Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read online

Of course, the idiotic hippie who wrote the song probably thinks it’s fair enough, too. But one day, when he’s older and wiser and millions of people are stealing his music, he will start to wonder how the concept of theft became so blurred. Perhaps it’s always been so.

  When I was growing up I would steal rhubarb from the nuns at the local convent. It was their rhubarb. They’d grown it. And they were doubtless looking forward to stewing it and having it for pudding one night with some double cream. I deprived them of that. And yet this was not considered to be burglary. It was called scrumping and, at worst, I could expect a clip round the ear from Constable Plod.

  Later, when I was away at school, the council knew that whenever roadworks were necessary in the local village, it could expect to lose pretty well all the cones and most of the flashing amber beacons. Only when we helped ourselves to the temporary traffic lights did it finally come round and make a fuss.

  We see similar problems in the workplace. Take a computer home and we all accept that this would be theft. But what about a pen? Nobody’s going to mind about that – unless, of course, it’s a Montblanc and you took it from the managing director’s top pocket.

  Hotels are a hotbed of legal fuzziness. I spoke last week to a chap who says his wardrobe at home is stuffed full of dressing gowns he has nicked from various suites around the world. Even though he works in the DVD business, he says that because he has paid many hundreds of pounds for the room he is entitled to take the robe home.

  Really? Because on that basis he’s also entitled to take the television and the sink. Worse. He can spend £300 on the weekly shop at Waitrose and after settling up he’d be within his rights to swipe half a dozen boxes of Black Magic chocolates.

  Shoplifting is an interesting case in point, actually. Obviously, it would be poor form to nick a fridge freezer but a Bounty bar? A gentleman’s magazine? I’m a fervent believer that Woolworths went west simply because nobody in the store’s history ever actually paid for anything. Every branch was always full of schoolkids with fast hearts, wide eyes and bulging pockets.

  And this, I think, is the issue we face with the internet. When a fourteen-year-old downloads the latest collection of noises from JLS it has a known value of 79p. It’s a modern-day penny chew, a stalk of rhubarb from the nunnery. It’s nothing.

  It’s the same story with a film. You’re nicking something that’ll soon be on Sky anyway. And yes, I know, some of you will have read this online, having bypassed the subscription fee. Why not? Rupert Murdoch won’t miss a quid.

  The trouble is that so long as we continue to believe that theft is only theft if the stolen item is bulky, tangible and expensive, the time will come when Bruce Willis will be forced to hang up his vest and every film made is a tuppence ha’penny slimmed-down version of The Blair Witch Project. And the only news you get will be from Twitter. And your book will have been written by someone who actually admits it’s worthless.

  And you’ll have to wade through hours and hours of unimaginable tripe on the music scene before you find a song written by someone who knows what they’re doing. A someone who’ll eventually hang up their guitar and have to get a proper job so that they can actually get paid.

  I don’t think there’s a damn thing that can be done to stop theft on the internet. It’s uncontrollable. But I do think there is something that can be done to change people’s perception of illegal downloads. Stop saying that if you nick a film, you are a thief or a pirate. Pirates are cool. Kids have pirate parties and everyone loves Jack Sparrow. Surely it would be better to say that if you nick a film, you are a mugger.

  3 July 2011

  Dear BBC, why d’ya think Dick Whittington gave Salford a miss?

  And in other news last week, Chris Patten, who is chairman of the BBC Trust, said the corporation is too centred on Notting Hill, too bothered about chilli and lemon grass, too Peter Mandelson and completely out of touch with most licence-fee payers, who simply want pies with a splash of chlamydia. Doubtless this tub-thumping rallying call is all part of the BBC’s strategy to move various shows and departments from London to a small town called Salford. Which I believe is the stupidest media decision since someone on a tabloid newspaper said: ‘Hey, guys. I can listen to Prince William’s voicemails.’

  A lot of the arguments against the BBC’s move have been centred on the expense, but I believe there’s a more important problem than money. In short, Salford is up north.

