Born to Be Riled Read online

  Look, if you are a gossip writer on the Sun and you see Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman having a row over lunch in San Lorenzo, you’ve got a story – even if they were merely arguing over what colour to paint the west wing’s sitting room.

  Same goes with cars. You feel a bit of a wobble over a particularly nasty pothole and as far as you’re concerned, the car is crap. I’ve said it before; car testing is an inexact science, same as writing gossip stories.

  But then along came Hello! and all of a sudden celebs were queuing up to open their hearts. Here, at last, was an outlet where they knew they could put their side of the story without fear of contradiction. As a result, Hello! gets into everyone’s lovely homes while the rest of the paparazzi are camped outside looking at the action through a Nikon F2. Hello! buys up all those photographs of Diana with her breasts out to ensure the world never sees them – the bastards – but you can be damn sure that Diana now owes them one. When she’s ready to talk about the new man in her life, Hello! will get the story first.

  And it’s basically the same with cars. Every magazine fights to be first with the road test of a new car – and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Autocar beats everyone to it with the new MGF. The trouble is, how do we know that what they’ll write about it isn’t total bollocks? We don’t.

  Take Paula Yates. I suspect she’s a silly two-timing bird who ditched her husband and children for a fling with a hirsute Australian who looks like he needs a good bath. This is a line most newspapers are free to take. But in Hello! we get her side of the story, which isn’t quite the same. And nor, frankly, do I find it rings very true. Bob Geldof deserves better.

  And you, the reader, deserve better than what Autocar has in store. They may get the stories first, but if you want opinions rather than public relations puff, stick with the Beeb.

  Kids in cars

  So what’s the daftest lyric you ever heard? I always go for Mink Deville’s immortal ‘He caught a plane and he got on it.’

  Or what about McCartney’s magnificent ‘In this ever changing world in which we live in’?

  Ten years ago, some would undoubtedly have cited Mungo Jerry’s ‘Have a drink. Have a drive. Go out and see what you can find.’

  But not any more. The war has been won. Nobody in their right mind even thinks about drinking and driving any more.

  Oh sure, we need the occasional prod and at Christmas time victims are wheeled out to get the message across a bit more. The police step up their vigilance but the hit rate is miserable.

  They pull over anything that moves, and in some regions only 8 per cent of drivers are found to be watching the world go by through haze-coloured spectacles.

  Britain’s drivers are about the safest in the world. Well done. Let’s hop on a bus, go down the pub and get rat-faced.

  But no. The thought police decided that a new menace must be dreamed up. No one is drinking and driving any more so let’s point our big guns at… eenie, meenie, minie, mo… people who drive around talking into mobile phones.

  Unfortunately, Nokia and Ericsson and all the other mobile phone manufacturers were too quick. Before the government could get into its stride on this one, the boffins came up with the new digital phone… which doesn’t work.

  Today, my airbag is better at communicating messages than my phone so I simply talk into that. This may look funny but it’s not against the law.

  So the eenie meenie game began all over again and settled on people with bad tempers. Yes, you. You keep losing your rag while behind the wheel and you are therefore suffering from road rage.

  Then it was E and then it was joy-riders and then it was youngsters who’d just passed their test and were driving at 80 on motorways. Then it was old people whose reaction times were measured in light years.

  In recent years, the thought police have had a go at just about everyone. No one is safe. But, astonishingly, they’ve missed what is easily the biggest menace the roads have ever seen. It tends to affect sensible, mature people in their early thirties. Law-abiding citizens who read the Daily Mail and vote Conservative.

  Never mind drink driving. Never mind E. Never mind mobile phones or speeding or road rage. I’m talking about… children.

  According to the RAC, 91 per cent of parents admit that they have been distracted by children while driving, and 7 per cent have crashed as result.

  They list the top five distractions as children crying, kicking the back of the seat, fighting, throwing toys and pulling hair.

