How Hard Can It Be?

by Jeremy Clarkson

  And therein lies my problem with all this. At the moment, when a historian or a genealogist uncovers a faded picture from Victorian times, he will know it was a special occasion and that the person with his unsmiling face and ramrod back must either have been important or have done something worthwhile. But what will he be able to deduce when he leafs through the pictures we take today? Nothing. Except that we had machinegun-trigger fingers, enormous comedy noses and monochrome pets and we all got married in a fog of Vaseline on a swing.

  Sunday 7 June 2009

  Now there’s a first – my elephant has just exploded

  Recently, a friend bet me that I would never begin a newspaper column by suggesting that the musical score of Ondine, a little-known ballet, is virtually identical to side one of Works: Volume One, the Emerson, Lake and Palmer double album from 1977.

  I don’t normally go to the ballet. I usually have better things to do than sit about watching men standing on one leg for two hours. But last weekend I was taken by my ten-year-old daughter to the Royal Opera House to see Ondine. And here goes: I couldn’t help noticing that the score is virtually identical to side one of Works: Volume One, the Emerson, Lake and Palmer double album from 1977.

  Now, we know Keith Emerson was not averse to dropping a bit of classical pomp into his prog-rockery. For Brain Salad Surgery, he lifted chunks of Hubert Parry’s score for ‘Jerusalem’, and on Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky is credited as a co-writer. I was always under the impression, though, that side one of Works, a towering classical achievement, was all Keith’s work. The album sleeve notes certainly suggest that. And yet there I was, in the ballet, not just recognizing phrases and chords, but predicting precisely what would come next. Because I’d heard it all before.

  It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that Keith, a talented songwriter and knifeman, thought to himself: ‘The music from Ondine, a little-known ballet, has not been used to advertise tyres or chocolate. And chances are, no one who goes to the ballet will ever listen to ELP. So I’ll nick it.’ That would be a moral and legal outrage. So there must be another explanation. And there is. On a piano, there are only around twenty-five types of chord, each of which has twelve possible roots and can be inverted in a number of ways. Do the maths and it works out at around 8,400 possible combinations.

  The simple fact of the matter, then, is that by about 1963, all those combinations and all the combinations of stringing them together had been used up. It is therefore inevitable that some pieces of music are going to sound pretty much identical to something that has gone before. And as a result of that, it is pointless for bands to record new music. We’ve heard it all before.

  There is a similar problem with exploration. Obviously, every mountain has already been climbed, which is why, nowadays, you need to reach the top of Everest in the nude to make waves. Sometimes, when I am up in the Scottish Highlands, or in the middle of Iceland, I wonder if any human has ever trodden on the same piece of earth that I’m treading on at that precise moment. It’s nice to think I’m the first. But, realistically, it is improbable.

  In all forms of artistic endeavour, we see similar issues. Surely I am not the only person to have noticed that Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon is identical in every way to Rocky. Or that every modern bespoke, architect-designed house is the same as all the other modern bespoke, architect-designed houses. Or that every painting for sale on the walls of my local pub is identical to all the paintings for sale in your local pub. There are very few ways of painting a cow in a meadow. And they’ve all been done already.

  It’s rather depressing to think that, no matter what you do or where you go, you will always be Scott of the Antarctic, the plucky chap who came in second. Or that you can spend years writing an epic, only to have some artistic dunderhead think: ‘You’ve stolen that from a ballet.’

  However, there is one area in which every one of us breaks new ground every single day. We do it every time we speak.

  Recently, while filming an episode for the new series of Top Gear, which starts again next Sunday, incidentally, I turned to Richard Hammond and said: ‘Oh no. I’ve just shoved this anarchy flag through my water lilo.’ And I can be absolutely sure that no one has ever said such a thing before. ‘My elephant has just exploded.’ No one ever said that either. Or: ‘My word, Gordon Brown’s doing a good job.’ Or: ‘Caroline Flint. Mmm. Tasty.’

