For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three
Page 16
I bet the chief executive of Barclays agrees. He announced last week that the bank had made record profits, and was probably feeling pretty chuffed, right up to the moment he was summoned to a television studio and presented as the unacceptable face of capitalism who goes round the countryside at weekends stamping on puppies.
I felt it too, on Thursday, because for reasons I can’t be bothered to explain I was in London with a Rolls-Royce and no one ever let me out of a side turning.
Why? As I’ve said before, Simon Cowell, who is a rich man, gives the exchequer more each year than is generated by all the speed cameras put together. If you combined the tax contributions of all those who have Rollers, I bet you’d have enough to pay for Britain’s air traffic control system.
And that’s before you start on how much Britain’s rich do for charity. Last year a bunch of hedge-fund managers raised £18 million in a single night to help Romanian orphans. At one party Lady Bamford’s mates stumped up £3 million for the NSPCC. And I had lunch on Thursday with a chap who, so far as I could tell, single-handedly looks after every disadvan-taged child in the land.
And yet, when he climbs into his Bentley to go home at night, a bunch of communists and hippies, egged on by faceless former Greenham lesbos in government think tanks, makes sure he can never pull into the traffic flow.
Not that he’s going anywhere anyway, because Ken Livingstone has taken £8 a day from middle-class Londoners and given it to a crackpot South American lunatic in exchange for cheap oil, which means the capital is choked with buses full of Bulgarian pickpockets fleeing from the police.
I notice this morning that the blossom is out on my trees. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t feel like summer’s coming.
Sunday 25 February 2007
Fear and loathing in Las Manchester
We keep reading about plans for the supercasino in Manchester, and everyone seems very bothered about whether it’ll be like Las Vegas or not.
Well, in one important respect it won’t be. Las Vegas is situated in the middle of the Nevada Desert, not far from Death Valley, the hottest place on earth. Manchester is known for its year-round drizzle and its summertime peaks of 57°F.
As you approach Vegas from Los Angeles, especially at night, it is a genuinely impressive spectacle. All that power. All that energy. And so many air-conditioning units that as often as not the city generates its own overhead cloud cover to cool the gamblers down.
As you approach Manchester you usually think, ‘I’ll turn my wipers on now.’ And then you keep right on going to somewhere better.
We can’t forget the police, either. In Vegas they wear shorts, ride bicycles and – I’m not kidding – have flashing lights on top of their helmets. And no one laughs at them.
Then we have the hotels. At the MGM Grand in Vegas there are 5,044 rooms and the turnaround time is phenomenal. You check out, and even if it’s three in the morning someone else will be in your room just 20 minutes later.
The last time I stayed in Manchester, my hotel room had nylon sheets that made my hair look like it had been styled by a Van de Graaff generator, and the biggest diversion was the Corby Trouser Press.
However, in one important respect Manchester’s supercasino will be very similar to Las Vegas. The customers will be poor and fat when they get there.
And a little bit poorer and fatter when they leave.
When I first started gambling, back in the early eighties, it was a rather elegant way of passing the time. I’d go to the Connoisseur on the Fulham Road, or Le Casino in a Lower Sloane Street basement. This was a wonderful spot, with just four tables, a fire and a maˆıtre d’ called Roget who’d always offer to find me a taxi at 4 a.m., knowing full well I was always penniless and would have to walk.
Then there was the Moortown Casino in Leeds, where I first encountered the cooking of Marco Pierre White. The only problem here is that it was always full of old Jewish ladies, and getting on the blackjack tables was a nightmare.
So we used to ring from the phone box outside and ask to speak to Mrs Cohen. An announcement would be made over the club’s PA and then we’d simply push past the crowd of old ladies coming to the reception desk and, hey presto, we could play where we wanted.
Vegas too, in those days, was a laugh. The Strip was a great place for cruising. You could stay at the Aladdin for $8 a night, see the Doobies, play a little blackjack, develop a rapport with the dealer and it was all jolly lovely. Even though you knew your losses were being used by men called Don to buy guns in Chicago and cocaine in New York.
Last week you probably read about someone called the Fat Man who has dropped £23 million in the last few years at Aspinalls, a place described as lovely and luxurious and full of ‘the right crowd’. The way they talk, Lord Lucan is still in there chatting to Pamela Harriman, and so you probably think gambling is still a fun thing to do.
It isn’t. Le Casino and the Connoisseur were taken over, amalgamated and then resurfaced in a glittering, noisy barn under the Gloucester Hotel in South Kensington. I’ve been there a couple of times and it’s always full of Chinamen losing their tempers.
And Vegas. Oh. My. God. I went last summer and it’s now crammed.
You can’t move on the Strip, 24 hours a day, and as you sit at the bar being insulted by the uninterested staff you get the impression that it’s just a giant cathedral to the worst sort of capitalism. You know that it’s all owned by the corporations, who are using it to rape the terminally stupid.
They sit there, some of them on five or six bar stools, with a bucket of money on one phlebitis-ridden thigh and a bucket of lard on the other. And you just don’t want to join in.
I love playing cards for money. I really, really adore it. But that night I felt a bit sick watching the Sheriff of Nottingham simply empty the serfs’ pockets.
