The World According to Clarkson

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Keen to find out what had actually been exhibited at the gallery and if I was on the right track, I dug out an old copy of Time Out and was somewhat bewildered to find it had singled out a video exhibit by Liane Lang. Who she is, I have no idea. Another Big Brother contestant perhaps?

  My bewilderment turned to bafflement when I read what the video contains: a clay hand manipulates a woman’s groin fringed with spiky black hair. Devoid of sexiness, the image, we are assured, is perplexing. You’re damn right it’s perplexing. And it gets worse. Rebecca Warren, it says here, uses clay to a more playful and seductive effect. Painted with a wash of pink, a woman opens her legs to the lascivious attentions of what might be a grey dog.

  Astonished, I telephoned the gallery and asked what any of this had to do with Tony Blair and his third way. ‘Oh, nothing,’ said the girl. ‘It’s just that the exhibition opened on election day and we sort of thought the New Labour name fitted.’ Actually, it does.

  It’s a load of metropolitan claptrap. I may have missed the exhibition, which closes today, but to be honest I didn’t miss it at all.

  Sunday 19 August 2001

  Rule the Waves? These Days We’re Lost at Sea

  My childhood memories of Britain’s maritime achievements centre around endless black-and-white television pictures of shrivelled up little men with faces like Furball XL5 stumbling off their battered yachts in Southampton having sailed round the world backwards.

  Francis Chichester, Chay Blyth, Robin Knox Johnston. Grainy pictures of Cape Horn. And Raymond Baxter reminding us all that, once again, the noble island nation has tamed the savage ferocity of those southern oceans. Trafalgar, Jutland. The Armada etc. etc. etc. Britannia rules the waves. Always has, always will. The end.

  Now, however, we find that pretty well every sailing record in the book is held by the French. They’ve been across the Atlantic faster than anyone else, round the world faster than anyone else and, while plucky Ellen MacArthur grabbed all the headlines by pluckily coming second in the recent Vendée Globe race, the event was actually won by a Frog. Same as it was the year before. And the year before that.

  Some say the problem is sponsorship, some argue that sailing in Britain is drowning in its own gin and tonic. But the simple fact is that, these days, the only time a British sailor gets on the news is when his boat sinks. We had that bloke who turned turtle off Australia and survived by eating himself. Then there’s the Royal Navy which, these days, would struggle to gain control of a puddle. And let’s not forget Pete Goss, whose Team Phillips boat, built to go round the world, didn’t even get round Land’s End before the end came off.

  Now I should make it perfectly clear at this point that I’m not a sailor. I tried it just the once on what was basically an aquatic Rover 90. It was captained by an enthusiastic Hampshire type who kept saying we were really ‘knocking on’, but I doubted this, since I was being overtaken by my cigarette smoke.

  You could have steered that bloody thing through a hurricane and it would still have only done four knots. And that’s another thing. Why do people lose the ability to speak English as soon as they cast off the spring? Why is speed knots and knots reefers? And why, every time you settle back for a real reefer, do you have to get up again? To get the painters in.

  Furthermore, even the most mild-mannered man acts like he’s got the painters in as soon as he grabs the wheel (helm). Why? We’re at sea, for heaven’s sake. If I don’t respond immediately to your commands or pull a sheet instead of a halyard, it really won’t matter. A two-second delay will not cause us to crash.

  In fact, come to think of it, I know all there is to know about sailing, i.e. that it means spending the day at 45 degrees while moving around very slowly and being shouted at.

  Understandably, then, I was a trifle reluctant when I was invited to Brest, to join the captain and crew of Cap Gemini, a £3-million French-built monster – the biggest, fastest trimaran the world has ever seen.

  Launched just last month, it is hoped it will get round the world in 60 days and, to put that in perspective, an American nuclear submarine just made the same trip in 83 days. This is one really fast boat.

