The World According to Clarkson Read online

  What a complete waste of time. If they begin by saying ‘er’, then they don’t know and you are going to waste hours while they wonder whether you go left at Sketchley’s or right. So here’s a tip. If someone hesitates when you ask the way, or even if a look of bewilderment befalls their countenance for the briefest moment, drive off.

  Of course, some launch immediately into a bunch of militaristic directions, involving clear, concise hand signals and bushy-topped trees at nine o’clock.

  But that’s of no help either because you won’t be listening. It is a known medical fact, and it has been so since the dawn of time, that a man will hear the first word and then shut down.

  When the Romans invaded England, they went home to celebrate and didn’t come back for 80 years. Why? Because they couldn’t find it and, if they did ask for directions in France, they didn’t listen.

  In the late thirteenth century, Edward Longshanks used women to steer his armies around the realm because they could listen to, and absorb, directions, whereas men couldn’t. Actually, I just made that up. But there must be a vestige of truth in it because if he had relied for guidance on his knights, he’d have ended up in Falmouth rather than Falkirk.

  Certainly, I didn’t listen last week when, having been unable to find the shop I wanted, I found myself drawn inexorably by the man magnet that is Tottenham Court Road into one of those temples to the pagan world of meaningless beeps and unusual hieroglyphics: Computers ‘R’ Us.

  I didn’t listen to the voices in my head telling me to get out and nor did I listen when the man started to explain all about a new type of Sony laptop that has too many vowels in its name to be pronounceable. It begins with a V and then you have to make the sort of noise a cat would emit if you fed it through a mangle.

  Now don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a column about how I don’t understand computers, and how I wish I were back on the Rotherham Advertiser feeding bits of bog roll into a sit-up-and-beg Remington.

  I like computers very much and I know enough about them to send emails, write stories and find some ladyboys in Thailand. Unfortunately, however, I do not know as much about them as the people who work or hang around in computer shops, which means my mind does that man thing and stops working.

  Like, for instance, if you were offered the choice of Windows 2000 or Windows 98, you’d go for the bigger number. But the man in the shop advised me to spend less on the 98 and, when asked why, proceeded for all I know to talk about his Newfoundland terrier. I did not hear a single thing he said.

  The one thing I wanted was an ability to send emails via a cellular phone, so I asked: ‘Can I plug this into my mobile?’ And he replied… but frankly, he may as well have been talking about the problems of making decent onion gravy while marooned in a Nepalese hill fort.

  So I ended up buying it… and now I think it’s broken. Every time I log off from the internet the machine shuts down, casting whatever I’ve written that day into a silicon no man’s land.

  Obviously, I could take the computer back to the shop, but then they’ll find that I’ve been looking at ladyboys and this will be embarrassing. Besides, I can’t remember where the shop was, and I’m damned if I’m going to ask.

  I could phone a friend, but it would be a waste of a call because, as a man, I’m just an ego covered in skin and, if he knows how to solve my problem, that’s going to cause some light bruising. So I won’t listen. And if he doesn’t know, then he’s of no help anyway.

  At this point, a woman would reach for the instruction book, but this is the single biggest difference between the sexes. Forget the need to be cuddled after sex. And forget spatial awareness and fuzzy logic, because the most butch woman in the world, even Mrs Thatcher, would lie on her stomach for hours with the manual for a new video recorder, ensuring that when she gets back from dinner that night she will have taped the right channel at the right time.

  How dull is that. Me? I stab away at various buttons safe in the knowledge that I could be taping something on the other side, next Tuesday, which might be much better.

  This certainly helps when playing board games. Because I’ve never read the rules for Monopoly, I travel around the board in whichever direction seems to be most appropriate, and if anyone says I have to go clockwise, I respond with a strange faraway look.

  It always works. I always win.

  Sunday 21 January 2001

  We Let Them Get Away with Murder on Radio

  It’s coming to something when the news is making the news, but that is exactly what happened at the beginning of last week when the papers were full of ITN’s victory over the BBC in the Battle of the Ten ’clock Bongs.

