Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read online

  Girls, gongs and JR – if only I’d worn a jockstrap

  All awards ceremonies are the same. You sit on an uncomfortable chair for seven hours, watching an endless succession of orange people you don’t recognize getting gongs for their contribution to God knows what, and then, when it’s your turn, you either have to look pleased that someone else has beaten you, or you have to bound on stage and, through gritted teeth, say that you couldn’t have won by yourself. When, in your heart of hearts, you know you could. And indeed have.

  The hugely prestigious Rose d’Or festival in Switzerland is different, though. Very different. As different as the petal of a cornflower is from the crankshaft of an American monster truck.

  I was there because Top Gear had been picked for a gong. And the first indication that the evening might be a bit unusual came when I opened the obligatory goody bag. At this year’s Oscars the nominees were given tickets to go on safari in Botswana, a watch, beauty products and a testicular check-up. In Switzerland I was given a tube of toothpaste.

  I was then ferried in a smallish Vauxhall to the red carpet, which was a teeming mass of guests, none of whom seemed to have understood the dress code. Either that or in Switzerland ‘black tie’ means ‘anything you fancy, up to and including army boots and a jockstrap’.

  Feeling a trifle overdressed, I was ushered by an enthusiastic PR type with a clipboard to a waiting camera crew. The interviewer, a deliciously pretty Swiss girl, plainly had not the first clue who I was. But I’d been presented to her so she had to say something. And what she said was: ‘Eeeeerm?’

  Since there was no suitable answer to that, I was guided by my elbow to the make-up room, where an enormous German woman pointed to a small pimple on my nose and said to everyone within 500 yards: ‘Wow. That is a big spot.’ She set to work with a trowel, and fifteen minutes later I was on my way to the green room.

  Here I expected to be surrounded by the greats from international television. Simon Cowell. Jay Leno. Piers Morgan. And that madwoman from Homeland. But the only two people I recognized were Larry Hagman and Kim Wilde. As we chatted, I was fitted with an earpiece and a microphone and then I was pushed on stage.

  It wasn’t what I was expecting. Instead of a lectern from where I could deliver my acceptance speech, there was a sofa, adjacent to a massively breasted woman behind a desk. I took the applause from the very large audience, checked out the position of the cameras and sat down.

  Now I don’t know why, and with hindsight I see it was extremely arrogant, but I assumed the big-breasted woman would speak to me in English. She did not. To my dismay, she addressed me in one of the many languages I don’t speak: German.

  Happily, a rough translation of what she was saying started filtering through my earpiece. Unhappily, I couldn’t make out any of the actual words. So in my right ear I had the Swiss woman speaking in German, and in the left one I had an unseen translator speaking in inaudible tinny English. Small wonder the United Nations is so useless at getting anything done.

  Just as I thought things could not get any more confusing, she produced a pair of blacked-out spectacles, told me to put them on and then played Prince singing ‘Little Red Corvette’. You may remember that scene in the movie Lost in Translation when Bill Murray appears on a Japanese chat show and has no clue what’s going on? Well, that’s how I felt.

  Mercifully, I was soon allowed to remove my glasses, and there in front of me was an Australian girl from the second Transformers film carrying my award. There was applause and then a man with a clipboard took me backstage, past Larry Hagman and back to my seat.

  It wasn’t over. No sooner had I sat down than that man with a clipboard was back. ‘Schnell, schnell!’ he said. ‘You must go back on stage.’ Once there, I was given a massive bunch of flowers and told to stand at the back for reasons that were unclear.

  Then they became clear. The big-breasted woman announced the arrival of a newcomer. The audience went wild. And out tottered an elderly gentleman, who began to make a speech. Well, when I say a speech, it wasn’t really. A speech has peaks and troughs. It has pauses and moments of light relief. This had none of those things. It was as if he’d been invited on stage to read out every single entry on Wikipedia. Or to count from one to one billion.

