Born to Be Riled Page 15

  Which is why, when I hear the police are cracking down on people who drive around while talking into mobile phones, I laugh. In the big scheme of things, this is not really so bad.

  Lies, damn lies and statistics

  I’ve just spent two delightful weeks in Barbados where the sun shone, the diving was fine and the jet skis were fast.

  But I had time for none of this nonsense because I had taken by far and away the best read of the year so far.

  While everyone else on the beach was tucking into the new Patricia Cornwell, hoping that Lucy will get into a juicy lesbian affair some day soon, I was ensconced in the annual Lex Report on Motoring.

  Written after exhaustive research with 1209 drivers including 160 truckers, it is intended to show how our attitudes change from year to year.

  I’ll start you off with a simple, and obvious, one. Eighty-one per cent of all those questioned said the newly introduced written part of the driving test is a good idea. Of course it is: ‘those questioned’ don’t have to take it.

  Then there’s the old chestnut. Thirty-three per cent of motorists, says the report, think that driving standards in Britain are bad or very bad and 36 per cent think they’re only average.

  However, a whopping 74 per cent said they were good or very good. Only one per cent admitted to being hopeless behind the wheel.

  That doesn’t add up, until you consider another statistic that floated across my desk a couple of years ago. It said that something like 80 per cent of the British population had never been on an aeroplane, which means that the vast majority of those questioned are comparing our driving standards to… what?

  Had they been to India, or Greece, or New York, or Italy, or pretty well any damn place, they’d know that the standard of driving in Britain is outstanding and that about 90 per cent of our drivers rank as either superb or unbelievably gifted.

  Speed rears its ugly head in the report too, with some people saying they never break the limits. Presumably, they form part of the 11 per cent who were not aware of the existence of speed cameras.

  My favourite bit on the question of speed, though, is that 66 per cent of motorists did not feel speed bumps would slow them down. Well now, look here chaps; would you please write and let me know what sort of cars you have, because if they can get over those ludicrous humps without shaking the dashboard from its mountings, I want one too.

  Here’s another one. Sixty-four per cent of motorists wouldn’t slow down if heavier penalties were imposed, even if there were a three-month ban for exceeding the urban limit by 10mph or more.

  I see. So if the penalty for speeding were the loss of your eyes, the burning of your house and the rape and pillage of your children, you’d still sail through villages at 50 would you?

  People are telling porkies here, a point that becomes obvious when you get to the section on rubbernecking. Forty-three per cent of drivers admitted to slowing down to look at an accident with 37 per cent saying they look without slowing down. Two per cent say they’ll go so far as to change lanes for a better view. Which leaves 16 per cent who can sail past what looks like the conclusion of a Sam Peckinpah film without gawping a bit. Sorry guys. Not possible.

  If you do believe in statistics the section on drugs and drinking makes for alarming reading, because it says two million people have been in a car when the driver was over the alcohol limit, half a million have been driven by someone on cannabis, 250,000 when the driver had taken speed and 100,000 where ecstasy, cocaine or heroin was involved.

  Well now, that is extraordinary. All those people charging around either asleep, very wide awake indeed, or being chased by giraffes on surfboards, and so few accidents. We’re even better drivers than I thought.

  I do wonder, however, whether if I did a survey into market research I’d find that a majority of respondents were drunk or stoned out of their minds at the time.

  Or reading a map while on the phone. Here’s a good one – only 13 per cent of people admit to driving while talking on a hand-held phone. They’re lying because, as we all know, mobile phones don’t work.

  Back to the story. Only 9 per cent of drivers said they’d been in an accident in the last year, but there are some gender and sex differences here. The figure shoots up to 13 per cent when you’re dealing with 17 to 34-year-olds and 14 per cent when company car drivers were quizzed.

  Here’s the best bit though. Only 35 per cent of women drivers have ever had a crash compared to 53 per cent of men.

