The World According to Clarkson Read online

  The World According to Clarkson

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CLARKSON

  Jeremy Clarkson made his name presenting a poky motoring programme on BBC2 called Top Gear. He left to forge a career in other directions but made a complete hash of everything and ended up back on Top Gear again. He lives with his wife, Francie, and three children in Oxfordshire. Despite this, he has a clean driving licence.

  The World According to Clarkson

  JEREMY CLARKSON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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

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  These articles first appeared in the Sunday Times between 2001 and 2003

  This collection first published by Michael Joseph 2004

  Published in Penguin Books 2005

  1

  Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 2004

  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: 978–0–141–90135–0

  To Francie

  Contents

  Another Day’s Holiday? Please, Give Me a Break

  All This Health and Safety Talk is Just Killing Me

  Men are a Lost Cause, and We’re Proud of It

  We Let Them Get Away with Murder on Radio

  Willkommen and Achtung, This is Austrian Hospitality

  Gee Whiz Guys, But the White House is Small

  Flying Round the World, No Seat is First Class

  They’re Trying to Lower the Pulse of Real Life

  Forget the Euro, Just Give Us a Single Socket

  I’d Have Laid Down My Life for Wotsisname

  Creeping Suburbia isn’t Quite What I Expected

  Is It a Plane? No, It’s a Flying Vegetable

  Is This a Winner’s Dinner or a Dog’s Breakfast?

  Call This a Riot? It was a Complete Washout

  Being a Millionaire is Just One Step from being Skint

  What Does It Take to Get a Decent Meal Round Here?

  Cutting Lawns is the Last Word in Civilisation

  An Invitation from My Wife I Wish I Could Refuse

  How Big a Mistake are You Going to Make?

  America, Twinned with the Fatherland

  Cornered by a German Mob Bent on Revenge

  Wising Up to the EU After My Tussles in Brussels

  A Weekend in Paris, the City of Daylight Robbery

  It’s a Work of Art, and It was Built on Our Backs

  They Speak the Language of Death in Basque Country

  Reason Takes a Bath in the Swimming Pool

  You Can Fly an Awfully Long Way on Patience

  What I Missed on My Hols: Everyday Madness

  Rule the Waves? These Days We’re Lost at Sea

  Why Can’t We Do Big or Beautiful Any More?

  Learn from Your Kids and Chill Out Ibiza-Style

  Going to the Dentist in the Teeth of All Reason

  Sea Duel with the Fastest Migrants in the West

  My Verdict? Juries are As Guilty As Hell…

  The More We’re Told the Less We Know

  Without a PR Protector, I’m Just Another Fat Git

  Why Have an Argument? Let’s Say It with Fists

  Speaking As a Father, I’ll Never be a Mother

  I’m Just Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation, Britney

  Chin Up, My Little Angel - Winning is for Losers

  A Murderous Fox Has Made Me Shoot David Beckham

  I Bring You News from the Edge of the Universe

  Go to the Big Top: It’s Better than Big Brother

  The Nit-picking Twitchers Out to Ground Britain

  Cricket’s the National Sport of Time Wasters

  Have I Got News… I’m Another Failed Deayton

  Home Alone Can be the Perfect State for a Child

  Ivan the Terrible is One Hell of a Holidaymaker

  In Terror Terms, Rambo Has a Lot to Answer For

  House-Price Slump? It’s the School Run, Stupid

  The Lottery will Subsidise Everything, Except Fun

  The Shuttle’s Useless, But Book Me on the Next Flight

  When the Chips are Down, I’m with the Fatherland

  Save the Turtles: Put Adverts on Their Shells

  Give Me a Moment to Sell You Staffordshire

  A Quick Snoop Behind the Queen’s Net Curtains

  Who Needs Abroad When You Can Holiday in Hythe?

  We Have the Galleries, But Where’s the Art?

