For crying out loud!: the world according to Clarkson, volume three

by Jeremy Clarkson

  And getting the wrong sort. ‘Yeah, man. You gotta try some of this horse tranquilliser. It’ll even you out.’ Honestly, I bet that this morning Glastonbury is full to overflowing with your accountant calling all the policemen pigs and trying to reverse onto a selection of other men, having ingested six gallons of crystal meth.

  I understand the mentality, of course. You’re middle-aged. You have children. Your life is so boring you actually look forward to the arrival of the milkman. And you fancy, for just one weekend, the idea of transporting yourself from the humdrum and into the fetid sleeping bag of your youth.

  I have no problem with that. I’m not going to spend the next foot of newsprint berating you for not acting your age and laughing at you as you try to remember how to roll a joint. But I do have a problem with Glastonbury.

  Rock music is ours. By which I mean it belongs to anyone born between 1950 and 1971. We invented it, and we made the rules. You sit in a darkened room, in headphones, listening to Dark Side of the Moon, trying to work out whether it’s about hope, death or despair.

  And not just a lot of nonsense from five blokes who were out of their heads.

  For us, concerts were all about spectacle and volume. Jimmy Page strapped a laser to his violin bow and split the sky with a noise so huge that today it would not be allowed through the amps without a hi-vis jacket and half a dozen warning notices.

  The Who rocked up at Wembley one year with a laser and hologram show of such immensity that officials were genuinely scared that it might bring down airliners on their final approach into Heathrow. You watched that while Daltrey belted his way through a rendition of ‘Listening to you, I get the music’ and it made the hairs on your lungs swell up.

  These are the sensations my wife is hoping to relive this weekend. She wants to be drunk, wet, deafened and assaulted by a blizzard of showmanship and spectacle. For one glorious weekend she wants to pretend she’s eight.

  But what she’ll get is a bunch of reedy-voiced, stick-thin teenagers who’ve nicked what is rightfully ours and mangled it out of all recognition. A bunch of useless, talentless ne’er-do-wells who’d love to play you their next song but only after they’ve delivered a sermon on the evils of corporate America, global warming and how we should all club together to help some poor African kid with flies in his eyes. Oh for God’s sake. Either turn on the lasers or effoff.

  Of course, there was a lot of peace and love and get the troops out of Vietnam at Woodstock, but that didn’t matter because the people on the stage were in tune with the people in the audience. At Glastonbury this weekend it’s all out of kilter.

  It’s billed as a hippie festival and is, of course, sponsored by the newspaper of choice for those who like tie-dye – the Guardian. So, naturally, visitors are urged to leave their tents behind so they can be shipped to the Third World. They are asked to try horse dung as an alternative to Disprin. And some will be encouraged to hunt down ley lines using a forked stick. ‘They’re how pigeons navigate, you know, man.’

  But of the 177,000 people due to attend – at £145 a pop – only six will be druids called Merlin. The rest will have Volvos and Bell JetRangers. And we don’t need ley lines to navigate because we’re clever and rich and we have sat nav.

  Does anyone really imagine for a moment that my wife gives two stuffs about global warming? She certainly didn’t appear to be all that bothered on Thursday evening when, during the great carbon-saving switch-off, I ran round the house furiously turning on every light, hairdryer, dishwasher and toaster.

  She can’t like the music very much either. Certainly, I’d rather spend the day listening to the score from Confessions of a Window Cleaner. And then Shirley Bassey will come on.

  Sweet divine Jesus. What’s that all about? I would walk naked over a field of molten steel to avoid the shouty Welshster, but there she is, providing a respite for a bunch of delusional parents on a ley line in bloody Somerset. And I bet you a million pounds she gets the same rapturous reception afforded to Rolf Harris when he cropped up at Glastonbury a couple of years ago with his cardboard Aboriginal version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. It’s all just too ridiculous.

  I’m not proposing for a moment we ban festivals. There are some good ones, where old bands, who know what they’re doing, play old favourites to old people on rugs.

