Don’t worry, though. I do have a suggestion which should help in these troubled times. I suggest that we use their shells as advertising hoardings.
Why not? In the olden days, advertisements were limited to books, television and town-centre hoardings, but now you find them everywhere.
Every time I log on to the internet, I’m asked if I would like a bigger penis (yes, but not if it comes with a virus), so why not advertise on the back of a turtle? It moves slowly up the beach and is watched intensely by lots of people who may well be interested in buying, say, a new pair of binoculars.
Think. The nozzle of the petrol pump urges you to buy a Snickers bar when you are in the Shell shop and, as you queue to board a plane, the airport tunnel is festooned with reasons for switching to HSBC. It seems that the decision on where to put your money has now come down to finding out which bank manager can make hand signals in Greece without causing offence.
Then, when you get off the plane, the luggage trolley advertises all the new and exciting ways of getting to the city centre. Even the back of a parking ticket is now a mini-hoarding.
In the days of George Dixon, phone boxes were boxes in which you found a phone.
But not any more. Now they are full of advertisements for young asylum ladies from Albania as well, curiously, as posters which talk about the advantages of having a mobile phone.
Have you been in a London taxi lately? The undersides of the foldaway seats carry advertisements telling you to put an advertisement there. I got a mailshot last week asking me to sponsor a child. Does that mean some poor African orphan has to walk around with ‘Watch Jeremy Clarkson’ on his forehead?
Advertisers have bought up every square inch of everywhere where people stand still. I went to a pub the other day which had adverts in front of the urinals and it’s the same story in lifts, cinemas, Tube trains and, I presume, buses.
Fancy chilling out in some remote beauty spot where you can get away from the hurly-burly of consumerism? Forget it. Chances are you’ll find a bench complete with a plaque advertising some dead person who also liked to sit there.
In town centres, every hanging basket and roundabout is sponsored, although on the open road things are better. Advertisers are banned from putting hoardings within sight of a motorway, but don’t think you are safe. If Melvyn Bragg’s arts programme on Radio 4 becomes too incomprehensible and you flick over to Classic FM, pretty soon you’ll be brought down to earth and invited to buy your very own garden furniture.
The only problem is that the sheer number of people needed to find places for these adverts, and the even bigger number needed to sell the space, means that in the end there’ll be nobody left to make anything worth advertising.
I went to Sheffield last week and was horrified to note that the vast steelworks have been pulled down to make way for an equally vast shopping centre which, presumably, can exist only because all the people who used to make knives and forks are now employed advertising the shopping centre.
Soon advertising agencies will be the only businesses left. That’s bad for the economy but irrelevant as far as the turtle is concerned. He doesn’t care whether it says Corus on his shell or Saatchi Cohen and Oven Glove. Just so long as it says something.
Sunday 23 February 2003
Give Me a Moment to Sell You Staffordshire
Boo. Hiss. Ref-er-ee. In last week’s controversial Country Life poll to find Britain’s nicest and nastiest counties, Staffordshire was named the worst place in all England.
At first I assumed that being a Country Life survey it would have nothing to do with the real world. I thought they would have counted the number of monogrammed swimming pools in each county, divided that by the availability of arugula and added the number of hunts to come up with Devon as a winner.
But no. They’ve been quite thorough, looking at house prices, the weather, the efficiency of the local council, the quality of the pubs, tranquillity, the arts, the lot. And they ended up with a list that had Devon, Gloucestershire and Cornwall at the top (Cornwall? Have they never seen Straw Dogs?) and Staffordshire at the bottom.
Now I admit that Staffordshire is a bit like one of those lost cities in Egypt. We know it to be there. We can see it on maps. And it’s written about in books. But nobody knows where it is exactly.
Plus, it’s ringed by places of such horror that even Indiana Jones would think twice about trying to go there. He may have faced runaway balls and poisoned darts in his quest for the lost ark but should he, one day, mount an expedition to locate the ancient city of Stafford, he will have to go through either Wales, Birmingham or Cheshire. Grisly.
