Born to Be Riled Read online

  Born to be Riled

  Book Jacket

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Born to be Riled

  Jeremy Clarkson began his writing career on the Rotherham Advertiser. Since then he has written for the Sun, the Sunday Times, the Rochdale Observer, the Wolverhampton Express and Star, all of the Associated Kent Newspapers, and Lincolnshire Life. Today he is the tallest person working in British television.

  Jeremy Clarkson’s other books are Clarkson’s Hot 100, Clarkson on Cars, Motorworld, Planet Dagenham, The World According to Clarkson, I Know You Got Soul and And Another Thing: The World According to Clarkson Volume 2

  Born to be Riled

  The collected writings of

  JEREMY CLARKSON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by BBC Worldwide Limited 1999

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  1

  Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 1999

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90134–3

  This book is dedicated to –

  all those people who have bought it.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Norfolk, twinned with Norfolk

  GT90 in a flat spin

  Blackpool Rock

  Gordon Gekko back in the driving seat

  All aboard the veal calf express

  Speedy Swede

  Drink driving do-gooders are over the limit

  Car of the Century

  The Sunny sets

  Who’s getting their noses in the trough?

  Ferrari’s desert storm

  Killjoys out culling

  Flogging a sawn-off Cosworth

  Weather retort

  Burning your fingers on hot metal

  Speeding towards a pact with the devil

  Road rage – you know it makes sense

  911 takes on Sega Rally

  A laugh a minute with Schumacher in the Mustang

  Girlpower

  Nissan leads from the rear

  Cable TVs and JCBs

  Mystic Clarkson’s hopeless F1 predictions

  Commercial cobblers

  Struck down by a silver bullet in Detroit

  You can’t park there – or there

  Sermon on Sunday drivers

  A riveting book about GM’s quality pussy

  Aston Martin V8 – rocket-powered rhino

  Caravans – A few liberal thoughts

  Blind leading the blind: Clarkson feels the heat in Madras

  Norfolk’s finest can’t hit the high notes

  Car interiors in desperate need of some Handy Andy work

  New MG is a maestro

  Darth Blair against the rebel forces

  Riviera riff-raff

  Objectivity is a fine thing unless the objective is to be first

  Kids in cars

  Brummie cuisine is not very good

  Last bus to Clarksonville

  Land of the Brave, Home of the Dim

  Only tyrants build good cars

  The principality of toilets

  Clarkson the rentboy finally picks up a Ferrari

  Hate mail and wheeler-dealers

  No room for dreamers in the GT40

  A rolling Moss gathers up Clarkson

  Can’t sleep? Look at a Camry

  Big foot down for a ten gallon blat

  Car chase in cuckoo-land

  Frost-bite and cocktail sausages up the nose

  Bursting bladders on Boxing Day

  Lies, damn lies and statistics

  Radio Ga Ga

  Spooked by a Polish spectre

  Boxster on the ropes

  Concept or reality?

  Top Landing Gear – Clarkson in full flight

  A fast car is the only life assurance

  Rav4 lacks Kiwi polish

  Cuddle the cat and battle the Boche

  Secret crash testing revealed

  Diesel man on the couch

  Stuck on the charisma bypass

  Travel tips with Jezza Chalmers

  Capsized in Capri

  Noel’s Le Mans party blows a fuse

  The Skyline’s the limit for gameboys on steroids

  Henry Ford in stockings and suspenders

  NSX – the invisible supercar

  Corvette lacks the Right Stuff

  Footballers check in to Room 101

  Big fun at Top Gun

  Traction control loses grip on reality

  Driving at the limit

  Global Posting systems

  Fight for your right to party

  Gravy train hits the old buffers

  Weird world of Saab Man

  Freemasons need coning off

  The curse of the Swedish smogasbord

  Pin-prick for the Welsh windbag

  Showdown at the G6 summit

  Spelling out the danger from Brussels

  Dog’s dinner from Korea

  New Labour, new Jezza

  Sad old Surrey

  A frightening discovery

  Hannibal Hector the Vector

  F1 running rings round the viewers

  Big cat needs its tummy tickled

  Elk test makes monkeys of us

  At the core of the Cuore

  Last 911 is full of hot air

  False economies of scale

  Blowing the whistle on Ford and Vauxhall

  Hell below decks – Clarkson puts das boot in

  Country Life

  Beetle mania

  Football is an A Class drug

  Yank tank flattens Prestbury

  Supercar suicide

  Bedtime stories with Hans Christian Prescott

  Clarkson soils his jeans

  Burning rubber with Tara Palmer-Tailslide

  Jag sinks its teeth in

  Kraut carnage in an Arnage

  Absorbing the shock of European Union

  Minicabs: the full monty

  Supercar crash in Stock Exchange

  The school run

  Voyage to the bottom of the heap

  Van
the Man

  ‘What I actually meant was…’

  Mrs Clarkson runs off with a German

  Un-cool Britannia

  Move over Maureen

  Toyota gets its just deserts

  Kristin Scott Thomas in bed with the Highway Code

  Time to change Gear

  Even soya implants can’t make a great car

  Lock up your Jags, the Germans are coming

  Well carved up by the kindergarten coupé

  Fruit or poison?