  But it’s the sheer size of the thing which draws the crowds. Finding it in a port is a bit like finding a haystack in a needle. You just look for the mast which stretches up past the other masts, through the troposphere and way into the magnetosphere. This boat doesn’t need satellite navigation. You just climb up that mast and have a look.

  In fact, Cap Gemini doesn’t really have anything. To keep the weight down, the whole boat, even the sail, is made from carbon fibre and so, having gone to all that trouble and expense, they weren’t going to undo it with internal luxuries. The ten meat machines who sail it are expected to use their clothes for mattresses. And it doesn’t even have a lavatory.

  We set off and, for five glorious minutes, I think I saw the appeal of this sailing business. The sun came out, the wind picked up and the mighty yacht set off into the Bay of Biscay like a scalded cock. Perched on one of the three hulls, 20 feet clear of the iron-flat sea, I could scarcely believe my eyes as the speedometer climbed past 30, 35 and then 40 knots. Using nothing but the wind for power, we were doing nearly 50 miles per hour. This was astonishing. Had I been an American, I would have made whooping noises.

  But then the wind died down again and we turned for home. Except of course we didn’t. This being a sailing boat we had to endlessly tack back up the estuary, turning what should have been a 25-kilometre breeze into a 3-hour, 50-kilometre, aimless, walking-pace slog.

  There was nothing to eat, nothing to drink, nothing to smoke and, no matter where I went, some fantastically good-looking hunk of sun-bleached muscle trod on me and then shouted because I was in its way. This, I think, is why the British have largely given up with sailing.

  Apart from a few crashing bores in blazers, the rest of us have realised that, for getting round the world these days, you can’t beat an Airbus. Which is also French. Dammit.

  Sunday 2 September 2001

  Why Can’t We Do Big or Beautiful Any More?

  With the England football team on the crest of a wave and unemployment at an all-time low, it should be a good time to sit back, put on some Elgar and feel warmly fuzzy about being British.

  Concorde is coming back, too, and soon it will be tearing across the Atlantic twice a day to remind Johnny Yank that, once upon a time, we were capable of unbelievable genius. Even NASA’s most respected engineers have admitted to me, in private, that designing and building a supersonic airliner was a greater technological challenge than putting a man on the moon.

  So it’s wonderful that once again Heathrow will rumble and shudder under the onslaught of those massive Olympus jets. However, it’s also a little sad because you can bet your last cornflake that the British won’t have anything to do with man’s next great landmark.

  The problem is that the twenty Concordes cost £1.5 billion, which back then was an astronomical fortune. Even today it would buy two Millennium Domes. Yet despite this, the last five to roll off the production lines were sold for just FFr1 each.

  The whole project was driven by Tony Benn, a man who was also responsible for getting the hovercraft out of Cockerell’s shed and into the Channel. In addition, he helped to create ICL, Britain’s answer to America’s IBM. When he was postmaster-general, he pushed for the Post Office Tower which, for twenty or more years, was London’s tallest building.

  Denis Healey once said that Benn ‘came close to destroying the Labour Party as a force in twentieth-century British politics’. And I bet he had few friends at the Treasury either. But my God, he knew how to make everyone feel good about being British.

  Today, however, the government doesn’t give. It simply counts the cost. Everything is measured in terms of how many baby incubators it could have bought or how many teachers it might have paid for.

  You just know that if Norwich city council were to build a beautiful fountain in the city centre
, the local newspaper would find some bereaved mother to come out from behind the Kleenex to say the money should have been spent on speed humps instead.

  Part of the problem with the Dome was that instead of making a monument that would stand for all of time, they tried to make it a short-term business proposition whose basic function was to pay for itself. And while the London Eye has been a resounding success, you know that its foundations are rooted in someone’s profit and loss account.

  Maybe this is a fundamental problem with capitalism. Maybe the people of a country don’t get blanketed in the warm glow of national pride unless they have a socialist at the helm. Someone like Benn. Or the man who dreamt up those Soviet May Day parades. Certainly the communist cities I’ve visited do give good monument.

