I still remember the first time I was asked for an autograph. It was a middle-aged woman, and I sank to my knees in a mixture of shock, deep pleasure and eternal gratitude. I wanted to bask for ever in the turbulence of her magnificence. ‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,’ I said, clinging on to her ankles with one hand and writing a veritable essay with the other.
As Angela Rippon once said, ‘I love it when people ask for my autograph. It’s when they stop you have to worry.’
Except today I’m not so sure, because every time I turn round, there’s some snotty-nosed kid with a felt pen, half a chewed napkin and an expectant look on his face.
And it’s always his mum who does the talking: ‘He’s ever such a fan of Newsnight.’
Even the lavatory fails to provide a safe haven. Only last week I emerged from a stall in the gents at Birmingham airport, to find a couple of kids waiting outside with their dad: ‘They love your lunchtime show on Radio 2.’
On an average day I’m asked for an autograph maybe 20 times, usually when I get to the punchline of a story, or when it’s raining, or when I’m carrying something heavy.
Of course, I understand the autograph culture. At a charity auction last week, I sat next to a woman who paid £55,000 for a guitar that had been signed by Bono and Sir Cliff. And that made sense, because I have a guitar signed by Jan Akkerman from the Dutch group Focus.
I also have a 100-yen note signed by Bob Seger, and my most prized possession is Monty Python’s Big Red Book, signed by everyone on the whole team, right down to Carole Cleveland. In fact, come to think of it, the only autograph I don’t have is Johnny Morris’s. The bastard.
Signatures bring us closer to fame, and that’s great; but can I say, from the other side of the fence, that there are rules.
John Cleese said on the radio recently that he was asked for his autograph at his father’s funeral.
And when he said ‘No’, he was subjected to a torrent of abuse.
I know how he feels. I was given both barrels last week by a woman who said my signature was too much of a squiggle. And when I argued, she stomped off, saying, ‘It doesn’t look much like “Beadle” to me.’
Then you get the people, usually those with tyre-fitter haircuts and gormless faces, who just stand there, and when you say, ‘What’s the magic word?’ they have absolutely no idea what you are on about.
One man recently sauntered over and said he really didn’t like me on television, that I’d never made a good programme, that his wife wouldn’t have me on in the house, that he’d cancelled the Sunday Times because of me and that I should grow up. ‘Still,’ he concluded, ‘I’d better have your autograph, I suppose.’
And you know what? I’m so fearful of Johnny Morris syndrome that I agreed, knowing full well that the stupid man would sell it for 99p on eBay that very night.
Mind you, even this is better than the request for a quick picture, because the camera that’s produced is invariably a phone.
So you wait while a mate tries to turn it on.
Then you wait while it hooks up to the nearest satellite.
Then you wait a bit more while the mate fumbles around in the menu trying to find a camera setting.
Then you wait while he finds the zoom and the brightness setting, and you think, ‘Honestly, it would have been quicker to set up an easel and break out the oils.’
Soon, of course, thanks to Big Brother and other programmes of that ilk, everyone will be famous. And then you might imagine there will be no need for me to stand around in shopping centres gurning into people’s telephones or trying to write my name with one hand while having a pee with the other. This happens a lot.
Strangely, however, even when everyone is famous, I don’t think that much will change.
I was at a do the other day when I bumped into the boy band McFly. ‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘I hope you won’t mind but please can I have your autographs for my son?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ said one. ‘Providing I can have yours for my dad.’
Sunday 26 June 2005
Oops, £25,000 went overboard
We all know the form at charity auctions. You have a few glasses of wine and then you spend an hour or so trying desperately to not buy trips in hot-air balloons and books that have been signed by TV’s David Dickinson.
I especially know the form, because recently I was the auctioneer at a charity event to raise funds for Chipping Norton’s swimming pool. The evening went brilliantly, mainly because two hands kept shooting out of the crowd, buying just about everything, no matter how high the price.
