And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Read online

  What’s more, Hank does not like to sit on the beach and read a book. He likes to shout and play volleyball. When the Yanks are around, it’s like being on holiday in a primary school playground.

  For years the Americans were in a class of their own, but then the Berlin Wall fell down and, as a result, from the Indian Ocean through the Middle East and the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, Boris and Katya were making all the running.

  In many ways the Russians are like the Americans. They’re either far too fat or far too beautiful. There’s no middle ground. And again, like Uncle Sam, no part of the body is immune from man-made enhancement. The Americans go for surf-white teeth; the Russians for alarming special forces tattoos. And neither seems to see anything wrong with breast enlargement. I saw one Russian woman on the beach in Barbados the other day who had the body of a walnut and a chest that put Antigua in the shade.

  However, where the Russians move into an easy lead is beach attire. For the men it’s the traditional Speedo, while the women seem to get their fashion pointers from internet porn sites. I haven’t yet seen anyone strutting down the beach in stockings and suspenders but it’s only a matter of time.

  Today, though, a new contender has come along and blown the old favourites into the seaweed. The title of Most Stupid People on the Beach has gone in 2004… to Britain.

  We were designed to make Spitfires and Beagles. We’re supposed to be in a shed, in gloves, inventing stuff. We therefore do not look good on a beach. We’re piggy white and if you expose us to the sun, we turn into Battenburg cake.

  We’re designed for bracing walks along the front in Scarborough and wet camping holidays in Scotland. But our newly discovered wealth means we can now go to the tropics. Because it’s new money, we really have no idea what to do with it.

  Women are the worst offenders. On the beach they have a swimsuit, a watch and a pair of sunglasses. Not much, in other words, to show other holidaymakers that they are ‘considerably richer than yow’.

  It doesn’t stop them trying. Obviously they don’t go for the American thong or the Russian nipple tassels, but bikinis are held together with ludicrous gold clasps, sunglasses have absurd hinges which look as if they’ve come from a maharajah’s front door and as for the watches, they’re more like carriage clocks with straps.

  At lunchtime things get worse because now there’s an excuse to cover up. So out comes the T-shirt telling everyone that you’ve been somewhere else and the bejewelled sarong.

  I had to ask my wife where on earth these women buy their clothes, and she knew straight away. Dress shops. Specifically, dress shops in provincial towns that have been bought by husbands to stop their wives sleeping with the binmen.

  So where do the dress shops get their stock from? She was stumped. Not Armani, that’s for sure, or any designer anyone outside Leicester has ever heard of.

  You’ve never seen chintz like it. And whatever happened to the simple flip-flop? Now it cannot be considered footwear unless it has a flower on it and some high heels.

  Then we get to the question of these women’s teenage daughters, who strut around with the word ‘Sex’ on their bikini bottoms. Or ‘Peachy’. This is unnerving. Try to read a book about steamships of the nineteenth century when you’ve got a 15-year-old advertising her backside nine inches from your face. It’s especially unnerving for the Russians in their tight, revealing Speedos.

  Something must be done, so I’ve come up with a plan. When you’re in a shop buying an outfit for your holiday, apply this simple test: have you ever seen Victoria Beckham in anything remotely similar? If the answer is yes, put it back on the peg.

  If this doesn’t work, the government must step in. Again, I have an idea. Airports already have the technology to screen luggage for nail scissors and tweezers, so surely it can’t be that hard to look for, and then confiscate, gold slingback shoes, overly complicated sunglasses and any swimsuit with adornments.

  I don’t mind what provincial British women wear in their own homes. But abroad they’re not just letting themselves and their families down – they’re letting the country down, too, and that has to stop.

  And men: the Burberry baseball cap. No. All right? Just no.

  Sunday 25 January 2004

  Learn to kill a chicken, or you’ll get no supper

  When children from St George’s middle school in Norfolk went into the playground at break-time recently, a shoot at the nearby Sandringham estate had just begun and as a result it was raining dead and wounded pheasants.

