siamese banger racing. You race in pairs with your car chained to your partner’s. I knew Health and Safety would have a fit but, long before they could step in, the plan was quashed by the party commissars. ‘We’re worried about using the word Siamese,’ they said. ‘Could you call it “conjoined” banger racing?’

Not really, no.

Sunday 9 May 2004

On Thursday a group of hot-air fanatics floated seven enormous balloons over the centre of Birmingham and, as dawn broke, drenched the city with music that had been specially composed to change the way people sleep.

I should imagine that the change was profound. Instead of waking up dreamily at about seven or eight o’clock, it seems entirely likely that the city’s 2 million inhabitants were out of their beds at 6.30 a.m., wondering what harebrained lunatic had sanctioned such a thing.

That these balloonists lived to reach land shows the people of Birmingham to be exceptionally tolerant. If the Sky Orchestra had bombed my house with its ‘audio landscape’ at dawn, I would have shot its members out of the sky.

I do not mind if something makes a noise while engaged in a pursuit that is practical and useful. People, for instance, who buy houses near Heathrow and then whinge about aeroplane noise need to be larched.

I also despair at those who complain about low-flying RAF jets. One farmer in Wales became so fed up with the sound of the man-made thunder that he wrote ‘piss off Biggles’ on the roof of his house. Happily, every fly boy went over there for a look-see.

And as for the man who complained last week that Paul McCartney’s rehearsals at the Millennium Dome
were too loud: come on, mate. Complain about ‘Ebony and Ivory’ by all means, but don’t complain about an event that brings life to Tony Blair’s great white elephant.

It’s the same story with traffic noise and the din made by farmers when it is time to harvest the crops. These are simply by-products of the modern age. I don’t even mind other people’s mobile phones, unless they’re using the Nokia ring tone.

What I cannot abide, however, are people whose hobbies are solely designed to make a noise. I’m talking about born-again motorbikers who come to the countryside on a sunny Sunday specifically to make as much racket as possible. One day I will silence them by stretching a piece of cheese wire across the road.

I’m also talking about campanologists who wait for the country to have a monumental hangover before polluting the Sunday morning stillness with their infernal bells.

Why? If God thinks getting a bunch of beardies to play ‘Home Sweet Home’ on six tons of brass at seven in the morning is a sensible way of summoning his flock, he can get lost. It’s all very well banging on about peace and love, but what I want on a Sunday is a bit of peace and quiet.

I wouldn’t mind, but church congregations are now so small that everyone would fit in the vicar’s Ford Fiesta. So why doesn’t he pop round to pick up everyone personally? And quietly. No leaning on your horn like an idle minicab driver, thanks very much.

I also think it’s about time that something was done about microlights. Sure, an RAF jet is much louder, but by the time you’ve got back on to your chair, it’s already
knocking people over in Cornwall. A microlight, on the other hand, struggles to make headway in even the gentlest of breezes so it just sits above your garden all day.

I think it’s fine for people to have their own aircraft but I would impose a minimum speed limit up there of, let’s say, 600 mph. This minimises the inconvenience for those of us on the ground.

That’s a simple solution. What’s not simple is what I should do about the blackbird that has nested in the eaves, just six inches from my pillow.

This morning its chicks woke me at 5.20 and I spent the next two hours trying to think of what might be done.

My wife suggests that we get a cat, but this is impossible because I hate the way their bottoms look like dishcloth holders. Mostly, though, I hate them because they give me asthma, which would keep me awake even more than the birds.

It would be much easier to blow the nest, and everything in it, to kingdom come with my 12-bore. Yet I cannot bring myself to do that. I’m not even certain it’s legal.

It probably
is
legal to remove the nest gently and put it in the dustbin. But, again, it seems wrong. Weird, isn’t it? I would enjoy beheading a biker but I cannot bring myself to kill five baby blackbirds.

I thought about taking a leaf out of the Birmingham Sky Orchestra’s book and bombarding them through the night with old prog rock from a Sony Walkman, in the hope that they would sleep during the day.

But I’m told that baby blackbirds aren’t like baby people and that this won’t work. Nor will milk laced with heroin, apparently.

So what I’m going to do is feed them with lots of grain until they’re really fat.

Then I shall drown them in armagnac. And then, after they’ve been in the Aga for eight minutes, I shall pop them into a baked potato and eat them.

It’s called payback and, if it works, I shall try the same thing with the bell-ringers.

Sunday 16 May 2004

It’s easy for women. When they are in the newsagent’s at a railway station they can buy pretty much any magazine that takes their fancy, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to read it on the forthcoming train journey.

Woman and Home. Home and Garden. Garden and Hair. Hair and Beauty. Beauty and Slimming. Slimming and Slimmers. Slim Women. Slim Home. Slim Garden. Slim Hair
.

They’re all fine.

It’s not so easy for a man. We know we should pick up
The Spectator
or a book on Victorian poetry because this will make us appear sensitive and clever. And yet, what we really want is to spend the journey looking at naked Australian surfers, especially if they have been the victims of shark attacks.

That means buying a lads’ mag, which used to be fine. But now, unfortunately, it’s no longer possible to do such a thing, not if you want to read it in public.

The first time I saw a photograph of someone who had been eaten by a shark, I was pretty impressed. The second time was enjoyable too; but now, thanks to the proliferation of the lads’ mags, I’m bored witless by South African lifeguards who have lost their torsos.

Shark attack photos have been the staple diet of men’s magazines since they arrived on the scene, 10 years ago. But with the launch, and apparent success, of
Zoo
and
Nuts
, which are weeklies, the old monthlies have had to up the ante a bit.

With a circulation of 600,000 or so,
FHM
, the biggest seller, has the most to lose, so this month you can feast your eyes on a cow with two extra legs growing out of its neck, and a man who was born with his head on back to front. Also, there is a horse-shaped boy, a bloke with testicles the size of prize-winning pumpkins and a man with what appears to be a sack of red potatoes growing out of his face.

Fine, but this kind of stuff doesn’t really work on a train. I mean, it is hard to savour the shots of a man with elephantiasis when you have a stranger who may be a nun sitting next to you.

And it is no good turning the page because whoa, it’s a double-page spread of Abi Titmuss wearing nothing but a sheen of baby oil.

This is another problem. In the early days of lads’ mags, it wasn’t hard to find someone from a soap opera or the pop charts who, for a small fee, would appear in the centre pages, wearing nothing but a swimming costume. But now, with paparazzi on every beach in the world, the tabloid newspapers and celebrity glossies can quench our thirst for shots of G-list celebrities in their G-strings. So the lads’ mags have to go further.

That frightens away serious actresses from
Casualty
and
Coronation Farm
and means we are left to gawp at girls who once went out with someone who sold a dog to someone who lives next door to Richard and Judy.

This week, for instance,
Zoo
has printed a picture of Lisa Snowdon’s bottom. Who is Lisa Snowdon? I have
absolutely no idea.
Nuts
, meanwhile, has pics of Anoushka and Steph who, we are told, are presenters on MTV.