  You Think SARS is Bad? There’s Worse Out There

  Mandela Just Doesn’t Deserve His Pedestal

  In Search of Lost Time, One Chin and a Life

  In Search of a Real Garden at the Chelsea Show

  To Boldly Go Where Nobody’s Tried a Dumb Record Before

  Beckham’s Tried, Now It’s My Turn to Tame the Fans

  The Unhappiest People on Earth? You’d Never Guess

  Welcome to Oafsville: It’s Any Town Near You

  If Only My Garden Grew As Well As the Hair in My Ears

  Men, You Have Nothing to FEAR But Acronyms

  Red Sky at Night, Michael Fish’s Satellite is On Fire

  I Wish I’d Chosen Marijuana and Biscuits Over Real Life

  I’ve been to Paradise… It was an Absolute Pain

  Eureka, I’ve Discovered a Cure for Science

  Why the Booker Shortlist Always Loses the Plot

  Look in the Souvenir Shop and Weep for England

  Eton - It’s Worse than an Inner-City Comprehensive

  A Giant Leap Back for Mankind

  What a Wonderful Flight into National Failure

  The Peace Game in Iraq is Jeux sans Frontieères

  The Juries are Scarier than the Criminals

  They’re Trying to Frame Kristen Scott Donkey

  All I Want for Christmas is a Ban on Office Parties

  Another Day’s Holiday? Please, Give Me a Break

  According to a poll, the vast majority of people questioned as they struggled back to work last week thought that England should have followed Scotland’s lead and made Tuesday a bank holiday.

  Two things strike me as odd here. First, that anyone cou
ld be bothered to undertake such research and, second, that anyone in their right mind could think that the Christmas break was in some way too short.

  I took ten days off and by 11 o’clock on the first morning I had drunk fourteen cups of coffee, read all the newspapers and the Guardian and then… and then what?

  By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang a few pictures. So I found a hammer, and later a man came to replaster the bits of wall I had demolished. Then I tried to fix the electric gates, which work only when there’s an omega in the month. So I went down the drive with a spanner, and later another man came to put them back together again.

  I was just about to start on the Aga, which had broken down on Christmas Eve, as they do, when my wife took me on one side by my earlobe and explained that builders do not, on the whole, spend their spare time writing, so writers should not build on their days off. It’s expensive and it can be dangerous, she said.

  She’s right. We have these lights in the dining room which are supposed to project stars onto the table below. It has never really bothered me that the light seeps out of the sides so the stars are invisible; but when you are bored, this is exactly the sort of thing that gets on your nerves.

  So I bought some gaffer tape and suddenly my life had a purpose. There was something to do.

  Mercifully, Christmas intervened before I could do any more damage, but then it went away again and once more I found myself staring at the day through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. Each morning, bed and the blessed relief of unconsciousness seemed so far away.

  I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.

  I took the entire family to the sort of gifty-wifty shop where the smell of pot-pourri is so pungent that it makes you go cross-eyed. Even though the children were lying on the floor gagging, I still spent hours deliberately choosing a footstool that was too small and the wrong colour so that I could waste some more time taking it back.

  The next day, still gently redolent of Delia Smith’s knicker drawer, I decided to buy the wrong sort of antique filing cabinet. But after the footstool debacle my wife said no. So it seemed appropriate that I should develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when you are at a loose end because everything, up to and including herpes, is better than being bored.

  It’s hard, I know, to summon up a bout of genital sores at will, but with a little effort you can catch a cold which, if you whimper enough, will easily pass for flu. And yup, even lying in bed watching Judy Finnegan in a Santa suit beats the terminal cancer that is boredom.

  Boredom forces you to ring people you haven’t seen for eighteen years and halfway through the conversation you remember why you left it so long. Boredom means you start to read not only mail-order catalogues but also the advertising inserts that fall on the floor. Boredom gives you half a mind to get a gun and go berserk in the local shopping centre, and you know where this is going. Eventually, boredom means you will take up golf.

  On the day before Christmas Eve I sat next to a chap on the train who, as we pulled out of Paddington, called his wife to say that he was finished, that he had retired and that from now on his life was entirely his own. He was trying to sound happy about it, but there was a faraway, baleful look in his eyes which said it all.

  He would spend a month or two at home, breaking interior fixtures and fittings and generally killing everything in the garden, and then one day he would accept an invitation to tee off and that would be it. His life would be over long before he actually stopped breathing. Pity. He seemed like a nice chap.

  Or what about fishing? You see those people sitting on the side of the canal in the drizzle and you wonder: how bored do you have to be at home for that to be better?

  The answer, I suspect, is ‘not very’. After a week I was at screaming pitch and I couldn’t even cook some sausages to put in the fridge because one afternoon, when my wife wasn’t looking, I had tried to mend the Aga. And the thing had come off.

  I could have put it back, of course, but strangely, when you’re not busy, there is never enough time to do anything. I wrote a letter and still have not found enough space in the day to put it in an envelope. Mind you, this might have something to do with the fact that I spent eight hours last Tuesday on the lavatory. Well, it’s as good a hobby as any.

  Apparently the British work longer hours than anyone else in Europe and stern-faced men are always telling us that this causes stress and heart disease. Fair point; but not working, I assure you, would give us all piles.