  I do not speak now as a trendy southern poof who misses Tony Blair and has angst about sending my kids to private school. A television show found that since 1740 every single person in my family tree was born, married and died within twelve miles of one Yorkshire village. I am therefore a pure-blood northerner, a man who makes Michael Parkinson look like Brian Sewell. Cut me in half and you’d find I run on coal and whippets.

  But here’s the thing. While I was being raised in the north, my parents would occasionally risk the highwaymen and take me to London on trips. There are photographs that show a six-year-old me looking at an elephant in London Zoo and pointing at a black man on Bayswater Road. I remember trying to make a soldier in a busby blink and gazing in open-mouthed wonderment at the sheer size of the Palace of Westminster. It all seemed so much more exciting somehow than anything I’d ever encountered oop north.

  And now, thirty years after I escaped from Yorkshire, that still holds true. I still get a tinkle fizz when the motorway ends and I’m plunged into the labyrinth. I still get a kick out of the BT tower and from hailing a black cab. I absolutely love London. And I’m sorry, but if the BBC now said I had to move back up north, I’d resign in a heartbeat. Many others faced with the same problem have done exactly that.

  We are told that too many BBC shows are made by Londoners in London, but that simply is not true. Top Gear, the show on which I work, is based in the capital but, so far as I know, every single one of the production team is originally from somewhere else. The producer is from Glossop, in Derbyshire. One of the researchers is from Loughborough, in Leicestershire. Until recently we even employed a Scot. Richard Hammond is from Birmingham. James May is from one of the moons of Jupiter. We are therefore as ‘London’ as the Chelsea football team … when John Terry is ill.

  London is full of the cream. The bright. The sharp. The ambitious. People who had the gumption at some point to up sticks and leave the two-bit town in which they were raised and do a Dick Whittington.

  You see it as you drive about: cafes rammed full of people reading big newspapers and talking about big things and drinking coffee that people in Salford have never heard of. It’s where the shows are. It’s where films premiere. It’s the nation’s Oxbridge. It’s the best of the best of the best.

  Salford? It’s just Salford. A small suburb with a Starbucks and a canal with ducks on it. It’s a box that has been ticked. A gentle tousle of the politicians’ mop. According to Wikipedia, its only real claim to fame is that a man there was run over by Stephenson’s Rocket. Oh, and someone once found a head in a bog.

  This does not qualify it as a great place to make television shows. Indeed, it’s a very bad place. Every week we have to try to entice a guest to our studios, which are in Guildford. Sometimes it’s tricky. But it’s nowhere near as tricky as it would be if we had to get them up to Manchester. Or as expensive. Every week I’d have to say: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome … Stuart Hall. Again.’ That might become wearing.

  And how could a news programme run from Salford? It’s nowhere near any court that matters and nowhere near a single politician.

  Furthermore, if we ran the show from Salford, we’d be employing people from Salford. People who were born there and thought, ‘Yes. I like this. I see no reason to go anywhere else.’ And in the world of television that could be a genuine handicap. Every year we’d end up making a Christmas special from the Dog and Duck or the nearest Arndale centre. A television show needs to be run by worldly people. Not people who are frightened to death of the next town.<
br />
  And what would be the upside? Who cares where a show is made? Who cares whether the Blue Peter garden is in London or not? Who cares whether Simon Mayo is speaking to you from Portland Place or a glass-fronted tower up north? It makes not a jot of difference. At the end of a show now it often says BBC Wales or BBC Scotland. If at the end of Top Gear we put up an ident saying BBC England there’d be hell to pay internally. But why? Nobody who’d paid for the joke would give a damn.

  The big problem here is that politicians – and they’re behind this shift, be in no doubt about that – have got it into their heads that Britain is a big place. But it isn’t, really. It’s titchy. Moving half the BBC from London to Salford is the same as a parish council moving the table around which it meets from the village hall to the community centre.