  However, to disprove this theory there is the Grande Arche de la Défense in the not very communist city of Paris. Had they filled the middle with offices, the rental income would have been boosted tenfold, but then they wouldn’t have ended up with something so utterly magnificent. And what about the very non-communist US Navy? There is no practical reason on earth why it needs fourteen city-sized aircraft carriers. They exist primarily to instil in the folks back home a sense of security and national pride.

  So I’m left facing the inescapable conclusion that the lack of will to build something worthwhile, something beautiful, something brilliant, is a uniquely British problem. Maybe we can’t feel a sense of pride in ourselves because we don’t know who or what we are any more.

  The prime minister is a Labour Tory. There’s a mosque at the end of your street and a French restaurant next door. We are neither in nor out of Europe. We are famous for our beer but we drink in wine bars. We are not a colonial power but we still have a commonwealth. We are jealous of the rich but we buy into the Hello! celebrity culture. We live in a United Kingdom that’s no longer united. We are muddled.

  And this must surely be the only country in the world that sees its national flag as a symbol of oppression. So if you can’t be seen as patriotic for fear of being labelled a racist, you aren’t going to be desperately inclined to build something for the good of the nation. Not that you know what the nation actually is or means any more.

  Our football team may be on its way to the World Cup finals but we don’t even have a national stadium in which it can play home games.

  Concorde is back in the air – but not because the great white bird makes us all feel good. It’s back because the accountants at British Airways have turned the white elephant into a dirty great cash cow.

  To combat this disease, I would like to see a fund set up that does nothing but pay for great public buildings, follies, laser shows, towers, fountains, airships, aqueducts. Big, expensive stuff designed solely to make us go ‘wow’. I even have a name for this fund. We could call it the lottery.

  Sunday 9 September 2001

  Learn from Your Kids and Chill Out Ibiza-Style

  You may have seen various Ibiza-style compilation music albums advertised in the middle of fairly highbrow television programmes recently. And you may have thought that this was as inappropriate as advertising knickers in the middle of a football match. You are watching a documentary about insects. You are intelligent. The only Ibiza soundtrack that you’re interested in is the cicadas, not the mega-decibel noise coming out of the clubs.

  I mean, take an album called The Chillout Session which, according to the blurb on the cover, is a laid-back mix of blissful beats and chilled-out house featuring Jakatta, Leftfield, William Orbit, Groove Armada, Underworld and Bent. Dotcom computerised e-music for the e-generation. Or, to put it another way, rubbish.

  And rightly so. It has always been the job of modern music to annoy parents. When I used to watch Top of the Pops in the early 1970s my father’s face would adopt the look of a man who’d just been stabbed in the back of the neck with a screwdriver. There was bewilderment and some real pain, too, especially during ‘Ballroom Blitz’.

  This was a man who spoke the language of pop music with the élan with which I speak French. He used the definite article indiscriminately, talking about the Queen and the T Rex. He referred to the Rod Stewart as ‘that man who sings while he’s on the lavatory’, and once said of the Billy Idol: ‘You’d have thought if he was going on television, he’d have put a shirt on.’

  He honestly and truthfully could not see any difference at all between Rick Wakeman and Rick Derringer. I could never believe it, but to his ears, Mick Fleetwood and Mick Jagger were one and the same.

  And yet twenty years down the line, I found myself in the same boat, unable to tell the difference between the house and the garage. Techno, hip-hop, rap. It was all the same to me. A collection of angry-looking young men with their trousers on back to front, urging us to go out and kill a pig.

  This is undoubtedly why Radio 2 became the world’s most listened-to station. Thanks to an appealing blend of Terry Wogan and the Doobie Brothers, it was a little haven of peace for the fortysomething music lover who was terrified of the noises being made on Radio 1.

  However, if you listen exclusively to Radio 2, you are isolated from the fast-moving world of modern music. You become stuck in a Neil Young Groundhog Day, endlessly buying After the Gold Rush on CD and mini disc.