There’s no style any more. No panache. When you check in at the MGM there’s an army of valet parkers who direct you to one of the 16 lanes so that you are in the casino and at the tables that little bit faster.
In the past the receptionist would tell you about all the shows in town. Now you give them a credit card and you’re in your room, where the bed is still warm from the last sucker who breezed into town. It is horribly depressing.
And that’s what it’s going to be like in Manchester. Oh sure, you’ll get a handful of the nation’s orange people from Cheshire over there, dropping vast wads on black to make themselves more sexually attractive. But mostly it’ll be poor, fat people gambling away money they barely had in the first place.
And meanwhile, 160 miles to the south, Tessa Jowell will be sitting in an agreeable flat wondering what on earth became of her socialist principles.
I haven’t got any at all. Never had. But if I were her I’d feel a bit of a chump.
Sunday 4 March 2007
Bullseye! The pub is dying
Good news. It seems that the centuries-old tradition of being forced to pop down to the local for a pint and a game of arrows with your mates is coming to an end.
A survey of regular pub-goers last week found that only io per cent had played darts in the past year, compared with 41 per cent five years ago. Better still, four out often men in their twenties had never played in their lives and a similar number had no idea what a bullseye is worth.
I loathe darts. You settle down with your mates for a bit of a chat and a few drinks and then one of them suggests a game. Why? Why do I want to spend my time in the pub, standing up, doing maths?
Darts is a game for people who can’t make conversation, or who are so bored by seeing the same faces night after interminable night that they have to do something apart from talk.
We’re told that Henry VIII was a keen darts player and I can understand that. Because he didn’t have a PlayStation and he needed something to take his mind off an alarming collection of sores that were multiplying in his underpants, I can believe that throwing some shortened spears at the bottom of a beer barrel might in some way
be deemed entertaining.
When syphilis became less popular, I can still see how darts might have flourished. You’d come out of t’factory with t’lads and there was no point going home because the bog was at the bottom of t’garden and half your children had rickets. So you may as well go to t’pub.
But now, anyone who can’t think of what to say to their friends while in a pub can spend their time texting other friends who aren’t there. Even that is better than bloody darts.
Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m not very good at it. My ability to hit the treble 20 is governed not by hand–eye co-ordination but by the laws of averages and probability. Mostly, I fail to hit the board at all, or the dart bounces back and pierces my shoe.
And then I’m expected to stand there, with my foot nailed to the floor, trying through a fog of pain to deduct 17 from 263.
Some people call this a sport. Rubbish. A sport is something that requires specialist clothing, whereas all you need to play professional darts is a loud shirt that you don’t tuck into your trousers, a stomach the size of Staffordshire and an idiotic nickname.
They’re all called ‘the Viking’ or ‘the Viper’ or ‘the Assassin’ when in fact they should all be called ‘the fat bastard who hates his wife and kids so much he’d rather spend his evenings throwing arrows into a bit of bristle with his fat and disgusting friends’.
Show me somebody who likes playing darts and I’ll show you a social misfit with so much worrying imagery on his hard drive that if it were ever discovered, the courts would lock him away for a thousand years.
That’s why I’m glad to see it’s dying out and that pubs are replacing their oches with abstract art and bits of furniture from Conran. But you know what? I won’t really be happy until the pub itself has gone.
People, normally those who have their own arrows and can get breaks of 50 or more in snooker, lament the passing of what they call ‘the rural drinking pub’. They paint a picture of traditional England with low ceilings, horse brasses, a fire and people from the village gathered around to swap stories over a pint of handmade beer.
‘Mmmm’ you might think. But the reality is that you have to stand up, the beer’s got twigs in it, the landlord is a psychopath, you can’t hear what anybody is saying, the fire’s too hot, you can’t stand at the corner of the bar because ‘that’s where Jack stands and he’ll be in in a minute’ and if you inadvertently spill someone’s drink you’ll be invited into the car park to do pugilism. Oh, and the only cigarettes in the dispensing machine will be Lambert & Butlers.
Often, these rural drinking pubs serve a selection of sandwiches and pies, but for nutritional value you’d be better off eating the little blue tablets in the urinals.
Then you have city-centre pubs where men go to meet girls, not realising that all girls in city-centre pubs have thighs like tug boats and morals that would surprise a zoo animal. Show me a man who married a girl he met in a city-centre drinking pub and I’ll show you someone who’s made to wait in the loft, playing darts, while she entertains lorry drivers in the front room.
Of course, these people would sneer at what they call gastro-pubs but I don’t see why. In a gastropub, nobody has their own tankard, nobody will throw a dart into the side of your head, there are no biker chicks who want to rape you, especially if you have a lorry, and there will be a chef who, sometimes at least, has a clue what to do with food.
Your darts player would poke his nose into such a place and then leave in disgust because it had arugula on the ‘menu’ and it was playing a chill-out CD.
What’s wrong with that? Moby is a better listening experience than the descant of a beeping fruit machine set to the bassline of some old bore in red corduroy trousers who’s regaling the landlord with a story from the golf course and keeps referring to Mrs Bore as ‘the wife’.