  After twenty minutes of standing under the hot lights, with my face planted in a hay-fever factory, and wishing I’d opted for the jockstrap rather than my heavy suit, I started to feel quite dizzy. But still the man was droning on. And I know enough about how autocues work to know he wasn’t even a third of the way through.

  I tried to focus on something important. At first I wondered why the autocue was being projected in widescreen. Then I worked it out. In German, when ‘Danube steamship company captain’ is one word, you can’t have a 4:3 screen or nothing will fit. Having solved this riddle, I started to see if it was possible to will yourself to death.

  Luckily, before I succeeded, a woman I did not recognize leapt up from the front row of the audience, thanked the man and took an award from the Transformers girl, and that was that.

  Afterwards, Larry Hagman was confused. He’d flown all the way from Los Angeles and hadn’t won anything. I had, though, so I decided to hit the after-show party. Here a slim and well-dressed Dutchman invited me to spend the night with him ‘disco dancing’. I made my excuses and left.

  Back in my room I watched Swiss television. It’s not like ours in any way. Which is probably why they gave a gong to Top Gear.

  20 May 2012

  I’m desperate to be a German – call me Gunther Good-Loser

  You would have thought that after fifty-two years of being absolutely useless at absolutely everything – except perhaps the word game Boggle – I’d have learnt how to be a good loser. And yet I’m deeply ashamed to admit that I haven’t.

  Vince Lombardi, the famous American football coach, once said, ‘Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.’ And that’s the trouble. He’s right. And I don’t want to be a loser. I can’t bear it. I can fix something that looks nothing like a smile on my face and I can extend my hand in a show of gracious defeat but, inside, it feels as if I’m on fire.

  I lost a close game of table tennis recently to the very tall man in glasses who appears on the television show Pointless, and I was gripped in the aftermath by an almost uncontrollable need to stab him in the liver and jump up and down on his bleeding body shouting ‘bastard’.

  It was much the same story when I watched England lose to South Africa at the Stade de France in Paris five years ago. The etiquette of rugby provides no place for unsportsmanlike behaviour, so when the game ended I dutifully turned to the enormous Boer behind me and said, ‘Congratulations.’ But, like the ‘p’ in ‘ptarmigan’, there was a silent bit. And it was this: ‘But I hope when you get home they put a burning tyre around your neck, and the necks of the entire team who have beaten us, you big, thick-necked, southern-hemisphere ape.’

  Conversely, when Jonny Wilkinson kicked that last-minute drop goal to clinch the 2003 Rugby World Cup for England, I spent an hour ringing random numbers in the Sydney phone book and laughing fanatically. This means I’m not a good winner, either. I fear this may be a British disease.

  Let us examine the case of Colin Welland, the former Z Cars actor. When he won an Oscar for his screenplay for the film Chariots of Fire, he held it aloft and told the assembled moguls that ‘the British are coming’. Which was inappropriate and, as it turned out, entirely wrong.

  Then, later, when he failed to win a Bafta for the same film, he was caught on camera slumping back into his seat and looking as though someone had just launched a surprise sword attack on his scrotum.

  When a sporting event finishes, I want close-ups of the losers. I want to enjoy their pain. Sir Ferguson is, we’re told, similar to this. Even though he rarely fields the best team in the world, he is a consistent winner, partly because of his capacity for hard work and partly because of his unparalleled experience. Mostly,
though, the reason his team win a lot is because the players know that if they lose they will be attacked in the dressing room afterwards. Losing is what defines us. When we think back through our military history, what names leap out of the fog? The American war of independence. The charge of the Light Brigade. Arnhem. In Britain we remember and worship John McEnroe for his tantrums and Paul Gascoigne for his tears. Gore Vidal could have been talking about us when he said, ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’

  The Daily Mail’s website is a massive hit mainly because that is its mantra. In England success and those it envelops are to be ridiculed. Winning is a bad thing.

