But what I love most of all is the hair. The anchor’s barnet is always worth a giggle, but when it cuts to the chap in the field I’m like a Smash robot, rolling around in the sitting room, with barely enough breath to summon the children to come and have a look. How does it get like that? Do they take a picture of John Kerry to the barber’s? And what is it cut with? A spade?
Local hair is one of the main reasons why all the tear-jerking, bereaved-parent stories on local news go so wrong. They love someone in tears on local news.
They’ve seen it on Trinny and Susannah. They’ve seen it on The Apprentice and they know it is a ratings winner. They also know it means they have a chance to sign off with a line about counselling.
But they can never quite pull it off. The reporter does everything right. He puts on his special ‘caring’ voice. The cameraman tightens for a Big Close Up when the family photo album is produced. But the parent in question won’t cry because… well, you can’t when the chap with the microphone has a dead horse on his bonce.
That’s why they’re always taken outside, into the cold, for the cutaways and the wides. Because the chill and some grit will get the tear ducts going and then: bang. They have the money shot.
They can go back to the studio for a couple of quick puns, a spot of off-autocue flirting with the weathergirl and then hand you back to Huw Edwards for some proper news about Iraq.
Sunday 26 March 2006
The lost people of outer Britain
As Gordon Brown droned through yet another dreary budget the other day, I was in the Yorkshire Dales, watching a hill farmer bump across the heather and snow in his old Land Rover.
Was he listening to the chancellor, I wondered. And if so, what would he make of those plans to impose a new higher rate of tax on people who drive four-wheel-drive cars, such as his old Defender.
It’s a hard, brutal life up there on the roof of England, especially at this time of year when the lambs are coming. Three times a night those hardy old souls have to drag themselves out of their warm beds to stomp about on the moors with half their arm up a sheep’s backside.
I watched them from my hotel room, their million-candle-power torches piercing the night like Second World War searchlights.
And for what?
A fat lamb these days is worth no more than £50. And now they have to rear five simply to tax their Land Rover. Just because someone from the bigoted metropolitan elite is waging a class war with the yummy mummies of Wandsworth.
Up there in the Dales most people think Leyburn is a long way away, Leeds is Hong Kong and London may as well be on the moon. So when they listen to the radio and the television, they must wonder what on earth everyone is on about.
What is meant, for instance, by immigration? If you look on the census form for the nearest town – Hawes – you will find that 99.6 per cent of the population is ‘white’ and just 0.4 per cent ‘non-Christian’. I presume this blip has something to do with the local Indian restaurant.
Mostly, a dalesman’s idea of exotic food is a bit of blueberry in his Wensleydale, and a foreign language is Geordie. God knows who does the plumbing.
Then you have crime. They must hear on the radio stories of gang rape and 16-year-old girls being shot in the face, and they must wonder if they’ve somehow tuned in to a station from Andromeda.
In a break from filming I was sitting on a bench in the middle of Thwaite (population 29) when into the village trundled the mobile library. That in itself was quaint enough. But it was nothing compared with what happened next. Because from out of the passenger door stepped a community support policewoman.
Now let’s not forget, shall we, that I’m not talking here about the 1940s, or some remote Scottish island. I’m talking about a twenty-first-century village just a couple of hundred miles from London… where the police patrol their patch in mobile libraries.
Car chases would be interesting. Especially if the villains head for West Stonesdale. Sadly, the library can’t follow on that road because it doesn’t have a good enough turning circle for the hairpin bends.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’re assuming there are villains to chase.
‘Well, there are,’ said the (very pretty) policewoman. Oh yeah, I retorted with a southern sneer. ‘And how many people with ASBOs are there within thirty miles of where we’re standing now?’
Wrong question. ‘Aha,’ said the policeperson, ‘we do have a woman in Wensleydale with an ASBO.’ Right. And what had she done? Knifed a bouncer in a late-night brawl? Nicked a car? No, wailed Miss Dales Constable. ‘She hit her brother with a stick of rhubarb.’
I am not making this up. And nor is she. I’ve checked and a woman called Margaret Porter was indeed given an ASBO for throwing three sticks of rhubarb at her brother.
Other crimes? Well, someone had his quad bike stolen last year, but now that Kojak could roll into town at any time in her diesel-powered library that sort of thing has stopped.
Speeding? Difficult to say, because the policewoman set up a dot-matrix site the other day but it didn’t work. She’s taken it to the fire station to see if they can figure out what’s wrong. And if they work it out, they’ll doubtless get a local coal merchant to run it back to the police station.
You get my point. We accept ID cards and traffic cameras because we know there are Albanian people-traffickers in our midst. So why are they accepted in Thwaite, where the most offensive weapon is a vegetable?
There’s more too. I listened to Jonathan Ross talking about some obscure shop on Marylebone High Street. I knew what he was on about. You probably knew what he was on about. But I’d bet my left ear that the hill farmers of West Stonesdale, who can no longer read library books, had absolutely no idea at all.
