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Jeremy Clarkson’s Hot 100
Jeremy Clarkson’s Planet Dagenham
Born to be Riled
Clarkson on Cars
The World According to Clarkson
I Know You Got Soul
And Another Thing
Don’t Stop Me Now
For Crying Out Loud!
The World According to Clarkson
Volume Three
JEREMY CLARKSON
MICHAEL JOSEPH
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
MICHAEL JOSEPH
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published 2008
1
Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
978-0-14-192372-7
This is dedicated with gratitude to the Green Movement, the Americans and the Health and Safety Executive for giving me so much to write about.
The contents of this book first appeared in Jeremy Clarkson’s Sunday Times column. Read more about the world according to Clarkson every week in the Sunday Times
Contents
Mother knows all the best games
On your marks for a village Olympics
We’re all going on a celebrity holiday
The worst word in the language
McEton, a clever English franchise
Rock school sees off drone school
Flogging absolute rubbish is a gift
My kingdom for a horse hitman
Where all the TV viewers went
It takes immense skill to waste time
An Oscar-winning village hall bash
The secret life of handbags
Bad-hair days on the local news
The lost people of outer Britain
Cut me in on the hedge fund, boys
Flying with the baby from hell
With the gypsies in junk heaven
Listen to me, I’m the drought buster
Trust me, work is more fun than fun
Pot-Porritt wants me eliminated
Simon Cowell ate our strawberries
The united states of total paranoia
Arrested just for looking weird
School reports are agony for parents
How to make a man of a mummy’s boy
My near-death toilet experience
When I am the Mayor of London
How to blow up a dead seal
The Royals, a soap made in heaven
I’m calling time on silly watches
Amazing what you can dig up in Africa
If you’re homeless find a hedgerow
There’s a literary future in the iLav
Life’s ultimate short straw
My new career as a rock god
My designer dog is a hellhound
The ideal pet? Here, nice ratty
The conspiracy not to cure the cold
Real men don’t go home at 7 p.m.
Schools are trying to break children
That Henry II, he was dead right
Making a meal of Sunday lunch
Nice jet, shame about abroad
It’s English as a foreign language
I didn’t drop the dead donkey
Let’s all stay with Lord Manilow
Brought down by bouncing bangers
TV heaven is an upside-down skier
No pain no gain (and no point)
The end is nigh, see it on YouTube
Robbie and I know about pills
Drip-drip-drip of a revolution
Fear and loathing in Las Manchester
Bullseye! The pub is dying
You can’t kill me, I’m the drummer
What the hell are we saying here?
Hell is a tent zip in the snow
If you’re ugly you’ve got to be funny
Why Brits make the best tourists
Save the planet, eat a vegan
Stuff the tiger – long live extinction
I went to London and it had gone
Playing the fool at Glastonbury
Kick the fans out of Wimbledon
Hands off 007 or I’ll shoot you
Get back in your stockings, girls
Save rural Britain – sell it to the rich
Dunked by dippy floating voters
The hell of being a British expat
Binge drinking is good for you
Public school is the hell we need
Dial M for a mobile I can actually work
Biggles, you’re a crashing bore
The kids are all right with lousy TV
It’s a man’s game being a rugby ref
Feed the world – eat blue whales
It’s lies that make TV interesting
A Met Office severe bossiness warning
Make my day, sir, shoot a hoodie
Enough, I’m gonna torch my antiques
Our poor bloody backroom boys
Unhand my patio heater, archbishop
Mother knows all the best games
Can we be honest for a moment. You didn’t have a good Christmas, did you? Your turkey was too dry, your kids spent all day glued to their internets, and you didn’t bother watching the Big Christmas Film because you’ve owned it for years on DVD.
What you should have had to liven things up was my mother. She arrived at my house with a steely resolve that the Christmas holidays would be exactly like the Christmas holidays she enjoyed when she was a child. Only without the diphtheria or the bombing raids.