  Britain is a small place with a whopping great world-class city in its bottom right-hand corner. It therefore makes sense to me that every head office, every government department, every newspaper and, most of all, every television and radio show is based there.

  10 July 2011

  Okay, I’ll come clean on Rebekah and the Chipping Norton plot

  A recent piece in Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph suggested there is a turning point in the career of all prime ministers after which their place on the scrapheap of history becomes assured.

  This is probably true. Tony Blair was doomed from the moment he said to George W.: ‘Yes. Let’s bomb Iraq.’

  John Major had had it after Black Wednesday, and Gordon Brown became a spent force … well, when the nurse cut his umbilical cord.

  According to Peter Oborne in the Telegraph, David Cameron’s moment came when he chose to become involved with the Chipping Norton set – ‘an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners’ who all have homes near one another in the Cotswolds.

  I see. So this pretty little market town, whose most notable resident to date was the famously power-hungry and amoral Ronnie Barker, is actually a haven for the worst excesses of corruption. Behind the hanging baskets and the tea shoppes, the man in the hardware store is let off his VAT bill if he hands Cameron an under-the-counter tin of gloss paint.

  It’s all rubbish. The fact is that 99 per cent of the population of Chipping Norton are not in the Chipping Norton set, and that 99 per cent of the set don’t actually live in Chipping Norton.

  According to every single report I’ve read, Matthew Freud, the PR man who is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, is a leading light and the host of our most glamorous parties. But he lives in Burford, which to most people in Chipping Norton – myself included – is basically France.

  Then there’s Steve Hilton. Apparently, he’s a Tory adviser, but I’ve never met him. Nor have I met another chap who has been mentioned, Sir Howard Stringer. But that’s probably because he lives in Chinnor, which is as far away as Russia. Last weekend the Mail on Sunday suggested Nat Rothschild is also involved simply on the basis he once used the M40.

  I’ll let you into a secret, though. There is a group of Chipping Norton people who do live close to one another and who do meet up most weekends for wine and cheesy things on sticks. I am one of these people. And so is the Blur bassist Alex James, who often brings his children round to swim in our pool.

  We have other friends, too. There’s Tony and Rita and James and Annabel and Dominic and Caroline. Bored yet? No? Well, that’s because I haven’t got to Emily and Miles, who have the pub.

  Of course, there are some other people in the group who have been in the newspapers recently. There’s Cameron and his wife Sam, but we don’t see much of them these days, partly because he is jolly busy running the country and partly because Sam is one of those non-smokers who suddenly remembers when she’s presented with a smoker like me that what she’d like to do is smoke all my bloody cigarettes. And then send me out to get some more.

  Then there’s Rebekah Brooks and her husband, Charlie. They actually met over supper in our house one night and are the most fantastically kind and generous people we know. I feel desperately sad that Rebekah has had to resign but the cloud does have a silver lining – I can see more of her. She has been a friend for a long time. She is now. And she always will be.

  And now let’s get to the meat. The question that has burnt brightly in the Guardian for the past six months. The infamous Christmas-time party at Rebekah and Charlie’s house. Investigative journalists have established that the Camerons were there but they have not been able to establish what was discussed.

  I’m going to tell you everything. I was there with my wife – and that’s a story already for the Mirror. James Murdoch was there too, with his wife. There were two other couples, neither of whom have even the slightest connection to newspapers, the police force or the government. They were simply neighbours.

  We began with a cocktail made from crushed socialists and after we’d discussed how the trade union movement could be smashed and how News Corp should be allowed to take control of the BBC, Rupert Murdoch joined us on a live video feed from his private volcano, stroking a white cat.

  Later, I remember vividly, a policeman knocked at the door and Rebekah gave him a wad of cash. Cameron tapped the side of his nose knowingly and went back to his main course – a delicious roast fox.

  That’s what you want me to say happened, isn’t it? But what you’re going to get now is the truth. I’ve kept quiet for six months but I feel the time is right to tell all. What Rebekah and Cameron talked about most of all – and I’m a trained journalist so I understand the need to get things right – is sausage rolls.

