Born to Be Riled Page 7

  Roads wear out and every so often we must expect the Cavaliers in the outside lane to be replaced by men whose trousers fail to cover all their bottoms. Cones will go up and the traffic will stop.

  It may well be irritating to sit there, being gently marinated in your own sweat. But the fact is that roadworks are the inevitable result of a thriving society in which 42 ton trucks thunder up and down the highways and byways, bringing fresh produce to your corner shop. However, there’s a worrying trend. For the last four weeks, London’s South Circular Road has been closed due to an entirely new sort of roadwork. I have been marooned by gridlocked traffic for more than a month. And it’s not because the road had worn out or because some vital underground maintenance needed to be carried out. No, they have dug up the main artery between south-west England and the City because Cableguyz, our local cable TV company, decided to drive one of their JCBs through a water main.

  You’ll know when the cable people are about to come round, because you’ll wake up one morning to find the pavement outside your house looks like one of Joseph’s more vivid overcoats. All the electricity, gas and water routes are individually marked out in different coloured chalk so that they know exactly where to dig when the time comes.

  When the time does come, your street begins to look like the Somme. If they don’t park a JCB on your car, they’ll encase it with mud. And then, when all their carefully laid chalk marks are covered with more mud, they’ll wait for you to step into the shower before they drill through the water pipe. You get out and are half-way through writing a book on your computer and they’ll cut the power. Then, in the evening, when you have eight people coming for dinner, they’ll sever the gas. Outside, there will be troughs both at the top and bottom of your road, so even if you could get to your car, there’s no way you’ll be able to drive it anywhere.

  A day or two after they finish, a man with a bad suit and a cheesy grin will knock on your door asking if you’d like the cable service which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is now available in your street. If this happens, there’s only one course of action – you must punch him straight in the mouth. What you must not do is invite him in and sign all the various forms which spew out of his plastic briefcase.

  If you do, more men will come round to drill great big holes in your walls, just so that your television can show exactly what was coming in anyway, via the big council house wok on the roof.

  I now have cable television and it is a disaster. It tells me what is happening in Lewisham, and at night it shows me a bunch of overweight German blondes with black pubic hair having simulated sex. There are two 24-hour-a-day news services, both presented by people whose teeth are so white I can’t look at them, and reruns of programmes which weren’t funny 25 years ago – and which are very not funny now.

  I can see French game shows and, if I tune into QVC, I can buy a video recorder from Tony Blackburn. Yesterday, a woman spent one hour trying to sell me a necklace, so I tuned to MTV, where Prince was singing a song called ‘My Name Is Prince’. Blimey.

  Most of the 36 channels on offer are scrambled, and if I want better porn or big bucks films or, perish the thought, football, I need to dig even deeper into my pockets. And I refuse to let my money be used to dig up your street. It’s not sociable.

  To be fair, I do get a great deal of motorsport on my television these days, but car racing without the Murray Walker soundtrack is like holidaying in a caravan – it’s not really a holiday at all. The only advantage Eurosport has is that it covers post-race press conferences, whereas Grandstand switches immediately to cricket as the chequered flag falls.

  But is this worth £168 a year, when you get the BBC for half that? Plus, the BBC doesn’t dig up your road, sever all your essential services, cut off your telephone for two days or send cheesy salesmen round wearing awful clothes.

  Mystic Clarkson’s hopeless F1 predictions

  Before giving the result of a football match which is to be televised later, news readers usually invite us to put our fingers in our ears and hum.

  But this morning, as you lay in the bath listening to the radio, I bet it went something like this. ‘In Northern Ireland today, Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, likened the situation to… Hill won… the conflict in Israel…’

  Bang. There was no warning and those two little words took all the suspense from the subsequent televisual feast. Plus, with Grand Prix, knowing who won the first race means you have a pretty good idea of who’s going to win the world championship.

  Furthermore, when you know who’s won, there is little to be gained from finding out how he did it. He simply drove faster than everyone else.