  Was I alone in thoroughly enjoying the last day of the Premier League season? Because we had almost an hour of unbridled joy watching the anguish on the faces of Manchester City fans as they thought the title had gone to Manchester United. And then some icing on the cake when the boys in red realized at the last moment it hadn’t.

  I’m so unpleasant, in fact, that when a sporting event finishes, I never want to see the winners running around looking happy. I want close-ups of the losers. I want to enjoy their pain. And instead of the winning team being paraded around on an open-top bus, it should be the losers. That would make for much better television.

  Unless they are German. The best losers … in the world.

  It would be easy, and stupid, to suggest that they’ve had enough practice in recent times but, truth be told, in very recent times they haven’t really had any practice at all. Motor racing. Industry. Football. They are alvays ze vinners. They even have the only eurozone economy that’s growing.

  Last weekend, though, it all went wrong for them. Bayern Munich lost the European footballing crown in a penalty shootout to Chelsea. Which meant that the big German team’s fans had to trudge home alongside a joyous army of boys and girls in blue.

  I tried – really, I tried – as the game finished, to organize my face into the right shape. It needed to be proud and happy. But not smug or boastful. The effort was wasted, though, because every single German I met was a model of decency und kindness.

  Many pointed out the irony of an English team beating a German side at penalties. And how it was quite correct that we should get lucky once in a while. Others shook my hand. Most were quick to say, ‘Well done.’ And I could see absolutely no evidence that inside they were dying or on fire. There were no balled fists. They were sad to have lost. But happy for us that we’d won.

  This is extremely admirable. It’s a state of mind I wish I could achieve in those white-hot moments of despair when the ball goes out, or I pick up a ‘Q’ at the last moment, or I land on Mayfair, or I get shot in the head by a Nazi zombie.

  My inner McEnroe wants to be a Roger Federer, something the Germans seem to have achieved. I don’t crave their shorts or their jackets or their moustaches. But I do crave their sportsmanship. I crave their decency. I crave their niceness. I want to be a German.

  Because then I could take on the columnist Jane Moore at Boggle. This has not been possible in the past because she is reputedly very good at it. And I fear she would win. And then we’d never be able to speak again. Because she’d be dead.

  27 May 2012

  Go on, troll me – but leave your name and address

  Britain’s gold-medal-winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington has announced that during the Olympics she will not be looking at Twitter or any other similar site because she gets upset by remarks about her appearance.

  What kind of person looks at a picture of Ms Adlington and thinks, ‘I know what I’ll do today. I’ll go online and let the long-legged, blue-eyed, world-beating blonde know that her conk’s a bit on the large side. And then afterwards I’m going to leave a message for Uma Thurman saying she’s got thin hair’?

  You may think that if this is happening there must be a lunatic on the loose. But you’d be wrong. There are, in fact, tens of thousands of lunatics out there, all of whom spend their days going online to insult a selection of people they’ve never met.

  When a newspaper prints a picture of a pretty girl, comments are invited from readers, all of which follow a pattern. Savagery. Just last week the television presenter Melanie Sykes was described as a ‘sleazeball’ for finding a boyfriend. Somebody called Hilary Duff was accused of having a ‘man’s shoulders’. And Keira Knightley was told she looked like a ‘famine victim hours from death’.

  My wife has been subjected to this as well. She was photographed recently while out running, and you simply wouldn’t believe how much bile this prompted. One person was so cruel that I was tempted to go round to her house and cut her in half with a sword. I also wanted to set fire to her photograph albums and boil her pets.

  But therein lies the problem. She’s anonymous. She’s known only as a stupid user name – ‘Fluffykins’ or some such. She could be in Birmingham or Hobart. She’s a microbe in a fog of seven billion particles and she knows it. Which is why, as I write, she’s probably telling Bruce Forsyth he looks like a Russian icebreaker. With a moustache!!!!!

  Would she walk up to a person in the street and say, ‘God, you’re fat’? No. And yet she sees nothing wrong with getting the message across just as clearly on the internet. Because that’s the sad truth. The only people who read these comments are the people to whom they refer. And they are powerless to reply.

