Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read online

  When we understand all this, we can see perfectly well why committees don’t work. There are too many distractions.

  This is why companies and countries run by one person are so productive. Because they don’t spend all day flirting or talking about sex or seeing how far they can lean back in their chair without falling over, they get things done. I therefore have a suggestion. Soon, we will be asked if we wish to change the voting system. I think we should seriously consider introducing a dictatorship.

  23 May 2010

  Sheep are the robbers’ new bullion

  Alarming news from the north. Last week someone broke into a field on the outskirts of Knutsford in Cheshire and stole a hundred mummy and baby sheeps. The farmer’s wife is distraught as one of the stolen animals was a pet. And they took its new lamb as well. It’s all just too heartbreaking for words. And it’s by no means an isolated incident.

  Just a few days earlier in Lancashire, a farmer in Ramsbottom – I’m afraid I’m not making that up – woke up one morning to find that someone had half-inched 271 of his flock.

  Meanwhile, in Wales, 200 were nicked, a similar number went missing in the Borders, and in Cumbria alone fifteen farmers have been targeted. It seems, then, that up north, sheep are the new bullion.

  It’s not just sheep, though. In Tamworth, Staffordshire, someone has been nicking piglets; in Norfolk, Mrs Queen lost £15,000-worth of cows; and in Shropshire some chap rang the police the other day to say someone had stolen 800,000 of his bees. That’s on top of the 500,000 bees that were stolen from Lothian last June. At this rate I may have to think about fitting a burglar alarm to my tortoise.

  So what’s going on here and, more importantly, why has no one yet been caught? I mean, how hard can it be to find someone who has stolen a million bees? Surely he’ll be in a hospital, swollen beyond all recognition and moaning the low moan of deep, relentless agony.

  I want to catch him, frankly, because stealing someone’s bees is a bit like stealing someone’s eczema flakes. What exactly are you going to do with them?

  Then there is this sheep-rustling business. To steal 271 sheep with no one hearing, you need to have several things: some experience of how sheep behave, a knowledge of the countryside, a fleet of dogs and a big lorry. Now I’m no detective but I reckon that if we examine this evidence, the culprit is almost certainly going to be a shepherd. Interestingly, however, police investigating the crimes are not looking for someone sitting on a fence, in a brand new smock. Instead, they seem to have decided that crime syndicates are at work here. Wow! The Wurzels with sawn-offs.

  Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Apparently, stolen sheep and underground, unlicensed slaughterhouses aren’t troubled with European Union hygiene regulations. Which means the market could soon be flooded with a surplus of dodgy joints. It sounds to me as though there could be a Mr Big at large in the hills. Pablo Esco-baa, perhaps.

  Frankly, though, I can’t imagine the profits are that large. Which is why I find myself wondering why we now have Ronnie and Reggie Gummidge from the Cosy Nostra rushing about in the uplands stealing sheep when they could be doing the traditional gangster thing: robbing banks.

  I always wanted to be a bank robber when I grew up. As a career, it seemed ideal: short periods of glamorous and interesting work followed by lengthy spells of relaxation in Spain. All my heroes were bank robbers: Butch and Sundance; Jack Hawkins’s League of Gentlemen; Bonnie and Clyde. Bank robbers were cool.

  There was a time when a bank was robbed every other night. We became used to waking up in the morning to the sound of Dixon tearing past our house in his Austin Westminster, on the trail of some blagger in a stripy jersey and a Jag.

  You’d imagine that today bank robbery would be even more popular.

  We all know the police are mostly engaged in the lucrative business of apprehending motorists. And the few who are allowed to concentrate on proper crime are either back at the station, filling in forms, or on courses, learning how to climb over a garden wall. The chances of being caught, then, are almost zero.

  Obviously, if you wander into your local branch of Barclays and, halfway through the robbery, you succumb to the drugs you’ve taken and fall asleep, then, yes, you’re going to get nicked. But if you really concentrate on planning and get all the details just so, you’ll be fine. The only problem would be the crowds of well-wishers showering you with rose petals as you ran for the getaway car.

  And yet despite all this, the last really big bank job on UK soil was in 1994, when raiders made off with £26.5 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast. That’s an astonishing sixteen years ago. So what’s happened? Why have people stopped stealing wedge, which makes you popular and cool and rich, and started stealing honey bees, which makes you go to hospital?

  I wouldn’t mind, but the people behind the Belfast heist have never been caught. And most of the money has never been recovered. One night’s work: £26.5 million. And no time in the slammer. That’s got to beat traipsing around the freezing moors at night, whispering orders at Shep in the hope that you can flog a dodgy chop to Mrs Miggins at No. 22 for a couple of quid.

  It’s odd, but I think I have the answer. If you go to a hilltop farm, you will find a sheep. But if you go to a bank, you can be pretty certain you will not find any cash. Obviously, they’ve given most of it to the Greeks, but what about the rest? I think it’s melted because I haven’t seen or used any for years. So to be a bank robber in the twenty-first century you don’t need to be able to crack safes – just computer codes. And I’m sorry, but fiddling about on HSBC’s hard drive is a miserable pursuit. Certainly, it’s way less cool than nicking the Queen’s cows.

