Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (6 page)

Have you ever watched a vast swarm of starlings reel around the sky in Africa? Or a million-strong herd of wildebeest? If so, I'm sure you've marvelled at their ability to communicate without actually appearing to do so. But you know what? I think humans can do exactly the same thing. Back in the 1980s the Comedy Store in London would allow a queue of wannabe comedians each to have ten minutes on the stage after the main performers had finished. By this time of night, most of the audience was either hopelessly drunk, extremely chatty or at home in bed.

So it was a tough crowd, even for a seasoned campaigner. For a bag-of-nerves newbie, hoping to get noticed, it must have been a nightmare.

And for one particular girl, on a night when I was there, it must have been even worse. She came on to the stage, picked up the microphone and delivered what we had to assume was her best line. You always deliver your best line first. That way, you have the audience on your side from the get-go. So she delivered her best line and she was greeted with absolute silence.

It was a fairly funny line but – as one – a couple of hundred people in varying degrees of inebriation decided not to make a sound. If someone had heckled, then she'd at least have had a well-rehearsed put-down to fire off. A heckle could have saved her. But none came. You could have heard a pin drop; well, you could have done were it not for the deafening sound of a poor girl dying from the inside out.

I've always been fascinated by that moment. Because how did all those people suddenly decide, without communicating, to behave in exactly the same way?

Clive James, the veteran broadcaster, wit and raconteur, always maintained that you will get a bad audience if you have a bad script. And that, conversely, if you are good, the crowd will be good, too. But I've now proved this to be incorrect. Two weeks ago, while recording the
Top Gear
show, James May, Richard Hammond and I talked for a few minutes about the new Nissan Micra, and there was the sort of quietness normally associated with church services. As a result, the whole scene was edited out of the programme.

However, as a test, we did exactly the same story again last week. The same people saying the same words on the same day of the week in the same place. And the audience laughed until their buttocks fell off. I found that very, very strange, so I did some research.

Back in the early 1970s, an American woman called Martha McClintock, from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, asked 135 college girls living in dorms to record their period start dates. To her amazement she found that, as the academic year wore on, the dates became closer and closer together. The girls were getting in sync.

How was this possible? Well, it seems that plants and insects – even cows – communicate with one another using pheromones. And some scientists believe that humans emit pheromones, too, through their armpits. Could it be that back at the Comedy Store in the 1980s we could smell the comedian's fear radiating out from her pits, and responded to it?

Is that possible? Could it be that the stock market goes haywire from time to time, not because there is anything fundamentally wrong with the system but because of hidden
messages in someone's body odour? If so, we should all be a little bit terrified. Because what if reason tells us to do one thing but we are then compelled by our noses to do something else?

I do not want to buy Peter Mandelson's new book. I don't see why he should have any more of my money. But I'm frightened to death that I may soon be standing next to someone in a bookshop and, as a result of their whiffy pits, feel compelled to buy it. Likewise, reason dictates that if I see Mandelson crossing the road in front of me, I should press the accelerator as hard as I can and try to run him down. But what if, at the last moment, I get a hint of Mando juice and decide to hit the brake pedal instead?

It gets worse. Right now, all of us are in agreement that the country is broke. The human part of our brains is telling us we have more debt in relation to gross domestic product than almost any other country in the world and that savage cuts, along with tax rises, are the only answer. Of course, there are murmurings about the abandonment of free swimming lessons for the elderly, and arty people were running around last week moaning about a proposed Arts Council budget cut. But as a collective whole we are all agreed that something has to be done.

Unfortunately there is no doubt that, at some point in the not-too-distant-future, we will all decide – as one – that the cuts are not necessary and that the price we're paying is far too high. We shall simply wake up one morning and decide that David Cameron is a stupid idiot and that we must have a Labour government back in power as soon as possible. It is inevitable.

We see this all the time. Everyone has a Nokia phone. Then everyone has a BlackBerry. Everyone believes in global warming. Then everyone thinks it's rubbish. Everyone loves Jonathan Ross. Then everyone doesn't any more.

I've never understood what causes this to happen. But now it's clear: the cow/starling part of our brain is responding to messages in the ether. Like bulls, we are being led around by our noses. Someone, somewhere in the world turns left, so we must all turn left. This is not a sound platform on which to build an economy. Let alone a species.

I can only suggest that, in the coming months, Cameron focuses very carefully on personal hygiene. He can make the speech of his life, but unless he delivers it from behind an impenetrable wall of Right Guard, it won't make the slightest bit of difference. Deodorant. It's the only way we can survive.