Likewise the news. We hear, every day, about the chronic water shortage and how we must all stop cleaning our teeth. But up north the reservoirs are overflowing, the brooks are babbling and the concept of a water shortage is as daft as the concept of a diplomatic row over parking tickets.
Last week I suggested that local news programmes on the television are a waste of time. And that national news is much better. But the news we get is not national.
It’s centred on London, which is home to just an eighth of the country’s population. This, if I lived in the Dales, would be very annoying.
Nearly as annoying, in fact, as being made to pay an extra £45 a year to tax my Land Rover because someone in Chelsea recently bought a Hummer.
Sunday 2 April 2006
Cut me in on the hedge fund, boys
I have no idea what a hedge fund is, but after a day trip to Mustique last week I think I need to plant one.
At first I couldn’t quite work out whether this privately owned island in the Caribbean is heaven on earth or a small piece of hell. Certainly, it’s the first country I’ve ever been to which is completed mowed, from end to end, in nice neat strips. Honestly, I’ve been to dirtier, messier nuclear laboratories.
It seems sanitised somehow, but then I thought, what’s wrong with that? A lot of very rich people have come here and built a world where there is no crime, no disease and no unpleasant working-class people on the beaches. Not unless they’re in an apron and they’re toiling over a barbecue, roasting yams.
After a day drinking wine, and swimming in the preposterously turquoise sea, going back to Barbados felt like going back to Birmingham. As our little plane took off from the freshly mowed airfield, I looked back and thought: ‘No. Mustique is more than all right. It’s living, breathing proof that the resurrection’s a load of nonsense.’
Because if Jesus really had come back from the dead, he’d still be alive today.
And if he were still alive, it’s sensible to assume he’d be living in the best place on earth. So he’d be in Mustique. And he wasn’t.
Of course, some of the 90 or so houses that sit like big wedding cakes on the newly mowned hillsides belong to high-profile stars such as Mick Jagger, Tommy Hilfiger an
d Stewart Copeland – the second of only two policemen on the island.
But the vast majority belong, it seems, to hedge-fund managers.
Now I can describe these people to you very easily. They are all quite young, and they all appear to be super-fit. None smokes. Few drink. All have swept-back hair and dazzling teeth, and all, you imagine, would quite like to murder someone, to see what it’s like. You’re thinking Bret Easton Ellis. So am I.
They are also lip-slobberingly rich. There are estimated to be 9,000 funds worldwide which, between them, have assets of $1,500 billion. So they’re not really hedges at all. They’re bloody great leylandii.
What’s more, a whopping 78 per cent of all the hedges in Europe are grown and nurtured in London. That’s $255 billion. And that’s great, but before we get too excited, we must first of all try to work out what a hedge fund is.
According to a friend in the City, they’re brilliant because whether the stock market goes up or down, you still make pots of money. Great. Sounds like my kind of gambling. But what are they exactly?
‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘You rent shares from someone who has a lot of them and then you sell what you’ve rented.’ Now this, so far as I can tell, is actually called ‘theft’. Small wonder they’ve all got houses on Mustique. They’re all burglars.
‘No,’ said my friend, ‘because you always pay back the person you’ve rented them from, plus interest.’ I see, so you rent some shares, sell them, and then give the profit (if you’ve made any) to the person from whom you did the renting. That seems like a lot of effort and risk for no gain at all.
My friend became exasperated and told me to stop thinking so literally because the money never actually exists. ‘It’s like a house of straw, then?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she tutted. ‘It’s like a house of straw that’s a hologram. It isn’t there.’
On the worldwide internet, a hedge fund is described thus: ‘A fund, usually used by wealthy individuals and institutions, which is allowed to use aggressive strategies that are unavailable to mutual funds, including selling short, leverage, programme trading, swaps, arbitrage, and derivatives.’
Gibberish. And galling, too, because I’m not a stupid man. I’m able to grasp the most complicated concepts, especially if it means I can walk away from the table six years later with £100 billion in my back pocket, a Gulfstream Vand a house on Mustique. But this hedge-fund business was eluding me.
One thing I did note was that hedge funds are not regulated like normal share dealings. I’m not surprised. How could a flat-footed policeman possibly be expected to investigate a house of straw that doesn’t exist?
And there’s something else. While hedge funds operate outside the law, don’t exist, and always make money whether the market rises or falls, 85 per cent fail. How’s that possible? That would be like losing money at the races whether your horse came in first, third or in a big tube of Evo-Stick.
To find out, I turned to a publication called Money Week which, in a lengthy and indescribably boring article, explained why hedges are starting to crumble. There are many reasons, apparently, none of which I could understand. But all of which are wrong.
I’ve given it a moment’s thought and I know exactly why the business is in trouble. It’s obvious. In order to function, hedge funds need wealthy investors.
But as my recent trip to Mustique demonstrated, all the world’s richest people these days are hedge-fund managers. This, then, has become a business that can only invest in itself.
Soon these guys are going to have to forget about the super-rich and chase down those who are simply well off. That’d be me, and that’s great. Lend me your house on Mustique for two weeks next Easter, and we’ll talk.