  But I do think the time has come for new bands to be banned from playing or performing rock music. It’s ours. They should go and invent their own plaything.

  Sunday 24 June 2007

  Kick the fans out of Wimbledon

  As the All England Lawn Tennis Championship edges towards its thrilling conclusion in front of half-empty grandstands, there will be the inevitable calls for corporate fat cats to go away so the real fans can come along in their anoraks and their Daily Telegraph small-ad sandals.

  It started on the first day with a million Henmaniacs clogging up the internet’s message boards, all saying it was disgusting that instead of watching His Timness, most of the audience was to be found slumped on a bar, yelling about City takeovers and drunkenly attempting to swab mysterious stains from the front of their chinos with their old school ties.

  Blah blah class war blah toffs blah blah all right for some.

  Hmmm. It’s certainly true that businessmen and their guests do tend to get stuck into the fine wines at lunchtime and some decide they’d rather spend the afternoon ogling the waitresses than utilise their precious Centre Court tickets.

  And it’s also true that even those who do wobble back to the match often have no clue what’s going on, calling the racket a bat and generally leaving their mobile phones switched on. Some, and you know who you are, even spend the whole match speculating on what the crusty old ladies are doing to themselves under their tartan rugs in the royal box.

  Last year I sat next to Johnny Vaughan who, probably excited by having such a large audience for once, decided he would regale pretty much everyone with a series of increasingly funny stories. I’m afraid I was party to the gales of laughter that provoked much shushing from the real fans and, inevitably, the intervention of a man in a blazer. Whom I called Stewart, before I realised his badge actually said steward.

  Frankly, I can’t see what’s wrong with any of this. Quite apart from the fact that corporate guests spend pots of money on tents and exotic cheese, which allows the club to send its roof away for a polish, I’d rather watch an empty seat than some of the extraordinary specimens you see cheering and applauding when the real fans are allowed in.

  I think the rot began with the creation of Henman Hill. It swarms each year with the sort of people who clap along in time to the music at the Horse of the Year Show and have all of Cliff’s records. Naturally, they all adored Princess Diana, principally because she stuck one to those swan-eating toffs in Buckingham Palace.

  You’d imagine, as you watch this sea of flab cheering and hollering in their nasty clothes, that they’re having a brilliant time. But all they’re doing, in fact, is determinedly showing the fat-cat wallahs that they – the people – are having more fun. Which they’re not.

  I don’t care how much you yell and wave your arms about, you will never convince me that sitting on a patch of mud eating a wizened Israeli strawberry is anything like as much fun as getting sloshed with Johnny Vaughan over a plate of poached salmon and some Jersey Royal new potatoes.

  It just isn’t.

  You may well say, ‘It’s all right for some’, and I’d agree. It is certainly all right for George Clooney, who was born with an attractive face. Or whatsername who’s going out with Shrek-ears Rooney. Some people are lucky. So sit down, shut up and get used to it.

  Small wonder Terry Wogan, normally the most genial man in the world, announced on his radio show last year that he’d like to go down to Henman Hill and ‘machine-gun the lot of them’.

  Let them inside the courts themselves and, oh dear, things really start to go wrong. Replete with their sunburn marks and their Millets wet-weather gear, the
y applaud absolutely everything. Double faults from anyone who is taking on their beloved Tim Henman. The arrival of Sir Cliff Richard. Even a decision by the referee to keep on playing even though it’s technically the middle of the night.

  But the thing they applaud most of all is when the umpire asks one of the corporate fat cats to switch off his mobile phone. They love that. Some toff full of swan being publicly humiliated. It gives them such a warm glow that the wiring in their Playtex bras actually starts to melt.

  Unfortunately, what you have to remember is that Wimbledon attracts enormous television audiences from all over the world and I often wonder what these sophisticated people from abroad are going to think of Britain when they see some hysterical fat woman with raspberry-ripple arms and American Tan tights, fanatically applauding a pigeon that has just landed on Court One.