  But if I take my cynical trousers off for a moment, and slip into a nice pair of sensible slacks, in beige, from Marks & Spencer, it’s worth having a little look at what might happen in 1996.

  The experts are suggesting that Michael Schumacher stands no chance in his all-new Ferrari. They point to the winter testing programme, saying that the car arrived too late to be shaken down properly, and that first indications suggest its new V10 engine is too gutless and too unreliable.

  Well I’ve met enough racing drivers to know they don’t choose to lose. Michael Schumacher could have stayed with Benetton, a team he knows and enjoys, and very probably won the crown for the third year in succession.

  No one with a ‘need to win’ like his is going to throw the chance of another trophy away because he feels like a change. He’s gone to Ferrari because he knows something we don’t. I have no idea how the car performed in Australia because I wrote this before the event but, mark my words, Schumacher – a man I hate more than butter beans and Jeffrey Archer – is my tip for 1996.

  Damon Hill, we are told, has spent the winter psyching himself up for the battles that lie ahead. He is now a lean, mean fighting machine who will slice through the field in what everyone says is the best car.

  Well Damon’s a nice chap and that’s where his problems start. Nice chaps with wives and children do not go wheel to wheel at 160mph in a fight to the death. To do that, you must be a berk, and Damon is not at all berkish, which is why he is destined to be the runner-up. Again.

  Some are saying his new team mate, Jacques Villeneuve, is a more realistic bet. He, after all, is the son of possibly the greatest entertainer of them all – Gilles Villeneuve. Yes, well my dad understood how to do his VAT returns but that doesn’t make me a chartered accountant.

  Damon’s fans hit back, saying he has trounced all-comers in the American Indycar series. Oh for heaven’s sake, that’s like saying you can be a Red Arrows pilot because you’re good at Monopoly.

  We’ve seen these Indycar boys come over to F1 before – Michael Andretti was the last – and they make complete and utter fools of themselves. Look at Nigel Mansell. In America he became used to duelling with fat has-beens like Mario Andretti, so when he came back to F1 last year he looked as stupid as his facial topiary.

  But back to F1 and Benetton. My sources suggest they do have some reliability problems and that Berger and Alesi are finding the car’s twitchiness a nightmare. And anyway, the likeable Gerhard Berger seems more interested these days in putting a plastic dog turd under your pillow than actually winning a race.

  I hear that McLaren is now back as a force to be reckoned with. David Coulthard has promised not to spin off on the warm-up lap anymore, or run into the pit wall when coming in for tyres, and Mika Hakkinen is fit once more after his awful crash in Adelaide. Indeed, he smashed the lap record while testing at Estoril only last week.

  This means he is more deranged than ever. He has an awesome reputation in Grand Prix as a madman and there is now talk that his head injury has made him even nuttier. I like the guy hugely, but don’t think he’ll win.

  First, he will continue to crash a lot as he ekes out levels of grip which are not available; and second, while the new Mercedes engine goes like a bomb, it will also go off like one fairly often.

  That will be mildly entertaining
but it won’t really compensate for the tedium that will result from a new rule in 1996. No car is allowed to qualify unless it can get within 107 per cent of the poleman’s qualifying time. Thus, there will be no Fortis and Minardis cruising round to get in everyone’s way.

  Being held up by a dawdling backmarker added some spice to the race, and gave Murray Walker something to shout about. But now it has gone, and next year Murray will go too.

  There is some good news though, because when ITV takes over the reins in 1997, the BBC will have to concentrate its resources on the British Touring Car Championship.

  This is 26,000 times better than Formula One, with more overtaking in one lap than you get in the whole Grand Prix Championship.

  The Touring Car season begins on Easter Monday. You want to know who’ll win? Haven’t a clue. You want to know who’ll crash? Most of them. Can’t wait.