  And they give us case studies to contemplate. Rebecca, aged three, threw a toy which jammed under the brake pedal. Jake, aged five, kept climbing into the front seat and changing gear. Antonia, aged four, had a mint imperial stuck up her nose. Let me add some of my own observations. Emily, my two-year-old, can produce such vigorous and sustained bouts of vomiting that the entire car is full of sick in three minutes.

  Finlo, who’s my boy child, can cry so loudly that the front windscreen regularly shatters. Only last week he perforated his nanny’s ear-drum.

  I freely admit that his 400-decibel chants drive me to distraction. In Antibes the other day I leapt from the car while it was still moving and buried my head in the sea, telling my wife that I wouldn’t come out again until he’d shut up.

  Let me tell you this. In a country with no drink driving laws, I have driven a car while so drunk I couldn’t talk without dribbling. I have driven while bursting for a pee. I have done 90 while attempting to talk on the phone. And after 40 aborted attempts to get through, I suffered from road rage so badly that I pulled the steering wheel out of the dash.

  But on each occasion I was a lily-white angel compared to how I am when driving around with the children.

  I know of one woman who turned round to slap one of her kids while driving down a motorway in a Range Rover. She veered off course and, in trying to straighten up again, rolled the car into a bridge parapet.

  So what can be done? It’s no good giving them toys because in a car the most harmless Fisher Price drawing kit becomes more deadly than a thermonuclear missile.

  It’s no good giving them nothing either, because they then scream with boredom, and don’t try taping up their mouths with duct tape. This doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.

  Noddy cassettes shut them up for a bit, but how many times can you hear that infernal signature tune before you start to foam at the mouth? Frankly, I’d rather let them scream. I’d rather listen to Radio One even.

  It’s taken a couple of years to work it out but my wife and I now use heroin. Before we go anywhere we slip a little smack into their peanut butter sandwiches and they’re good as gold.

  You might think us a little irresponsible but the goverment doesn’t. Drug smugglers now get let out of prison after just one year, leaving more cells free for people who drive without due care and attention.

  Brummie cuisine is not very good

  This week, I shall herald the arrival of the British Motor Show with an even bigger sigh than usual.

  Now don’t get me wrong. I love the whole glitzy shebang. I love the old cars. I love the new cars. I love the dancing girls. I love the kids running round collecting brochures. It’s a billion-dollar party thrown by a multi-billion-dollar industry.

  And this year, the girls should be even prettier and the metal even more gleamy because 1996 is the hundredth year of car production in Britain.

  But unfortunately, on a global scale, Britain’s annual showcase is as highly regarded as an Albuquerque tractor pull.

  Today, the major shows are Frankfurt, Tokyo and Geneva. That’s where the important cars are launched. That’s where you bump into the mandarins and the moguls. That’s where you’ll find on-stand special effects which make EuroDisney look like a garden shed.

  At this point, I guess you’re sighing too. Yes, yes, yes, you’ll be saying, but that’s the price we must pay for our industrial unrest in the Seventies. If you want a strong motor show, you must have a strong motor industry.

>   To which I say pah, and then pah again. Geneva doesn’t have any motor industry at all, and Detroit – Motown itself – has a motor show which feels like it was put together by Blue Peter.

  No, if you want to know why the British Motor Show is so widely ignored by the world’s motor industry, you need look no further than the Michelin Guide.

  Turn to the section marked ‘Birmingham’ – whoa there, you nearly missed it. And there’s the problem: not a single restaurant you would actually choose to eat in unless your children’s lives were at stake.

  So, what about hotels? Well there’s the Swallow which I can’t afford, the Hyatt which is always full and a wide selection where the rooms are too hot and three photocopier salesmen are having a fight in the bar at 2 a.m.

  So, what if Hank J. Dieselburger Jnr, main board director of General Motors fancies a little late-night action? Again, a great many pubs which can do you a fist in the a face or a head in the basket, but that’s about it.

