Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Page 30

  But there’s more to it than that. It’s because guns are fascinating. If someone came round to your house today with a 9mm Glock, I can pretty much guarantee that if you have a functioning scrotum, you will want to handle it. And if the person in question has some bullets, you will want to go outside and shoot at a tree.

  This probably has something to do with mating. When you have a gun in your hand, you are the most powerful person in the room. Which means you’re like those birds that appear on natural history programmes with their feathers all puffed out, making themselves look manly and virile in front of all the girl birds.

  A gun is also a comfort blanket. You know that if it’s just you, with your weedy little arms, versus a bad man with a gun, you stand no chance at all. However, if you too have a gun about your person, there’s a slim chance that as you blast away at all the furniture with your eyes closed, he won’t stroll over, punch you in the face, take the gun from you and shoot you in the head with it. A gun doesn’t level the playing field. But it does tilt it slightly back in your direction.

  There’s another thing. Guns are fun. I once spent a pleasant evening in the Arizona desert with a man who had a Mack truck filled from floor to ceiling with every kind of weapon you can imagine. He even had two 8,000-round-a-minute mini-guns mounted on his helicopter.

  I was especially fond of something called a squad automatic weapon and spent many hours bouncing tracer rounds into the night sky until the desert actually caught fire. There’s no reason, in a civilized world, why a member of the public should have this gun. And no reason why anyone should cackle and squeal with joy as they fire it into the void. But I did. And you would too. And that is the problem.

  29 July 2012

  Listen, Fritz, we’ll do the efficiency now – you write the gags

  Ben Elton is working on a new television sitcom about a health and safety department. Doubtless it will be full of high-visibility ear defenders and there will be many hilarious consequences. British health and safety is a rich comic vein. Or rather, it was before the Olympics came along.

  I gathered with about 200 ocean-going cynics to watch the opening ceremony and as the lights went up on those little black and white children skipping around a maypole, all of us imagined the worst. We’d seen the knuckle-bitingly embarrassing handover in China.

  We’d heard about the low-budget sustainable eco-plans for east London and we all knew, deep down in our stone-cold hearts, that Britain is a basketcase. We never get anything right. Only this time we wouldn’t get anything right with the whole world watching.

  Well, obviously we were wrong. It was a triumph and, as I write, the Games are proving to be a triumph as well. Furthermore, the trains are running on time, there are no strikes at Heathrow and London is quiet. This, I feel, is going to have a profound effect on not just Elton’s new comedy but everything else too.

  After the last world war, Britain lost its empire and slid into a soot-blackened well of dirt, discontent and despair. People lived in a monochrome world with outside khazis that didn’t work, had no job and, as often as not, had a hideous lung disease. And it was here, in the misery pit, that our world-famous sense of humour was forged.

  You knew your new Austin Princess wouldn’t work properly. You knew the pubs would shut every time you were thirsty. You knew there’d be a power cut very soon and you knew that the little cough you’d developed yesterday was the onset of pneumoconiosis. And the only way to deal with it all was to have a laugh.

  Think about it. How much comedy do you find in British literature that was written when we were rich and successful and ran the world? How many laughs are there in Wuthering Heights or The Return of the Native? Not many. We were known in Victorian times for many things. But being funny wasn’t one of them.

  However, when unemployment was running at more than 3 million, the miners were all throwing stones at policemen and your rubbish hadn’t been collected for a year, Elton was bringing the house down in the Comedy Store and we were all gathered around the television, laughing our heads off at Frankie Howerd. Titter ye not. But titter we did.

  When the people of other countries are displeased with their leaders, they chase them into drains or hang them from lamp posts. Us? We employ Ian Hislop to machine gun them with jokes. When John Cleese was unhappy with the service at a dreary seafront hotel, he didn’t write an angry letter. No. He wrote Fawlty Towers. I spend my working life on TV praying to all the gods that ever there were that James May will catch fire. Because then we can all have a jolly good giggle.

