Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (14 page)

The press should not be free to screw up the lives of my children. That's why I'm pro-injunction.

It had been a fairly normal day. Woke up, rowed with the kids, spoke to my mother about yet another operation she needs, made breakfast for a ten-year-old Japanese girl who's come to stay. In the afternoon I faced up to the fact that
Top Gear
is being sued for libel and malicious falsehood, dealt with the fallout from recent tabloid allegations that I'd fed a pretty blonde some lettuce and at around midnight settled down to write some newspaper columns. Then my phone exploded.

Someone on Twitter had claimed that Jemima Khan had taken out a super-injunction to prevent intimate photographs of us being published. Jeremy and Jemima? Presumably the claimant has some kind of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
fixation.

Now if you are going to be romantically linked with anyone, then I'd rather it was Jemima Khan than, say, Huw Edwards. But, even though I hate doing this, I'm duty-bound to say that the claim is incorrect. Although I know Jemima quite well – my wife and I had been round for dinner with her the night before – we have never been alone together. There are no intimate photographs. The end.

Naturally, Jemima was very upset. Rather too upset, I thought. She tweeted to say she was ‘in a bloody nightmare'. She found the very notion of being intimate with me ‘upsetting'. After a while I began to think, ‘All right, love. Steady on.' I know I'm a bit fat and my hair's pubic and I have teeth
the colour of plywood. But there's no need to tell the world you're feeling sick at the mere thought of being intimate with me.

At work, it got worse. My producer said the idea was comical. At this stage I began to get quite upset. If we look at Jemima's previous loves – Imran Khan and Hugh Grant – I fit right in there.

Slap bang between the two. In my mind.

And in the mind of the
Daily Telegraph
, too, because the next day it ran big pictures of us on its front page, saying that we hadn't had a fling. Which is the same as saying, ‘They bloody have, you know.'

The
Daily Star
went further. ‘
Top Gear
Jezza in sex pics fury' screamed the front-page headline. It then said in tiny letters that the allegations were ‘false' and, in an editorial on page six, that ‘it's all rubbish'.

You don't see an editorial, though, when you're walking past a newsagent. My kids simply saw a story saying that I was caught up in a sex-picture tangle. As their friends saw it too, they had a bad day.

So. Had I known about this story before midnight, would I have taken out an injunction to stop it appearing? To protect my children? Yes. In a heartbeat.

And that's a point everyone seems to be missing in the big debate about press freedom. Yes, we want a free press but we don't want a press that's free to wantonly screw up the lives of my children, or Jemima's, or yours.

I realize, of course, that injunctions, allied to Max Mosley's drive to make the papers reveal stories to victims in advance, will pretty much put the tabloid press out of business. They'd be reduced to printing pictures of a shark leaping out of the sea. Which is what the
Mirror
did on Tuesday.

Deciding which of these injunctions should be granted is
tricky. What's personal and what's not? When does a private life stop and a public image begin?

According to Charlotte Harris, a media lawyer: ‘There has been a terrible mis-characterization of the people involved.' Apparently, 80 per cent of injunctions go to the victims of blackmail, harassment and stalkers and those who suffer threats to their families. Only a tiny minority are given to footballers who have been in bed with a teenager.

So it's all very well saying that all injunctions should be overturned now, but if they were, it would be a charter for lunatics and blackmailers to do and say pretty well whatever took their fancy. Moira Stuart likes to smash up wheelchairs. The editor of the
Daily Telegraph
is at the centre of a paedophile ring. Just so long as the newspaper says the victim denies the allegations, it's all legal.

If newspapers were a bit more fair-minded, if people thought their side of the argument would be heard, instead of relegated to page ninety-four, there would be no need for so many injunctions.

I am not a saint. And as I'm in the pay of the BBC – a publicly funded body – it might seem reasonable for newspapers to question some of my lifestyle choices. But they wouldn't question them. They'd demand that I be sacked. They'd say I'd sparked fury and work themselves into a frothing rage. That would alarm my family and that's why I try to keep my private life private. It's why I'm pro-injunction.

It is said only the rich and famous can afford a gagging order. But only the rich and famous ever need one. Others say that everything anyone at the BBC does should be published. What? Sophie Raworth's sexual fantasies? Pictures of Jeremy Paxman on the lavatory? Where do you draw the line?

I suppose we could start by drawing it just above the point where someone says on Twitter that Jeremy Clarkson and Jemima Khan have had an affair. And even though everyone knows it to be rubbish, it somehow becomes front-page news for two days.

15 May 2011

I've never quite understood this country's obsession with property prices. Because if the house you're trying to sell has fallen in value, it stands to reason the house you're trying to buy has fallen in value as well. So what does it matter?