  The BBC explained afterwards that it had twice as many stories, twice as many live reports and twice as much foreign coverage, but it was stymied by ITV, which ran Millionaire two minutes late and went straight to its bulletin without a commercial break.

  It even had the gallant knight Sir Trevor McDonald crop up in the middle of Chris Tarrant to say there would be some news soon and not to go away.

  This ratings war is getting dirty and deeply annoying. In the past, when programmes largely began on the hour or at half past, you could watch a show on ITV and then, when it had finished, find something else that was just starting on another channel.

  But look at the schedules now. Things start at five past and finish at twelve minutes to, so by the time you flick over to the Beeb’s new drama series you’ve missed the explosion and the subsequent car chase and have no idea what’s going on.

  I understand why it has to happen, of course. When I worked on Top Gear it didn’t matter whether we were featuring a new Ferrari that ran on water or standing around in a field pretending to be sheep, we always got the same viewing figures. However, if the programme began late, after all the other channels had started their 8.30 p.m. shows, we would drop 1 million or so.

  Interestingly, however, this type of ‘schedule shuffling’ does not seem to be happening in the world of radio.

  My wife, for instance, listens only to Radio 4. It could run a two-hour shipping forecast and still she would not retune to another station. I know for a fact that, like the rest of the country, she has no clue what Melvyn Bragg is talking about on In Our Time, but every Thursday morning the whole house echoes to the unfathomable pontifications of his stupefyingly dull guests.

  At 10.25 a.m. every day I point out that over on Radio 2 Ken Bruce has a good quiz about pop music – a subject she enjoys very much – but for some extraordinary reason she prefers to listen to the state of the sea at Dogger Bank.

  I am no better. Left to my own devices I start the day with Terry Wogan, who last week got it into his head that all Chinese people smell of Brussels sprouts. Then it’s Ken’s pop quiz followed by Jimmy Old.

  Now at this point I should turn over, because Old bombards his listeners with the big-band sound and talks to his guests about the price of fish. Then people call up and read out the editorial from the Daily Telegraph and it’s just not me. But no. I sit there saying that it’s only for two hours and then it’ll be time for Steve Wright.

  Why do I do this? On television I only need to catch the tiniest glimpse of a spangly jacket, the suggestion of a Birmingham accent or the first bar of the EastEnders theme tune, and in one fluid movement I reach for the remote and switch over. Yet, displaying the sort of brand loyalty that would cause Marks & Spencer to pickle me in brine, I will drive for hour after hour while Old drones on about how Mrs Nazi of Esher thinks asylum seekers should all be shot.

  There is a choice. Obviously Radio 1 is out, unless you enjoy being serenaded by people banging bits of furniture together, and Radio 3 transmits nothing but the sound of small animals being tortured. What about local radio? In London there is Magic FM which broadcasts the Carpenters all day long. Of course, the Carpenters are fine – especially when you have a headache – but between the tunes men come on and speak.

  I should have thought that being a disc jockey
wasn’t so bad. I mean, it could be worse. But obviously I’m wrong, because nowhere in the whole of humanity will you find a bunch of people quite so unhappy as the CD spinners on ‘Misery’ FM.

  By 8 a.m. on a Monday they are already counting down the hours to Friday night as though all of us treat the working week as something that has to be endured. In their world, we all work for Cruella De Vil. And it’s always raining.

  Even if it’s a bright sunny day and we’ve just heard on the news that John Prescott has burst, they would still find something to moan about and then it’s on to Yesterday Once More for the fourteenth time since 6 a.m.

  There is no point in going elsewhere because quite the reverse applies. Misery FM is largely run by people on their way down the career ladder, but elsewhere in local radio most of the DJs believe themselves to be on the way up – so they sound as if they’re talking to you while someone is pushing Harpic up their nostrils with an electric toothbrush.