  And yet, when asked to sit the new written driving test, only one in five women passed compared to one in four men. It seems then that women don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re doing it very well.

  It’s easy to get depressed by some of the findings but we should all remember that market research said, categorically, that Labour would win the last election.

  This is why I always treat any form of survey as a work of fiction. On that basis, the Lex effort easily beats Tom Clancy’s new book, Executive Orders.

  To save you the bother of reading it, the two hillbillies don’t get their bomb to Washington and the ebola virus goes away all on its own. Oh, and the Arab baddie winds up dead.

  Radio Ga Ga

  So, you’re settled in front of Des O’Connor and whoops, half-way through, along comes a car commercial which costs about twenty times more than the programme.

  But when you’ve finished watching that Audi A3 charging around in Iceland, or the Ka in la-la land, or the Volvo in Palm Springs, what have you learnt?

  Well you might have an idea what it looks like, though this is by no means certain, but that is it. You don’t know how much it costs, whether it has a warranty, whether it is safe or whether it is fast.

  In the past this hasn’t mattered. The agency bought space on television to let us know the car exists, hoping that we’d all be captivated enough to read more detail in newspaper and magazine advertisements.

  But they don’t do this any more. My favourite press advertisement at the moment is for Peugeot’s wonderful 106GTi which is seen about 500 feet in the sky, and still heading upwards, having driven over a humpbacked bridge.

  There is a hint here that the car is exciting and fast, but you need Jodrell Bank to read the small print where a price is quoted.

  Same goes for the splendid press advertisement for the Mercedes SLK. The car is parked at the side of the road, alongside a series of skid marks, the idea being that everyone is slowing down for a better look. Great, but are there any seats in the back? And how long’s the waiting list?

  We are not told; well not in print anyway. No, that is now the job of local radio, in which the entire technical specification of the car, the price and the discount offers are crammed into 26 seconds of garbled nonsense. That leaves four seconds for the jokey pay-off.

  At the moment they’re running one round these parts for the Fiat Ducato van, in which a Scouser is trying to buy the said vehicle from a homosexual gentlemen’s outfitter. The customer asks whether he can fit his drainpipes inside, and we think he’s talking about trousers. But he isn’t. It’s hysterical; nearly as funny, in fact, as having a vasectomy.

  Then there’s an advertisement for a Saab, in which a salesman is telling his colleague all about his new 900 and how it’s just set a world endurance record. But all the way through, the colleague thinks he’s talking about ‘Melanie’, the office crumpet.

  Brian Rix couldn’t stretch a joke further, but you haven’t heard the punch line yet.

  Ready? Saab-man says he’s going to show his new car to the aforementioned Melanie, and his colleague is heard to remark, in an amusing, sceptical voice, ‘Must you now?’ I nearly crashed I was laughing so much.

  These days, television and press advertisements treat the viewer and reader with respect. We are shown subtle images and are expected to work them out for ourselves.

  But the banal is acceptable and even welcome in a medium that plays Phil Collins all day long, a medium that whooped for j
oy when it heard about the balding one’s latest marriage rift. It means more soppy songs, and more excuses to never play anything else.

  And then there are the otherworldly disc jockeys. Why is the breakfast presenter always having a suggested affair with the bimbo in the traffic helicopter, that’s what I want to know?

  And why can’t they ever say something a teeny bit controversial? Actually, to be fair, they do from time to time. But after Phil has sung about leaving a wife, there’s always a little apology.

  Just yesterday, a lad phoned in from his bedroom to request ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ and the presenter berated him for running up his parents’ phone bill. But, after the tune, she was back to say that calls to her radio station were of course free, so everyone was happy and no one’s armpits smell.

  Local radio presentation is so bland I bet they never get any letters at all. I bet that if you asked a postman where the town’s FM station was, he’d have no idea.

  He certainly won’t be listening any more because he’ll have been annoyed by the car advertisements and completely bamboozled by those from local garages.