  Sunday 7 January 2001

  All This Health and Safety Talk is Just Killing Me

  You may recall that after the Hatfield train crash last year six-chins Prescott, our deputy prime minister, turned up at the scene and gave the distinct impression that with a bit more effort and a lot more investment, nobody would die on the railways ever again.

  There was a similar response last week to the news that the number of people caught drinking and driving in the run-up to Christmas rose by 0.1 per cent. All sorts of sandalistas have been on the radio to explain that if the drink-drive limit were lowered to minus eight and the police were empowered to shoot motorists on sight, then death on the road would become a thing of the past.

  These people go on to tell us that mobile phones will cook our children’s ears, that long-haul flights will fill our legs with thrombosis and that meat is murder. They want an end to all deaths – and it doesn’t stop there. They don’t even see why anyone should have to suffer from a spot of light bruising.

  Every week, as we filmed my television chat show, food would be spilt on the floor, and every week the recording would have to be stopped so it could be swept away. ‘What would happen,’ said the man from health and safety, ‘if a cameraman were to slip over?’

  ‘Well,’ I would reply, ‘he’d probably have to stand up again.’

  Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed with the wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios must display warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and the other day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use a door. I am not kidding.

  So you can imagine the problems I shall encounter this week when, for a television series I’m making, I shall climb into a decompression chamber to find out what life would be like on an airliner at 30,000 feet if one of the windows were to break.

  The poor producer has been given a form the size of Luxembourg which asks what hazards I will face. Well, my lungs will explode and the air in the cavities under my fillings will expand ninefold, causing untold agony, but I probably won’t feel this because there is a good chance that the subsequent hypoxia will turn me into a dribbling vegetable.

  I consider it a risk worth taking, but my thoughts are irrelevant because these days my life and how I live it are in the hands of the men from health and safety. The same people who said last year I could not fly in a US-Army helicopter because the pilot was not BBC-approved.

  Oh, come on. Everyone knows that American forces are not allowed to crash their helicopters. Following the 1993 debacle in Somalia, when they lost sixteen men who were sent in to rescue two already dead comrades, it has now been decided that no US serviceman will ever be hurt again. Not even in a war.

  This has now spread to Britain. You’ve read, I’m sure, about the hearing damage which can be caused by sergeant-majors who shout at privates, but the plague goes deeper than that. On a visit to RAF Henlow last week, I was rather surprised to see that someone from health and safety had pinned a poster to the notice board, warning the fighter pilots that alcohol will make them aggressive and violent. Oh no, that’s the last thing we want – aggressive and violent fighter pilots.

  Then we have Britain’s fleet of nuclear-powered hunter killer submarines, which have all been grounded or whatever it is you do
with boats, by health and safety because they could be dangerous.

  Now attention has been focused on Britain’s stockpile of uranium-depleted missiles, which are by far and away the best method of penetrating the armour on enemy tanks. Great, except health and safety doesn’t like them because it turns out they might kill someone.

  Former squaddies are on the news saying that they loosed off a few rounds in Kosovo and now they have caught cancer. Deepest sympathies, but let’s look at some facts. They only way depleted uranium can get through the skin is if someone shoots you with a bullet made out of it. It can get into the body through the lungs, but since it is 40 per cent less radioactive than uranium that occurs naturally in the ground, it does seem unlikely that it could cause any damage. I have been down a uranium mine in Western Australia and, so far, I have not grown another head.

  However, I do find it odd that the Ministry of Defence will test only soldiers who served in Kosovo and not those who were in the Gulf, where 300 tons of depleted uranium were used and the alpha radiation has had longer to do its stuff. But if by some miracle it does find that our boys have been irradiated and that one squaddie died as a result, then we can be assured that depleted uranium will, in future, be used only on NATO, rather than by NATO.

  Where will this end? The US Air Force managed to kill seven British soldiers in the Gulf with what it likes to call friendly fire, so would it not be sensible for those of a health and safety persuasion to ban Americans from the battlefield, too?

  Some people say global warming and ozone depletion will kill us. But I’m far more worried about the people who have made it their sworn duty to keep us all alive.

  Sunday 14 January 2001

  Men are a Lost Cause, and We’re Proud of It

  Being a man, I am unwilling to pull over and ask someone for directions, because this would imply they are somehow cleverer than me. And obviously they’re not, because I’m toasty warm in a car and they’re mooching around on foot.

  Sometimes, though, and usually in a town where the council has let a group of fourteen-year-olds from one of its special schools design a one-way system, I have been known to give up, become a traitor to my gender and ask a passer-by for advice.