  You don’t watch MTV. You don’t read the NME. You don’t see Top of the Pops any more. So, how do you know when there’s some new music out there that you would like?

  The record companies can’t put flyers under the windscreen wipers of every Volvo in the land, so that’s why these Ibiza Chillout records are being advertised in the middle of programmes you like to watch. It’s because they feature the type of music you would like to hear.

  You may not have heard of William Orbit but you will know his song well because it’s Barber’s Adagio for Strings. And while you may be unfamiliar with Groove Armada, you’ll be able to hum along because you’ve heard their tune on and on in those slow-motion end-of-championship slots on Grandstand.

  Listening to this music is like having a length of ermine pulled through your head. If honey could make a noise, this is what it would sound like. It becomes the perfect soundtrack for your spag bol and Chianti supper party.

  Of course, you’re not going to listen to it in the same way that you listened to Steve Miller’s Fly Like an Eagle in 1976. Back then, listening to an album was a job in itself whereas this e-music is acoustic wallpaper, something you have on while you do something else. In our language, it’s Jean-Michel Jarre meets Mike Oldfield, without the joss sticks and the vinyl crackle.

  Moby is particularly good. Buy I Like to Score tomorrow morning and you’ll never listen to Supertramp again. You’ll retune your car stereo to Radio 1 and you’ll put up with five hours of pig killing for five minutes of the whale song.

  And you’ll start to hear other bands that you like. Radiohead. Toploader. Coldplay. Dido. David Gray. Stereophonics. You may have heard the names over the past few years and you may have assumed, as I did, that they banged garden furniture into computers and recorded road drills for the benefit of your children, but no. You’ll hear melodies that will cause you to hum along. And none of them will encourage you to stab a policeman.

  I’ve taken to buying their albums and it’s wonderful not having to stand at the counter in a record shop being called ‘man’ by the spiky salesman because I want The Yes Album on CD.

  But if middle-aged people are able to discuss the latest mega-mix from Ibiza and the vocal range of Joe Washbourne from Toploader then our children will have nowhere to go. We’ll be in Ibiza giving it large and, to rebel, they’ll be on a Hoseasons canal boat singing songs from The Sound of Music.

  Sunday 16 September 2001

  Going to the Dentist in the Teeth of All Reason

  Left to its own devices, an elephant would never die. It has no natural enemies. It is not prone to riding a motorcycle. It has the metabolic rate of granite. So, to ensure that the world was not eventually overrun by herds of immortal two-
tonners, nature put a time bomb in its mouth: weak teeth. They are replaced with new ones every ten years, but when the sixth set has worn out, that’s it. Game over for Nellie.

  Human beings are different. The enamel that coats our teeth is not only the hardest substance in our bodies but also one of the toughest and most resilient concoctions found anywhere on planet Earth.

  Think about it. The oldest evidence of humanoid existence was found three years ago just outside Johannesburg. Named Little Foot, nothing much remains. It’s just a sort of fossil, except for the teeth which loom out of the rock as fresh and as shiny as they were when the poor creature lived, 3.6 million years ago.

  We see this all the time. Archaeologists are forever pulling dead priests out of fields in Lincolnshire and declaring that they died during the Reformation after being boiled in acid, burnt, hung, drawn, quartered, crushed and then quartered again for good measure. Every bone is always smashed and rotten and yet the teeth still gleam.

  So why, then, has the government recently announced that it will be allocating £35 million to help eradicate tooth decay? Why did it say that poor children can now get free toothbrushes on the National Health Service? Well, it’s because the health minister who dreamt up these schemes is called Hazel Blears. This would make her a woman. And that would make her completely obsessed with other people’s teeth.

  When I was a single man I went to the dentist only once, when I had toothache. He said all my teeth would have to be filled except two, which would need root canals. Then, after he had filled my face with needles and Novocaine, he asked whether I would like the work done privately or on the NHS.