For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Read online

  The acoustic equivalent of a Shakespearean sonnet. Musical Chaucer.

  So why are children not given that week’s chart hits to learn? This is music they can identify with more readily than ‘The Happy Farmer’ or something written by a precocious Russian when he was five, 200 years ago.

  If you give a child an Airfix model of a kitchen table, he won’t enjoy the finished result. If, on the other hand, you give him a model of HMS Hood, he will.

  And then he’ll want to move on to bigger and better things.

  When I was 10, I was made to learn songs that sounded awful on the first pass and even worse when I’d mastered them. And I can’t help wondering how much more fun it would all have been if I’d spent my music lessons making siren noises while playing ‘Blockbuster’ by Sweet.

  Had this happened, I would have progressed through T Rex, through Genesis and on to Billy Joel. And then it would have been me being ridden round the hotel in Cuba.

  Of course, a lot of modern songs are riddled with sharps and flats, which make them hard for a child to grasp, but mostly it would take even the most half-witted music teacher only five minutes to convert them so you only need hit the white notes.

  Take ‘Ode to Joy’ as an example. In my music book there’s an F sharp which, from memory, means it’s in G major. But in my daughter’s music book, it’s in C major so there are no sharps or flats at all. It’s therefore easier to learn, easier to play and sounds exactly the same.

  Except, of course, she has no interest in Beethoven. She wants to play ‘Clocks’ by Coldplay and ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ by the Who. She wants to end up with HMS Hood, not a kitchen table.

  And without wishing to be selfish, as a parent, so do I. Trying to force our children to do their piano practice is like trying to force a gorilla into a dinner jacket. They have no stomach for it, and frankly neither do I, because in even a fairly large house there’s no hiding place from the cacophony when they begin.

  The insistence of a road drill when you’re hung-over is a bad sound, but it’s preferable to the noise of a nine-year-old learning a song that wouldn’t be any good even if it were played properly.

  I therefore have an idea. Can someone, please, bring out a song book called Tunes Your Dad Likes in C Major? And can Ruth Kelly stop worrying about grammar schools and put it on the curriculum?

  Sunday 5 February 2006

  Flogging absolute rubbish is a gift

  I didn’t have much to do last Thursday so I went on a day trip to St Nazaire to look at the Second World War U-boat pens.

  Ooh they’re big. And clever. Above the roof there’s a corrugated concrete awning designed to break up bombs before they hit the structure itself, and channel the blast horizontally away from the precious submarines.

  This system could even repel the blast from an RAF Tallboy. When dropped from 20,000 feet these supersonic 5-ton bombs could displace a million cubic feet of earth, creating a crater 80 feet deep and 100 feet across.

  And yet when one hit the roof of the St Nazaire sub pens all anyone inside heard was no louder than the discreet cough of an embarrassed butler.

  Later the Americans peppered the roof with battleship shells dropped from B-17s.

  But that didn’t work either. In fact, at the end of the war the only thing left standing in St Nazaire was the target.

  They’re still there today and you’d expect, as I did, that inside Madame Tussauds would have run amok, with lots of waxwork Germans toiling over wooden torpedoes and millions of schoolchildren on guided tours of a real U-boat. But no. All I found was lots of graffiti and, in one pen, half a dozen upended shopping trolleys.

  Still, in another there was a gift shop which I assumed would be full of Airfix U-boat kits, copies of Das Boot, an underwater oven glove perhaps, or maybe the very Enigma decoding machine captured by Jon Bon Jovi.

  But no. All they had in the window was several trolls in traditional Breton costume – which was in no way relevant, since St Nazaire is not actually in Brittany – while inside there were plates made into clocks, lighthouses made into table lamps, place mats featuring scenes of France I wasn’t in, and most incongruously of all a rack of T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Leprechaun’s Corner’, which is a pub in Dublin.