  Left speechless by the car that cuddled me

  One car the god of design wants to forget

  Can a people carrier be a real car? Can it hell

  Hell is the overtaking lane in a 1-litre

  Forty motors and buttock fans

  Audi’s finest motor just can’t make up its mind

  Keep the sports car, drive the price tag

  Out of the snake pit, a car with real venom

  The Swiss army motor with blunted blades

  Perfection is no match for Brian and his shed

  Waging war with the motoring rule book

  Evo’s a vulgar girl, but I love her little sister

  At last, a car even I can’t put in a ditch

  Trendy cars? They’re not really my bag

  Why life on the open road is a real stinker

  Cotswold villages and baby seals

  Shopping for a car? Just ask Rod Stewart

  Gruesome revenge of the beast I tried to kill

  Out of control on the political motorway

  Old sex machine still beats young fatboy

  Whatever happened to the lame ducks?

  Bikers are going right round the bend – slowly

  Freedom is the right to live fast and die young

  A shooting star that takes you to heaven

  Congratulations to the Cliff Richard of cars

  David Beckham? More like Dave from Peckham

  A prancing horse with a double chin

  £54,000 for a Honda? That’s out of this world

  It’s Mika Hakkinen in a Marks & Spencer suit

  Like classic literature, it’s slow and dreary

  Prescott’s preposterous bus fixation

  Take your filthy, dirty hands off that Alfa

  Yes, you can cringe in comfort in a Rover 75

  Don’t you hate it when everything works?

  The kind of pressure we can do without

  Three points and prime time TV

  Every small boy needs to dream of hot stuff

  Footless and fancy-free? Then buy a Fiat Punto

  Now my career has really started to slide

  The best £100,000 you’ll ever waste

  Styled by Morphy Richards

  The terrifying thrill of driving with dinosaurs

  Perfect camouflage for Birmingham by night

  Another good reason to keep out of London

  My favourite cars

  Need a winter sun break? Buy a Bora

  Driving fast on borrowed time

  I’ve seen the future and it looks a mess

  Nice motor; shame it can’t turn corners

  Stop! All this racket is doing my head in

  Looks don’t matter; it’s winning that counts

  It’s a simple choice: get a life, or get a diesel

  Insecure server?

  Ahoy, shipmates, that’s a cheap car ahead

  So modern it’s been left behind already

  Something to shout about

  Appendix

  Foreword

  As a motoring journalist, you spend much of your life on exotic car launches, feeding from the bottomless pit of automotive corporate hospitality. And then you come home to tailor a story that perfectly meets the needs of the public relations department that funded it. For sure, you dislike the new ‘xyz’ but what the hell. Say it’s fabulous and you’re sure to be invited on the next exotic press launch. And so what if some poor sucker reads what you say and buys this hateful car? You’re never going to meet him because by then, you’ll be on another press launch, in Africa maybe, trying out the ‘zxy’.

  I used to live like this, and it was great. But sadly, when I climbed into Top Gear, I had to climb off the gravy train. This is because, all of a sudden, people in petrol station forecourts and in supermarket checkout queues started to recognise me. These people had bought a car because I’d said they’d like it. And they didn’t like it because it kept breaking down. So now, they were going to fill my trousers with four star. And set me alight.

  I learned, therefore, pretty quickly that the single most important feature of motoring journalism - or any kind of journalism for that matter - is speaking your mind. You mustn’t become Orville with a PR man’s hand up your bottom. I know that over the years, these columns from the Sunday Times and Top Gear magazine have caused PR men to choke on their canteen coffee, and that makes me happy. I have been banned from driving Toyotas, I’ve had death threats, and my postman once had to deliver letters from what seemed like the entire population of Luton. But at least I can sit back now and know that every single opinion on these pages was mine. I just borrowed a car, and told you what I thought. No sauce. No PR garnish.

  I never said you had to agree with my opinions but I can say that in the last 10 years, I’ve only been on maybe five press launches and I’ve sat through all of them with my fingers in my ears, singing old Who songs at the top of my voice.