  Last week we learnt that there were now exactly 999,999 words in the English language. Actually, a spokesman for the Global Language Monitor claims there are a million, but since the millionth entry is ‘Web 2.0’, it must be discounted on the basis it is an existing word with a number tagged on to the end.

  Then you have the Oxford English Dictionary, which claims there are in fact 616,000 ‘word forms’ but only 171,000 that could be called current.

  Whatever the true figure, I calculated recently that the BBC alone transmits around 87m words a day, all of which manage to offend the Daily Mail, and while I accept that most people only ever use a few hundred types of word in the course of a lifetime – unless they are estate agents, in which case it’s about a billion, none of which makes any sense – we cannot ignore the fact that there are 400m people in the world for whom English is the first language.

  That’s 400m people saying, on average, 1,500 words a day. Week in, week out. You’d imagine, then, that every single combination would have been used up years ago, and yet we can be certain no one has ever said: ‘I name this ship HMS Vulnerable.’ Or: ‘The thing I love most about my husband is his herpes.’ Or: ‘Look at that maniac in that Saab.’

  We can also be certain that making a whole newspaper column out of the similarities between Ondine and Emerson, Lake and Palmer has never been done before. Definitely not by anyone who could be £10 better off as a result. But then, I need the money because, according to the Daily Mail, all BBC presenter salaries are to be slashed. Interestingly, though, no one had ever said that either.

  Sunday 14 June 2009

  No, I won’t wear a tiara, if it’s all the same to you

  Back in the 1980s, I seemed to spend half my life traipsing to Covent Garden to hire a dinner jacket and the other half mournfully explaining to the man on the returns desk that it was covered in sick when I rented it. And that, no, despite the strong smell of chlorine and the fact it was only 6 in long, it had most definitely not been in a swimming pool. What’s more, every wedding, and there was one every weekend from what I remember, required the idiotic combination of a stovepipe hat and a morning suit. Which would then be ruined because I’d have to leave the reception and dash off to throw some food at the chap who was getting hitched the following Saturday. Inevitably, that led to more mournfulness at Moss Bros.

  Back in those days, you couldn’t go anywhere without going home first to get changed. Restaurants would turn you away if you weren’t wearing a tie. Gentlemen were required to wear jackets. Shorts were for the playing field, and I was once turned away from Rotters Nitespot in Doncaster because, despite my claims that the jacket was actually velvet, the bouncer was most insistent it was made of corduroy. Corduroy was a big no-no in Donny back then. Because it was deemed cheap, publicans and club owners felt that you wouldn’t care too much if it were torn in half in a fight. You had to be smart because that way, it was felt, you’d be less likely to stick a pint pot into the face of someone who was looking at you funnily.

  Happily, these days things are very different. Last weekend I went to a posh wedding and nobody’s jacket went down to the backs of their knees. I wore a £40 suit I’d had made in Vietnam. One chap was in a pair of Levi’s.

  Then, last week, I was at a fundraising event for Palestinian children in London’s glittering West End. Time was, I’d have had to dash into an Indian restaurant on the way to ‘borrow’ a waiter’s bow tie. Not any more. People appeared to be wearing what they’d had on when they finished work. Lily Allen wasn’t even sporting a bra. The hussy.

  At the Royal Opera House
not that long ago it was all veils and tails. Now they will let you in in your underpants. And why not? Who says that to see a woman on tiptoe you need to be mummified in starch? I think this casualization is excellent because, if you are staging a get-together, whether it be a fundraising event for the people of Gaza or a wedding, it is absurd to tell your guests what they must wear. That would be like forcing them not to smoke, or insisting that all the vegetablists eat meat. If you are a host, then it is your duty to make sure that your guests have as nice a time as possible. That means letting them wear and do and eat whatever takes their fancy. If I invite you round to my house, it’s because I want to spend an evening in your company. And I don’t care about what box you come in. Army boots and a jockstrap? Fine. Naked? That’s fine too. Especially if you are Lily Allen.