  We were planning a big walk with all our kids over Christmas and thought it might be a good idea to build a fire in my woods and stop off for a picnic. Rebekah was worried about what we’d eat. Cameron thought sausage rolls would be nice. My wife said she’d get some.

  Aha, you cry. But what about evil James Murdoch? Was he not to be found sticking pins into a waxwork model of Vince Cable?

  No, actually. James was sitting opposite me and we spent most of the night arguing about the environment. He likes it and I don’t. The row only ended when Samantha Cameron suddenly remembered that what she’d like was 400 of my cigarettes.

  In other words, it was much like a million other Christmas-time dinners being held in a million other houses all over the world that day. BSkyB was not mentioned. Nor was phone hacking. And it was the same story the next time we all met. That time, we played tennis. You might call this disgustingly middle class. Going for walks and picnics and tennis. And I won’t argue with you. But louche? Amoral? Corrupt? No.

  Of course, much has gone wrong in recent years and many will spend the next few years wondering what caused the rot to set in. But I can assure you that the root cause of it all will not be found in Chipping Norton.

  17 July 2011

  Okay, tontine tango birdie, let’s baffle ’em with insider talk

  British prisoners of war in some of the more barbaric Japanese camps were not allowed to speak to one another. So, to get round the problem, they developed a new language that featured no Bs, Ms, Ps, Vs or Ws. This meant they could at least whisper, without moving their lips, and thus avoid arousing the suspicion of the guards.

  People in certain villages in North Wales perform a similar trick even today: when an English person walks into their local pub, they switch to a version of English in which the A, E, I, O and U are replaced by the letter L.

  Then, of course, there were the eighteenth-century plantations where slaves, often from different parts of Africa, conversed in English. But not the sort that their English master would have a hope of understanding. The language has lasted, and now I have literally no idea how the courts work in Barbados since the defendant invariably answers all the questions by speaking in a way that is indecipherable to anyone in a suit. ‘Dah you own?’, for example, means ‘Is that yours?’ Not guilty is ‘Ah’n do dah’. Which is literally ‘I didn’t do that’.

  So, there have been good reasons i
n the past for using language as a device for not being understood. But today people seem to mangle language just to make themselves sound more important.

  This began in about 1840 with the birth of Cockney rhyming slang and is practised extensively in the world of light aircraft. Instead of speaking to the tower in a manner the passengers can understand, the pilot chooses to say things that make the task look much more difficult than is actually the case. ‘Whisky Oscar Tango Squawking on niner niner two decimal seven. Requesting basic service ILS Echo to outer beacon.’

  We see a similar problem with the practitioners of business who now talk about ‘quantum’ instead of money and ‘P and L’ instead of money and ‘piece’ instead of money.

  It’s like footballers coming up with a million new words for ‘goal’.

  Lawyers are also annoying, never using one word when several thousand will do. And then several thousand more, until the reader has completely lost the point and sometimes the will to live.

  You think you have just about got to the end of a sentence but then there’s a colon and you know that there’s at least a fortnight to go before you get to the next verb. I signed a legal document a while ago, not because I agreed with what it said: I was bored.

  So, some people talk strangely to hide what they’re saying from eavesdroppers. And some because they want to make a simple job look more difficult. So what excuse, I wonder, do golfists have?

  Last week there was a golf tournament in Kent that must have been jolly important because it was the only thing on the news apart from the people who knew the person who once met someone at a party who may or may not have illegally listened to Sienna Miller making a hair appointment.

  I’m not kidding. Every half hour on every radio station, we had the phone hacking stuff, and then instead of the collapse of the euro, or the famine in East Africa, all we had was a breathless report about the leaderboard at Sandwich. And I’m sorry, but I couldn’t understand what they were on about. A man, whom I’d never heard of, was four under par behind another man I’d never heard of who needed an eagle and a bogey to win. It was as though the reporter were reading a Scrabble board.