  If I say something that offends you, either here or on the television, you know where I am. You can find me. You can shove a pie into my face or throw manure over my garden wall. These things happen and, in a way, it’s to be expected.

  But the person who ignores Adlington’s remarkable achievements in the pool and concentrates only on her nose? She has no idea who they are or where they live.

  This has to stop. And we know it’s possible from the recent conviction of a Newcastle University student who was given two years’ community service for bombarding the football pundit Stan Collymore with racially abusive tweets. This showed that if you are a racialist and you use the n-word, you are not anonymous and the police can find you.

  We should be able to do the same. Easily. When people call from blocked numbers in the middle of the night to sing unpleasant songs, I should be able to get their number from Vodafone in a heartbeat. When Adlington is abused for having a daggerboard on the front of her face, she should be able to locate the culprit with a couple of clicks. His name. His address. The name of his boss. The lot.

  Fans of the internet boast about its openness but, actually, it isn’t open at all. It’s a web of secrecy, full of dark corners that can be probed only by government agencies, and sometimes not even then. There are tens of thousands of lunatics out there, and the problem could be solved at a stroke if they were forced to step out from behind their user names and bask in the ice-cold glare of retribution.

  This is not just a solution for Adlington. It’s a solution for Lord Justice Leveson as well. For what feels like the past 200 years this poor old man has been made to sit in what appears to be World of Sport’s old studios, listening to a bombastic man in silly spectacles questioning every single person who has ever been, met or seen a politician, journalist or celebrity.

  He is charged, among other things, with trying to recommend a code of conduct to which newspapers must adhere. But whatever he comes up with is pointless because clamping down on newspapers in the digital age is like worrying about a cut finger when you have rabies.

  Newspapers are already covered by the laws of libel, which don’t affect those on the internet to anything like the same degree. Because even if you can find the online culprit, what’s the point of suing a penniless fat man who lives with his mum and spends his day spouting bile from his porn store in the loft? Even if he did turn out to be loaded, you’re still up a creek with no boat because the only people who read his bile were you and your immediate family.

  Privacy? There’s a big debate here, too, but again I must ask why. Why is it not possible for a newspaper to dig around in your dirt when
‘Buttcrack775483’ can go through your bins and your knicker drawer – even your stools, if it takes his fancy – and describe exactly what he finds on his blog, knowing that he will get away with it?

  I’m not suggesting for a moment that you should not be allowed to laugh about the vastness of my stomach. Within certain bounds of reason, you should be entitled to say pretty much what you like about whomsoever you like. But only if you do so in full view.

  In short, we need to get rid of web anonymity. And if there’s one recommendation I’d make to newspapers, it is this: only accept readers’ comments if they are prepared to divulge their name and address. That way, we could choose to visit the person who thinks it’s hilarious to make fun of Rebecca Adlington. And give him a comedy nose as well.

  3 June 2012

  Kaboom! It’s my turn to play fantasy climate change

  Ray Bradbury died last week. So now the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles is up there in the firmament with all the other great science-fiction writers: Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams and Arthur C. Clarke. There’s still a demand for science fiction, of course. Doctor Who remains popular among children and Prometheus is doing good business at the cinema. But in print? Well, you may imagine, if you spend any time at all in the bookshop, that all anyone seems to write about these days are mentally unstable Scandinavian detectives and women being lightly whipped.

  In fact, though, you’re wrong. Science fiction is thriving; only today it’s all being written by global-warming enthusiasts.

  Global warming was invented by Margaret Thatcher as a blunt instrument she could use to bop Arthur Scargill and his sooty miners over the head. But it didn’t really catch on until the name was changed from ‘global warming’, which sounds comforting and pleasant, to ‘climate change’, which has unstoppable, apocalyptic overtones. With its new handle in place, science fiction had its modern day Martian.