  ‘Who knows?’ they must be thinking. ‘A television producer might be listening, so if I’m really zany and wacky all the time I’ll end up on the box.’

  Too right, matey, but on television they’ll see you coming and switch channels.

  On the radio, for some extraordinary reason, they won’t.

  Sunday 28 January 2001

  Willkommen and Achtung, This is Austrian Hospitality

  A small tip. The border between Switzerland and Austria may be marked with nothing more than a small speed hump, and the customs hut may appear to be deserted, but whatever you do, stop. If you don’t, your rear-view mirror will fill with armed men in uniform and the stillness of the night will be shattered with searchlights and klaxons.

  I’m able to pass on this handy hint because last week, while driving in convoy with my camera crew from St Moritz to Innsbruck, a man suddenly leapt out of his darkened hut and shouted: ‘Achtung.’

  I have no idea what ‘achtung’ means, except that it usually precedes a bout of gunfire followed by many years of digging tunnels. I therefore pulled over and stopped, unlike the crew, who didn’t.

  The man, white with rage and venom and fury, demanded my passport and refused to give it back until I had furnished him with details of the people in the other car which had dared to sail past his guard tower.

  I’d often wondered how I’d get on in this sort of situation. Would I allow myself to be tortured to save my colleagues? How strong is my will, my playground-learnt bond? How long would I hold out?

  About three seconds, I’m ashamed to say. Even though I have two spare passports, I blabbed like a baby, handing over the crew’s names, addresses and mobile phone number.

  So they came back, and the driver was manhandled from the car and frogmarched up to the stop sign he’d ignored. His passport was confiscated and then it was noticed that all his camera equipment had not been checked out of Switzerland. We were in trouble.

  So we raised our hands, and do you know what? The guard didn’t even bat an eyelid. The sight of four English people standing at a border post in the middle of Europe, in the year 2001, with their arms in the air didn’t strike him as even remotely odd.

  We have become used to a gradual erosion of interference with international travel. You only know when you’ve gone from France into Belgium, for instance, because the road suddenly goes all bumpy. French customs are normally on strike and their opposite numbers in Belgium are usually hidden behind a mountain of chips with a mayonnaise topping.

  But in Austria things are very different. Here you will not find a fatty working out his pension. Our man on the road from St Moritzto Innsbruck was a lean, frontline storm trooper in full camouflage fatigues and he seemed to draw no distinction between the Englander and the Turk or Slav. Nobody, it seems, is welcome in the Austro-Hungarian empire.

  The camera crew, who were very disappointed at the way I’d grassed them up and kept referring to me as ‘Von Strimmer’ or simply ‘The Invertebrate’, were ordered back to Switzerland. And me? For selling them out, I was allowed to proceed to Innsbruck.

  Which does invite a question. How did the guard know where I was going? We had never mentioned our destination and yet he knew. It gets stranger, because minutes later I was pulled over for speeding and even though I had a Zurich-registered car, the policeman addressed me straight away in English.

  This puzzled me as I drove on and into the longest tunnel in the world. That was puzzling, too, as it wasn’t marked on the map. What’s happening on the surface that they don’t want us to see?

  Finally I arrived at the hotel into which I’d been booked, but a mysterious woman in a full-length evening gown explained menacingly that she had let my room to someone else. And that all the other hotels in Innsbruck were fully booked.

  Paranoia set in and took on a chilling air when I learnt that one of the army bobsleigh people I was due to meet the following day had been kicked to death outside a nightclub.

  I ended up miles away at a hotel run by a man we shall call ‘The Downloader’. ‘So, you are an Englisher,’ he said, when I checked in. ‘There are many good people in England,’ he added, with the sort of smile that made me think he might be talking about Harold Shipman.

  Something is going on in Austria. They’ve told the world that the Freedom Party leader has stepped down, but how do we know he’s gone and won’t be back? Let’s not forget these people are past masters at subterfuge.

