And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (8 page)

Would you read
Asian Babes
on the train? Would you pull out the
Playboy
centrefold and nod appreciatively? Precisely. And it’s no different with Anoushka and Steph, even though, it turns out, they have been to a 40th birthday party, hosted by someone called Shane Richie.

So this brings us back to the newsagent’s at the railway station and the quandary of what to buy.

GQ
has columns by Boris Johnson and Peter Mandelson, which gives it an upmarket, serious feel, but there are visual landmines in there, too. You turn the page expecting to find a piece on starvation in Africa, but oh no, it’s Kate Winslet’s thrupennies, and the nun’s giving you daggers.

So what about the
New Statesman
? Well, yes, but it pretty much guarantees that you’ll wake up in Wakefield, 200 miles from your intended stop, with a bit of dribble hanging down from the side of your mouth.

Specialist publications do have a certain allure. Sit on a train reading
What Computer?
or
Autocar
and you can be pretty much assured that nobody will sit next to you. The downside, of course, is that you will have to read
What Computer?
or
Autocar
.

All specialist publications assume the reader knows as much about the subject as the staff. I recently bought a home cinema magazine and there was not one single word that made any sense at all.

Socially, it is possible to buy a magazine such as
Arena
or
Wallpaper
* but it’s hard to work out what they are about. Mostly, they seem to be full of rather trendy people
leaning on bicycles in alleyways, and they are not what you’d call funny – which brings me to the solution.

Being British, and male, we may like reading about gardening or food, and we do have an extraordinary appetite for television listings magazines. But what we like most of all is a damn good laugh.

This means that when I get to a railway station I always buy the two funniest magazines you’ll find anywhere in the world:
Viz
and
Private Eye
.

Sunday 23 May 2004

After Margaret Thatcher announced she’d be privatising water, she probably thought there was nothing left to sell. But there was – the air.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were quick to realise this and so, in 2000, they sold it at auction to a group of multinational companies for a whopping £22 billion.

Now those multinationals are selling it back to us in the shape of third-generation (3G) mobile phones that allow you to check prices on the Italian stock exchange, email naked girls in Vietnam, watch the BBC news, and remind you that next Saturday is your wedding anniversary.

In essence, if you buy one of these phones, you are getting a Filofax, a television, a cinema, a portal to the internet, a computer, a video camera and a photograph album. Great, but is it necessary?

My mobile phone man tells me that, according to his accounts, only 3 per cent of his customers use their current phones for sending photographs. So why should anyone, apart from Rebecca Loos, want a 3G phone that lets you talk, face to face, on a video link?

On
Tomorrow’s World
years ago, Raymond Baxter told us that such a thing was possible. So did Judith Haan. And so did Philippa Forrester. But video calls never caught on, because we use the phone primarily for lying and it is
much harder to tell porkies when you’re being watched.

So why, if we don’t want video phones at home, might we want them when we are out and about? And how long do you suppose the battery will last?

What’s worse is that you still won’t be able to use the phones as phones because, as has always been the way with mobiles – except the Nokia 6310 – people on the other end sound like Daleks and, just before you have a chance to sign off, the call will end. So you have to ring back just to say goodbye.

It is easy to see what is going on here. Having spent a Nasa-sized fortune on the radio waves to handle all this data, the mobile phone industry is attempting space travel before it can walk.

When the motor car was invented, people did not sit around, wondering how a washing machine and a tumble drier could be attached to the back. They honed it and refined it. Only now, 100 years down the line, are we seeing the fitting of extras such as television screens and satellite navigation.

This is plainly not happening with mobiles. Last year, I bought my wife a Sony Ericsson Something Or Other for about £1 million. It turned out to be a fantastic personal organiser and video game console, but for speaking to other people she might as well have used a chair leg.

‘Ah, yes,’ said the man in the shop, when I complained. ‘That particular model isn’t very good.’

Not very good! For the past 12 months, she’s rung me up, we’ve said ‘What?’ at the top of our voices a lot and then, when she’s inadvertently moved more than two inches from a base station, the line’s gone dead.