  Adversity and hardship are the cradles of comedy, so what are we to do now the Olympics have shown that, actually, Britain can be rather more than Belgium with a bit of drizzle? What if we’re all inspired to succeed and everything we do from now on is equally well run and magnificent?

  You really do sense this tide of optimism, certainly in London. Most of us watched that opening ceremony, with the inspiring semi-animated rush down the Thames and Kenneth Branagh as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and we’ve all plainly decided Britain doesn’t need to be rubbish at everything.

  People talk about how the achievement will change the way other countries feel about us. Far more important is how it will change the way we feel about ourselves. That’s what happened after Barcelona hosted the Games. Basking in a Ready Brek glow of pride, it went from a crummy little fishing port to one of the coolest cities in the world.

  That could well happen here. The Olympics have injected us all with a long-forgotten sense of contentment, and who knows what effect this will have?

  What if Terminal 2 reopens at Heathrow on time and all the passengers’ suitcases end up on the correct planes? What if we build an aircraft carrier that can be used as a launch pad for actual planes? What if the people in charge of parking meters in some London boroughs scrap the pay-by-phone system, which doesn’t work, and bring back the coin slot, which does? What if the banks examine what Sebastian Coe has achieved and think, ‘Hey, chaps. Why don’t we lend money to people who can pay us back?’

  Where would that leave Have I Got News for You? Paul Merton may still be able to offer up some nugget about a squashed cat, but poor old Hislop would be castrated. And who’s going to find Elton’s new show funny if health and safety officers start to behave sensibly? Certainly I bet you would have found Twenty Twelve far less chucklesome if you’d known then what you know now.

  If Britain becomes as well run as Switzerland, we could end up with a Swiss sense of humour. In other words, we’d end up with absolutely no sense of humour at all. You’d have John Bishop and Michael McIntyre and all the other observational comedians walking into empty theatres and saying, ‘Have you noticed how all the trains run bang on time …’

  The only crumb of comfort we can take from all this is that Germany is in a pickle. Thanks to the curious machinations of the European Union, various southern euro states have decided it’s best if they sit under an olive tree all day and get Hermann to pay for all their public services.

  As a result, Johnny Boche will soon be bankrupt. The country will have strikes and riots, and everyone’s Mercedes will break down all the time. This could well mean that in the not-too-distant future, all the world’s best comedians will be German.

  5 August 2012

  Arise, Sir Jeremy – defier of busybody croupiers and barmen

  There were calls last week for the Cabinet Office to hand over the honours system to an independent body in the hope that more lollipop ladies could be knighted and more OBEs awarded to those who have done voluntary work in ‘the community’.

  Of course, this is yet another example of the drive to create a new people-power society in which the fat, the stupid and the toothless are encouraged to lord it over the bright, the thin and the successful. Already we are seeing its effects. A tiny number of morons decided that they would like very much to stroll through my garden, pausing a while to peer through my kitchen window, and now they can.

  A noisy minority decid
ed that Jonathan Ross should be driven from the BBC, and he was. And expensive public libraries are now kept open just because an infinitesimal number of internet-phobes from ‘the community’, chose to dance about outside with placards.

  We turn firemen into heroes if they get their trousers wet and treat single mums like round-the-world sailors. David Cameron is an idiot, Boris Johnson is a buffoon, Richard Branson is a spoilt child. But the man who empties your bins is as wise as an owl and must be given a CBE immediately.

  Unless this nonsense is stopped, we shall become like America and, having spent a couple of weeks there recently, I can assure you that this would be A Bad Thing.

  We begin the shoulder-sagging saga in Las Vegas, six floors below a party that seems to have made the papers. I wanted to show my sixteen-year-old son how blackjack works, but although he was allowed in the casino, he was not allowed to stand near any of the tables.