  I mean, they managed to convince the entire planet that Adolf Hitler was a German. Most people here do think Haider will be back. As chancellor. And that’s a worry.

  I’m writing this now in my room, hoping to send it via email to the Sunday Times but each time I try to log on, messages come back to say it’s impossible. Maybe that’s because The Downloader is up in his attic, looking at unsavoury images of bondage and knives, or maybe it’s because I’m being watched. Journalists are.

  Either way, I’m nervous about smuggling text like this past customs tomorrow when I’m due to fly home. I shall try to rig up some kind of device using my mobile phone, hoping these words reach you. If they do, yet I mysteriously disappear, for God’s sake send help. I’m at the…

  Sunday 11 February 2001

  Gee Whiz Guys, But the White House is Small

  If you are the sort of person who gets off on Greek marbles and broken medieval cereal bowls, then there’s not much point in visiting an American museum. Think: while Europe was hosting the crusades, the Americans were hunting bison.

  However, I have always wanted to see the Bell X-1, the first plane to travel faster than the speed of sound, so last weekend I set out for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. The trip was not a complete success because the X-1 was swathed in bubble wrap and housed in a part of the museum that was closed for renovation. But never mind, I found something else.

  There are those who think America is as richly diverse as Europe – they’re hopelessly wrong, and Washington, DC is the worst of it. I’d never realised that it is n’t actually in a state. The founding fathers felt that, if it were, the others would feel left out – and that’s very noble. Except it means that residents of the capital city of the free world have no vote.

  Another feature it shares with Havana and Beijing is the immense sense of civic pomposity. The downtown area is full of vast, faceless buildings set in enormous open spaces and guarded by impossibly blond secret-service agents in massive Chevy Suburbans. The pavements are marble and the policemen gleam.

  Just three blocks south of Capitol Hill you find yourself in an area where 70 per cent of the population are gunmen and the other 30 per cent have been shot. Then to the west you have the dotcom zone, which is full of idiotic companies with stupid names and unintelligible mission statements. Half.formed.thought.corp: Bringing the World Closer Together.

  You look at those huge mirrored office blocks and you think: ‘What are you all doing in there?’ The politicians will never have the answer as they all live in an area called Georgetown, which is as
antiseptic and isolated from the real world as the sub-basement at a centre for research into tropical diseases.

  Here, the only cannon is Pachelbel’s. It was nice to find it playing in the lobby of my hotel. It made me feel safe and cosseted, but it was on in the lift and in the bookstore next door, and in the art gallery.

  It was even playing in the ‘authentic’ Vietnamese restaurant where customers can gorge themselves on caramelised pork in a white wine jus. Now look, I’ve been to Saigon and in one notable restaurant I was offered ‘carp soaked in fat’ and ‘chicken torn into pieces’. A difficult choice, so I went for the ‘rather burnt rice land slug’. I have no idea what it was, but it sure as hell wasn’t caramelised or served in a wine sauce.

  Still, what do the Americans know about Vietnam? Well, more than they know about France, that’s for sure. The next morning I ordered an ‘authentic French-style country breakfast’ which consisted of eggs sunny-side up, sausage links, bacon, hash browns and – here it comes – a croissant. Oh, that’s all right then.

  What’s not all right are the people who were eating there. Every single one of them was a politician, or a politician’s lapdog, or a political commentator or a political lobbyist.

  Because all these people with a common interest live together in a little cocoon, they labour under the misapprehension that their work is in some way important. They begin to believe that there are only two types of people: not black or white, not rich or poor, not American or better; just Democrat or Republican.

  So what, you may be wondering, is wrong with that? Surely it’s a good idea to put all the politicians together in one place, it saves the rest of us from having to look at them.

  I’m not so sure. When Peter Mandelson couldn’t remember whether he’d made a phone call or not he had to resign and it was treated as the most important event in world history. On the television news a man with widescreen ears explained that Tony Blair might actually delay the election, as though everyone, in every pub in the land, was talking of nothing else.