I think this was probably sensible. I don’t normally agree with the RSPCA since I believe it is the duty of an animal to be on my plate at supper time but, that said, it’s hard to condone wanton cruelty.
And circuses were cruel. They had boxing kangaroos that were plainly off their heads, and animal-rights activists were forever opening up cages to find that the elephants had eaten their own dung and the tigers had bitten off their own tails. If they’d given a fox some cannabis and told it to jump through hoops of fire, that would have been fine. Foxes deserve to be humiliated. But there’s something hideous about watching a lion, the king of the jungle, standing on one leg in a tutu.
There was something equally hideous about the ‘modern’ circus which replaced the Chipperfield original. This usually involved a message of some kind and the message was usually about Margaret Thatcher: ‘Next up tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Dave Spart, who will use mime to explain the relationship between poll tax and apartheid.’
Not exactly family entertainment, and nor were the French and Canadian alternatives, which tended to feature dwarfs juggling chainsaws.
It really did look, as the new millennium dawned, as if the circus had been buried for good. Even the Dome, which was the biggest top of them all, reinforced that. So what was I doing in a tent last week?
I have no idea but I can tell you that, as live entertainment goes, it blew Darcy Bussell into the hedgerow and the Rolling Stones into the middle of last week.
It was called Gifford’s Circus and it was held in a tent of a size that would be familiar to anyone who has camped out on Everest. There were no clowns in terrifying suits and they had not plundered the Kalahari for animals. In fact the only four-legged entertainment came right at the end when a dog, belonging to someone in the audience, sauntered into the ring and got its lipstick out. It was that kind of show.
They had two jugglers from Ethiopia, who are apparently on the verge of taking a world record with their back-to-back routine. And they had Ralph and Celia, who came on in Victorian bathing costumes and played what appeared to be a game of aerial twister. Did you know it was possible to stand on one leg with a woman balanced on your nose? No, I didn’t either.
I don’t want to sound like some tweedy duffer who thinks television is the devil’s eye, but there was something uplifting about this simple rural entertainment. Believe me, watching a man taking off his trousers on a tightrope is amazing. I can’t even do it in a bedroom without falling over. It was uplifting because it was so ‘up close and personal’, and so small and so low-budget that you could see there was no computerised trickery.
Isn’t that what you want from entertainment – seeing people do things you cannot do yourself? Big Brother? Give me the big top any day. If you are one of the twenty million dispossessed who stare at a wall every night because you can’t think of anything better to do, give the local circus a try. I think you’ll like it.
I was going to finish up at this point with something edgy and sharp. Something a little bit cool and now. But in the spirit of the piece I will leave you with this:
A goat goes into a jobcentre and asks in perfect English for some work. The slightly amazed clerk has a look through his files and says he could try the circus.
‘The circus?’ says the goat. ‘Why would the circus want a bricklayer?’
Sunday 28 July 2002
The Nit-picking Twitchers Out to Ground Britain
House prices are teetering on the edge of a bottomless hole and pretty soon anything with less than six or seven bedrooms will be worth less than its contents.
There ’sa very good reason for this. As far asI can tell, every single house in Britain is on the flight path for one of the government’s proposed new airports. No village is exempt. No dale is deemed too beautiful. No town is too small or inconsequential. Even Rugby, apparently, needs four runways, six terminals and 5,000 miles of chain-link fencing. Nottingham, too, and Exeter – everywhere does.
The thinking behind this is worryingly simple. The government, fresh from its success with the Millennium Dome and the River of Fire, has worked out that no people in Britain flew on commercial airlines in 1901 and 180 million did in 2001. So, using the same sort of maths that brought us Gordon Brown’s shiny new overdraft, it reckons 500 million people will be landing and taking off from British airports in 2030.
That’s half the population of China. It’s twice the population of America. It’s everyone in Britain using a plane ten times a year. And that seems unlikely somehow.
Still, if you reckon half a billion people will be needing a runway within 28 years, it’s easy to understand why every field in the land is currently earmarked as a potential airport.
This has led to a biblical outbreak of Nimbyism. Councils affected by the proposal to build a massive new airport on the Kent marshes took the government to court last week, saying the extra noise should go to Gatwick. So now, we can be sure, the people of Sussex will be fighting back.
This will turn Tunbridge Wells into the West Bank. It’ll be father versus son, mother versus daughter, neighbour versus neighbour. And it will all be completely pointless because, let me explain right now, there is no way in hell that an airport will ever be built on the Medway marshes.
First of all, since London swelled up to the size of Belgium, Kent is as inaccessible as the South Pole or Mars. Given the choice of going on holiday via an airport in the middle of the Thames estuary or staying at home and beating myself over the head with a brick, I’d stay at home.