My mother does not like American television shows because she ‘can’t understand what they’re on about’. She doesn’t like PlayStations either because they rot your brain. And she really doesn’t like internets because they never work.
What she likes are parlour games. And so, because you don’t argue with my mother, that’s what we played.
The kids, initially, were alarmed. They think anything that doesn’t run on electricity is sinister an
d a little bit frightening.
So the idea of standing up in front of the family and acting out a book or a film erred somewhere between pointlessness and witchcraft.
Strangely, however, they seemed to like it. Mind you, playing with a seven-year-old is hard, since everything she acted out had six words and involved a lot of scampering up and down the dining room, on all fours, barking. Usually, the answer was that famously dog-free movie with four words in the title, Pirates of the Caribbean.
My mother, on the other hand, could only act out books and films from the 1940s, but this didn’t seem to curb the kids’ massive enthusiasm. They even want to watch The Way to the Stars now, on the basis my mother made it sound like Vice City.
I loathe charades but even when I tried to bring a halt to proceedings by doing The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, they cheered me on with roars of encouragement. Other books I used to try to ruin the day were Versailles: the View from Sweden, which is nearly impossible to act out and even harder to guess. And when that failed, Frank McLynn’s completely uncharad-able 175g.
Eventually, with my mother still chuntering on about Trevor Howard’s impeccable and unAmerican diction, and the seven-year-old still under the table barking, and me trying to act out If, mercifully, we decided to play something else.
Not Monopoly. Dear God in heaven. Please spare me from that. I’m due in Norway on Thursday and if we break out the world’s most boring board game, I’d still be cruising down the Angel Islington in my ship. Happily, it turned out that in my mother’s world Monopoly is far too modern and that in her day you made your own entertainment.
So out came the pens and paper. I can’t be bothered to explain the rules of the game she chose, but in essence you have to think of countries, or girls’ names or things you find in space that begin with a certain letter. It sounds terrible compared with watching The Simpsons or shooting an LA prostitute in the face, but you know what, the kids loved this even more than charades.
The seven-year-old was so keen she developed a sudden and hitherto unnoticed ability to write. I’m not kidding. We pay £5 million a term to have someone teach her. She has a nanny. And we spend endless hours trying to get her nose out of Pirates of the Caribbean and into a book, but to no avail. She has never, once, written anything down that could pass for a word.
But that day she wrote until her pen ran dry, and wailed like a banshee when it was time for bed.
With the kids tucked up, I did what any sane man would do and reached for the television remote. But my mother had other plans. So we put a tablecloth over the jigsaw she’d been doing and played cards.
What a buzz. It was a blizzard of smoke, wine, trumps and tension. There’s no television show, no internet site and certainly no PlayStation game that provides you with the same thrill as sitting there, a bit drunk, in a room full of lies, with a fist full of rubbish. A game of cards, it seems to me, provides everything you could possibly want out of life. It’s as exciting as any drama and as convivial as any dinner party. It’s also fun, free, environmentally friendly and something you can do as a family.
What’s more, having discovered that my seven-year-old can write, I also discovered the next day during a game of Blob! that she can perform complicated mental arithmetic. She’s claimed for 12 straight months that she can’t count but she can sure as hell count cards. I swear to God that in the three days of Christmas she learnt more than in the last three years of school.
There’s more, too, because I also swear to God that we had more fun as a family than could have been possible if we’d powered up the Roboraptor and turned on our internets.
So, today, while you are stabbing away at buttons on your PlayStation, wondering why you keep being kicked to death, or watching a film that you’ve seen a million times before, only without advertisements, might I suggest you flip the trip switch on your fuse box, light a fire and break out the playing cards, the pens and the paper.
Just avoid the charades.
Because that’s just nature’s way of explaining why you never made it as an actor.
Sunday I January 2006
On your marks for a village Olympics
While watching the absolutely breathtaking New Year’s Eve firework display in London I finally formed an opinion on the question of Britain hosting the Olympic Games.
