Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (12 page)

While appearing on television recently, I questioned the wisdom of car companies sponsoring football teams. Because while those hideous Audi-branded seats at Old Trafford do much to endear the German motor manufacturer to Manchester United's million-strong army of fans, they have the reverse effect on the billion or so people who support a different team.

Audi is therefore paying hard-earned cash to ensure that my son will never ever buy one of its products. He couldn't bear the thought that some of his money would be going to Sir Alex Ferguson, who he thinks might actually be the devil.

Sponsoring a football team is a bit like sponsoring a religion: ‘Tesco. Proud to be the official supplier of fine foods to Britain's synagogues.' You can see that there would be problems with this. It'd be like Apple sponsoring abortion clinics in the Bible Belt. Or a man I know who once tried to get his company, a well-known cigarette brand, to sponsor public executions in West Africa.

If I were running a large company and I wanted to put its name in front of millions of people, I'd sponsor a hospital. Because there are only two possible outcomes for those who pass through the portals. They either die, in which case nothing is lost, or they are repaired, in which case they will be forever in your debt.

On the face of it, sponsored vets look like a good idea, too. If they perform a successful operation on your dog, they could shave Audi's logo into its fur and few would complain.
Especially as the sponsorship deal would make the operation less expensive.

But I see a downside to this. If the vet who fired a bolt gun into the back of my donkey's head had been wearing a Sony jacket, I'd have emerged from the experience feeling less well disposed to the idea of buying a Vaio laptop any time soon.

You might imagine that it's a good idea to sponsor a television programme since it's safe to assume that everyone watching is doing so on purpose and will like what they see. But today, with Sky+ and online availability, most people will zoom through your carefully constructed messages. Or if they are watching live, they will dislike you for wasting their time. Certainly, I made a solemn vow in series three of 24 never to buy a Nissan. I had tuned in to see Jack Bauer shooting swarthy-looking men in the knee, not some dizzy bint driving about the place in an off-road car.

Sponsorship, then, is a tricky business. You need to ensure that many people will see your company's name, that all of them are happy with the positioning you've chosen and that no one's donkey is killed. Which brings me on to proposals to sponsor the police.

This isn't a joke. The Hertfordshire force now has so many faith advisers on its chaplaincy team – including humanists – that it is extremely short of money. And, as a result, a senior officer has written to local businesses asking them to sponsor ten vehicles used by special constables.

In return for cash, the businesses would get their name on the cars, which, says the letter, will provide the ‘benefit of being associated with the constabulary brand'. Did you know the constabulary was a ‘brand'? Me neither. I thought it was just a lot of people in plastic shoes pretending to be Nigel Mansell. However, despite the upbeat nature of the letter, I'm not sure it's a good idea to let Currys or DFS or Asda
sponsor the police force. Or service. Or whatever silly name the government halfwits have dreamt up now.

First, and this is a serious point, if a policeman in, say, a PC World jacket turned up in a car with PC World written down the side to investigate some wrongdoings at the company's headquarters, many people, myself included, would assume he would emerge after a short while to say that everything was in order. In other words, there'd be a perception that fat cat bosses, as we must call them these days, are simply buying immunity from prosecution.

There are other problems, though. A lot of people do not much care for the police. Some of these people are burglars and robbers, and a company might decide it's not too bothered about alienating them by visibly supporting the force. But what about when the police run radar traps and fine you for driving a bit too fast? Certainly, if I were to be apprehended by a sergeant in a Burger King hat, I'd ensure that from that moment on I never ate another Whopper.

My biggest problem with this sponsorship idea, though, is dignity. There was a time when British policemen looked good with their tall hats and shiny buttons. Today, they either look like everyone else with their silly high-visibility jackets or they look like cartoon characters from shoot-'em-up video games with their black overalls and their sub-machine guns.

Neither outfit lends itself to sponsorship logos. I mean, seriously, can you imagine how the world would react should there be a televised gunfight in the middle of Hitchin and all the goodies were running about in jackets promoting a local garden centre? We'd be a laughing stock and rightly so.

Plus, one of the less savoury jobs performed by officers is informing families that someone dear to them has been killed in some awful way. I don't think they'd be able to achieve the right level of gravitas if they were dressed up as the Michelin man.

We know that, as a rule, the government is completely useless at running anything and that Richard Branson and Sir Sugar will always do a better job. If I were in No. 10, I'd hand over pretty much everything to the private sector – starting with the forests – but even I would be forced to conclude that some aspects of government work must be run by public servants using public money. The armed forces are one of these things. GCHQ is another. And so are police.

Besides. I pay half what I earn in tax.

And it's nice to think I'm getting at least something in return.