I know where Staffordshire is because I spent most of my most interesting years there. I went to school about half a mile from it, my virginity went west in Yoxall, I got my first speeding ticket on the A38 outside Bartonunder-Needwood, and it was in Abbots Bromley that I learnt how to be chemically inconvenienced, how to be thrown out of a pub, how to be chucked by a girlfriend without blubbing, how to drive fast, how to do everything that matters, really.
No, honestly. In the Coach and Horses I learnt that it was possible to snog a girl and play pool at the same time. You don’t pick up a trick like this in Tiverton, that’s for sure.
I remember, too, going home from parties in those misty dawn mornings that were a hallmark of that baking summer of 1976. Across the Blithfield Reservoir on the boot of some girl’s mother’s Triumph Stag, Bob Seger’s Night Moves on the eight-track. That was Staffordshire and God it was good.
So when I saw the result of the Country Life survey I was horrified.
Staffordshire worse than Hertfordshire? Worse than Essex? Worse than East Sussex and even Surrey? Rubbish. If Kent is the garden of England, then Surrey is its patio.
Staffordshire, however, is one of its lungs. The rolling farmland near Uttoxeter, replete with wisteria villages, is as delightfully English as anywhere in the country and the Cannock Chase on a damp autumn morning, with the dew in the ferns, is like Yosemite, without the cliffs to fall off or the bears to eat you.
Actually, to be honest, it’s not like Yosemite at all, but there is a lot of wildlife. Deer. Deer. More deer. If you’re really lucky, you might catch a glimpse of a great crested Lord Lichfield stomping about the woods. And where does the Duke of Devonshire live? Derbyshire, that’s where.
Mind you, he’s about the only thing that has come out of Devon. I’m struggling now to think of anything in my house that was made there. And you could spray the county with machine-gun fire without hitting a single musician, artist or rock band. You wouldn’t hit a pheasant either. The bloody things are all far too high.
Whereas Staffordshire is the birthplace of your lavatory bowl, the Climax Blues Band, Dr Johnson, all your crockery and Robbie Williams. It’s also home to my oldest friend, who has the best name in the history of speech: Dick Haszard. And even better, his uncle’s a major.
I was explaining all of this to the man who edits my column. There was lots of puffed-up indignation and tutting. So we agreed that I wouldn’t write, as planned, about that Swiss yacht winning the America’s Cup and that I would write in defence of Staffordshire.
Sadly, though, I can’t. The problem is the towns. Stafford. Lichfield. Stoke.
They’re all ghastly. And it’s all very well having the Cannock Chase, but it’s named after Cannock, which would be the worst town in the world were it not for Burton upon Trent. Rugeley is a power station. Tamworth is a pig, Newcastle under Lyme is just confusing and Uttoxeter is hard to spell. All you can buy on the high street in any of these places is a house or a hamburger, and at night all any of them offer is a polyurethane tray of monosodium glutamate and the promise of coming home with a beer bottle sticking out of your left eye.
I still maintain that it’s not the worst county. I’d far rather live in Staffordshire than Surrey but, and this is a serious point, trying to argue that you’d have a good time there because I did 25 years ago is daft. Nearly as daf
t, in fact, as those professional Scousers who from their piles on the banks of the Thames still maintain that Liverpool’s the greatest place on Earth. Well, if that’s the case, Cilla, why don’t you push off back to Walton?
Sunday 9 March 2003
A Quick Snoop Behind the Queen’s Net Curtains
Last week the Queen of England very kindly agreed to break off from her waving duties and lend a hand with a television programme I’m making about the Victoria Cross.
And so on Wednesday I slipped into a whistle and went to Buckingham Palace to see some prototype medals she’d found in a cupboard. Sadly, I never met my new researcher but I did have a snout around the state rooms, which provided a rare insight into the life of the royals.
First of all, I’ve never really understood why the richest and most powerful of the world’s royal families has to live behind a Coronation Street, working-class veil of net curtains. There are no nets at Versailles, for instance. But it turns out they are weighted at the bottom and designed to catch flying glass should someone set off a bomb.