  It’s bad enough when a major car firm, using the very best Soho agency brains, turns to local radio, but when the advertisement is paid for by the managing director of Rotters Autos, who thinks he can do the job just as well, the results are catastrophic. And they’re even worse if he tries to write a jingle where ‘autos’ and ‘customer’ are somehow made to rhyme.

  He knows that in the real world people are interested in price, and he feels it’s entirely appropriate to tell everyone about all the deals he can offer. There are quite a few, but if he speaks quickly he can get them all in.

  Then he learns that by law there have to be disclaimers after any advertisement where money is mentioned, and that another voice must explain that offers are subject to status, that written details are available on request and that the typical APR is 14.3 per cent.

  He therefore has to speak so fast that he’d even make a Noddy story sound like mumbo jumbo.

  I’ve been listening to local radio for a couple of years now, but the advertisements in general, and the car advertisements in particular, have forced me back to the BBC. I even thought about giving Chris Evans a try, but he seems to be on holiday.

  Anyone know when he’ll be back?

  Spooked by a Polish spectre

  I don’t doubt that you go a bit red round the gills every morning when you find that Postman Pat has filled your hall with junk mail. You don’t want to win a tumble dryer, you don’t need an Amex card and you’d rather buy Razzle than Reader’s Digest. But consider for a moment what life would be like if you actually had to read everything that came through your door. Imagine if you were forced to open bank statements and bills, rather than simply feed them to the waste disposal unit.

  Well, that’s what happens at Telly Towers every morning. I have to scoop up the debris that Pat has fed to my doormat, and read it. I’m talking about press releases from the world’s car companies – tomes that redefine the concept of dull. They are more boring than a Jane Austen novel, more shiversomely tedious than a parish council meeting. Just last week, Nissan changed the radiator grille or something on the Micra and poor Pat gave himself a hernia lugging the press pack up my drive. Seventeen pages in, I’d already worked out that the whole thing could have been done in one sentence: ‘We’ve changed the Micra a bit.’ But today, in amongst the encyclopaedic volume on the Corsa’s new engine and a gushing diatribe about the new Hyundai Lantra Estate, was something that stopped me dead. FSO is not dead. The Polish car company has managed to survive the transition from Communism to Lech and back to Communism again. And more than that, the cars are still being imported to Britain. Oh no. I still maintain that the Nissan Sunny was the worst car of all time. It had no redeeming features; nothing that you couldn’t find better and cheaper elsewhere. But the worst car in the world to drive was the FSO Polonez.

  It did have a redeeming feature – it was cheap. But it had to be, because it was a car that wasn’t really a car at all. It was a box under which the careless car-buyer would discover a 1940s tractor. The styling was enough to put most people off, but it only had to compete with the Wartburg and the Trabant, neither of which will ever feature in a book called ‘Beautiful Cars’ by Jeremy Clarkson.

  You cannot begin to imagine how bad the ride was on this truly awful car, and just as you were marvelling at its ability to bounce so high off the ground, you’d find its steering didn’t really work because the front wheels had been concreted on. If Karl Benz had invented its engine, he’d have given up on the whole concept of internal combustion. The noise frightened birds and the fuel consumption read like the spec sheet from an Intercity 125.

  The last time I actually went in a Polonez was last year. It was a minicab and it broke down in Heathrow’s tunnel. Then I had an argument with the fat driver when I point-blank refused to pay. But since that long, fume-filled walk to the terminal, I’ve not heard anything about this wart on the bottom of motoring. Until now. It seems FSO has a new car called the Caro which has met with some success in Britain. Last year 480 were sold here, but I can only assume that the owners limit forays onto the road to the hours of darkness. I’ve certainly never seen one.