27 February 2011

For the past few weeks I've been travelling the world, and once again I'm filled with a sense that no one knows how to run a hotel properly. For example, when you are staying at the top of a thirty-storey skyscraper, four lifts are not enough. Because at eight in the morning, when everyone is going downstairs for breakfast, you can be waiting until lunchtime for a car to arrive.

And it's even worse when you get back at night and you are busting for a pee and one of your colleagues, who's staying on the fourth floor, decides it would be amusing to press all the buttons as he gets out.

Mind you, the vertical nature of a hotel is nothing compared with those that are laid out horizontally. Because it can often take several days to get from the reception area to your room, where inevitably your electronic key card does not work so you must go back to the front desk and start all over again.

At some hotels these days it's best to book another room on the way to the actual suite you've been given so that you can store basic emergency supplies: pants, soap and some high-energy chocolate bars.

Then we have the problems of learning how your room works. I realize, of course, that many hotels send a porter to explain everything when you arrive but you never listen because you are too busy rummaging surreptitiously through your wallet to find a suitable tip, and then doing mental exchange-rate maths to work out whether you are about to give him £2,000. Or, worse, 2p.

The upshot is that, later on, when you want to turn out the lights, you have absolutely no clue how this might be achieved. And when you finally manage it, by hitting the light fittings with your shoe, you realize the air-con is still on and you must find the control panel in the dark.

Then you wake up at two a.m. with jet lag and decide to watch television. Well, in every single modern hotel this is not possible because the remote-control device has 112 buttons, all of which are the size of a match head, and you can't locate the switch to turn the light back on to find your glasses.

So you stab away at what looks promising and all you get are messages from the Japanese engineer who designed the set to the man whose job it is to install it. Why can't hotel managers understand that almost all of their guests need just three things: a button for volume, a button for news and a button for porn? I don't want to adjust the contrast or the aspect ratio. I just want to find out what's going on in Japan and see some ladies.

Oh, and when I'm taking a shower, I am not wearing my spectacles, which means I cannot read the labels on all the little bottles in there. I'm therefore fed up with washing my hair with body lotion.

The worst aspect of staying in a hotel, though, is trying to do your laundry. It shouldn't be that difficult. You just bung it all in a bag and give it to someone at the reception desk.

But no. There's always a form on which you must say precisely what you are handing over. The form lists every possible item of clothing that anyone anywhere might want cleaning. Ball gowns. Scuba suits. Fencing masks. Ruffs. Doublet and hose. Army uniforms. G-trousers. All of this is intended to demonstrate what a wide and interesting clientele comes to the hotel but it's a bit annoying when all you want is some clean underwear.

You search and you scan for the right box to tick but it's never there because, in hotel management-speak, ‘knickers' is a rude word. Eventually, between ostrich feather hat and quilted smoking jacket, you find the word ‘pants'. But this, you then realize, means ‘trousers'.

So the search begins again until eventually you work out that, in business land, shreddies are known as undershorts. With a sense of triumph you fill in the box called ‘guest count', saying you have eight pairs you'd like to be cleaned – but wait, what's this? It's another column called ‘hotel count'. In other words, it's a form in which you give the hotel your opinion on how many pairs of dirty pants you have and then it is given the opportunity to disagree.

This says it all. In essence, the hotel guest these days is nothing more than a robber and a cheat. A person who has checked in to drink the gin and fill the empties with water, claim for underwear they don't own and check out without paying. At best, we are a nuisance.

Certainly, I felt that way while staying at the Palazzo Versace hotel on Australia's Gold Coast. This is the place where contestants from ITV's
I'm Not a Celebrity
come to vomit up the bugs they've eaten while living in ‘the jungle'. And I can see why. It is very Peter Andre. Here, I was not made to feel like a thief but I was made to feel very ugly. The corridors were full of pictures of beautiful, famous people in varying degrees of undress. None had a pot belly and a suitcase full of dirty shreddies. Downstairs there was a salon offering ‘eye couture', and in the room a booklet ‘suggests' what guests might like to wear at any given time of day. Jeans and a T-shirt didn't get a mention.

It's also very clean. And to keep it that way, guests are constantly made to lift up their feet so that a tribe of former boat people can mop up bits of imaginary food that have
been dropped on the floor. Then, at night, an army of yet more cleaners patrol the open spaces with factories on their backs, fumigating and vacuuming and desperately trying to rid the building of any evidence that it might have people in it.

But the best bit came one morning when the manageress came over to our table to announce that she'd reviewed the film from the previous day's CCTV cameras and had noticed two of our party playing the piano in the reception area. It's hard to think what else one might do with a piano but she was most insistent. It mustn't happen again. Behind her, I couldn't help noticing, there were two fully-grown men snogging.

