The World According to Clarkson (11 page)

The problem is that we are used to all this, and more. We expect the tiny bit of road that isn’t jammed solid to be festooned with speed cameras. We expect the train to be late and the Tube to explode. We know that the plane will make an unscheduled stop in Bogotá and that if we complain we’ll be taken off by the police, arrested and shot.

Naturally, we expect a charter flight to get us back to Stansted four hours after everyone else because, of course, this particular airline is the sponsor of the spectacularly hopeless Minardi Formula One team which, last time I looked, was just finishing the 1983 French Grand Prix.

Sunday 12 August 2001

And so, after two months on the Continent, I’m back in Britain trying to decide if I have missed anything. What I normally miss is the British weather. A dose of hot sunshine may be pleasant for a week or two, but soon you begin to tire of sunscreen and having a red nose. You find yourself hunting down bits of shade and not wanting to do any work because it’s far too sweaty.

After four weeks I found myself lying awake at night dreaming of being cold. We have no idea how lucky we are in this country having weather that we don’t notice; weather that doesn’t slap us in the face every time we set foot outside the door.

But what concerns me more than the weather is what I’ve missed in the news. We all assume when we come back from a spell abroad that the country will have changed out of all recognition. There will have been fourteen days of developments about which we will have no knowledge.

New fashions will have come and gone. New political parties will have formed, new bands will have been created and we won’t be able to talk about any of it at dinner parties. So what exactly have I missed in the past nine weeks?

I missed Bill Clinton standing in for Cliff Richard
at Wimbledon, and I missed the joyous spectacle of Jeffrey Archer going down, but then I didn’t really because the verdict was extensively covered in the Spanish newspapers where, for some extraordinary reason, he was likened to a modern-day Oscar Wilde. Well yes, apart from being conspicuously un-gay and even more conspicuously unable to write.

Also, I missed Madonna’s deification. When I left she was a fading Detroit pop star but I’ve come back to find that she is sharing a social plinth with a fat blonde hairdresser from Wales who seems to have become famous after admitting to a fondness for blinking. The foreign newspapers missed that one. Perhaps they were diverted with the problems in the Middle East.

It seems that I also missed a hugely funny television programme about child pornography, although I’m told that most of the people who found it offensive missed it too.

Then there has been this business with Michael Portillo. When I left he was going to be leader of the Conservative Party. But now the clever money seems to be on some bloke who I’ve never heard of. Is he good at blinking as well? One has to hope not or he might miss himself.

I was about to deduce that I had missed nothing when my eye was caught by the New Labour exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. What on earth were they exhibiting? Perhaps they had taken a leaf out of Tracey Emin’s book. Perhaps this is where all the National Health Service beds went. And all the bricks that should
have been used to build playcentres for the kiddies. As well as the last vestiges of our pride and dignity.

Have you ever heard of anything quite so preposterous as an exhibition, in a world-renowned art gallery, that is named after the ruling political party? A party that received fewer votes than the girl who likes blinking.

But, that said, I would love more than anything to do my own New Labour exhibition. ‘This is the egg that hit Mr Prescott and here’s the shirt worn by Tony when he had the sweat problem. And if you follow me now past the Women’s Institute zone, we can see Peter Mandelson’s mortgage-application form, lovingly entwined with Reinaldo’s visa-waiver document.’

In the restaurant I would have lots of mugs, lots of mad cows and lots of free fish for the Spanish visitors. In the play zone I would have hundreds of savage, rabid foxes and a helter-skelter. If anyone said that wasn’t very New Labour, I would tell them it was a spiral staircase for disabled people. Inside I would have Ron Davies in the lavatories, Keith Vaz on the till and audio guides recorded by Michael Martin. And when it all went horribly wrong I would blame Mo Mowlam.

Keen to find out what had actually been exhibited at the gallery and if I was on the right track, I dug out an old copy of
Time Out
and was somewhat bewildered to find it had singled out a video exhibit by Liane Lang. Who she is, I have no idea. Another
Big Brother
contestant perhaps?