18 July 2010

For the past few years, many millions of people in this country have been scared to pop to their local shop or petrol station in case they bump into Piers Morgan. Well, I have good news. He's been given a new job hosting a television show in America, which means you can go to the bakery for bread knowing he can't possibly be in there.

Doubtless he will have received a Google alert about this mention and even as we speak will be scribbling furiously in his little diary about how I haven't been offered a job on television in the States because my teeth are too beige and I have a fat stomach.

Well, sorry, Piers, but I was in fact asked to meet with all the main American networks a few years ago. I even went over there for some meetings and it was all very grown-up. But in the hotel bar one night I did some maths and uncovered a problem.

They sign you up to do a pilot – quite why I had to make a pilot of a car show I have no idea – and if they like it, you are required to make six shows. If they go well, the run extends to twenty-five shows, and if those get high ratings, they demand a hundred more.

So you go over there to make one pilot and, whether you like it or not, you could still be there five years later. Now, of course, I realize this isn't an issue for Morgan but I have friends in Britain and after five years I'd be missing them terribly. I'd almost certainly become a mental, launching into anti-Semitic tirades at policemen and hurling telephones at hotel receptionists.

Aha, you may think, but what about the money? Well, for sure, if your television programme is a big hit on an American network, then yes, you will be very rich. So you'd be there in your Jacuzzi, with two Las Vegas showgirls, eating some swan, and your children would be 5,000 miles away thinking that, perhaps, you loved cash more than you loved them. I don't think that would be very healthy.

Besides, lots of people move to a new job for money and it rarely works out. Morecambe and Wise. Trinny and Susannah. Barry and Norman. You take the corporate shilling and your career will be over in a jiffy. I don't, by the way, include poor old Jonathan Ross in this. He is an extremely nice and kind man whose move to ITV was thrust upon him by people with an agenda. I'm sorry to say this here, but I think the whole episode was disgraceful.

Anyway, I had a problem. I was in America and due to meet all the big networks for a job I really didn't want. I therefore made a plan with my producers. Upon entering each meeting, we would take it in turns to name a band. And then each of us would have to get as many of their lyrics as possible into the conversation.

This is why, at one network, we were asked what made
Top Gear
so appealing, and my producer, Andy Wilman, answered: ‘It's the karma karma karma karma karma chameleon.' It's also why, at the next meeting, I said it was ‘art for art's sake' and that ‘life is a minestrone'. I was so pleased with that one, I then said, ‘served up with parmesan cheese'. Which may have been a mistake. Certainly no job offers were forthcoming afterwards.

I cannot tell you how much fun this is. You're being asked about back ends and put options by some of the brightest, sharpest people in television, and you're sitting there wondering how ‘The Logical Song' went and if any of its lyrics have anything at all to do with anything anyone is saying.

Of course, you will argue that this is all fair enough if you don't really care about the outcome of a meeting. But sitting there running through Don Henley's back catalogue in your head would be stupid if you did. Really? Because I put it to you that all meetings are a waste of time and that you would achieve more if you simply sat on your hands and whistled Dixie. So you may as well play song-lyric bingo.

Think about it. If you have a meeting to agree a deal, then both sides will have to compromise, and that means everyone leaves feeling a bit disappointed. If you decide not to compromise, then what's the point of going? So, there can be no such thing as a ‘good' meeting. It's either disappointing or useless. There is no other way.

As evidence, I give you the Copenhagen summit. Last year 115 world leaders flew to Denmark to discuss what might be done should global temperatures rise. After eight draft texts and an all-day get-together, involving thousands of people, everyone agreed they couldn't agree on anything.

It was always thus. As a cub reporter on a local newspaper I sat through thousands of council meetings that achieved absolutely nothing. I remember one in which the members spent an hour discussing whether they should have a glass or a plastic water jug at future meetings. And they ended by suggesting they discuss the issue in more detail next time they met.

G7? You may remember that after much pressure from Bonio and St Bob, Gordon Brown and co decided to discuss the possibility of cutting Third World debt to zero. So they talked for ages and discovered they all disagreed with one another.

Now stop and wonder how many meetings have been held between Israel and various other Middle Eastern states over the past fifty years. Anything achieved there? Well, a bloody
great wall, but that's about it. They'd have achieved more if Binyamin Netanyahu had greeted President Bashar al-Assad last time they met by saying, ‘Rudy's on a train to nowhere.' Why not? Nothing else has ever worked. And who knows, maybe Syria's president is a Supertramp fan. Maybe that's the key that would sort out the West Bank.