  The croupier had been issued with the power to enforce this law and as a result shouted, ‘Back up!’ as my son peered over my shoulder. In an attempt to defuse what appeared to be a life-or-death situation, I asked the boy to reverse slowly until he reached a point where the lobster-brained croupier was happy. Quite soon I noticed that he’d reversed perilously close to the table behind him, and I pointed this out to the woman. ‘Okay,’ she said, realizing the mistake. ‘Forwards. Forwards. Forwards a bit more. Stop.’ He ended up about nine inches from where he’d started.

  Obviously it’s a good idea to stop teenage boys gambling but the idea of using a stupid person to enforce this law doesn’t work at all. A point that had been made a few days earlier at a hotel near Yosemite. When my eighteen-year-old daughter joined me at the bar for a refreshing Coca-Cola she was told, very loudly, that she needed to be twenty-one to sit there, and that she would have to join the half-hour queue for a table. So let’s just get this straight: you can sit at a table and have a Coke but you cannot sit at the bar, even though the two places are 2ft apart?

  The shouty barman agreed the law was stupid and that it would be ridiculous to deny a bar stool to, say, a twenty-year-old soldier who had just lost a leg in Afghanistan. But said there was nothing he could do.

  Yes, Bud or Hank or Todd, or whatever single-syllable name you have, that’s the problem. There is something you can do. You don’t spend your evenings peering into the barrel of your Heckler & Koch machine pistol. You don’t eat stuff that you know to be poisonous. You have nous. You have at least some initiative. Use it.

  When on the balcony of a hotel room in Los Angeles, I was told by a bossy cleaner that she ‘needed’ me to extinguish my cigarette. Smoking on a balcony in Los Angeles is not allowed. But why? There was no one within 300ft. I was outside. I would place the butt in an empty beer bottle. But logic is a dandelion seed when the hurricane of state law is entrusted to someone with an IQ of four.

  We went to an exhibition of Titanic artefacts. For reasons that are entirely unclear, all our cameras had to be left in a locker. But you can’t use the lockers unless you can provide the idiotic ticket woman with photo ID. Can you think of a single reason why you need to prove who you are before being allowed to leave one of your own belongings in a locker? Me neither.

  There was a similar problem with a zip wire my children wanted to try. Yes, they were tall enough and, yes, my cash money was acceptable. But before they were allowed to have a go I had to give written permission. And for that I needed photo ID.

  What would photo ID prove? That my name was Jeremy Clarkson. But would that show I was the children’s father? No, because they were not required by state law to prove who they were. The fact is this: ID was required because in totalitarian states such as Soviet Russia and North Korea and America it’s important to know who is doing what at all times.

  At one hotel we used there were two pools: a family pool that was full mostly of homosexual men, and a European pool where lady guests were allowed to remove their bikini tops. Strangely we weren’t allowed to sit round the European pool even though we had photo ID to prove we were actually European.

  After two weeks of being told by janitors, night watchmen, cleaners and passers-by that we couldn’t smoke near fruit machines, go barefoot in a shopping mall, park near a fire hydrant, drink in the street, take cameras to the Grand Canyon skywalk or make jokes to anyone in any kind of uniform, we kissed the tarmac at Heathrow and now see Britain in an all-new light.

  Yesterday I was overtaken by a man in a sports car who had an unrestrained golden retriever in the passenger seat. And I rejoiced. Then, this morning, I applauded when I saw a cyclist jump a red light. And I have thoroughly enjoyed sitting with my children outside the Plough in Kingham, smoking and drinking and having a nice time. This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government’s petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don’t.

  2 September 2012

  P-p-please open up, Arkwright, I need some t-t-t-trousers

  We return this morning to a subject I’ve talked about before. It’s a subject close to every man’s heart: the sheer, unadulterated, trudging misery of shopping for clothes.

  I buy my shoes at Tod’s on Bond Street in London. Its window is always full of many attractive designs, and if I have a few minutes left on the meter I will sometimes pop in to buy a pair. But they never, ever, have anything in a size 11. The lady always comes back from a lengthy trip to the storeroom brandishing a pair of size 5s, asking cheerfully if they will do instead.