  It gets worse. Modern cars are almost impregnable, modern art is worthless, half the world lives with a panic button and a can of Mace under its pillow, CCTV has made all city centres no-go areas and most of the police are tooled up with shooters.

  This, then, is why there has been such a spate of animal thefts. Because these days, what else is there to nick?

  30 May 2010

  Please, carry on filming, I’m only burning to death

  With the next series of Top Gear just weeks away, we are in a frantic race against time to finish off all the films. I won’t say what they’re about here, though, because obviously you already know. This is because every single thing we do is photographed and videoed by passers-by. And then either posted on the internet or sold to the newspapers. Now that everyone has a camera in their pocket all the time, everyone is a paparazzo, and that has changed my life completely. I’m not complaining because, obviously, life will be a lot more worrying when the attention stops. But, that said, could I please make a small request.

  When you stop me in the street to ask for a photograph, have some clue about how your phone camera works. That way, when you ask a witless passer-by to take a photograph of us, he won’t spend twenty minutes holding it the wrong way round and taking endless shots of his own nose.

  There’s another annoyance, too. Yesterday I was snapped walking up Holland Park Avenue, going into Tesco, buying eggs, driving up the M40 and relieving myself in Oxford services. I’m not joking. I turned round while I was having a pee to find a lorry driver filming me. Doubtless, this riveting scene is already on YouTube. Unless, of course, the chap wants it for some kind of bizarre private collection.

  I feel fairly sure that if I were to catch fire, no one would try to beat out the flames or find an extinguisher. They’d simply record the event on their phones.

  You think I’m being silly? Well, you may recall that in the run-up to the election, the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage decided to tow a banner behind a plane, urging people to, I don’t know, stamp on a bratwurst. Unfortunately, the banner got entangled in the plane’s tail fin and it crashed.

  I’m certain you recall the photographs of him in the wreckage, with blood pouring down his face, and of the pilot, seriously injured in the seat next to him.

  Now here�
�s the strange thing. Someone took those photographs. Someone raced to the scene, saw two injured men hanging upside down and thought: ‘I know. I’ll get my camera out and take a picture of this.’

  Of course, it’s possible that the person responsible was a professional photographer, in which case the boundaries are blurred. It is a professional photographer’s job to record events, not shape them. But I think this mainly applies during periods of civil unrest and war.

  However, it is also possible the person responsible was a bank manager or an accountant. And I don’t know about you but I think if I were presented with a badly injured man in the wreckage of a plane – no matter how much I disagreed with his opinions – I’d think about neck braces and mouth-to-mouth and fuel leaks rather than exposures and angles and what some pictures might be worth.

  We saw a similar problem recently with the sun-dried baby on the beach. Someone decided that the best way of helping the poor infant, who suffered 40 per cent burns, was to take some pictures of him.

  And then you have those people – and for some reason they’re almost always German – who think it’s a good idea to climb over the security fences at zoos.

  Maybe they think the leopard or the tiger looks cute but, of course, as soon as they’re actually in there, they quickly realize that it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Usually as the creature is eating their leg. What would you do if you saw someone being eaten in a zoo? Throw things at the animal? Try to find a rope so what’s left of the person can climb out?

  Yes. I’d do something like that, too. But most people, if the internet is anything to go by, whip out their cameras and make a grisly little film.

  It’s almost certain these days that if you got into trouble at sea, you would not be rescued.

  The police, as we know, are not allowed to help. David Hasselhoff is gone. And onlookers would simply take out their phones. You’ll get your fifteen minutes of fame, all right. But it will be the last fifteen minutes you ever have.

  What the camera does, of course, is detach the onlooker from the events unfurling in front of them. There’s a sense as you operate it that you are watching the scene unravel on television and that, as a result, you are unable to help. In short, cameras dehumanize humanity.

  But there is an upside. Because in recent years I’ve noticed that ‘news’ is not what’s happened. It’s what’s happened on camera.

  If a herd of tigers runs amok in a remote Indian village, it’s not news. If a gang of wide-eyed rebels slaughters the inhabitants of a faraway African village, it’s not news. But if it’s a bit windy in America, it is news. Because in America everything that happens is recorded.

  I find myself wondering if last week’s Israeli raid on a Turkish ship in a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza would have had the coverage it did if the battle hadn’t been captured on film. And likewise the racing driver who broke a leg after crashing in the Indy 500. It only became a big deal because we could watch the accident from several angles in slow motion.

  In recent months this phenomenon has even spread to the natural world. I mean it. When an animal does something normal, it’s not news. But when it is ‘caught on camera’ doing something normal, then it’s in the Daily Mail. These days, if you snap an owl catching a mouse, you are Robert Capa.

  In the end, this can only be good for all of us. Figures out recently show that more people in India have access to a mobile phone than a lavatory. Soon, it will be the same story in China and Africa. And then, when all the world’s being filmed, all of the time, we can go back to a time when news was something interesting rather than something we can simply see.

  That way, I wouldn’t have to spend half my morning looking at pictures of Twiggy going shopping. And an eagle eating a fish.