  Sure there are some things I wish I’d never written. I wish, for instance, that I’d learn to stop predicting the outcome of a Grand Prix championship and I wish I’d never been so rude about horses. But most of all, I wish I wasn’t growing up quite so quickly. Just seven years ago, I had an Escort Cosworth and wanted a minimum speed limit of 130mph on motorways. Babies, I thought, were only any good if served with a baked potato and some horseradish sauce. And here I am now with an automatic Jaguar, three children and a fondness for the new 20mph inner city speed limit.

  So, as you read through the book, you might find what you think are contradictions, some evidence perhaps that I told the truth one day and some bull the next.

  Not so, I’ve just got a bit older.

  I expect soon that I shall start to favour cars that have wipe down seats, denture holders in the dash and a bi-focal windscreen - but don’t worry. Even when my nose has exploded and all my fingers are bent, I still won’t like diesel, or people carriers or Nissans, and I shall still be happy to point out the weirdness of America. 250 million wankers living in a country with no word for wanker.

  And be assured that when I’m dead, they’ll find a note at my solicitors’ saying that I want to be driven to my grave at 100mph in a something with a V8.

  Jeremy Clarkson, 1999

  Norfolk, twinned with Norfolk

  In a previous life I spent a couple of years selling Paddington Bears to toy and gift shops all over Britain. Commercial travelling was a career that didn’t really suit – because I had to wear one – but I have ended up with an intimate knowledge of Britain’s highways and byways. I know how to get from Cropredy to Burghwallis and from London Apprentice to Marchington Woodlands. I know where you can park in Basingstoke and that you can’t in Oxford. However, I have absolutely no recollection of Norfolk. I must have been there because I can picture, absolutely, the shops I used to call on in, er, one town in this flat and featureless county.

  And there’s another thing, I can’t remember the name of one town. The other day I had to go to a wedding in one little town in Norfolk. It’s not near anywhere you’ve heard of, there are no motorways that go anywhere near it, and God help you if you run out of petrol.

  For 30 miles, the Cosworth ran on fumes until I encountered what would have passed for a garage 40 years ago. The man referred to unleaded petrol as ‘that newfangled stuff’ and then, when I presented him with a credit card, looked like I’d given him a piece of myrrh. Nevertheless, he tottered off into his shed and put it in the till, thus proving that no
part of the twentieth century has caught up with Norfolk yet.

  This is not surprising because it’s nearly impossible to get there. From London, you have to go through places such as Hornsey and Tottenham before you find the M11, which sets off in the right direction, but then, perhaps sensibly, veers off to Cambridge. And from everywhere else you need a Camel Trophy Land Rover.

  Then, when you get there and you’re sitting around in the hotel lobby waiting for the local man to stop being a window cleaner, gynaecologist and town crier and be a receptionist for a while, you pick up a copy of Norfolk Life. It is the world’s smallest magazine.

  In the bar that night, when we said we had been to a wedding in Thorndon, everyone stopped talking. A dart hit the ceiling and the man behind the counter dropped a glass. ‘No one,’ he said, ‘has been to Thorndon since it burned down 40 years back.’ Then he went off, muttering about the ‘widow woman’.

  Moving about Norfolk, however, can be fun. I am used to having people point as I go by. Most shout, ‘Hey, look, it’s a Cosworth!’ but in Norfolk they shout, ‘Hey, look, it’s a car!’ Everywhere else people want to know how fast it goes, but in Norfolk they asked how good it was at ploughing. The spoiler fascinated them because they reckoned it might be some sort of crop sprayer.

  I’m sure witchcraft has something to do with it. The government should stop promoting the Broads as a tourist attraction and they should advise visitors that ‘here be witches’. They spend millions telling us that it is foolish to smoke, but not a penny telling us not to go to Norfolk – unless you like orgies and the ritual slaying of farmyard animals.

  The next time some friends get married in Norfolk, I’ll send a telegram. Except it won’t get there because they haven’t heard of the telephone yet. Or paper. Or ink.

  GT90 in a flat spin

  Earls Court becomes the fashion capital of the western world this week as the London Anorak Show opens its doors to members of the public.

  Better known as the Motor Show, families will be donning their finest acrylic fibres and braving the Piccadilly Line so that they may gawp at all that’s new and shiny.

  However, if you want to see all that’s really new and shiny, you need to stay on the Piccadilly Line until you arrive at Terminal Four. And then you should catch a plane to Japan.

  The trouble is that the London Motor Show clashes with the Tokyo Motor Show, and there’s no surprises for guessing which one is rated most highly by the exhibitors.