  Which is a bit like someone in a restaurant ordering the vegetarian option and being asked if a nice, juicy T-bone steak will do instead. No, it won’t. And now, thanks to this time-wasting, I have a parking ticket.

  Shops never keep shirts in the size I want either, and every single available jacket would only really fit Ziggy Stardust. Trousers? Don’t know, because I’m way too big to fit in the overheated postbox the retailer laughingly calls a changing room. However, if by some miracle you do find something in your size that you like, your problems are far from over because you have to pay for it.

  When you buy £100-worth of petrol, you put your card in a machine, tap in your code and seconds later walk out with a receipt. When you buy £100-worth of trousers, you must stand at the desk while the sales assistant inputs what feels like the entire works of Dostoevsky into her computer. And then she will want your name and address so that you can be kept abreast of forthcoming clothing lines that won’t be available in your size either.

  And you can’t get round the problem by going somewhere else because these days there is nowhere else.

  This is my new beef. Every single high street and every single shopping centre in every single town and city is full of exactly the same shops attempting to sell exactly the same things that you can’t buy because they don’t keep your size in stock.

  A recent trip to San Francisco has demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be this way. I took my children to Haight-Ashbury so that I could talk to them about the summer of love and how Janis Joplin was about a billion times better than any of the talentless teenage warblers on their iPods.

  At first I was a bit disappointed to find that the whole area had been turned into a vast shopping experience. The kids weren’t, though. And soon neither was I.

  The first shop was rammed with Sixties clothing and accessories. Purple hippie sunglasses. Vietnam Zippos. Joss sticks and curious-looking chemistry sets. There were posters of Hendrix and CND badges and I bought more in there, in ten minutes, than I’ve bought in Britain in ten years.

  Then I found a shoe shop. It was selling shoes and boots the likes of which you simply would not find anywhere in Britain and it had in stock every single size you could think of. I bought many pairs. Then I bought two jackets that fitted, and then we decided to visit one of the many coffee shops. None of which was Starbucks.

  Not a single one of the shops wanted my name or address when I bought anything. They had no intention of sending me exci
ting product information and they did not expect me to hang around while they updated their stock figures.

  You hand over your card, provide the inevitable photo ID, sign your name and leave.

  Of course, you may imagine that all of the hundreds of tiny independent shops in the area are being run by free-love people who arrived in San Francisco in June 1967 and who are therefore not interested in profit. You might imagine that as long as you worshipped at the altar of peaceful protest, you could barter for one of the chemistry sets with beans.

  There was plenty of evidence to suggest this might be so. One shop was being run by a chap in his sixties. He wore his hair in a ponytail, with a pair of John Lennon glasses, a poncho and a set of groovy loon pants. Later, though, I saw him locking up his shop and climbing into a brand new Cadillac Escalade.

  So why, if there’s money to be made, have the big boys not moved in? Bloody good question.

  Because that’s exactly what’s happened on the British equivalent of Haight-Ashbury: the King’s Road in London. Back in the day this was a mishmash of small shops selling individually made items to Mick Jagger and Johnny Rotten. Now it’s WH Smith, HMV, Marks & Spencer. It’s exactly the same as Pontefract and Pontypool. Genesis has gone all Phil Collins.

  The trouble is that there are only a few streets in London where the big multinational retailers want to be. This means the rents are six times higher on the King’s Road than they are on Haight Street in San Francisco. One American chain called Forever 21 paid almost £14 million in key money to HMV to take over its lease on Oxford Street. And against that sort of financial clout, a slightly off-his-head jewellery designer with a fondness for growing beans and a laissez-faire attitude to payment is going to find himself priced out of the market.

  The good news is, however, that I’m by no means the only person who shivers with despair at Britain’s one-size-fits-nobody attitude to shopping. I’m not the only person who fumes with rage over the sheer length of time it takes to pay. And how the financial pressure to make every square foot count means stock and changing rooms are smaller than most lavatory cisterns.