That’s something you andIdon’t have to worry about, and nor do we have to share our house with 500 staff, most of whom, it seems, will one day take the tabloid shilling and spill the beans on your toiletry habits.
Then there’s the bothersome business of guests. Last week the new president of Albania was scheduled to make a twenty-minute visit. Imagine what that must be like.
Going to meet him off the Eurostar and trying not to look surprised when he emerges, not from the carriage, but from a hidey-hole underneath the bogies.
Then she’s got the weekly visits from His Tonyness. They probably weren’t so bad when he was a new boy but now it must be awfully wearing to have to call him sir and kiss his shoes all the time.
Mind you, he’s nothing compared with the ordinary people. Pretty well every day a bunch of hand-wringing do-gooders goes to the palace for an official function of some kind, and every single one of them, no matter how worthy they are, will feel an almost uncontrollable urge to nick something.
I did. Over the years I have been to hundreds of houses and have never once felt the need to pocket a teaspoon or an inkwell. But over a cup of tea in the palace’s music room, I was overcome with a Herculean bout of kleptomania. I had my eye on the harpsichord but anything would have done. A cup. A saucer.A milk jug, even.
Staff, I’m told, keep a watchful eye on visitors but what do you say when you see a leading Rotarian shove a royal teapot in his pocket? How on earth do you ask for it back, diplomatically? I mean, he’s going to know that you know that it didn’t get in his trousers by accident.
And what’s more, when Denise Van Outen boasted that she’d nicked an ashtray while on a trip to the palace Mrs Queen couldn’t very well prosecute. It would seem mean, somehow. The same goes for the old biddies who pick flowers while at the garden parties. Even Prince Philip has never been heard to yell: ‘Oy, Ethel! Leave that orchid alone.’
Gravel, apparently, is what most people steal. Handfuls of it. Although my biggest problem with the loose shale that covers the courtyard was resisting the urge to do a handbrake turn on it.
The worst thing, though, about living in the palace is the decor. The Queen is the only person alive who watched that Michael Jackson shopping trip to Las Vegas and thought: ‘I’ve got one of those vases.’
The whole thing is a symphony of gloomy portraits of unsmiling ancestors with splashes of pure ostentation and gilt. In the main corridor pink and gold Eltonesque sofas clash violently with the bright red carpets.
It’s a Neverland kind of Derry Irvine hell and, unlike anyone else, the Queen can’t watch an episode of Homefront and think: ‘Right. I’ll knock through here, fit a natural wood floor, some Moroccan-style scatter cushions and top it all off with a bit of rag-rolling on the ceiling.’ She’s stuck with it.
She’s stuck with her job, too, endlessly waving and asking people to hand over the teapot. Of course, theoretically, she still has the power to start a war, though His Tonyness is capable of doing that on his own these days, and she can still dissolve Parliament.
This brings me on to my biggest point. Imagine having the power to send that braying bunch of ne’er-do-wells from the Palace of Westminster home, and not doing it.
Not even for a bit of fun, during a party. Whatever you may think of the Queen she has willpower, that’s for sure.
You may argue that the pain of being a queen is eased by her vast fortune. This may be true. But what can the poor dear spend it on? A speedboat? A Lamborghini? She’s not Victoria Beckham, you know.
Some say she should be replaced with a president. But who, at a cost to the nation of just 82p per person per year, is going to live in what amounts to Liberace’s wardrobe, and spend their days making small talk with stuttering and sweaty two-bit Third World politicians whose entourage is hell-bent on nicking the carpet?
You’d need to be mad to volunteer for all this. But then presidents usually are.
Sunday 16 March 2003
Who Needs Abroad When You Can Holiday in Hythe?
What a week. With the blossom in the trees and the sun on our backs, the nation kicked off its shoes, sat back and split its sides at photographs of those holidaymakers in Italy, all cold and shivering under their umbrellas.