  Commercial cobblers

  Have you seen that hideous man in the Boots commercial on television? The one who spices up his tedious life by choosing a designer pair of spectacles. So that I can’t poke him in the eye should we ever meet in a lift, or on a railway station. ‘He’ll take care of that. And it’s good to know…’

  Oh for God’s sake man, please shut up. We’ve got the message. Boots do designer glasses. If things get so bad that I can’t read a newspaper without being in another room, I’ll feel my way straight down there in my blazer and slacks.

  This is the point, surely, of television advertising. In the tiny timeframe available it’s only possible to give the audience one little nugget. The product may be a dodecahedron, but in the ad slots, we only get an atom.

  Unless the subject matter is cars, in which case the trick is to hand over absolutely no information whatsoever.

  In a Volvo, it is possible to drive across the Corinth canal on railway lines should the more conventional bridge be blocked for some reason.

  How much does a T5 cost? How fast does it go? Can you get a chest of drawers in the boot? Dunno, but if anyone ever starts to throw packing cases at me out of a DC3, I’ll wish I had one.

  The point, of course, is that the advertising agency is trying to create an image. If you have a Volvo T5, you are the sort of person who is likely to be chasing Dakotas. And while your next-door neighbours are doing the garden, you’re out in the eye of the hurricane.

  Buy a T5 and you’ll be at every dinner party in town, being anecdotal and getting laid.

  Unless someone turns up with a Peugeot 406. This guy gets raped in a restaurant, just after he’s pulled a little girl from under the wheels of a truck. He plays rugby, is a mercenary and wears a sharp suit.

  There’s no such thing as an average person. Absolutely. But there is such a thing as an average car, and the 406 is it. I’d rather have a Mondeo, but in the knicker-elastic snapping stakes, the 406 is streets ahead.

  Today, the most important man in the car design process is the advertising copywriter. All cars in the mid-ranges are basically the same, so the only way people can choose is by selecting an image.

  The 406 is an endearing and well-priced family saloon with the usual features, the usual economy and the usual performance. There are the usual mistakes too in the shape of poor seats, a lousy gearbox and rather too much noise from the 2.0 litre engine.

  I am sure it will be a massive sales success for Peugeot though, and that is entirely down to the admen.

  Look at the Vauxhall Vectra. Here is another dull and tedious family saloon car with all the usual features and all the usual mistakes. It is being annihilated in the sales charts. Why? Because the advertisements are crap.

  In an attempt to encapsulate the essence of New Age imagery, the film director responsible has obviously studied every special effect in the book and, for the reputed cost of £1 million, has apparently ended up shooting the commercial through marmalade.

  To date, Lowe Howard Spinach, the advertising agency responsible, has spent another £6 million to ensure that a whopping 96 per cent of the UK population will see the commercial 17.8 times. Ten per cent will see it 30 to 40 times and 1 per cent will see it over 60 times.

  You will be able to recognize this 1 per cent in the streets. They will be gently banging their heads against brick walls.

  As far as I’m concerned, we should bring the millennium forward by 45 months so that this stupid commercial can be taken off the air and out of the magazines, and put into the wastepaper basket.

  Where it will nestle alongside the tripe without onions that Rover has served up just recently.

  ‘An Englishman in New York’ cost Rover £1.3 million to make. And the joke is that they don’t even sell their cars in the USA because Americans grew tired of the endless mechanical maladies.

  When it was announced that BMW were to take over Rover, two senior executives were apparently heard discussing their futures. One said to the other, ‘Do nothing. That way you can’t be blamed for anything.’

  If only he’d listened. But no. He sanctioned that ridiculous advert which served only to line the already bulging pockets of Sting’s accountant.

  Where’s the image association? I can’t afford a parking space, so I watch television from inside my car. I’m a berk. Cross the road if you see me coming the other way.

  Dear Rover. Large warehouse flats are out. The couple in the Findus advert had one of those back in 1987. Wall Street is in the discount bucket at my video rental shop. It’s 1996, boys, and Peugeot are making mincemeat of you.

  Your engineers did a good job with the Rover 200, and your stylists were wide awake too, but your admen must have been having a large and luxurious lunch with plenty of wine that day.