I have a Motorola that has several thousand features, all of which are jolly useful, I’m sure. But the speaker is so quiet, I can’t even hear the beeps and static coming from my wife’s Sony. The damn thing would make Brian Blessed sound like a hamster.

It will have to go, which means the two hours I spent reading the instruction manual will have been a waste of time, and now I’ll have to spend another two hours reading a booklet about whatever I buy instead. But I don’t have time to do that because I’m in the middle of the book about my wireless internet. Honestly, that’s all I read these days – instruction books for gadgets that don’t work.

What I want from a cooker is the ability to cook food. What I want from a washing machine is the ability to make clothes clean. And what I want from a phone is the ability to speak with someone else without them thinking I’m the love child of an unusual relationship between Stephen Hawking and Telstar.

I want a telephone that is full of telephone technology, not cameras and internets. I want it to be a Ryanair-no-frills phone. A Ronseal communicator that does only what it says on the tin. In other words, I don’t want it to stop working every time I go behind a tree.

I’m not kidding. My phone cuts off – at least I think it does; it’s so quiet, I can’t be sure – where the M40 meets the M25. This is not the middle of the Gobi Desert. It’s not the bottom of the Mariana trench.

Predictably, health and safety is the problem here. The reason why our phones are so useless as communicators is because if they were more powerful they’d fry our heads.

Fair enough, so how’s this for a plan? When we go abroad, our phones hook up to whichever service provider has the strongest signal at that time. So why can’t they do that when we’re at home? When I’m in Devon, where Orange is strong, I want to talk via Orange; and when I’m in London, where Vodafone provides the best coverage, I want to use Vodafone. Is that impossible?

Technically, the answer is no. But financially it’s ‘difficult’, so we’re stuck with phones that shtwang lang. krzzzzz. Hello. Hello, hello…

Sunday 30 May 2004

As the rugby World Cup drew near, Jonny Wilkinson upped his training regime a notch. He was at the ground 12 hours a day for six days a week so that when the big day came he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, miss.

David Beckham seems to have taken a rather different approach as he prepares for the forthcoming Euro 2004 football tournament. Instead of wasting his time at the training camp, he has got himself another tattoo. His tenth, apparently.

Worryingly, it didn’t seem to do him much good last week when England were held to a one-all draw by a Subbuteo team of Japanese little people.

But then it’s hard to see how a tattoo might improve anyone’s footballing skills.

In fact, it’s hard to see the point of a tattoo at all.

I remember, when I was a local newspaper reporter in the late 1970s, writing a piece about unemployment in the wake of some strike or other. One interviewee told me he had all the right qualifications but was always rejected after an interview. He couldn’t see why, but I could. It was the enormous spider’s web that had been tattooed on his face.

There was a time when a tattoo would demonstrate that you had been in the nick or the navy, but now pretty well everyone I ever see has what looks like a huge Harley-Davidson motif peeping out of their trousers.

Has Camilla Parker Bowles got a giant eagle with a man’s skull eating a snake on her backside? I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

No, wait. Actually I would be surprised because despite the notable exception of Lord Lichfield, who has a seahorse on his arm, and Sir Winston Churchill’s mother, who had a snake round her wrist, tattooing is still very Club Yob. It’s still the preserve of pole dancers and people with England flags fluttering from their car aerials. Abs, formerly from the band Five, has a tattoo on his nipple and I think that says it all.

Of course, when I was 16 I fancied the notion of having a small red Che Guevara-style red star permanently etched into my left buttock.

I didn’t, for two reasons. First, the law states that you can’t get a tattoo unless you are drunk. That’s why 18 is the minimum age.

Second, a tattoo artist once ran his needle over my forearm to show me just what a painless experience it was. He was lying. It felt like I was being stabbed in slow motion.

What would I have ended up with? Aids, probably, and a smudge on my bottom. What’s the point of that? Why endure all the pain and expense when you’ll have something that you’ll never see. That’s like manhandling a giant Bukhara rug all the way back from Uzbekistan and then using it to carpet your loft.