We shook off the culture of strikes, chilly winters and Michael Foot and now we must shake off the spectre of the pub and all that it stands for: beer with the consistency of Breezer.
Sunday 11 March 2007
You can’t kill me, I’m the drummer
When the BBC asked if I’d become involved in the Comic Relief extravaganza, obviously my initial reaction was ‘no’. I saw no reason to give up my time so a couple of African dictators could buy bigger Mercs.
But then I was told the Comic Relief money doesn’t actually buy cars or bigger power tools with which Mr Mugabe can drill into his opponents’ heads. It buys useful stuff such as ambulances and help for the mentally ill of Britain.
And anyway, saying no to the Comic Relief team is a bit like saying no to the man at the Tube station with the stack of Big Issues. In fact, it’s even harder because you can’t smile and say: ‘It’s all right, I’ve already got one.’
So what did they want me to do? Wear a leotard and flail about on an ice rink? Sing? Stand in a school playground while children rubbed lumps of elephant dung into my hair?
It turned out the offer was even worse. Would the three Top Gear presenters like to appear on a humorous celebrity version of A Question of Sport?
As I’d rather have spent the afternoon sitting on a ham slicer, I came up with another idea. What about Top Gear of the Pops? It’d be like Top Gear, only instead of cars we’d have music. And then, I said jovially, we could finish with a tune from the Top Gear band.
The Comic Relief people loved this, and commissioned it immediately. And that was great, except for one teeny-weeny detail. There was no such thing as the band.
Yes, Richard Hammond used to play bass with a band 20 years ago but gave up when, in a fit of temper, he broke his guitar over the singer’s head. And sure, James May is an accomplished harpsichord player with a degree in the science of music. But while he’d be good at Brahms and Chopin, he’s not so good when it comes to what he calls ‘pop’.
And that leaves me. I took up the drums about six months ago and have had seven lessons. I practise infrequently and have become to the world of sticksmanship what Germany is to the world of cricket.
In my heart, I fondly imagined that one day, many years from now, when I’d become more proficient, I might team up with some like-minded souls and perhaps play a small gig to a few close friends in a pub. But here I was, volunteering to make my debut, in a week’s time, in a studio full of 700 people, to a television audience of maybe five million.
There’s no medical term for what I was going through. Doctors call it simply ‘shitting yourself.
And it became worse when we turned up, a day before the studio recording, to practise for the very first time.
I’d selected Billy Ocean’s ‘Red Light Spells Danger’, partly because it’s a good happy pop song ideal for ending a feel-good Comic Relief show. But mostly because there are only a couple of twiddly bits for the drummer. The rest, though fast, is all fairly straightforward.
Except it isn’t. Not when you put other instruments into the mix. I’d always thought the drums are a sort of noise that go on in the background of a song, but it turns out the drummer is the engine room. The man who keeps time.
The single most vital piece of the entire ensemble.
Unaware of this, I did my first twiddly bit and sort of picked up with the beat where I’d left off. Much to my surprise, the rest of the band stopped playing, lowered their shoulders and turned to stare at me.
Actually, Hammond sort of glared. There was a very real sense that if I did that again he’d kill me. And since I didn’t know what I’d done wrong this was worrying.
When you’re behind a drum kit, bashing away as though you’re in a cage, trying to get out, you can’t hear any of the other instruments. You kind of assume they’re playing the tune and all is well.
But no, rock music is not the anarchy I’d always assumed. It’s actually pure maths. I had to hit the snare at the precise moment Hammond was hitting some aspect of his guitar, and no, he couldn’t just ‘miss a bit out to catch up’. When I suggested this, he became even more angry.
And when I said: ‘Oh well. It’s for Comic Relief. Perhaps people will find my inability to keep time funny,’ they shouted even more.
Eventually, our singer, Justin Hawkins, formerly of the Darkness, turned up. He was a bit amazed to find the drummer and the bassist squaring up to one another, but after a couple of run-throughs said: ‘That’s as good as it’s going to get’, took over my drum kit and spent the rest of the day jamming with Hammond and May while I ate crisps.
And so the next day, after seven lessons and two run-throughs, we took to the stage and did our song.
And afterwards everyone was very kind to me, in the same way you’re very kind to a four-year-old who’s painted a picture of some flowers.
Even though they look like dogs.
The finished product was transmitted on Friday night at 10 o’clock. I hope you were all in bed and missed it.
Sunday 18 March 2007
What the hell are we saying here?
A few weeks ago I became a businessman, which means I’ve started going to meetings. Or, as they should be known, ‘places where nothing happens and nothing gets done’.
Here’s how they go. Each of the people round the table expresses their opinion on a particular subject, and each of these opinions is completely different. Then, after you’ve drunk a cup of what might be coffee, but could be oxtail soup, a biggish woman – and it’s always a woman – says: ‘Well, we’re outside the box here with a new kind of hybrid venture and we can’t know what the result will be until we’ve run the flag up the flagpole and seen which way the wind’s blowing.’
Plainly, you want to argue with this, but as you draw breath to speak you realise that what she just said didn’t make any sense. And anyway, she hasn’t finished.