Annoyingly, the hands turned out to belong to my children, who had got bored and decided to join in. So we went home with, among other things, two bags of dung, a nylon T-shirt and several signed copies of my own book.
With that experience so fresh in my mind, I should have known better than to stick my hand up at a children with cancer do last week. The lot was a week on a 140-foot superyacht in the south of France. It has two speedboats slung over the back, many windsurfers, two jet skis, 12 cabins, a crew of eight (including a bosun) and the usual range of bar stools coated in whale foreskin. Ordinarily, seven days on this ocean-going gin palace would cost £75,000. Bidding started at £25,000. Or, rather, it didn’t. Nobody put their hand up, so, since I knew the auctioneer, I thought I’d help him out by getting the ball rolling. ‘At last,’ he exclaimed, in an excitable, auctioneery way, ‘a bid of £25,000 from Mr Clarkson. Now. Who’ll give me £26,000?’
The marquee, I noted with quiet satisfaction, was stuffed with several hundred extremely blonde women and an equal number of bronzed men who, I figured, would want to show their friends just how rich they’d become in recent years.
This always happens. Only a week earlier, at yet another charity auction, I had gleefully stuck my hand up to buy two weeks’ use of the huge, 96-sheet advertising hoarding that dominates Cromwell Road coming into west London.
I wanted it so I could write something rude about a colleague who commutes down that road every day, but I knew in my heart of hearts it would go to someone much, much richer. And it did. And so would the boat…
A minute passed and still no hands had gone up. The auctioneer was giving it his all, gyrating and twitching as though he’d become attached to the mains, but nothing.
Then the awful truth began to dawn. The women were blonde because they were hairdressers, not jet-set jetsam. And the men were brown because they work all day in the open air, with scaffolding. Nobody was going to top my bid. And they didn’t.
Outwardly I was calm. I’d just given £25,000 to a very worthy charity that seeks to provide a home away from home for the families of children with cancer.
So I acknowledged the applause from the hairdressers and waved cheerily at the auctioneer whose bacon I had so nobly saved.
But inwardly I was in a flat spin. I mean, shit, £25,000 is a colossal amount of money. And I’d just spent it by accident.
Someone next to me tried to argue that £25,000 was cheap. But that rather depends how you look at it. Twenty-five thousand pounds for something that would normally cost £75,000 is indeed a bargain. But, in the same way that I was once offered a fully functional jet fighter for £4.5 million, it’s also completely irrelevant.
I just don’t have this kind of money to hurl around like confetti. Maybe I’d spend £25,000 on a car. But on a whim? Jesus. I felt sick.
Then it got worse, because my wife, whose face had turned the colour of tracing paper, was busy reading some small print in the catalogue about what the price didn’t include.
Fuel, for instance. And on a boat of this type you don’t measure consumption in terms of miles per gallon or even gallons per mile. Oh no. When you are topping up a vessel like this, you have to think of the diesel fuel in terms of tons. And then there are the mooring fees which, in a port like Monte Carlo, will be hundreds and hundreds of pounds a night.
‘So,’ I said to my wife quietly, ‘even if we could afford to
get the boat to Monaco, and we can’t, we wouldn’t be able to afford to park it there.’
Yes, and that’s just the start of it, because other things that weren’t included were drinks, food and, crucially, a tip for the crew, which is normally 10 per cent of the charter fee. Great. I was facing a week on a boat, not eating, not drinking and not moving. Just recovering from the fact that I’d had to walk to the south of France because I couldn’t afford the easyJet bill.
You haven’t heard the really funny part yet. You see, contrary to what the auctioneer said in his warm-up spiel, it turns out the vessel is only available in the week commencing 17 September.
And guess what? Slap bang in the middle of the week commencing 17 September it’s the Top Gear charity karting evening. Where I shall be hosting a charity auction to raise money for the parents of children with cancer.
I’ve examined all the options, and I’m afraid the only solution is for me to commit suicide. Still, at least I’ll be going to heaven.