However, it is possible to make your house shoot up in value while everyone else plummets into a world of negative equity, unpleasant letters from the bank, despondency, despair and, eventually, death. Simply open a really good restaurant at the end of the road.

Checklist: balsamic vinegar and olive oil on the tables; lots of weird bread items in a nice basket; some silly cheeses; and pretty waitresses in jeans. That's about it, really.

Let us examine the case of Padstow, a fishing village on the north coast of Cornwall. It's always been a popular holiday destination and, as a result, property prices in the area were always 20 per cent higher than anywhere else in the county. But then along came Rick Stein, who opened a jolly good restaurant, and now, as a direct result, Padstow property is 44 per cent more expensive than the Cornish average.

Then you have Bray, in Berkshire. For centuries you would want to live there only if you were keen on brass rubbing. But then up popped the Fat Duck and the Waterside Inn and now you can't even buy a can of pop in the village shop for less than £1 million.

I am similarly fortunate. Not that long ago a super-expensive farm shop and restaurant opened just a few miles from my house and, as a result, every metrosexual in London
now wants a country retreat in the area. The result? Well, last weekend some
Daily Mail
reporters stood at the end of my drive for a while and decided my sorry little collection of ramshackle outbuildings was worth a whopping £2 million
*
.

I don't really understand why restaurants have this effect. But nothing else will transform an area quite so drastically. Last week, for instance, a £35-million modern art gallery opened in Wakefield. It looks a bit like the Guggenheim – if you stand very far away and squint – and it houses forty-four sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, who everyone has heard of. I imagine.

Feeling a need to move to Wakefield as a result? Of course not, because an art gallery, as we know, is just a building behind which children on school trips can go for a smoke.

Then, of course, just up the road in Doncaster there was the ill-fated Earth Centre. Built with millions of our money, it was a place where visitors could look at a yurt and watch their own excrement being disposed of in an eco-friendly way.

Doubtless the locals felt that such an attraction would cause the value of their houses to soar. They were to be disappointed.

As soon as it opened, property prices in the nearest village fell and didn't start to rise again properly until after someone realized that nobody wanted to look at their stools being mashed and the Earth Centre was closed.

Shopping centres don't work, either. They just mean more traffic in the area. And while public transport links are good, you can't exactly buy a house in the hope that someone will
come along soon and build a railway station in the back garden.

It's the same story with Richard Curtis. I could have bought a house in Notting Hill for about £2.50 before the film came along. Afterwards, the same house would have been worth £2.5 billion. Had we known in advance about that movie, we all could have made a fortune. But we didn't, and that's the problem: guessing which area is about to become hot. And that brings me back to the question of restaurants.

Next week a friend of mine who has had much success with clubs and bars all over the world is opening a pizza joint on Portobello Road in west London. You may scoff at this and claim the area is already so expensive that one new cafe can't possibly make a difference. However, what you don't know – I didn't – is that Portobello Road is the longest road in the world.

It starts in Notting Hill, and this is the bit we all know. Pretty art students selling fascinators from trestle tables and Paddington Bear wandering about looking for Mr Gruber. Then it goes all trendy and there are many people in bars, wearing extremely thin spectacles. And then it reaches the A40 flyover and you assume it stops. But it doesn't. It keeps right on going, plunging north through parts of London that have no name until, eventually, it gets to what looks like West Beirut. In one of the windows I could make out the bulky form of Terry Waite, chained to a radiator.

And as I sat there at a pre-opening dinner, drinking rosé with the trendiest people in all of London, local hoodie types emerged from nearby houses on those stupid small bicycles all people on council estates seem to have. They couldn't believe what they were seeing. They didn't realize that spectacles could be so thin. And many had very obviously never seen a real live homosexual before. There was much pointing.

Here's the thing. Soon, and I can guarantee this, they will all be gone. This one restaurant, all on its own, will cause the small bicycles to be replaced with Vespas. The shops currently selling taps and hens will be sold to bijou furniture designers who will fill the windows with driftwood coffee tables at £4,000 a pop.

And the flats in the area? You could probably part-exchange one today for a tin of boot polish. Whereas next year, when Jude Law is living there, and Sienna Miller's popping past your window to buy a granary loaf, a one-bedroom basement flat will fetch half a billion. You mark my words.

Oh, and before I go, here's another tip. I gather Curtis's next film is to be set in Hitchin. Or I might be making that up.

22 May 2011

Last week Iceland exploded again. Against a backdrop of images that looked like an atomic bomb had gone off, weathermen were saying the resultant ash cloud was heading our way and that soon all Britain's airports would have to be closed.