  They’re going to think we’re all ugly and mad.

  They’d know for sure if they could get into her head and find out that her idea of heaven, what she dreams about in the wee small hours, is a threesome with Tim and Cliff.

  I would therefore urge Wimbledon to take a lead on the matter and start to get the real fans out of sport.

  The place would look better, and remember: the fat cat’s host at Wimbledon has paid £23,000 for a five-year debenture. What’s more, corporate hospitality shovelled £1.4 million into the Natural History Museum’s coffers last year and keeps events like Ascot and Henley afloat.

  Eventually, this idea could be rolled out into football as well. I went to the Cup Final this year – my first ever game – and I loved it. I might even be tempted to go back, so long as I can sit in a box, with a nice claret, and not squashed up against a fat man with a spider’s web tattooed on his face.

  Sunday I July 2007

  Hands off 007 or I’ll shoot you

  I am not a jealous man. I do not sit around all day coveting my neighbour’s helicopter or your new hair system. Some people are fortunate and others are not, and anyone who fights that truism is on a path that leads to madness and communism.

  That said, however, I fell to my knees and wept with envy and rage last week when I opened my morning newspaper to discover that Ian Fleming’s estate had asked Sebastian bloody Faulks to write the next James Bond book.

  ‘Nooooo,’ I wailed, in the manner of someone whose daughter has just fallen from a cliff, as I learnt that the manuscript has already been blessed by Bond movie producer Barbara Broccoli.

  Getting Faulks to write a Bond book is like asking Polly Toynbee to write the next Die Hard film. It’s like casting Vinnie Jones as Mr Darcy. In the whole history of getting things wrong, this is right at the top of the list.

  I met Sebastian once and he seemed like a nice chap. I have also read many of his books and they are marvellous. The scene at the end of On Green Dolphin Street where the woman howls was so powerful I thought I might have a feminine side after all.

  Not a big side, you understand. Not big enough to make me even think of placing scented mini-cushions in my underwear drawer, but certainly big enough to have me reaching for the box of tissues.

  And let’s be honest. Any author who can get 16 stone of beefheart blokeishness all teary-eyed and snivelling over some silly woman’s doomed and entirely fictional love affair is plainly very good at his job. But we’re talking about Bond here.

  And I’m sorry, but when it comes to shooting people in the face with a harpoon, that job, by rights, is mine.

  I suppose I should admit at this point that I’ve never read any of Fleming’s originals. But I don’t see why this should hold me back. If his estate and Broccoli were to tell me that Bond was a dark and brooding loner who managed to be both gallant and a seducer all at the same time, I think I could manage.

  I’d simply begin by saying: ‘Bond woke up in bed with a girl who he liked very much. Darkly and broodily he hauled himself from under the sheets, kissed her on the ear and said, “My darling. You are marvellous. But I am a loner and I must go now because I have to blow up an oil rig”.’

  Then I could get into the meat of what matters in the big wide world of Bond: gadgets, explosions, wisecracks and improbably large men who’ve had their hands replaced with spiky lumps of ebony.

  Oh and the car chases. I bet I’d be a bloody sight better at those than Sebastian nancy boy Faulks with his Birdsong and his bloody Dolphin Street. Bastard.

  Apparently, his new book, which is probably called Bond Joins the RSPB, is set in 1967 when 007 is damaged (yawn), ageing and is called in as a gunfighter for one last heroic mission.

  Wrong wrong wrong. Bond cannot be damaged. Even if he were to fall out of a hot-air balloon and into the spinning blades of a Hughes 500 – and I bet Faulks thinks that’s some kind of lawnmower – he should emerge with nothing more than a slightly disarranged tie knot.

  And he cannot age. He simply morphs from a Scottish milkman with a tattoo on his arm into a safari suit and keeps right on going.