Let me finish on one final piece of evidence that all meetings are a waste of time. Someone in America recently called one to discuss who should replace the CNN chat-show host Larry King. And they decided that, of the six billion or so people on earth, the answer was Piers Morgan. My case rests.

25 July 2010

Britain has just sent a new ambassador to Finland. He is called Matthew Lodge and he will be living in a historically important house that was thoroughly modernized back in the 1980s using Finnish stone. I'm sure he will be very happy there. But how, exactly, will he fill his days? If you are the British ambassador in Washington, or Berlin, then obviously there is much to be done. There will be cocktail parties to attend, and UK citizens will lose their passports and need new ones. But Helsinki? The Foreign and Commonwealth Office says that Lodge will be responsible for relations between Britain and Finland.

What relations? We get on with the Finns in the same way that I get on with my neighbours. I know they exist. The end.

I realize, of course, that Britain and Finland are the only two democracies in human history ever to declare war on one another but it seems highly unlikely that this will ever happen again. So what are the ambassador's weekly reports going to say? How many different ways can he find to say, ‘Relations between Finland and Britain remain cordial'? They've been that way since 1945.

We're told that Lodge will also be responsible for the well-being of British nationals living in Finland. Right. I see. And how many of those are there? Two? Seven? Nobody lives in Finland. Not even Finns. It's almost completely empty. You may as well be the British ambassador to Mars.

And I'd like at this point to apologize to Lodge for singling
him out because, of course, it's pretty much the same story for our man in Denmark, Norway and indeed right across Scandinavia. The globe, too. I mean, what does the British ambassador to Slovakia do? No, really. What?

I should imagine he spends the first half of his year planning the annual cocktail party and the second half clearing up the Ferrero Rocher wrappers.

All of this conjecture brings me on to a breakfast invitation I once received from the German ambassador in London. There were just the two of us, in a huge room, and we had cold meats until, after an hour or so, a butlery sort of chap came in and coughed discreetly, signalling that my time was up. So I left, and as I did so I wondered: what on earth was that all about?

The only possible reason for the invitation was that, having had some cold meats in a very agreeable room overlooking Belgrave Square with an absolutely charming man, I would feel better disposed towards the Hun. And you know what? It worked. He gave me some ham. I bought a Mercedes-Benz.

This is why I am delighted to hear David Cameron telling British embassy staff all over the world that the days of croquet and gin slings are over; that they must now push hard to support British business. And it's also why I'm thrilled to see he's gone to India.

For too long Britain has concentrated its efforts on America in the vague hope of keeping the special relationship alive. But, truth be told, there is no special relationship. The idiots in the middle bit have never heard of us and the rest still hate us for shooting up the White House or pulling their forefathers' toenails out.

We helped them become part of an ‘international' force in Iraq and Afghanistan. We helped them secure their need for oil. And what did British business get in return? A bollocking for spilling a bit of it on one of their beaches. How many US
construction companies buy JCB diggers? How many Eurofighters are there in the US Air Force? Quite.

But if our giddiness with America was bad, then our attitude to the rest of the world was even worse. We either ignored it or dispatched John Prescott to tell them that they couldn't have cars and power stations because of the environment.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, meanwhile, maintained an ethical foreign policy that meant we just told foreigners in dresses and hats they had to stop whatever it was they were doing and behave like us.

All that has to change. We have to stop lecturing the men in dresses and beg them to think British. And the best person to do that is not Prince Andrew. No, it's the people who live there. And the people who live there are our ambassadors.

We must therefore pull them from whatever secretary happens to be filling their afternoons these days and set them to work, as salesmen. Our man in Delhi gives a local dignitary a cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich and, in return, he buys a Eurofighter. Well, it worked for me.

The big problem is, of course, what else will they sell? Tesco's home delivery service? A mobile dog-grooming service? Britain is a nation now of people who go to work, send emails and come home again. If you look at the business leaders who accompanied Cameron on his trip to India, few of them run companies that make anything.

And that – that – has to be the starting point. Because it's no good forging a special relationship with India or Finland or anywhere else if we have nothing to offer. It's no good giving our ambassador to Slovakia a Ford Mondeo to travel the country as a salesman if he has no samples to put in the boot.

Now is the time to turn this around. People will lose their
jobs over the coming months and years. They should be encouraged to go into their sheds and make something. Because now you won't need to worry about marketing. You have the ambassadors to do that for you. And you don't need to worry about a shop front, either. Because it's the British embassy in just about every capital city in the world.

The days of Brown and Blair are over. The days of patronizing, hectoring, ethical nonsense are gone. Britain is now back in business. We just have to work out what that business is going to be.

1 August 2010