Of course, they could get round this by building better road and rail links but what they could never get round is the most fearsome organisation in the entire world. In a straight battle between this lot and Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden would end up killing himself to escape from the hounding. It can nit-pick a man to death from 400 paces. It never gives up. Its members are terminators. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
The twitchers have pointed out that the Medway marshes are home to the country’s largest heronry and that is pretty much that. A simple avocet would have done the trick but they’ve come up with a whole herd of herons so one thing’s for sure; there will be no Kent airport.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some environmental protesters in China who had wheeled out a dolphin to try to stop the massive Yangtze dam. And Chinese officials had got round the problem by shooting it.
But that will never happen here. The mere fact that we have this consultation shows how democratic we’ve become. Now everyone has the chance to object. As a result, nothing will happen until the end of time. No matter where the government selects, there will always be a slug or a beetle or a butterfly.
What we need at a time like this is someone who can machete their way through the eco-twaddle. We need someone who can shove the government’s projections back up Alistair Darling’s new hole czar. We need a realist at the helm. And I can think of nobody better qualified than me.
Video conferencing and emails take up less time and involve less risk for businessmen than being chased across the Atlantic by heat-seeking missiles. So I can see, in the fullness of time, a dramatic fall in the demand for business travel.
However, there will be a significant increase in the number of people travelling for fun. And, as I said earlier, it won’t be fun if they have to set off from a mudflat on the Medway or a business park in Rugby.
You have to leave via London and – contrary to the claims made by Stansted, which is in Bishop’s Stortford, or Gatwick, which is in Brighton – the capital has only one airport: Heathrow.
The government’s proposals seem to call for one new short runway but what good is that? Build six new long ones and be done with it. They will be able to handle the bigger planes that are coming. Heathrow is more accessible than any other airport in Britain and nobody living nearby can complain because it was there before they were. They’re all deaf anyway but six planes landing at once are not six times
louder than six planes landing one at a time.
However, best of all, the RSPB can’t object because any birds native to the reservoirs of Staines were long since sucked into the Trent engine of a passing 777 and shredded.
Sunday 1 December 2002
Cricket’s the National Sport of Time Wasters
I understand that England recently lost a game of cricket. Good. The more we lose, the more our interest in the game wanes and the less it will dominate our newspapers and television screens.
Cricket – and I will not take any argument – is boring. Any sport which goes on for so long that you might need a ‘comfort break’ is not a sport at all. It is merely a means of passing the time. Like reading.
Of course, we used to have televised reading. It was called Jackanory. Now we have Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is much better. Things have moved on, but cricket has not.
I’m not sure that it can. Even if Nasser Hussain, who is the captain of England, were to invest in some new hair and marry Council House Spice (aka Claire Sweeney, the ex-Brookside actress turned Big Brother contestant), it wouldn’t make any difference.
Nobody is quite sure how cricket began, though many people believe it was invented by shepherds who used their crooks to defend the wicket gate to the sheep fold. This would certainly figure because shepherds had many long hours to while away, with nothing much to do.
The first written reference to cricket was in 1300, when Prince Edward played it with his friend Piers Gaveston. And again, this would figure. Princes, in those days, were not exactly rushed off their feet.
Cricket was spread around the world by British soldiers who found themselves marooned in godforsaken flea-bitten parts of the world and needed something to keep them amused, not just for an hour but for week after interminable week.
Today Australia dominates the game – which furthers my theory. Of course they’re good at it. They have no distractions. And the only way we can ever beat them is to round up the unemployed and the wastrels and give them all bats. Certainly, they’d feel at home in the pavilion. It’s exactly the same as sitting in a bus shelter all day.
Let me put it this way – is there a sound more terrifying on a Sunday afternoon than a child saying: ‘Daddy. Can we play Monopoly?’
Like cricket, Monopoly has no end. The rules explain how you can unmortgage a property and when you should build hotels on Bond Street but they don’t say, and they should, that the winner is the last player left alive. And what about Risk? You make a calculation, based on the law of averages, that you can take the world but you’re always stymied by the law of probability and end up out of steam, throwing an endless succession of twos and ones in Kamchatka. Still, this is preferable to the modern version in which George W. Bush invades Iraq and we all die of smallpox.
Happily, my children are now eight, six and four so they’re way past the age when board games hold any appeal. Given the choice of mortgaging Old Kent Road or shooting James Bond on a PlayStation, they’ll take the electronic option every time.
Then there are jigsaws, which I once had to explain to a Greek. ‘Yes, you spend a couple of weeks putting all the pieces together so you end up with a picture.’
‘Then what happens?’ he asked.
‘Well, you break it up again and put it back in the box.’
It’s not often I’ve felt empathy with a Greek, but I did then. And it’s much the same story with crosswords. If scientists could harness the brainpower spent every day on trying to find the answer to ‘Russian banana goes backwards in France we hear perhaps’, then maybe mankind might have cured cancer by now.
Crosswords, like jigsaws and cricket, are not really games in themselves. They are simply tools for wasting time. And that’s not something that sits well in the modern world.
We may dream of living the slow life, taking a couple of hours over lunch and eating cheese until dawn, but the reality is that we have a heart attack if the traffic lights stay red for too long or the lift doors fail to close the instant we’re ready to go.