  It’s almost as though the owners had deliberately stocked the shop with anything they could lay their hands on just so long as it had nothing to do with the war.

  Which seems a bit daft since I’m willing to bet that no one has ever said, ‘I fancy a Breton troll for my mantelpiece so I’ll go to those U-boat pens in St Nazaire to see if there’s a gift shop there which can help.’

  This would be like going to Windsor Castle to buy a holographic keyring of the Grand Canyon. But that said, I’m constantly amazed at the inability of gift shop proprietors in the world’s tourist hot spots to sell anything that anyone might remotely want to buy.

  There’s always a glass dolphin, perfectly crafted, with the name of the place you’re in stencilled onto the base. Now if there was just one on the shelves and if it was a bit rough and ready, then yes, you might be fooled into thinking it had been made, by hand, in a cave, by a local man in traditional national costume.

  But since you’re in an airport terminal and there are 2,000 of them in there, and they’re all the same, and they say ‘Made in China’ on the bottom, and you saw exactly the same thing in San Francisco last year, only with ‘California’ etched onto the base, then you’re not going to be fooled.

  Scandinavian gift shops are big on selling smoked salmon so you can go home with a taste of the north. But they are sold pre-sliced in hermetically sealed bags, and you just know that no wizened old trawlerman has access to the sort of packaging machine which can do this. If you want industrialised smoked salmon in a plastic bag, you’ll wait till you get home and call Jethro Tull.

  Another gift shop favourite is the intricate 4-foot galleon, complete with real canvas sails, half a mile of cotton rigging and cocktail-stick delicate masts.

  Great. But how are you supposed to get something like that home?

  If you’re setting up a gift shop for tourists here’s a hint. Sell stuff that airport baggage handlers can’t break. And more importantly, ensure that your stock reflects your surroundings in some way. Accept that visitors to a World War Two submarine pen are not necessarily going to want an Eiffel Tower snow shaker.

  Well, I did, but that’s because at home I have what I call the ‘Cupboard of Shit’.

  It’s a glass-front Georgian cabinet in which I keep all of the useless rubbish I’ve found in gift shops over the years. Pride of place goes to a foot-long alabaster model of the Last Supper in which all the disciples are wearing different-coloured glitter capes.

  But then I’m also proud of my Chinese-made plastic New York fireman figurine, complete with a moustache and a wounded mate on his shoulder. Movingly, this exquisite piece is called ‘Red Hats of Courage’.

  I understand, of course, that the townspeople of St Nazaire might not want to cash in on the horrors of the U-boat war, or the British commando raid that wrecked the port in 1942, or the American landings there in 1917, or the loss in the Loire estuary of the troopship Lancastria and 4,000 souls in 1940.

  I suppose we should respect them for that. But something relevant would have been nice. A model, perhaps, of a crowd of people in stripy jumpers with their hands held high, eating cheese.

  Sunday 12 February 2006

  My kingdom for a horse hitman

  If a newspaper columnist wants to live an easy life, then it’s sensible to steer clear of certain issues. Laying into Jesus is right out. And it’s probably not a good idea to say the poor should have their shoes confiscated. But the greatest taboo – the biggest landmine of the lot – is the touchy subject of horses.

  I once wrote a column suggesting that nobody should be allowed to keep a pet unless their garden is big enough to exercise it. Under no circumstances, I argued, should you be allowed to put your animal in a lorry
and drive it on the public road at 4 mph.

  This went down badly. It turned out that there are three million horsists in Britain and each one of them wrote to me, hoping that I would die soon. So I made a mental note to skirt round equine issues in future.

  Sadly, though, there are now three million and one horsists in Britain because my wife has just bought a brace of the damn things. I don’t know how much they cost but since they were imported from Iceland, I’m guessing it was quite a lot.

  Not as much, however, as they’re now costing the National Health Service. The first to fall off was my nine-year-old son. He’d seen his sister trotting round the paddock and, being a boy, figured he could do it too.