Sunday 23 April 2006
Flying with the baby from hell
Memo to the nation’s religious leaders. When delivering a sermon, here’s an idea: try to make it relevant or interesting in some way.
I bring this up because last week on Radio 2’s Pause for Thought a Buddhist was trying to tell us to think of others and not just ourselves.
Now there are many examples he could have used here. There’s the parable of the good Samaritan, which has worked well for thousands of years. Or there’s the parable of the John Prescott, an inarticulate fat man who was steered through life by his pant compass and his class hatred and ended up lost in a tabloid world of hate and ‘Two Shags’ ridicule.
But no. The story we got was about a ‘wicked man’ whose only good deed on earth was not treading on a spider. So when he died, the spider lowered a sliver of thread into hell so he could climb out.
With me so far? Unfortunately, lots of people also used the thread to get out and it snapped and they were all killed.
So what’s the good Buddhist trying to say here? That if you let others share your good fortune, everyone will die? That the wicked man wasn’t wicked after all? Or that he’d written the sermon after sniffing several pints of glue?
Whatever, the story was rubbish, so this morning I’m going to see if I can do better with my own sermon on selfishness. It’s called the parable of the British Airways Flight to Barbados.
There was a wicked man who had agreed to go on a golfing holiday with his boss.
Plainly, this had not gone down well with his wife, who had demanded that she come too, and their children, one of whom was a baby.
Now British Airways does not allow you to smoke while on board, or carry knitting needles or have sexual intercourse with other passengers.
You are also not allowed to board if you have shoes with explosive soles or if you’ve had one too many tinctures in the departure lounge. And if you make any sort of joke, about anything at all, in earshot of the stewardesses, you will be tied to your seat as though it was 1420, and you were in the stocks.
But you are allowed, welcomed even, into the club-class section of the plane even if you are accompanied by what is essentially a huge lung covered only in a light veneer of skin.
I want to make it absolutely plain at this point that I never took any of my children on a long-haul flight until they were old enough to grasp the concept of reason. It is simply not fair to impose your screaming child on other people, people who have paid thousands of pounds for a flat bed and therefore the promise of some sleep.
There’s talk at the moment of introducing planes with standing room for economy-class passengers. Imagine the sort of seat you get in a bus shelter and you’ll grasp the idea. Fine. So why not soundproofed overhead lockers into which babies can be placed? Or how about flights where under-twos are banned? I’m digressing.
The family at the centre of this morning’s parable were seated in club class, between me and another columnist on the Sunday Times, Christa D’Souza. I said I wanted to write about them. Christa said she wanted to kill them.
The crying began before the Triple Seven was airborne, and built to a climax as we reached the cruise. And this was the longest climax in the history of sound. It went on, at Krakatoan volume, without hesitation, until we began the descent eight hours later. At which point, thanks to a change in pressure on the lung’s tiny earholes, the noise reached new and terrifying heights. I honestly thought the plane’s windows might break.
And what do you suppose the mother did to calm her infant? Feed it some warm milk? Read it a nice soothing story? Nope. She turned her seat into a bed, puffed up her pillow, and pretended to go to sleep.
I know full well she wasn’t actually asleep for three reasons. First, it would have been impossible. Second, no mother can sleep through the cries of her own child, and third, every time I went to see Christa I made a point of trailing a rolled-up newspaper over the silly woman’s head.
So why was she pretending? Aha. That’s easy. I know exactly what she said to her husband as they left home that morning. ‘If you’re going to play golf while we’re on holiday, you can be childminder on the plane. I spend all day with those bloody kids. I’m doing nothing.’
This is almost certa
inly why the lung was so agitated. Because the person it knows and loves was apparently dead, while it was being jiggled around by a strange man it had never seen before. Because he leaves for work at six in the morning, doesn’t get back till 10 and is away all weekend playing golf.
And that’s why he was put in charge of the children, and that’s why the flight was ruined for several hundred people. Who then had to spend a fortnight in the Caribbean, terrified that the lung would be on their night flight back to Britain.
It wasn’t. And this is the point of my sermon. I do not know what happened to it.
But if there really is a God, I like to think it was eaten by a shark.
Sunday 30 April 2006
With the gypsies in junk heaven
Back in February I told you about my Cupboard of Shit. It’s a glass-fronted Georgian cabinet in which we house quite the most startling collection of pointless, tasteless rubbish it’s possible to conceive.
A particular favourite of mine is the plastic figurine of a New York fireman carrying his wounded buddy through what appears to be a half-eaten tomato sandwich. But it is, in fact, supposed to be the ruined remains of the World Trade Center.
Then there’s the Corsican shepherd with the melted face, the endless array of stupid creatures made from shells, a particularly horrible snow shaker and a Jesus on a rope.
British seaside gift shops are a fine hunting ground for all this stuff but even better are retail establishments within 400 yards of anything to do with the Catholic church. You should see my alabaster Last Supper in which all the disciples are wearing coats made from different-coloured glitter.
For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three Page 5