This would have caused inconvenience to thousands of us, as we'd have been forced to spend the next few months listening to friends telling very improbable stories about how they got back from Prague. ‘I had to crawl to Madrid and then I got someone in a rickshaw to take me to Toulon, where George Clooney offered me a piggyback.'

Weirdly, it seems only yesterday that Europe was shut down by the first cloud of Icelandic high-altitude dust and I was boring anyone who'd listen with the astonishing tale of how I got home from Warsaw. To précis: I drove.

And it's not just Iceland that has gone wonky recently. Who could have guessed after the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami that, just over six years later, there'd be another double whammy off the coast of Japan? An event so massive we all forgot instantly that only days earlier a tectonic shiver had reduced the wonderful New Zealand city of Christchurch to a crumpled pile of broken sewage pipes, decapitated churches and shattered dreams.

In the twenty-first century alone, we've had Haiti. And Pakistan. And the floods in Queensland. And Hurricane Katrina. And a seemingly never-ending stream of tornados reducing America's Bible Belt to matchwood. And the French heatwave that killed almost 15,000. And swine flu.

When I was growing up in the 1960s the natural world seemed so stable and safe. I don't remember my parents ever feeling the need to hoard soup and paraffin. Sure, they'd occasionally make me send food I hadn't eaten to a place called Biafra, and while Aberfan was grisly, it was a) man-made and b) not really in the same league as the Asian tsunami.

In short, we used to be surprised when we woke in a morning to find that Mother Nature had girded her loins while we were asleep. Now it's the other way round. We're amazed when we wake to find the world is pretty much as we left it when we went to bed.

So what's going on? While eco-mentalists are examining the sky for telltale signs of impending doom, and NASA is scanning the heavens for the pinprick of light that will herald the dawn of our extinction, is some major Hollywood-style catastrophe unravelling in the upper mantle? Is the crust cracking up? Is the world falling to pieces? Or is it all down to the iPhone?

Iceland is always exploding; has been since a volcanic burp brought it into existence in the first place. As recently as 1963 there were no islands of any note off the south coast but then the planet decided to be sick and by 1967 the region's guillemot community had a whole playground. It's called Surtsey and it's a mile across.

Today the arrival of a new landmass would keep the rolling news channels going for years, but back then no one had a smartphone, which meant that, to all intents and purposes, the event never happened. If the recent Japanese earthquake had happened in 1970 it would have made a few paragraphs on page twenty-nine of
The Times
and that would have been that. Now, though, CNN needs to be fed, twenty-four hours
a day. And it's not picky about what it eats. If it's on film, it's news. If it isn't, it isn't.

In many ways this is a good thing. In the past a tsunami was something that really only existed in schoolbooks and we in Britain had absolutely no idea what it might be like to be stuck in an earthquake.

Now, though, thanks to a Japanese office worker who filmed the shaking filing cabinets in his office, we do. And in case we forget, YouTube is on hand to remind us.

Floods? Well, in Britain they used to come up to the news reporter's ankles, and only then because he'd spent an hour before the broadcast looking for the deepest puddle in which to stand while delivering his report. Now, thanks to Apple and Nokia, we know what it's like when a flood picks up an articulated lorry and smashes it into a petrochemical refinery. We know that floods don't lap. They rage and boil and ruin rather more than your new button-back settee.

There's more. Without mobile phones, few of the uprisings in the Arab world this year would have had much traction. A few youths would have gone on the streets, thrown some stones and been shot. It wouldn't have been news here because we wouldn't have been able to watch it.

Remember Rodney King? He was a black man in America who was ordered out of his car after a police chase and beaten up. News? Not really. I imagine that sort of thing happens a lot. But because the beating was videoed, it was on the front pages.

So, yes, now that we all have them, the camera phone is a tool for justice, and for putting us closer to the action when the world springs a leak. However, there is a problem.

In April 1994 there were many pictures on the news of Kurt Cobain, a rock star who had apparently killed himself.
And then there was the televised death of the Formula One driver Roland Ratzenberger at an event in Italy. There was, however, little coverage of the unfilmed Rwandan genocide that saw about 800,000 people hacked to death in 100 days. Only when pictures of the aftermath started to roll in did it get noticed.

This is still going on today. Whenever Bangladesh is overrun by some terrible natural disaster, we never really know. This is because the only means most people over there have of recording it is with an easel and some oil paint. Whereas whenever it rains in America, we are treated to some grainy, wobble-vision mobile footage of a fat man sobbing and pointing at his upside-down Buick.

It used to be said that if it bleeds, it leads. Now, though, if you want it to stick, you need a pic.

29 May 2011