  This was a perfect opportunity for the teachers. The children could have been marshalled and shown how the birds should be plucked. ‘Right, now gather round, everyone. You, Johnny – put the pheasant on its back and stand on its outstretched wings. Now pull the legs firmly…’

  It would have been a marvellous illustration of how animals get from their natural habitat into a lovely casserole.

  Sadly, this didn’t happen. Instead, the teachers ran around wringing their hands.

  The children all cried. And letters were sent to the estate managers at Sandringham asking that birds are not shot while the children are outside. This way, the little munchkins will continue to believe that burgers grow on trees and that Coca-Cola comes from natural springs in Wyoming.

  After the incident, a woman in the Daily Mail said that she objected to organised shoots because the birds are bred specifically for slaughter. So how do you think bacon happens? Few people keep pigs for fun, you know.

  I am becoming increasingly depressed at the way we’re trying to insulate ourselves from the reality of the food chain and the wonders of the natural world.

  Last week a 55-foot sperm whale that had beached itself in Taiwan was being transported on a lorry when it exploded in Tainan city. Passers-by, buildings and cars were drenched by 50 tons of blood, goo and blubber. It can’t have been a pretty sight. And doubtless there will now be some kind of legislation banning biologists from taking dead whales through a built-up area.

  Why? When an animal dies, or a human for that matter, the stomach fills with methane gas. Sometimes the pressure becomes so great that the carcass goes off like a bomb.

  I’d like to think this explosive power could in some way be harnessed. I don’t want to get lavatorial, but the cows in New Zealand produce 900,000 tons of methane every year. It’s one of those little facts that I keep in my head for emergencies such as this.

  Anyway, it would be nice to think that we could get milk from their udders, meat from their legs and electricity from their bottoms. But I know that in this day and age people would be reluctant to switch on the lights at home if they thought that the power was coming from Daisy’s farts.

  We are seeing this kind of nonsense on the current series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! The contestants, with their man-made lifestyles – and in some cases their man-made breasts – are absolutely incapable of dealing with the jungle wildlife. Do they really believe that the producers would let them put their heads in a tank full of properly dangerous spiders and snakes? Of course not.

  So if they’re not worried about being eaten or dying in screaming agony, what’s the problem? It’s not just creepy-crawlies that get them running around squealing, either. On Thursday the team were presented with a dead chicken for their supper.

  ‘Eugh. I’m not eating that,’ cried Kerry, predictably. Fine. Leave it out in the sun and let it explode.

  The same thing happened recently on the American show Survivor. The starving contestants were given some chickens but couldn’t bring themselves to kill and pluck them. They’re chickens, for God’s sake. And chickens are basically vegetables. We’re talking here about a bird which is so daft, it can operate normally with no head. Anyway, while they were deliberating about what should be done, the birds were eaten by a couple of monitor lizards.

  I remember watching a report about Malta on some televisual travel show. We’d seen the harbour, heard about the tedious local customs and were mov
ing on to the indigenous food. ‘They eat rabbits!’ cried the presenter with the sort of tone I might have used if I’d found out that they eat each other.

  For a moment I was baffled. They eat them whole and raw? They eat them alive? No. They kill them, skin them and put them in a pot with some onions, just like we do. And yet this woman, bright enough to be given a job in television, was astonished.

  I honestly don’t understand this. Out there in the real world, away from the twenty-first-century supermarket/freezer/microwave chain of catering, there are insects which eat their partners after sex, there are turkey vultures that will vomit on you when threatened, there are cats that kill for fun. And there are leopard seals that play aquatic tennis, using penguins as the ball.

  So in the big scheme of things, shooting a pheasant in the face or attaching a Friesian to the national grid really isn’t all that bad.

  Of course, if you don’t want to be a party to the killing or the exploitation, that’s fine. Be a vegetarian. But if you’re going to eat meat, don’t stand on tiptoe and shriek when you find out how the cow became a McMeal.