  6 June 2010

  Surgery to solve the deficit – cut off Scotland

  As we know, the country is in a terrible mess, and as a result, the head of every government department has been told to go away and implement cuts.

  This all sounds very sensible but because I’m a television presenter, I know it won’t work.

  Here’s why. Every Thursday night, the producers of Top Gear stitch together the various elements of the show to create a finished product that is around seventy minutes long. Because this is eleven more than the time slot, we have to make cuts.

  Or as Clive James used to say when he was making TV shows, we have to throw away our babies.

  It’s extremely annoying. You’ve edited a segment to be as good as possible, and now you have to start with the scissors, losing the odd fact here and the odd joke there. It takes an age, it hurts and the same thing always happens when you’ve finished. The programme is better, tighter and sharper. But it’s still six minutes too long.

  So it’s back to the drawing board. And this time, you must lose links and explanations. You are no longer performing liposuction on fat. You’re cutting away at bone and muscle. Important stuff. You are bringing it in on budget but the finished product won’t stand up. Think of it, if you like, as a hospital with no electricity. It’s still a hospital but it’s not much use if the iron lungs don’t work.

  To prevent this happening on Top Gear, we try not to trim muscle and bone. When we’re desperate to cut time, we lose limbs.

  You may have seen the Vietnam special we produced a couple of years ago. What you didn’t see in that show, however, was a sequence involving the Stig’s Vietnamese cousin. This had been tough to make. We’d located a local motorcycle stunt rider, we’d shipped a bike over from Japan, we’d done two recces and written several treatments, and twenty-five people had spent a whole day filming the scene under a sticky sky and watchful gaze of government officials who kept wanting to see the rushes.

  The reason you didn’t see it is because so many unforeseen things had happened on the trip, the finished programme was miles too long. And when we’d slashed and burned the fat, there was still twelve minutes to go. So instead of slashing and burning at the muscle and bone, we threw away a whole sequence. Better, we thought, to lose an arm than ruin every organ in the body.

  And that brings me back to Britain’s economy. Yes, the NHS can sack a few managers and the Department for Transport can shelve plans to widen the B3018. Little things such as this will save millions but there will still be millions to go, which is why David Cameron and Cleggy, the tea boy, must think long and hard about losing the Vietnamese Stig. They must think about chopping a whole department. Obviously, I would suggest the Department of Energy and Climate Change because it’s silly, when times are tight, to have a whole ministry attempting to manage something over which humankind has no control. It’d be like having a Department of Jupiter.

  But the climate change department is relatively small, and cutting that when you are a trillion in debt would be like trying to solve a £50,000 overdraft by not having your hair cut any more. No, Cameron and the shoeshine boy need to lose something big and I believe I have the answer: Scotland.

  Let us examine the benefits of this. In the last election the Scottish National Party, which wants independence from England, took nearly 20 per cent of the vote in Scotland. Add this lot to the non-voters who also want to go their own way and you realize there is significant support north of the border for Hadrian’s Wall to be rebuilt.

  Economically, the SNP thinks Scotland would be fine. I don’t know why, since Scottish public spending is 33 per cent higher per head than it is in the south-east of England.

  But on its website, the party says that Ireland is independent and is the ‘fourth most prosperous country in the world’ (really?) and that Iceland, another small independent state, is the ‘sixth most prosperous country in the world’. (Apart from being totally bankrupt, obviously.)

  Let’s not get bogged down, though. The upsides go on and on. Without Scotland on the electoral map, Cameron would have a majority in the House of Commons, so he could lose the Cleggawallah, we’d never again have a Scottish prime minister and Scotland would beco
me abroad – which would make it an exotic holiday location.

  I think we could take this further. Why not draw the boundary between England and Scotland at York? This way, the SNP would feel that William Wallace’s sacrifice hadn’t been in vain and, better still, all the northern English constituencies could be governed by the sort of left-wing, wetland-habitat, save-the-bat and build-a-wind-farm government they seem to like so much.

  So what, you might be thinking, is in it for those who remain – the Welsh and those in the south of England? Well, there’s no doubt that letting Scotland go would be very painful, especially after 300 years of friendship. But what are the alternatives? The NHS? The Ministry of Defence?

  No. I’m afraid it has to be Scotland. It costs the UK £5 billion a year and saving that, on top of the £6 billion in cuts from the fat elsewhere, would go a long way towards solving our debt crisis.

  Oil? Well, obviously the Scottish oil companies such as, er, whatever they’re called, will continue to pump the black gold into Aberdeen while the others, such as BP and Shell, could simply divert their pipelines to Kent. That’s fair. Oh, and we’d have to move the Trident submarine fleet as well.

  I want to make it plain to my Scottish readers that I do not want to throw you on to the cutting-room floor. I shall miss you with your funny skirts and your ginger hair. The SAS will miss you, too, since over the years 75 per cent of its soldiers are said to have been from north of the border. But we simply cannot afford to stay together any more. Goodbye, then, and good luck.

  13 June 2010

  Give to my new charity – Britain’s Got Trouble