  Here’s another odd thing. There are no signposts around Birmingham to the ‘City Centre’. There are signs to Kidderminster and Wolverhampton and Stratford. There are signs directing you away from the place, but nothing at all enticing you in.

  Which is OK because if you do end up parking where the centre should be, your car, absolutely definitely, will be stolen.

  And it will be recovered several weeks later in one of the suburbs which sit like a ring of scum round the empty centre – Birmingham is a rugby team’s bath after they’ve let the water out.

  And as a little drop of icing on the cake, the National Exhibition Centre, home to the motor show, isn’t even in Birmingham. It’s merely near it.

  The motor show should be held in London, which fizzes and effervesces with life and action. There are thousands of restaurants and hotels, there are nightclubs to cater for every musical taste, and for Kim Ho Lam, guards that change, big red buses and the Queen.

  In the eyes of Johnny Foreigner, Britain is London, so why then, you may be wondering, does the motor show fare no better when it’s held at Earls Court?

  Easy. Earls Court is a relic from a time when cars were black and people walked quickly.

  Sure, they’ve added an extension but it’s still the wrong shape and getting exhibits in and out is harder than getting directory enquiries to give you Salman Rushdie’s phone number.

  Visitor parking? Er, have you tried Slough?

  Plus, you try working in there. Human beings need oxygen to survive but this is the one gas denied to people in Earls Court. If Spock beamed in to the motor show with one of those Star Trek atmosphere testers, he’d dismiss the place as uninhabitable.

  Last year, my co-presenter Quentin Willson claimed he’d caught consumption, and I saw viruses flying around brandishing knives and forks.

  Scientists are said to be baffled as to where ebola lives between strikes. Well hey guys, have a look in Earls Court. After a day in there your skin dries up and you go home all covered in sores and boils.

  What the British Motor Show desperately needs if it’s to get back on the world stage is a new venue. I hear they’re building a million-square-foot monster in the Docklands and that sounds just fine.

  Groovy reflective architecture, waterfront bistros, a nearby airport for Ford’s fleet of company jets and a £7 cab ride from Soho’s fleshpots. The Koreans will be over in a flash.

  Sadly, this project hasn’t even started yet, which means that the show, even in such an important year for the British motor industry, is at the NEC.

  And as a result, the show-stopper is expected to be the Morris Minor.

  Ford has developed a new car which runs on water, does 2000mph, costs £4 and can generate 4 g in a 90 degree bend, but they’ve chosen to exhibit it instead at the Lubbock show.

  And Lubbock, in case you’re interested, is a small Texan town about 45 miles from the middle of nowhere.

  Last bus to Clarksonville

  When I was at the launch of the Escort a few years ago, I never heard anyone on the podium say that it ‘handles like a dog’.

  History has produced many fools. Alfred may have been great but he couldn’t even cook. Dan Quayle couldn’t spell ‘potato’. Colin Welland thought Chariots of Fire heralded the triumphant return of British movie-making. But if you want to see contemporary idiocy on a scale so vast it beggars belief, I urge you to sit in on a Hammersmith and Fulham Highway Committee meeting. Forrest Gump meets Worzel Gummidge isn’t in it.

  Being Labour-controlled, you expect the town hall to be full of dimwits, but these guys set new standards. Ask them to spell ‘potato’ and it would come out as ‘grpfing’. Let them loose on the roads and all hell breaks loose.

  A few months ago they decided it would be a good idea to put a bus lane up the Fulham Palace Road which, as anyone who has ever been to London will tell you, is the busiest road in the world. You will never see an M-reg car down there because nothing has moved since last August.

  Anyone with even half a brain could stand on the Hammersmith flyover, gawping at the resultant carnage, and announce that the scheme had been a failure. But not the chaps and chapesses on the council. Oh no. They’ve gone bus lane crazy. Temporary bus lanes have become full-time bus lanes. Cycle ways are bus lanes. Buses coming out of the station have right of way and their own set of lights. In Fulham the bus is king and the bus driver is Craig Breedlove.