There was, however, a fly in the blueness of it all. Normally when the sun puts his hat on someone on the weather forecast will tell us precisely how long we can spend outside without catching cancer.
This week, however, the Ministry of Misery came up with a new idea. On Wednesday it announced that the warm weather may cause smog in the south-east and that this may lead to breathing difficulties.
Oh, for God’s sake. What kind of sad, friendless person peels back his curtains on the sort of days we had last week and thinks: ‘Oh no’? Well matey, whoever you are, just because you spend all weekend in the darkest corner of your mother’s attic, downloading photographs of naked ladies, doesn’t mean we have to as well. So get back to your internet and leave us alone.
This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Italy or France. And even in the land of the healthy and the home of the safe you aren’t warned on the radio to stay indoors whenever it stops raining. What you get there is: ‘It’s a beautiful morning in the Bay Area. We’re expecting highs in the upper twennies. Here’s the J Geils Band.’
What we get is: ‘It’s a beautiful morning in the southeast. We’re expecting thousands of people to choke to death. Stay indoors. Stay white. Here’s some Morrissey.’
However, despite the best endeavours of the killjoys, the pleasant weather did set me thinking. Was it right to laugh at the 1.8 million people who’ve gone away for Easter? Can you really have a good holiday here at home?
Those of you who spent Good Thursday in a jam are probably thinking: ‘No, you cannot.’ But actually, spending two hours in traffic listening to the radio is better than spending two hours checking in at an airport. In a jam nobody wants to look in your shoes, for instance.
There are some drawbacks, though. Wherever you go in Britain some clown on a two-stroke microlight will spend the day 100 feet above your head, battling pointlessly and noisily against a four-knot headwind.
But let’s not forget that the Lonely Planet guide voted Britain the most beautiful island on earth.
There’s variety, too. Readers of the Sun can go to Blackpool or Scarborough. The reader of the Independent can go to Wales, the readers of Taxi magazine can go to Margate. Readers of the Observer, all of them actually, can take their Saabs to one of those wooden fishing cottages on Dungeness, where they can spend a week pretending to be Derek Jarman and having angst about the nuclear power station.
And readers of the Daily Mail? Well, they can go to their cellars to avoid falling house prices, murderers and whatever plague it is that’s going to kill them this week.
So what about you, readers of the Sunday Times? Well, obviously, you have Norfolk and Rock to play with, but if you fancy s
omething different – very different – may I suggest the Imperial Hotel in Hythe?
As is usual in British south-coast provincial hotels, the heating was turned up far too high, the carpets were far too patterned and the chef had ideas far above his station. The menu was full of things nestling on other things.
But don’t be fooled. Don’t think this was just another British hotel that threw in the towel when cheap package holidays started in the 1960s. No, this place presented me with one of the most bewitching nights of my entire travelling life.
The dining room, for instance, featured an altar – and, on the far wall, some curtains, behind which, I can only presume, there was an oven. So when the older guests, so prevalent here on the south coast, drop dead in the soup, they can be cremated on site. ‘You check in. We check you out.’ Maybe that’s the Imperial’s motto.
I must also mention our waitress. She was a pretty little thing who laughed, and I mean likea drain, whenever anyone spoke to her.
After dinner she took me into a broom cupboard – I felt a Boris Becker moment coming on but sadly it was not to be. She needed to explain, she said, that she was joyful because she has Jesus Christ Our Saviour inside her. Lucky old Jesus.
The bar was full of dead pensioners, a group who said they were ‘tri-service people’ but were actually 00 agents, and all the German baddies from Die Hard, who’d arrived on the lawn in a helicopter.
I therefore went to the lounge and guess what I found? If it had been a Roman orgy or a Ku Klux Klan meeting, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but in fact there were 50 soldiers from the Chinese army in there. You don’t find that sort of thing in Siena.
So will I be taking my summer holiday at the Imperial? No, not really. The Lonely Planet is right to say Britain is the most beautiful island on earth. But only as a place to live.
The World According to Clarkson Page 16