  However, even today, with liberalism running amok, the dress code has survived. And often you need Colossus to decipher it. ‘Country casual’; ‘purple and fun’; ‘1963’. Or, worst of all, ‘fancy dress’. I was invited last week to a ‘white tie and tiara’ do and I’m afraid it went the way of all invitations where the host tells the guests what to wear. Into the bin. White tie and tiara? Do me a favour.

  The worst offender, however, is Royal Ascot, which trundled into the summer last week with all the welcoming warmth of a bed of rusty nails. Gentlemen are required to wear a black or a grey morning coat and a top hat that may be removed only in restaurants or in enclosed seating areas. That’s stupid enough but things are so much worse for women, who must wear a hat or a ‘substantial fascinator’. Nope, I have no idea either. But then things get really idiotic. You may not bare your midriff, you may not wear a miniskirt, you may not wear anything with a halter neck, and dress straps must be at least 1 in across. Anyone whose dress has straps narrower than this will have their royal enclosure pass removed and may or may not be slapped lightly by the Queen.

  Amazingly, women are allowed to wear trouser suits, the national costume of the terminally dull, but the trousers must match the jacket. Who dreams this stuff up? It’s not taken from the pages of tradition because women did not wear trouser suits until the glass ceiling was removed in about 1993. It’s recent. And that means somewhere out there, walking around, with a vote and a driving licence, is a person who actually sat down one day and decided women who wished to see a horse running past them very quickly with a small Irishman on its back would be allowed to wear trousers, but only if they were made from the same material as the jacket.

  How empty must your life be to think of such a rule? How pointless and stupid? It genuinely baffles me because if you reach a point in your existence where you start to worry about whether men should be allowed to wear a hat while eating lunch, then you must have considered and done everything else that life has to offer. Up to and including what it would feel like to put a shotgun in your mouth and pull the trigger.

  All a dress code such as this does is encourage the orange and the dim to come along and pretend that they are posh for the day. Meanwhile, the wicked and the interesting are doing something else. In a pair of jeans.

  Sunday 21 June 2009

  I’m not superstitious, Officer, but it’s bad karma to harry a druid

  I have only ever given my children one piece of advice. Other parents I know talk solemnly about drugs, sex, pregnancy, work, manners and the importance of good A-level grades. But all I’ve ever told my kids is this: ‘No matter what, never salute a magpie.’

  I don’t know when I got into the habit. Or even why. Maybe it was peer pressure. Maybe it was boredom. But one day, while driving along, I saw a lone magpie hopping about on the grass verge and I saluted it. And that was that. I was hooked. And now, I know for sure that if I fail to salute even a single one of them I will catch cancer within the hour.

  This is a huge problem in Milton Keynes, where, for reasons known only to Bill Oddie, there are one trillion magpies, all of which hang around by themselves on the endless sponsored roundabouts. I’d love to know how many people die on the town’s roads each year because the driver was warding off bad luck. I bet it’s millions.

  All superstition is mumbo jumbo. I know that. As a result, I will happily walk under a ladder, and I know that if some bees come to my house it will not burn down. I realize too that a black cat will give me just as much asthma as a brown one and that if my left ear feels warm it’s because it’s a sunny day. And yet I have this magpie thing going on. It makes me very angry as there is no methadone. There is no clinic. There is no cure.

  Still, it could be worse. I could believe in the power of ley lines, the magic of dance and that I have the ability, through deep concentration, to become a dog or a cow, so that I may experience life from its point of view. In short, I’m awfully glad I’m not a druid.

  Last week they were at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice. Apparently, 36,500 poor souls got up in the middle of the night and were dragged by their beliefs and their little Citroëns to a field in Wiltshire, where they were forced by custom to mark the disappointingly cloudy dawn by chanting and pretending to be King Arthur.

  As a saluter of magpies, I have every sympathy with these people and I wish them well. I like having hippies in the world. They bring a richness and a calm, and while they like to wear hoods, they do not beat up old ladies.