You see these people, in
Heat
magazine usually, with half a yard of gothic symbolism plastered all over their back and you think: Do you hang your curtains pattern-side out for the neighbours to admire?

There are other problems, too. Tattooing has been around since the dawn of time, but if we examine the work of all the great artists – Leonardo da Vinci, van Gogh, Monet – we find they would apply their skill and dexterity to just about any surface: walls, ceilings, canvas, paper. But not the human body.

At no point did Constable ever think, ‘I know, I’ll paint
The Haywain
on Turner’s arse.’

Tattoo art is invariably awful. David Beckham today is beginning to look like an Iron Maiden album cover. But then, look at the average tattoo artist.

Maybe, if my children were being held hostage, I would let Tracey Emin loose with the needles, but not a bald, 18-stone Hell’s Angel with most of Travis Perkins’s stockroom stuck through his nose.

I wouldn’t mind, but most proper artists spend weeks thinking about their work and how it should be approached. What you get from the Hell’s Angel is a five-minute consultation, and what you end up with is a doodle. Furthermore, most successful artists learnt their craft by wearing berets and walking along river banks. These tattoo guys, you know, learnt their craft by customising vans.

The only good thing is that when the subject dies, the tattoo dies too. Except in Japan, of course, where you can buy dead tattooed people to turn into furniture.

Interesting idea: yakuza scatter cushions.

I doubt if anyone would believe that a friend of mine’s love for Ferrari was so intense that she had a prancing horse tattooed just above her G-string. Now, whenever she bends over, people say, ‘Er, why has someone drawn a donkey on your back?’

It’s rubbish, and she is stuck with it for ever. Oh, I know there are all sorts of procedures these days for having tattoos removed, but they cost – and hurt even more than having the damn thing implanted in the first place.

Do they work? Well, you only have to examine a blotched and botched London Underground train that’s had its graffiti washed off to see the answer is no, not really.

Sunday 6 June 2004

Following two complaints from outraged Muslim leaders, a poster showing four young ladies in nothing but Sloggi G-strings has been removed from sites near mosques.

It’s jolly easy to get all frothy about this. There will be those who will say that if Muslims don’t want their children to see pictures of girls in their underwear they should have stayed in Uzbekistan. And doubtless those of a
Daily Mail
persuasion will point out that if a British person moves to France and complains about the local café serving horse burgers, he’ll be told where to get off.

There are other issues, too. Christians claim that they’ve been complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority for years about ‘lewd posters’ to little or no effect. And yet all it takes is a raised eyebrow from a mullah, and Sloggi gets an eviction notice.

Sloggi, of course, maintains that it’s difficult to advertise underwear without actually showing it. Although it could take a leaf out of Superman’s book and have someone wear their thong on the outside of their trousers.

My problem with this, however, has nothing to do with race or positive discrimination or even the ASA. No. My problem is with the sanctimonious, mealy-mouthed, holier-than-thou, underemployed twerps who do the complaining.

Remember that ‘Hello boys’ advertisement for Wonderbra? That got 150 complaints.

Then there was the ad for Velvet toilet tissue with the slogan ‘Love your bum’; 375 complained about that. Five hundred moaned about FCUK’s logo and 275 worked themselves into a dizzy lather about Club 18–30’s ad: ‘Discover your erogenous zones’.

What you have to remember here is that all these people had to telephone directory enquiries for the number for the ASA, get the address, write a letter, buy a stamp and walk to a postbox.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they merely wished to register their disapproval but, having gone to so much effort, they always say they want action and results.

It’s not just in the world of advertising, either. Only this week the
Points of View
programme on BBC1 brought a dribble of complaints about excessive speed and what-have-you to the producer of
Top Gear
and asked if, in the light of these letters, he would be effecting changes in how the presenters drive and treat speed in future. Happily, he was bold enough to smile and say, ‘No.’