27 March 2011

Every so often an organization with a bit too much time on its hands does a survey and concludes that Norway is the best country in the world. We're told that no one has ever been murdered, the cod is superb and there are many dew-fresh meadows full of extremely tall blonde girls who have nothing to do all day except knit exciting underwear.

Economically, we're told, they are also better off. Thanks to all the oil, Norway is the second-wealthiest and most stable country in the world and has the second-highest GDP per capita, after the statistical anomaly that is Luxembourg.

And, of course, we mock. We explain that it's all very well living in a crime-free gated community where everyone seems to be out of a commercial for Ski yoghurt, but unless you occasionally step on a discarded hypodermic needle and catch AIDS, you aren't really living life to the full.

If none of your buses is full of sick, you become one-dimensional and boring. This is why so many Norwegians commit suicide. It's also why, in all of human history, Norway has produced only a handful of people who've made it big on the international stage. One painted a figure screaming. One walked to the South Pole. And the other made a name for himself by suggesting that the sun only shines on TV. Which suggests that he only ever watches
Teletubbies
.

And that, it seems, is what Norway's all about. Designed by Playmobil and run along the lines of Camberwick Green, it's the set for a children's television show, with lots of rosy cheeks and a
Midsomer Murders
attitude to immigration.
Lovely, but so far as the rest of the world's concerned, there's not much of a there, there.

Well, for reasons that are not entirely clear, I've been to Norway quite a lot just recently and I'm sorry, but I can't quite see what's wrong with it. I suppose the speed limits are a bit low, and the only way you can enjoy a cigarette and a glass of wine at the same time is to buy a house. Also, it's a bit chilly, but that just gives you an excuse to put on an excellent Kirk Douglas
Heroes of Telemark
jumper and some splendid woolly mittens.

Let me give you one small example of why I like it there. When a British person asks for my autograph, the request always comes with a back-handed compliment: ‘I dislike your programme very much and I hate you on a cellular level but my son is a fan, so sign this or I'll ring the
Daily Mail
and explain that you ruined a small boy's life.'

Russians explain that if you don't stand still until they've gone back to their hotel room for a camera, they will kill you. Aussies slap you on the back a bit too hard and Americans get massively carried away. But in Norway, you get a ‘please' and an ‘if it's not too much trouble' and a ‘thank you'. One man became so excited that I'd posed for his picture, he took out his penis and began to masturbate. I've never experienced gratitude like that anywhere.

Then there's the spirit of
janteloven
. It's a tall-poppy thing that dictates you really mustn't be a show-off, no matter how much money you have. Delightfully, there's no such thing as Cheshire in Norway. It's why 19 per cent of Norwegians who win the country's lottery buy a Toyota. Only one has ever bought a Porsche.

Politically, Norway is sort of communism-lite. Thirty per cent of the population are employed by the state, 22 per cent are on welfare, 13 per cent are too disabled to work and, as
parents are given twelve months' combined paid leave when they have a baby, the rest of the population is at home changing nappies. This is probably why there is absolutely nothing in your house bearing the mark ‘Made in Norway'.

Interestingly, and contrary to what you'd expect, there is crime. An American was pickpocketed in 2008. And there are beggars. Mostly, though, they are from Romania and that does raise a question: why Norway? Why leave the warmth of your homeland and settle in a country where a glass of beer is £40 and if you sleep on the streets, you wake up with your face stuck to the pavement?

Well, I asked, and the answer was surprising: ‘Because in Norway when you ask someone for money, they give it to you.'

Can you see anything wrong with any of this? Kind-hearted souls in excellent jumpers giving away their money to those less fortunate than themselves. No Premier League footballers bombing about in Ferraris. No bankers smoking cigars the size of giant redwoods. No grime. No graffiti. And a range of first-class shops that aren't full of anarchists weeing on the Axminster.

And now we must ask ourselves: how could we achieve such a level of harmony here? We are northern European, just like the Nors. We like a drink, just like they do, and we like to have a fight afterwards. Which they do as well. I'm tall and have blue eyes so, probably, my great-great-grandad was a Viking. Just like yours. So why is Britain such a mess when Norway is the living embodiment of civilization?

Some might say that Norway excels because almost no one there goes to church. They are the least religious people on earth. But we aren't a nation of Bible-bashers, either. So it must be something else. Others say it's the oil. But Norway has had one of the highest standards of living since the seventeenth century. So that's not it either.

No, I reckon the reason Norway is so nice is that the population is tiny. And countries with a small number of people in them – Iceland, Estonia and, er, the Vatican – work better than those that are filled to the gunwales.

I'm afraid, then, the only way of getting the UK to match the Scandinavian model is to abolish the UK. Norway separated from Sweden in 1905, and we should follow suit by severing the knots that bind together the wildly disparate bits of Britain. In short, I think the sovereign state of Chipping Norton would work rather well.

3 April 2011