My bewilderment turned to bafflement when I read what the video contains: a clay hand manipulates a
woman’s groin fringed with spiky black hair. Devoid of sexiness, the image, we are assured, is perplexing. You’re damn right it’s perplexing. And it gets worse. Rebecca Warren, it says here, uses clay to a more playful and seductive effect. Painted with a wash of pink, a woman opens her legs to the lascivious attentions of what might be a grey dog.

Astonished, I telephoned the gallery and asked what any of this had to do with Tony Blair and his third way. ‘Oh, nothing,’ said the girl. ‘It’s just that the exhibition opened on election day and we sort of thought the New Labour name fitted.’ Actually, it does.

It’s a load of metropolitan claptrap. I may have missed the exhibition, which closes today, but to be honest I didn’t miss it at all.

Sunday 19 August 2001

My childhood memories of Britain’s maritime achievements centre around endless black-and-white television pictures of shrivelled up little men with faces like Furball XL5 stumbling off their battered yachts in Southampton having sailed round the world backwards.

Francis Chichester, Chay Blyth, Robin Knox Johnston. Grainy pictures of Cape Horn. And Raymond Baxter reminding us all that, once again, the noble island nation has tamed the savage ferocity of those southern oceans. Trafalgar, Jutland. The Armada etc. etc. etc. Britannia rules the waves. Always has, always will. The end.

Now, however, we find that pretty well every sailing record in the book is held by the French. They’ve been across the Atlantic faster than anyone else, round the world faster than anyone else and, while plucky Ellen MacArthur grabbed all the headlines by pluckily coming second in the recent Vendée Globe race, the event was actually won by a Frog. Same as it was the year before. And the year before that.

Some say the problem is sponsorship, some argue that sailing in Britain is drowning in its own gin and tonic. But the simple fact is that, these days, the only time a British sailor gets on the news is when his boat sinks.
We had that bloke who turned turtle off Australia and survived by eating himself. Then there’s the Royal Navy which, these days, would struggle to gain control of a puddle. And let’s not forget Pete Goss, whose Team Phillips boat, built to go round the world, didn’t even get round Land’s End before the end came off.

Now I should make it perfectly clear at this point that I’m not a sailor. I tried it just the once on what was basically an aquatic Rover 90. It was captained by an enthusiastic Hampshire type who kept saying we were really ‘knocking on’, but I doubted this, since I was being overtaken by my cigarette smoke.

You could have steered that bloody thing through a hurricane and it would still have only done four knots. And that’s another thing. Why do people lose the ability to speak English as soon as they cast off the spring? Why is speed knots and knots reefers? And why, every time you settle back for a real reefer, do you have to get up again? To get the painters in.

Furthermore, even the most mild-mannered man acts like he’s got the painters in as soon as he grabs the wheel (helm). Why? We’re at sea, for heaven’s sake. If I don’t respond immediately to your commands or pull a sheet instead of a halyard, it really won’t matter. A two-second delay will not cause us to crash.

In fact, come to think of it, I know all there is to know about sailing, i.e. that it means spending the day at 45 degrees while moving around very slowly and being shouted at.

Understandably, then, I was a trifle reluctant when I was invited to Brest, to join the captain and crew of
Cap Gemini
, a £3-million French-built monster – the biggest, fastest trimaran the world has ever seen.

Launched just last month, it is hoped it will get round the world in 60 days and, to put that in perspective, an American nuclear submarine just made the same trip in 83 days. This is one really fast boat.

But it’s the sheer size of the thing which draws the crowds. Finding it in a port is a bit like finding a haystack in a needle. You just look for the mast which stretches up past the other masts, through the troposphere and way into the magnetosphere. This boat doesn’t need satellite navigation. You just climb up that mast and have a look.

In fact,
Cap Gemini
doesn’t really have anything. To keep the weight down, the whole boat, even the sail, is made from carbon fibre and so, having gone to all that trouble and expense, they weren’t going to undo it with internal luxuries. The ten meat machines who sail it are expected to use their clothes for mattresses. And it doesn’t even have a lavatory.