  Sadly, I wasn’t around to stop him so I’ve only heard from the ambulancemen what happened exactly.

  The next casualty was our nanny, who disproved the theory that when you fall off a horse you should get straight back on again. Because having done that she promptly fell off a second time. We had to mash her food for a while but she’s better now.

  So what about my wife? Well, as I write she’s skiing in Davos.

  Except she’s not because 24 hours before she was due to go she came off the nag, spraining her wrist and turning one of her legs into something the size, shape and texture of a baobab tree. So actually she’s in Davos, drinking.

  Apparently, the accident was quite spectacular. On a quiet road, just outside David Cameron’s house incidentally, she took the tumble with such force that she was incapable of moving. And had to ring the nanny who, as a result of her fall, could only limp to the scene of the accident.

  Needless to say, the horse, with its walnut-sized brain, had been spooked by the incident and had run off. Neither of the girls was in a fit state to catch it, which meant a ton of (very expensive) muscle was gallivanting around the road network, as deadly and as unpredictable as a leather-backed Scud missile.

  After it was returned by a sympathetic neighbour, I offered to get a gun and put the bloody thing out of my misery. But no. The accident was not the horse’s fault, apparently. And nor will my wife take the blame, because she’s been riding since she was an embryo and hunting since foetus-hood.

  What happened was that the horse skidded on the tarmac. I see. An Icelandic horse, capable of maintaining significant speed over lava fields and sheet ice, couldn’t stay upright on asphalt. Of course. Stands to reason.

  So now all the female members of the Clarkson household are busy joining internet campaigns to get every road in the land resurfaced with special horse-grip tarmac.

  This, it seems to me, is the problem with horse ownership. You can’t have one half-heartedly. Every morning you must go and clear its crap from the stables, and then you must spend the afternoon combing it and plaiting its tail and feeding it tasty apples. And then each night, as you get into bed, each bruise and aching joint serves as a painful reminder of that day’s accident. Horses take over your life as completely as paralysis. You can think of nothing else.

  And this gives the horse fraternity a sense that the whole world revolves around their pets too. That’s why the hunting crowd are so vociferous.

  Because for them it’s not a pastime. It’s an all-consuming life. And it’s why my wife wants all roads resurfaced.

  More than that, she comes back every day white with apoplexy with something a ‘motorist’ has just done. Not slowing down. Not moving over enough. Not coming by. Not turning the radio down. This from a woman who refuses to drive any car with less than 350 brake horsepower.

  Of course, we’re told often and loudly that roads were originally intended for horses, and that’s true.

  In the same way that the royal family was originally intended to govern. But times move on. The horse was replaced by the car and became a toy. And now it should be allowed on the roads, in the same way that the Queen is allowed into parliament. Briefly, and by invitation only.

  I’ve always said that if a boy comes to take my daughters out on a motorbike I shall drop a match in the petrol tank. And that if he buys another I shall do it again. But in the past month I’ve learnt that four legs are infinitely more dangerous than two wheels. So if he turns up on a horse I shall shoot him, and it.

  In the meantime I have to content myself with the behaviour of my donkeys. All they do, all day, is run up to their new, bigger field-mates and kick them.

  Sunday 19 February 2006

  Where all the TV viewers went

  You probably haven’t seen Davina McCall’s new chat show, which airs at prime time on BBCi. And that’s a pity because I think it’s rather good.

  Throughout television history most chat-show hosts have been men. And this is a problem because men feel duty-bound to compete.

  If the guest fires a .22 joke into the ether, a chap has to come back with something heavier and better. Male conversation is gladiatorial, argumentative, spiky and designed most of all to be funny.

  I asked the editor of GQ magazine last weekend if he liked my new jacket. ‘No,’ he replied in a frenzied high-pitched squeak. ‘It makes you look like a ∗∗∗∗.’ Can you imagine a woman saying that?