  Normally, when you compare a book with a film, the book is always better. But with Bond, a collection of old stories about a dark and brooding loner, written a million years ago by a man who spent most of his day snorkelling, cannot possibly hope to compete with a film franchise that has spanned the world for 40 years. Bond is now a product of the multiplex, not the library.

  And if we have to have Bond books at all, they should reflect that. Instead of worrying how 007 might have been seen by a long-dead author, the powers that be should think more how he has been seen by two billion cinema-goers.

  I have no doubt at all that Faulks will give 007 layers of character so intense and so well rooted that it’ll be page 148 before he shoots anyone.

  And then I bet he spends the following 148 pages agonising over what he’s done. Who cares? Who goes to a Bond film to see a man in a bar agonising? And who goes to see Charles Gray’s bath-o-sub being dropped into a shark-infested lagoon?

  That’s why you need me to be the next Bond author. Because I get this.

  I’d have Bond shoot someone on page two and then, instead of analysing how this felt, I’d explain in quite a lot of detail about how the baddie’s head erupted in a thin grey and red mist as Bond leapt onto his jet pack and hurtled through a wall of noise into the night.

  In fact, I’m so angry that I wasn’t asked by Mrs Cauliflower or whoever to write the next book I might write a spy thriller anyway. It’ll be about an agent who’s more shallow than a summer puddle. After shagging a netball team for fun, he’ll walk into a bar where Bond is agonising over something. And shoot him in the back of the head with a short-nosed Heckler & Koch machine pistol.

  Get out of that one, Faulks. I’m going to shoot your superhero in the head. Then you’ll have to go back to your birdsong and your howling women and I’ll get what was rightfully mine in the first place.

  Sunday 15 July 2007

  Get back in your stockings, girls

  We know from Big Brother that today’s young ladies have replaced their appealing thongs with pants the size of spinnakers, and now comes news that the sales of stockings are in free fall. Down from £10 million sales in 2002 to £5 million in 2006.

  According to the Suns woman editor – as opposed to the real editor, who’s a woman – this is because girls have better things to do these days than get dressed up like a Parisian hooker every time they go to the shops.

  I absolutely understand that. Getting dressed in the morning is something that should never take more than 20 seconds and putting on a pair of stockings and suspenders can take anything up to three hours.

  Actually, this is only a guess, based on how long it takes me to undo a suspender belt. Even when I’m armed with a head torch and a pair of scissors.

  Anyway, I fully appreciate that in a post-Mrs Robinson world, where women work and raise children, stockings are to the wardrobe what the quill is to online banking.

  But here’s the thing, girls. Tell us that you won’t wear stockings because they are impractical and you may we
ll find that we’ll give up as well.

  At the moment we tend not to pick our noses when in your company because it is a bit slovenly. But if you’re going to slob around in a pair of footless tights and a sack, then you won’t mind if we bury an index finger in each of our nostrils and dig away.

  I was at London’s City airport this morning surrounded by a group of middle-aged chaps who, I presume, were going to Scotland to watch some golfists.

  At home, each of these men would, I’m sure, eat all their yoghurt and pretend to be interested in Victoria Beckham’s opinion on interior design.

  But at the airport, with no wives and girlfriends to keep them in check, they quickly reverted to type.

  By 7.45 a.m. they were on their third pint and as I boarded my plane, I believe they were beginning a farting competition.

  This is not a criticism. I recently spent a couple of weeks camping in Africa with 20 or so other men and you wouldn’t believe how neanderthal we became. Or how quickly.

  Every morning would begin with a conversation about who’d been for their number twos, what the number twos had looked like, what they’d smelt of, how much more there was to come, and whether any records for sheer tonnage had been set.

  Then we’d move on to who’d crept into whose tent the night before, what it had felt like, and how long, if we were the last 20 people on earth, it might take for one of us to sleep with James May.

  You might argue that your husband is not like this, but I assure you that beneath the veneer you see at home, he is.

  He may do the washing-up and take the children to the park, but when you’re not around, he’s like the light in a fridge. He’s a completely different animal, obsessed with bottoms, buggery and belching.