  Probably with the guys from Nissan. The Car They Don’t Want You To Drive. Good. I wasn’t going to drive it anyway.

  Struck down by a silver bullet in Detroit

  Last night, in one of the world’s five great cities, I shared an alligator with Bob Seger. Ever since that long hot summer of 1976, when I ricocheted around Staffordshire desperately trying to shake off those awkward teenage blues, I have worshipped the ground on which old Bob has walked. I know that it is desperately train-spotterish to have heroes, but here we have a man whose lyrics are pure poetry, whose melodies are a match for anything dreamed up by Elgar or Chopin and whose live act is, quite simply, the best in the world.

  After a gig at the Hammersmith Odeon in London in 1977, the manager wrote to Melody Maker to say that in all his years he had never seen a better concert. I was there, and it was even better than that. And there I was, 18 years later, in a restaurant in downtown Detroit, sharing a piece of battered alligator with the man himself. My tongue wasn’t just tied – it looked like a corkscrew. I wanted to talk music but Bob’s a chatterbox with the laugh of a cement mixer, and he wanted to talk cars. He was born in Detroit and apart from a brief spell in Los Angeles, which he hated, he’s lived there all his life.

  He argued, quite forcefully, that if you’re a Detroiter you are bound to be part man and part V8. The only jobs are in car factories, all your neighbours work there, and the only way to escape the production line is music. It’s no coincidence that Motown began in the Motor City.

  The buses move around empty, as does the hopeless monorail. The train station is derelict. Everyone drives a car in Detroit because cars are everyone’s soul. And Bob Seger is no exception.

  A point that’s hammered home by the GMC Typhoon in which the great man had arrived. He has a brace of Suzuki motorcycles on which he tears around the States, getting inspiration for songs like ‘Roll Me Away’, but for family trips to Safeway he uses the 285bhp, four-wheel drive truck – you may remember that we took its pick-up sister, the Syclone, to a drag race on Top Gear last year.

  Bob’s mate, Dennis Quaid, has one too apparently, which made me itch to ask what Meg Ryan was like – they’re married to one another – but Bob was off again, telling us between mouthfuls of reptile how things used to be in Detroit, how he used to go and race tuned-up musclecars bet
ween the lights, how a side exhaust gave an extra 15bhp and how they posted lookouts for the cops.

  This was heaven. The man I’ve most wanted to meet for nearly 20 years is a car freak, but the best was still to come. When we’d finished dinner, he sat back and pulled a pack of Marlboro from his pocket. He smokes, too! And so, he added, does Whitney Houston. By this stage, I had regressed to the point where I could easily have been mistaken for a four-year-old boy – I may have even wet myself slightly – but the full flood was saved until later that night.

  Do they, I enquired gingerly, still race their cars on the streets. ‘Oh sure,’ came the reply. ‘Most Friday and Saturday nights up on Woodward you can find some races going down.’And this, I’m happy to tell you, was not just some rock-star-close-to-your-roots-SOB. Because they do. Big money changes hands as a hundred or more guys turn up in Chargers and Road Runners and God knows what else. And then, from midnight until dawn, they simply line up at the lights, wait for the green and go. We watched it all, and happily, from your point of view, we filmed it too, for a new series called Motorworld.

  We learned, too, that in days gone by the big three American manufacturers used to take their new, hot cars to these races to see just how quick they were. And that, even today, engineers may sneak a new development engine out of the factory and down to Woodward to see if it can cut the mustard.

  And all this is set to a backdrop of Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Don Henley, Ted Nugent and Bob Seger – plus the thousand or so other stars that were born and raised in the Motor City.

  And we have Longbridge and Take That. Which makes me want to throw up.

  You can’t park there – or there

  Having tried to go shopping in Oxford last week, I now know why Inspector Morse needed to be a two-hour televisual feast. It took him that long to get across town.

  On that inner ring road you get to be very good indeed at crosswords.