  And that brings me on to the point of this morning’s column. What in the name of whatever god you hold dear were the police doing using an unmanned spy drone to fly around, taking pictures of these people as they swayed gently in the stillness of morning? Can you imagine the hullabaloo if Dixon of Dock Green used similar tactics during a Catholic church service? If the smells and bells were drowned out by the relentless buzz of a spy plane? And let’s be honest, shall we? On the crime-o-meter, Johnny Pope’s merry little gang of bachelors is far more likely to be involved in serious wrongdoing than some dizzy druid bird with flowers in her hair. I can see why the army might need a spy drone in Afghanistan. But how on earth could the Wiltshire constabulary justify the purchase of such a thing? To catch crop circlists? It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.

  And why were revellers limited to taking just four cans of beer each on to the site? This means there must have been a meeting at which a busybody in a trouser suit will have said ‘two’ and then a fat man will have said ‘five’, and much discussion will have taken place, at our expense, before the figure of four was arrived at.

  This is even more absurd, come to think of it, than the police spy plane. Certainly I feel sure that early man would not have embarked on the road to civilization if he had thought that, one day, humankind would arrive at a point where one man has the right to determine how much beer another man may take into a field in the middle of the night.

  Then there’s the drugs business. Now, I’m not going to come here and defend the use of narcotics. But we learnt last week that there are now 1m cocaine users in Britain. Statistically then we can be assured that marching powder is being used in the House of Commons, in village halls, in business meetings, at dinner parties and even, perhaps, by pop stars.

  So why pick on the druids? Why send sniffer dogs to their annual summer get-together? We know there will have been some dope and we know, because they’d stayed up all night, that some of the morris men will have got some marching powder up their schnozzers. But if it’s busts they’re after, Plod would probably have had a higher success rate if they’d had a snout about in their own locker rooms.

  The fact is that despite the massive, and extremely costly, operation the police made only thirty-seven arrests, mostly for minor public-order offences. That’s thirty-seven from a crowd of 36,500. One in a thousand or thereabouts.

  I’m not suggesting that the police ignore large gatherings of people. Whether it’s a football match or a bunch of Tamils in Parliament Square, the forces of law and order need to be on hand to give people directions to the nearest bus stop and break up whatever fights may occur. But I simply cannot understand why such large numbers we
re used to monitor a group of people who, by their very nature, pose about as much threat to the world as a flock of budgerigars. They hum. They make love to one another. They speak in Welsh. And they go home.

  Certainly I can assure you that driving along while under the influence of a silly scare story about magpies is much more of a threat to the nation’s peace and tranquillity.

  Sunday 28 June 2009

  After three brushes with death in planes I want a parachute

  Can you imagine what it must have been like on board that Air France aeroplane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean last month? Rather dreadfully, I can.

  Admittedly, my first plane crash was a rather minor affair. The Vietnamese pilot had had several attempts to land the country’s only jet, and I sort of knew as we bumped towards the runway for the fourth that it wouldn’t go well. And it didn’t. We ended up in a field.

  The second crash was in Libya. Or Chad. Or possibly Mali. The pilot wasn’t really sure where we were and, as it turned out, nor did he have any idea how to land. Because he was a bit drunk. Weirdly, he managed to get the nose wheel down first, and because it’s not really designed for that, it snapped off, meaning we skidded in a sparky, bouncy sort of way through the Sahara for a while.

  The third was not actually a crash. But it was by far the most terrifying, because it really did look for several minutes like there could be no other outcome.

  I had boarded a small, windowless twelve-seater on an island off Cuba for a short flight to Havana. The plane had been built by the Russians at some point in the 1950s and then used by the Angolan air force throughout the seventies and eighties before it eventually arrived in Cuba as a city hopper. Judging by the amount of oil that streaked along the wings and the smoke that belched from the Lada engines when they coughed into life, it had been built by people who couldn’t care less and serviced by no one, ever.