  Sunday 1 February 2004

  To win a war, first you need a location scout

  Hollywood’s powerful film and television workers’ union has called for cinemagoers to boycott Cold Mountain because this all-American Civil War story was ‘stolen’ by the British and filmed in Romania.

  Brit director Anthony Minghella has hit back, saying that he shot the movie in Transylvania because these days North Carolina, the actual location of Cold Mountain, is ‘too full of golf courses’.

  This isn’t true. North Carolina is a spectacular place with many smoky mountains, frothy rivers and spooky forests. It was the setting for Deliverance which, like Cold Mountain, needed huge vistas to give a sense of scale. But I don’t recall catching a glimpse of Tiger Woods wandering through shot as Ned Beatty was being asked to squeal like a piggy.

  North Carolina was also used as an epic backdrop for The Last of the Mohicans, and again Daniel Day-Lewis did not have to worry about the French, the Huron and being hit on the head by one of Colin Montgomerie’s tricky little chip shots.

  Nevertheless, Minghella insists that he went to Romania because the Carpathian Mountains more accurately reflect America in the 1860s. It’s hard to argue with that. Certainly the 1,200 extras he hired for the battle scenes were more realistic. None that I could see was to be found fighting with a pistol in one hand and a £3.99 McMeal in the other.

  However, I suspect that the real reason why Minghella went to Romania rather than America is money. It’s reckoned that, because of the cost of living and the minimal fees charged by all those extras, he saved about £16 million. Seems like plain common sense to me, but that hasn’t stopped the Americans crying foul over the location, the Australian lead actress, the British lead actor and Ray Winstone’s amazing Deep South (London) accent.

  This is rich. In fact, it couldn’t be richer if they weighed down the argument with five gallons of double cream and two hundredweight of butter. What about Pearl Harbor in which Ben Affleck managed, single-handedly, to win the Battle of Britain? I know Tony Blair once made a post-9/11 speech thanking the Americans for standing side by side with us during the Blitz, but then he doesn’t know the difference between a .22 air pistol and a Trident nuclear missile.

  In reality, there were some Americans who came over here to help in the early days of the war – 244 of them to be precise. But don’t think they came in a state of righteousness. Most were wannabe fly boys and adventurers who came because they had been turned down by the USAAF for being blind or daft, and they felt that the battered RAF wouldn’t be so picky.

  We are, of course, grateful to them, even though the day after the Japanese attacked Hawaii, just about all of them went home, taking their Spitfires with them and leaving us with the bill for their training. This point, I feel, wasn’t accurately made in the Affleck film, but that didn’t stop me buying the DVD.

  Then you have Shaving Ryan’s Privates in which the American army won the war despite the British making a complete hash of things, and A Bridge Too Far, in which Ryan O’Neal failed to storm though Arnhem thanks to the incompetence of Sean Connery.

  Oh, and let’s not forget U-571, where Matthew Mc-Conaughey bravely stole an Enigma decoding machine, thus clearing the way for Steven Spielberg to take his Band of Brothers through Belgiumshire.

  And why was Steve McQueen wearing his home clothes in The Great Escape? What branch of the services allows you to face the enemy in a pair of chinos, a baseball jacket and a T-shirt?

  Then there’s Vietnam. Not once, according to Hollywood, did the Americans lose a battle. So how they lost the war is a mystery. This, I suspect, is the main reason why Hollywood didn’t make Cold Mountain. Who’s the bad guy when both sides are, er… American?

  It’s a good job Britain still had a proper film industry when Second World War films were all the rage. Otherwise we’d have had Captain Chuck Gibson bombing the Mohne Dam with Brad and Tod in tow. And what kind of a name is Barnes Wallace? We’ll call him Clint Thrust.

  Hollywood’s record with the truth is simply abysmal, which isn’t so bad if you treat the cinema as a place of entertainment. But in America the multiplex is just about the only place where anybody learns any history. After Black Hawk Down the audience left the theatre with a sense that America had been in Somalia fighting the humanitarian fight. Not simply trying to depose a warlord who didn’t like the idea of US oil companies stealing all the oil.