I should explain at the outset that I don’t much like athletics. Running is fine when you are late for a train, or when you are nine, but the concept of running in a circle for nothing but glory seems a bit medieval if you ask me.
Speaking of which, the javelin. In the olden days when men ate bison and Mr Smith had not yet met Mr Wesson, I should imagine that a chap with an ability to chuck a spear over a great distance would end up with many wives. But now, I don’t really get off on watching a gigantic Pole lobbing a stick.
It’s the same with the hammer. When some enormous Uzbek hurls it into row G of the stadium’s upper circle, do we think he is the best hammer thrower in the world? Or the best hammer thrower among those who’ve dedicated the past four years of their lives to throwing hammers? With the best will in the world, that’s not a terribly big accolade.
No matter. The Olympic Games are like Richard and Judy. Whether you like them or not, they exist and they are popular. The question that’s been vexing me these past few months is whether I should be pleased they’re coming to London.
I think Lord Sir Pope Archbishop Earl Duke King Seb Coe should be richly rewarded for having secured a British win. He was employed to beat the French and by wearing a beige suit and talking about multi-ethnicity he did just that. Good on him.
Now, though, the staging of the event will be handed over to those who built the dome, run the National Health Service, operate Britain’s asylum system, manage the roads, set up the Child Support Agency, invaded Iraq, guard Britain’s European Union rebate and protect the nation’s foxes.
So if we spool forward to the summer of 2012, to the opening ceremony of the London Games, what are we likely to find? A perfect ethnic blend of London schoolchildren prancing about in the nearly finished stadium wearing hard hats and protective goggles lest they are exposed in some way to the Olympic flame. But no swimming pool because health and safety thought it was a ‘drowning hazard’.
That’s then, though. What’s worrying me most of all are the next six years as we struggle under the global spotlight to get the infrastructure built.
To me, good design and cost are the only considerations. But I’m not in charge, health and safety will be. And they’re going to spend every waking moment fighting with those who want all the seating to face east, to keep the Muslims happy, those who have found a rare slug in Newham and would prefer the village to be built elsewhere and those who want all the electricity to come from the wind and the waves, because of global bloody warming.
All Olympic Games since Los Angeles in 1984 have either made a profit or broken even. But I bet Britain shatters that record. Because unlike the Americans and the Australians, and especially the Greeks, we’re obsessed with save the whale, feed the poor, green ideology. And we’ve got it into our heads that even on a construction site no one need ever be injured.
And if people are prepared to waste our money on hi-vi jackets and organic prayer mats, then think how much they’ll be prepared to waste quenching the greed of those who live and work on the proposed site.
Already I’ve heard businessmen say the compensation they’re being offered to move their hopeless company somewhere else is nowhere near enough. They can smell the money and know that all that stands between them and a retirement home in Spain is a bunch of woolly-headed liberals who couldn’t balance the books at a village tombola.
So, what’s to be done to avoid this cataclysmically expensive fiasco? Well, we could hand the whole job over to the French. Or the army. But since, on balance, I want the Olympics to come here, how’s this for a plan? We take the Olympics back to its roots and host the whole thing at my kids’ scho
ol. No, really, I was walking across the playing fields the other day and found myself wondering what more the Olympic bods might need.
At the annual school sports day they can simultaneously stage six sprint races, four games of hockey and several swimming events in the full-sized pool. There’s even a nearby river for Matthew Pinsent. Work needed to make this an Olympic venue would involve nothing more than an enlargement of the long-jump sandpits. And I know a local builder who could do that, with no danger to his workforce, and no impact on global warming, for about £250.
I’m not really kidding here. If you log onto Google Earth, you will find that despite the best efforts of John Prescott to build houses on every school sports pitch in the land, the south-east of England is still littered with a mass of sports facilities. There are enough swimming pools in Surrey alone to keep Mark Spitz going for 40 years.
This, then, is my vision: not to host the safest, least offensive, most globally cooling Games of all time. But the smallest. And then we could spend the savings we make – about £5 billion – on the most important part of the Olympic ceremony. The fireworks.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 1