  Richard Noble should not worry about American competition for his new land speed record attempt. Nor should he concern himself with technical difficulties. His biggest threat is that, every morning, buses in Fulham are reaching speeds of 900mph.

  So why don’t I get on board? Well, a) they don’t run a service from Battersea to Edgbaston, and b) I don’t want to. However, the council is winning. On roads where there are no buses they’ve built speed bumps. Who cares that they wreck cars, or that they add to pollution as people speed up between them, or that they are a problem for ambulance and fire crews?

  Fulham has become so hard for car drivers – and I have to drive through it to get out of town – that I am now seriously considering leaving London for good. Yes, we’ve started taking Country Life and making ‘ooh’ noises at just what you can get for your money in the shire counties. We even had a practice run last weekend, up in Scotland. We drove from the hotel for five miles before we saw another car. It was heaven. I could have done 100mph. If I’d had a bus, I could have done 900.

  For sure, the fields were all green, which is a hateful colour, and there were trees everywhere, rustling and snuffling in the breeze. Then there was the mud, which is what makes the countryside such a foul place. There is no mud in Jermyn Street.

  Country pubs are pretty nasty too, full of people in chunky jumpers drinking beer with beetles in it. And I can’t think of anything worse than having to get on with my neighbours, or having to talk to the postman in the morning. But the simple fact of the matter is this: you can at least move around, which you cannot do here in London, where my postman could be a green monster from the planet Zarg for all I know.

  You can also park. In Fulham residents spend eight hours a day at work, eight hours asleep and four hours looking for somewhere to park. The remaining four hours are spent popping up the Fulham Palace Road for a packet of fags. In the country, people have drives so they can park right outside their front door every night. You can even have a garage without having to sell your children into slavery.

  The only way someone can raise enough money to have a garage in London is by becoming a rent boy. Or a stockbroker. Neither of which appeals terribly. Eventually, of course, everyone will see things the same way and the gradual shift to the south-east will be reversed. Everyone will move back from whence they came and the idiots from Hammersmith and Fulham Council will look down from the top floor of their red-flagged town hall and marvel at what they have done. The buses will have the roads to themselves. But there will be nobody on board.

  Land of the Brave, Home of the Dim

 
; My seat was in its upright position, the table tray was folded away and all my electronic games were off.

  But despite this, the stewardess was coming down the aisle like an Exocet missile. ‘Sir,’ she smiled, ‘you’re going to need to uncross your legs for take off. It’s a federal requirement.’

  This was a new one on me but comparatively speaking it’s a pinprick. Earlier in the day, I heard a security guard in a Las Vegas mall tell a group of weary shoppers to put their shoes back on.

  Our cameraman had been dumbfounded in an Albuquerque supermarket when, after asking for a pack of Marlboro, he’d been told, ‘This is a family-oriented store sir. We’re not allowed to sell you cigarettes.’

  Shall I go on? OK, how about this. A sticker affixed to the side of a huge rubbish skip warned passers-by not to clamber on the refuse collecting device. That bit was odd enough but underneath it said, and I quote, that ‘It is unlawful to tamper with or remove this notice.’

  This means that someone has called a meeting and voted to make it illegal to remove warning notices in the state of Texas. Illegal, you’ll note. Not inadvisable. Il-bloody-legal.

  But the best I’ve saved till last. My waitress in Reno said she could not serve me with a second beer until I had finished the first.

  Naturally, I asked, despairingly why this should be so and was told, simply, ‘It’s a rule.’

  And that’s it. No argument. No truck. You can’t line your beers up. You can’t cross your legs on a plane. You can’t tamper with notices. You can’t buy cigarettes in supermarkets.

  And the decent Christian folk of middle America just seem to accept it. Now, these people may be fat and their hairstyles need to be seen to be believed but they did invent the space shuttle so they’re not stupid.

  And yet they’re quite happy to put their shoes on when asked to do so by someone in a uniform. Why?