  I’m sure that it’s a pretty hateful machine. But there’s no denying one thing. At £4527, it is cheap. Also, it can be ordered with a 1.9-litre Citroen diesel engine and it will eventually get ZF power steering and Lucas brake systems. It may then become a half-decent car, but I’m also sure its price will rise. They’ll end up with a half-decent car at an indecent price. Except they won’t, because this press release says that Daewoo has taken a 10 per cent stake in FSO, and that in the next five or six years the Korean company’s share will rise to 70 per cent.

  The idea is simple. Daewoo will ship bits of old Astras and Cavaliers from Korea to Poland where they will be nailed together to form a vague, but inexpensive, interpretation of what motoring should be all about in the next millennium.

  We know all about that already, of course, because Vauxhall has shown us. No more fast cars. Birds in the trees and the good people of the world transported to and from work in Vectras. God Help Us.

  Boxster on the ropes

  I should make it plain, right at the outset, that I was born in Yorkshire, but don’t worry. Because I can’t play cricket, I don’t suffer from that most hideous of diseases – Professional Yorkshireman Syndrome.

  Even so, I do love the place. I think it’s hard to find scenery anywhere in the world quite so inviting as the Dales, the people are chummy and Leeds is just plain outstanding.

  The best bit of the county is to be found by going to Hull and turning left; up through Driffield and on towards Scarborough and Filey.

  If you removed all the people and their yellow houses from the Cotswolds, you’d be getting near the mark. It is chocolate-box pretty and you don’t even have to fight with a coachload of American tourists for the hazel nut crunch.

  Now this, of course, means you can unleash the beast under your bonnet on some of the smoothest, best maintained and almost completely empty roads. East Yorkshire is petrolhead heaven.

  And I was in a car to suit the mood – Porsche’s new two-seater, mid-engined convertible – the Boxster.

  It was fabulous. There is a delicacy to the steering that you simply don’t find in lesser machinery, which meant that on the moorland roads north of Pickering the car was a dream.

  And the roadholding is absolutely sublime. Even if I stabbed the throttle midway through a corner, the inside wheel just spun the unnecessary power away with the careless disdain of an Australian bushman whooshing away a fly.

  As far as ride comfort is concerned, it’s just unbelievable. The Boxster’s suspension is like the perfect secretary, dealing with the dross and making sure that only the really important information reaches its boss.

  You can have big fun in this car, revelling in the crisp bark of that 2.5 litre, six-
cylinder engine as it rasps past 5000rpm, snicking the gear lever from fourth to fifth, and then down to third for the next bend.

  The brakes wash away the excess speed, the big tyres grip, the sports seat holds you firmly in place and then, as you marvel at the complete absence of scuttle shake, it’s time to nail the throttle again. And don’t worry: even if you drive like the illegitimate son of a madman, you’ll still get 25mpg.

  You’ll even get home with enough energy left to press a little button and put the roof up.

  A clean bill of health then for Porsche’s mainstay into the next century? All you people on the year-long waiting list can sit back, safe in the knowledge that the car you’ve chosen is spot-on? Er no, not really.

  You see, it’s all very well thumping round East Yorkshire in a Boxster but don’t forget, you have to get there. And that’s not so much fun.

  First of all, you’ve got to buy it, which will set you back £37,000 if you specify big wheels and leather seats. This is a lot of money, especially when you remember that an MGF VVC is less than £20,000.

  And no, I’m not being silly. The MG is also a mid-engined, two-seater convertible which, in the real world… wait for it… is actually faster than the Porsche.

  The Boxster’s biggest problem is that unless you drive like your hair’s on fire, it’s JCB slow. In-gear acceleration times show an ordinary Rover 620i is faster.

  And to make matters worse, the Boxster has an irritating habit on the motorway of gradually slowing down. Drive any expensive car down the M1 and you’ll find it gets faster and faster. At turn off 32, you’re doing 70. By turn off 28, you’re up to 75. When you go past Leicester, you’re up to 80. And by Watford, your sonic boom is breaking people’s windows. Next stop, Hendon magistrates court. I know. I’ve been.