Answering-machine messages are my particular bugbear. I want a name and a number, and that’s it. I don’t have time to sit and listen to where you’ll be at three and who you’ll be seeing and why you need to talk before then. And even if I do pick up the phone personally, I don’t want a chat. I’m a man. I don’t do chatting. Say what you have to say and go away.
British film-makers still haven’t got this. They spend hours with their sepia lighting and their long character-developing speeches and it’s all pointless because we’d much rather watch a muscly American saying: ‘Die, m**********r.’
Slow-cooked lamb shanks for supper? Oh for God’s sake, I’ll get a takeaway.
Cricket, then, is from a bygone age when people invested their money in time rather than in things. And now we have so many things to play with and do, it seems odd to waste it watching somebody else playing what’s basically an elaborate game of catch.
Please stop watching – then it will go away.
Sunday 8 December 2002
Have I Got News… I’m Another Failed Deayton
Over the years I’ve always said no to appearing on Have I Got News For You. Actually, that’s not true. I haven’t always said no, because they only asked once. However, had they asked again, I would have said no again.
There didn’t seem to be any upside. I would sit there, dripping like cheese in an old sock, while Ian Hislop, Paul Merton and Angus Deayton skated elegantly around their carefully choreographed and heavily scripted routine.
Like pretty well everyone, I knew how the show was put together. Throughout the week, a room full of the brightest writers in the land would crank out jokes and then on studio day the presenters would hone and perm them to perfection.
The guests? Well they’d be like snotty kids, strapping themselves into a Spitfire and going up there, alone, against an entire battle-hardened German squadron. Yes, they might fire off a few bullets but they’d end up full of holes.
However, when the call came through a couple of weeks ago to sit in the main chair, I needed smelling salts. ‘What, be the quizmaster? Me – the car bloke?’
This was like being asked to run the state opening of parliament. I’d have the team on my side, making sure the throne was gold enough and that my crown wouldn’t fall off. ‘Yes. Just yes.’
It was a bit disappointing that the evening before I was due to record I had been invited to go out with four jolly attractive women who’d spent the previous few weeks learning how to be strippers and who needed a man to accompany them on a tour of London’s lap-dancing venues.
Normally, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse couldn’t have dragged me from that opportunity. But attempting to fly on HIGNFY with a hangover and no sleep was not sensible, so I was in bed at 11 o’clock in my smart pyjamas with the bunny rabbit ears.
In the morning a motorcyclist brought round the finished script on a purple cushion. It was very, very funny. And apparently quite simple, too. I just had to sit there, waiting for Paul and Ian to finish their prepared verbal tennis, then I would read my gags from the autocue, pick up the cheque (with a forklift truck) and go home.
Er, well, it’s not quite like that.
I arrived at the studios at 9.30 in the morning to find that Geoffrey Robinson, the former paymaster-general, had been charged with a selection of motoring offences. Plainly, this was good material. So half the script was thrown away to make room, and then the trouble started.
Obviously the three scriptwriters, headed by snake-hipped Jed, wanted to dwell on the white powder that had allegedly been found in Robinson’s car,* but the lawyers said it would be better to call it a substance. A substance? That was no good. A substance could be something on the bottom of his shoe. So after an hour or so everyone agreed that it could be called a ‘mystery powder’.
So where were Paul and Ian while this was going on? Well, to be blunt, they were at home, in loose robes. They didn’t breeze in till six.
And do you know something? They had not seen a script; they didn’t even know who the guests were.
All they see before the show, and I mean half an hour before the tape-players start to turn, are the photographs to which they are asked to come up with captions and the four people in the odd-one-out round. They had the same amount of preparation as the guests.
Let me tell you something else, too. I had always imagined that after twelve years of being professionally cynical they would be cruel and bitter and combative.
But they were like parents before a school sports day. ‘Don’t worry,’ they kept saying, ‘do your best. It’s not the winning.’ They were so kind that they nearly managed to shut down the hydrants in my armpits.
And God they’re quick. I would ask a question that I know they had never seen or heard before and they’d be off, with a top-of-the-head banter that left me breathless. I wish you could have seen the full hour and 40 minutes that they recorded rather than just the 29 minutes that was transmitted.
I’m sorry to sound so gushing but Paul is properly funny. And crammed into that tiny head, Ian has an encyclopaedia.
I should explain that they really do care about winning. Which is odd because, from where I was sitting, the scores seemed to mount up in an entirely arbitrary fashion. I have no idea why Paul ended up with sixteen and Ian with eleven. So far as I could work out, they both got nought.
And me? Well, I spent most of the evening reading from the autocue when I should have been looking at the notes on my desk. I forgot to ask two questions completely, I lost my earpiece so I couldn’t hear the instructions from the gallery and at no point did I ever know who was supposed to be answering what.
Doubtless it will all have looked seamless on television – they even managed to make sense of Boris Johnson. But the simple fact of the matter is that 7 million people will have watched my performance and thought: ‘Nope. He wasn’t as good as Angus Deayton either.’
The World According to Clarkson Page 13