Sunday 3 July 2005
Annoying: I like David Beckham
Every week the glossy supermarket magazines bring news of yet another celebrity who’s married a horse, drunk their own urine or thrown a telephone at some hapless hotel receptionist. The message is crystal clear: all famous people are mentalists.
Really? Well, I must say that Steve Coogan has never asked me to share any of his pee, Neil Morrissey has never thrown anything at my wife, and Jonathan Ross is not married to his hair. Quite the reverse in fact.
All the famous people I’ve met are just like everyone else. David Frost has bad breath. After a night out with Johnny Vegas, he was sick in a teapot. And Anne Robinson lets my children play tag in her bedroom.
Yes, Dale Winton is bright orange, but what’s unusual about that? If you were to tour the salons of Alderley Edge, you’d find they were stuffed to overflowing with people who are similarly autumnal.
The people I’ve met, however, are the angel fish, the small, home-grown stars whose fame is limited to Britain. But what about the whale sharks and the tuna? What about those whose names are etched on the consciousness of every living being on the planet? This is where we find the real eccentricity.
Take Elton John as an example. If he’d become a plumber, would he go around kissing other men on the lips? I suspect the answer’s probably no. And Angelina Jolie? Would she have painted her husband’s name across her wedding dress in her own blood if her dad had been Reg Arkwright rather than Jon Voight? I doubt it.
So what went wrong? It’s easy to blame money, but do Bill Gates and Richard Branson get together once a week to sacrifice a goat? Can you visualise the Duke of Westminster hurling a potted plant at a waiter because his soup’s not brown enough?
Maybe it’s a combination of fame and money. Maybe that’s what makes a normal person turn into an oddball, insisting that all the blue M&Ms are removed and that everyone on your table at dinner should eat with their feet. Maybe money buys the ability to dislocate yourself from reality; maybe it filters out the criticisms and allows only the warming, gentle rays of adulation to shine on the turbulence of your magnificence.
Maybe that’s Michael Jackson’s problem. He hears only the good things. ‘No, no, Michael. By all means dangle your child out of the fifth-floor window…’
Last weekend, I was backstage at the Live8 event and discovered the answer. The really famous, really global stars walked around like comets, trailing a tail of ‘people’ who had been employed to make sure nothing even remotely real got in their employer’s way.
These ‘people’ were like pilot fish, employed to remove the creases from life and scratch the itches you can never reach yourself.
Snoop Doggy Dog, or whatever he’s called, had an armada of bodyguards, each of whom was the size of a beach hut. I couldn’t work out what they were protecting him from exactly. Peaches Geldof? Nasa?
Then there was Madonna, who had a hundred bossy women with clipboards whose job, so far as I could see, was to yell a lot and make sure nobody got in Madge’s way. Which was a problem when they encountered Paul McCartney’s entourage coming in the opposite direction.
I tried to take a photograph of the ensuing chaos and was astonished when one of Madge’s secretary birds stuck her hand in front of my camera and shouted, ‘No pictures.’ Apparently one of the public relations pilot fish had decided that Mrs Ritchie could only be photographed with Mr Geldof. So obviously, to enforce this rule, a whole team had had to be employed.
Against this backdrop, even A. A. Gill looked normal, so we went in the beer tent for a drink. And it was here that I encountered David Beckham. Over the years I’ve made fun of his silly wife, his stupid tattoos and argued, forcefully, that if he spent less time at the hairdresser’s and more time at the training ground, he might have been an excellent footballer instead of a one-trick pony. I think that, after he was sent off in a World Cup match, I’d also said I’d like to beat him around the head and neck with a baseball bat.
‘Why are you always so nasty about me?’ he squeaked.
‘Gosh,’ I stuttered. ‘Well, the thing is that, um, sometimes when you’re looking for a metaphor, and er… you’ve got a deadline, you say stuff you don’t really mean.
‘Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think, “What have I done?”’
‘This is pathetic,’ tutted Gill, and walked off to find someone with a spine.