We set off and, for five glorious minutes, I think I saw the appeal of this sailing business. The sun came out, the wind picked up and the mighty yacht set off into the Bay of Biscay like a scalded cock. Perched on one of the three hulls, 20 feet clear of the iron-flat sea, I could scarcely believe my eyes as the speedometer climbed past 30, 35 and then 40 knots. Using nothing but the wind
for power, we were doing nearly 50 miles per hour. This was astonishing. Had I been an American, I would have made whooping noises.

But then the wind died down again and we turned for home. Except of course we didn’t. This being a sailing boat we had to endlessly tack back up the estuary, turning what should have been a 25-kilometre breeze into a 3-hour, 50-kilometre, aimless, walking-pace slog.

There was nothing to eat, nothing to drink, nothing to smoke and, no matter where I went, some fantastically good-looking hunk of sun-bleached muscle trod on me and then shouted because I was in its way. This, I think, is why the British have largely given up with sailing.

Apart from a few crashing bores in blazers, the rest of us have realised that, for getting round the world these days, you can’t beat an Airbus. Which is also French. Dammit.

Sunday 2 September 2001

With the England football team on the crest of a wave and unemployment at an all-time low, it should be a good time to sit back, put on some Elgar and feel warmly fuzzy about being British.

Concorde is coming back, too, and soon it will be tearing across the Atlantic twice a day to remind Johnny Yank that, once upon a time, we were capable of unbelievable genius. Even NASA’s most respected engineers have admitted to me, in private, that designing and building a supersonic airliner was a greater technological challenge than putting a man on the moon.

So it’s wonderful that once again Heathrow will rumble and shudder under the onslaught of those massive Olympus jets. However, it’s also a little sad because you can bet your last cornflake that the British won’t have anything to do with man’s next great landmark.

The problem is that the twenty Concordes cost £1.5 billion, which back then was an astronomical fortune. Even today it would buy two Millennium Domes. Yet despite this, the last five to roll off the production lines were sold for just FFr1 each.

The whole project was driven by Tony Benn, a man who was also responsible for getting the hovercraft out of Cockerell’s shed and into the Channel. In addition,
he helped to create ICL, Britain’s answer to America’s IBM. When he was postmaster-general, he pushed for the Post Office Tower which, for twenty or more years, was London’s tallest building.

Denis Healey once said that Benn ‘came close to destroying the Labour Party as a force in twentieth-century British politics’. And I bet he had few friends at the Treasury either. But my God, he knew how to make everyone feel good about being British.

Today, however, the government doesn’t give. It simply counts the cost. Everything is measured in terms of how many baby incubators it could have bought or how many teachers it might have paid for.

You just know that if Norwich city council were to build a beautiful fountain in the city centre, the local newspaper would find some bereaved mother to come out from behind the Kleenex to say the money should have been spent on speed humps instead.

Part of the problem with the Dome was that instead of making a monument that would stand for all of time, they tried to make it a short-term business proposition whose basic function was to pay for itself. And while the London Eye has been a resounding success, you know that its foundations are rooted in someone’s profit and loss account.

Maybe this is a fundamental problem with capitalism. Maybe the people of a country don’t get blanketed in the warm glow of national pride unless they have a socialist at the helm. Someone like Benn. Or the man who dreamt up those Soviet May Day parades.
Certainly the communist cities I’ve visited do give good monument.

However, to disprove this theory there is the Grande Arche de la Défense in the not very communist city of Paris. Had they filled the middle with offices, the rental income would have been boosted tenfold, but then they wouldn’t have ended up with something so utterly magnificent. And what about the very non-communist US Navy? There is no practical reason on earth why it needs fourteen city-sized aircraft carriers. They exist primarily to instil in the folks back home a sense of security and national pride.

So I’m left facing the inescapable conclusion that the lack of will to build something worthwhile, something beautiful, something brilliant, is a uniquely British problem. Maybe we can’t feel a sense of pride in ourselves because we don’t know who or what we are any more.