  This, surely, should worry the Hollywood film and television workers far more than where a movie was shot. In Saving Private Ryan the French beaches were Irish. In Full Metal Jacket, Vietnam was the London Docklands, and in boxing Lennox Lewis was British.

  Who cares? I certainly didn’t mind where Cold Mountain had been filmed or how much the extras had been paid. I just thought it was one of the longest films I’d ever seen. Good, though.

  Sunday 8 February 2004

  Fear of fat can seriously damage your health

  Scientists revealed recently that a child born in 2030 will live five years longer than a child born yesterday. So by the middle of this century there will be more people drawing a pension than people going to work.

  This will have a catastrophic effect on the economy because simple arithmetic shows there won’t be enough money in the kitty to keep all these old people in hips and cat food.

  So what on earth are we going to do? Make people save more so they’re self-sufficient in their old age? Get everyone to have more babies? Or ship in thousands of healthy young immigrants who can run around actually doing some work? A tricky decision.

  But then last week along came a report saying we won’t be living so long after all. Thanks to the efforts of McCain with its oven-ready chips and McDonald’s with its McMeals, we’re all going to explode by the time we’re 62.

  Now you’d have expected the government to greet the news with a sigh of relief.

  But not a bit of it. John Reid, the health secretary, said a big debate was needed to challenge the problem of obesity.

  So what’s going on here? One minute we’re told that we’re all going to live to be 126 and that we’ll have to eat each other to survive. Then we’re told that actually it’d be best if we ate nothing at all.

  At first I suspected this might have something to do with cool Britannia. Tony likes his art galleries and funky bridges and frankly he doesn’t want the place cluttered up with a load of fat ankles and prolapsed stomachs.

  Then I thought it was another bit of me-too-ism with Dubya. ‘Hey, George. We’ve got fat people as well.’

  But then a man in a suit went on the television to say the government really ought to tax oven-ready chips, and suddenly it all became clear. They tax us when we move and tax us when we park. They tax us when we earn money and tax us when we spend it. They tax everything we put in our lungs and now they want to tax everything we put in our stomachs.

&nb
sp; Well, I have some observations. First of all, the American idea of obesity is far removed from our own. They have people who have moved beyond the point where fat is a problem or a joke and into the realms where it becomes revolting. We do not.

  I’ve checked, and in Britain I’d be officially obese if I weighed 18 stone. But 18 stone when you’re 6 foot 5 inches isn’t even on nodding terms with what the sceptics call fat: 18 stone would, in fact, make me Martin Johnson.

  Last year, when Top Gear was running, life was so hectic that in one week I remember eating supper on a Thursday night, thinking: ‘God. I haven’t had a bite of anything since Sunday lunchtime.’ There just hadn’t been the time and, as a result, in just a few months I lost more than two stone.

  Now Top Gear’s not on air, I can kick around the house in loose robes all day, looking in the fridge every 20 minutes for cold sausages and filling in the gaps by tucking into Jaffa Cakes and Penguin biscuits. I’m relaxed and happy and I’ve put on a stone.

  So which is the healthier option? Stressy and thin or fat and happy? I’m not a doctor but I know what the answer is.

  Plus, think what this fat phobia will do to children. None of mine is what you’d call a waif and I’m genuinely scared that thanks to the nonsense being peddled by these health-obsessed Nazis, they’re going to start throwing up their lunch in the bike sheds.

  Perhaps then John Reid could admit that Norman Tebbit was right all those years ago and that we really should get on our bikes. Or maybe he might like to think about subsidising food that is good for us, rather than taxing food that isn’t.

  Better still, he might like to address the real cause of misery and stress in this country today. A few years ago I took out an endowment mortgage of £75,000.

  There was no mention in the sales patter that the investment company might lose my money, but that’s what it’s done. Last week I got a letter saying that there will not be enough to pay off the mortgage and that I’d better do something about it if I want to keep my house.