  As a result, modern, zingy chat shows hosted by men tend to be all about the host.

  It’s their duty to compensate for the dull guests and spar with the good ones. The only man who doesn’t do this is Michael Parkinson. Which is probably why he’s been around since 1912.

  Davina doesn’t compete either. And because she doesn’t play the big ‘I am’ we learnt a lot about her guest last week: Martin Shaw. And what we learnt most of all is that he’s rather dull. Some of his answers were so boring, in fact, that my children, with a great deal of harrumphing, got up and left the room. And this brings me to the point of my column this morning.

  When I was a child I did my homework and then watched television until it was time for bed. You may say, ‘Aha, but television was so much better back then’, but trust me on this, it wasn’t. It was grainy, lumpen, dull, black, white, infantile and all anyone could ever win was a pencil.

  Even so, when I first started to appear on television in the early 1990s, people were still watching in huge numbers. I once made a rather porridgy show for BBC2 that attracted 7 million viewers. Nowadays you could only do that if you screened Angelina Jolie having lesbian sex with that new weathergirl on ITV.

  Television viewing figures are in freefall. Morecambe and Wise used to pull in 25 million viewers. Now a show is judged to be a ratings success if it gets five or six. And it’s not that people are watching stuff from way down the satellite listings. The figures show they’re not watching at all. So what are they doing instead?

  Well, we know a lot of women are in chat rooms starting affairs with old schoolfriends, and a lot of men are on MSN pretending to be 12-year-old schoolgirls.

  I also know a lot are on eBay because I recently dumped a load of household waste into the online auction house and there was a global frenzy to snap up the lot. Next week I’m selling one of my bogeys and I bet I get a quid for it.

  Then you have podcasts. Just last week I read about an anonymous woman called Faceless who makes a daily broadcast over the internet, telling her fans via a voice scrambler what she’s been up to. I’ve listened and, in a nutshell, it’s nothing.

  She gets up, tries not to eat too much, has boyfriend problems, and says ‘like’ a lot. And people are downloading this rubbish. There are others who go out on the streets to make their own shows using the cameras on their mobile phones. Mostly, this involves punching anyone they come across and pushing complete strangers off their bicycles.

  One of the issues that my children have with normal terrestrial television is that they can’t watch what they want, when they want to watch it. ‘What do you mean Doctor Who is on Saturday at seven? I want to watch it now.’

  So off they toddle to bid for bogeys and make happy-slapping movies with each other on my phone. My youngest said the other day she ‘hates’ the BBC. Because so far as she’s concerned, it�
��s just ‘people talking’.

  I know this frightens the living daylights out of television people. They worry that they are playing gramophone records in a digital world, that they’re wearing a Jane Austen-style bonnet to a club. And they’re scared stiff that all their fancy graphics and micro-soundbites can only delay their inevitable demise. But I’m not so sure.

  It’s said that soon we’ll be able to watch shows on our mobile phones, but why would you want to do that? Why watch something that’s cheaply made for a small audience on a i-inch screen when you have David Attenborough on a 42-inch plasma at home? There’s only one reason why you would.

  Because you can.

  Certainly, eBay is interesting only because it’s new. When it’s been around for a while, people will realise that they didn’t buy Bill Oddie’s used underpants because that’s what they wanted. They bought them only because they could.

  I can prove this. Last year, Top Gear was Britain’s most downloaded television show. Which means there are thousands of people out there who’d rather fiddle about with their newfangled broadband connections than sit down and watch the damn thing on television. Or record it on Sky Plus.

  That would suggest we’re a nation of idiots. But since we’re not, I think we’re just going through a phase where pushing someone off a bicycle is more fun than watching television. It won’t last. Davina will.

  Sunday 26 February 2006

  It takes immense skill to waste time

  A report last week found that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is now the number one bedtime story for Britain’s children. But the findings also revealed that one in three parents do not read anything at all to their kids at night.