‘But you were really horrid about me on Parkinson,’ countered Beckham.
And I had to agree. I had used the poor chap as a metaphor for all that’s wrong with the world, on about a thousand different occasions, in newspapers, on the radio and regularly on television.
This is because we are forever hearing about David Beckham rather than from David Beckham. He employs people to speak on his behalf and, when he does talk on his own, it’s all been carefully choreographed by other people.
The thing is, though, that when you take the people away, you find a very nice chap: friendly, normal, and not as thick as you might have been led to believe (by me).
So now I have a serious problem. Who to hate? I can feel Jade Goody coming into the cross hairs. What do you think?
Sunday 10 July 2005
My burning hate for patio heaters
What with all the bombs and so on, you might imagine that Britain’s environmentalists and health and safety Nazis would give it a rest and stop bossing us all around. But no. While the nation’s normal people observed a two-minute silence last week, the busybodies were working out how much damage is done to the planet by tomatoes.
Yes, you thought Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was a joke B-movie, but it seems not. Honestly, someone has worked out that less environmental damage is done by eating tomatoes that were grown in Spain and then brought here on a ship than eating tomatoes that were grown in heated British greenhouses.
And while they were doing that, binmen in Fife were told not to turn up for work in shorts, despite the heat-wave, in case – and I’m not making this up – they scratched their knees or were bitten by an insect. It seems health and safety guidelines are clear on the subject.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace has taken a long, hard look at the world. It has noted the alarming emergence of Islamic extremism and the corruption in Africa. It’s logged the oppression in Burma and the slaughter in the Middle East. And it has decided that something must be done… about your patio heater.
Mark Strutt, a climate campaigner, claims they’re a ‘frivolous waste of energy’, while Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat environment spokesman, said the first thing that came into his head. ‘Blah blah blah, carbon dioxide blah blah, heating the earth for years.’
Apparently, there are now 750,000 patio heaters in Britain, and together they produce 380,000 tons of greenhouse gases every year. That’s nearly as much, in case you’re interested, as is generated by the nation’s joggers.
Now, I should explain at this point that my wife bought me a patio heater for our tin wedding an
niversary, whenever that was, and I’ve always been slightly nervous about it. Of course, now I know such things annoy Greenpeace, I shall keep it lit 24 hours a day, but still the doubts won’t go away.
First of all, there’s the word ‘patio’, which I dislike. And I especially dislike it because, unlike toilet or settee or lounge, I can’t think of an alternative. I suppose you could call it a terrace heater but a terrace, as I understand it, must be raised. There’s no such thing as a sunken terrace. That’s a patio, whether you like it or not.
The main reason, though, why I dislike patio heaters is that they’re trying to make Britain something it’s not. In Australia you can eat and party outside because the climate is kind and the evenings are balmy. Whereas here the climate is miserable and the evenings are freezing. This is great. In fact, it’s precisely because we were brought up on a diet of drizzle and fish fingers that we had the biggest empire the world has ever seen.
And it’s still going on today. Because there’s almost certainly no such thing as global warming, we still have completely unreliable weather and that’s why we have such a powerful economy. While the French and the Italians and the Australians are at the beach, we are all sheltering from the rain and the cold, at work. The patio heater undermines all that. It brings the possibility of alfresco dining to our restaurants and ends the caveat at the end of all garden party invitations: if wet, in the village hall.
What’s more, it encourages families to eat outside. And this, in Britain, never works because it’s almost always too cold, and, when it isn’t, it’s far too hot.
And when it’s far too hot, you can’t sit out because you’re English and you’ll burn. Not smoothly either. You’ll end up with strap marks, sleeve marks, a ‘V’ around your neck and a nose like Rudolf’s. At work the next day, you’ll look like a raspberry ripple. You’ll look ridiculous.
Oh, and unless you’re very careful, every single mouthful of food eaten outdoors in Britain will contain a wasp, and every slurp of drink a fly the size of Jeff Goldblum.
And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Page 20