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And Another Thing

I’m a nobody, my jet-set credit card tells me so

I suppose all of us were out and about before Christmas, pummelling our credit cards to within an inch of their lives. So, some time in the next week or so, we can expect a sour-faced government minister to come on television to explain that we are now borrowing more than we’re saving and that it has all got to stop.

In the mid-1970s, shortly after credit cards first emerged, we owed £32 million.

Now we’ve managed to get ourselves into debt to the tune of £50 billion, which works out at about £1,140 for every adult in the land.

As a result, the economy is teetering on the brink of collapse and little old ladies are having to sell their cats for medical experiments. And children are being lured into prostitution and up chimneys. It’s all too awful for words.

But there’s a darker side to credit cards. A sinister underbelly that is rarely talked about. I’m talking about the misery of not having the right one.

We’ve all been there. Dinner is over, the bill has arrived and everyone is chucking their plastic on to the saucer. It’s a sea of platinum and gold. One chap has produced something with a Wells Fargo stagecoach on the front. Another has come up with an HM Government procurement card, just like James Bond would have.

And then it’s your turn. And all you’ve got is your green NatWest Switch card.

Socially speaking, you are about to die. Or are you?

A couple of years ago I read an interview with some chap who’d got a fistful of cards in his pocket and claimed that the more shiny examples, specifically the much-coveted black American Express, gave him ‘certain privileges’.

Obviously, I had to have one. So I lied about my salary, handed over 650 bleeding quid, and there it was, in a leatherette box, presented like a fine Tiffany earring. My very own passport to the high life.

A few weeks later I was flying economy class to some godforsaken hell hole – I forget where – and found myself sitting in one of those oyster bars at Heathrow, fielding questions from men in nylon trousers about Volkswagen diesels. After a while I remembered the black ‘key’ in my wallet and recalled a bit in the booklet that said it opened the door to airline lounges around the world.

So, I plodded over to the club class lounge with my cattle class boarding ticket.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said the woman cheerfully.

‘Aha,’ I countered, ‘but I have a black American Express card which affords me certain privileges.’

It didn’t. So I went back to the diesel men at the oyster bar.

A month after that I was checking in at Blakes Hotel in Amsterdam when, again, I remembered the card and thought: ‘I wonder if this will get me a room upgrade.’

Joy of joys, it did. All I had to do was check into one of the emperor suites at £1 trillion a night and I would be automatically upgraded to a maharajah suite, with the enlarged minibar, at no extra cost. So, off to the economy broom cupboard I went.

As the months went by, I kept producing the jet-set, jet-black Amex and the result was pretty much always the same. ‘Non.’… ‘Nein.’ And in provincial Britain: ‘What the f***’s that?’

Actually, I’m being unfair. It wasn’t only provincial Britain that was mystified.

Pretty well everywhere east of New York and west of Los Angeles doesn’t take Amex, no matter what colour the card is. Some say this is because Amex charges too much.

Others because the Americans are infidel dogs.

Eventually, I found a fellow customer and asked what she saw in it. ‘Oh,’ she said, tossing a mane of pricey hair backwards, ‘it’s marvellous. Only the other day I needed 24 variegates and my local florist didn’t have them in stock. So I called the Amex helpline number and they got them for me.’

Great. But I have never ever felt a need to fill the house with variegates. More worryingly, I seldom have the courage to produce the black plastic on those rare occasions when I find myself dining in a restaurant that accepts it. Because what message would I be giving out?

When you produce a black Amex, what you are saying is that you earn £1 million a year. Is the waiter really going to be impressed? And what about your friends? They either earn a million too, in which case so what, or they don’t, in which case they won’t be your friends for much longer.

Having a black Amex is not like having a big house. That’s useful. And it’s not like having a big car. That’s more comfortable than a smaller one. The card exists, solely, to impress. It has no other function.

If I were the sort of person who had clients, then maybe this would be useful. But a word of warning on that front. I lied about my salary to get one, so who’s to say that the sweating golfer who whipped one out over dinner last night didn’t lie, too. A. A. Gill has one, for God’s sake.

As a result, I shall be getting rid of it. This will help Britain’s economy in a small way. But more importantly, it will do wonders for my self-esteem.

Sunday 11 January 2004

Oops: how I dropped the US air force right in it

Given the American military’s dreadful reputation for so-called friendly fire incidents, many people will not have been surprised last week when it was revealed that one of its F-15 jets had dropped a bomb on Yorkshire.

I wasn’t surprised either, but for a different reason. You see, a few years ago, when I was flying an F-15, I inadvertently dropped a bomb on North Carolina.

I was making one of those Killer Death Extreme Machine programmes which called for me to go very fast in a selection of different vehicles. So it was obvious I should hitch a ride in the fastest and toughest of America’s airborne armoury. The Strike Eagle. The unshootdownable F-15E.

What you saw on the television was me flying it, and then me being sick. What you didn’t see – for reasons of time, you understand – was me trying to drop a laser-guided bomb on the ranges at Kitty Hawk.

Now, you’ve all seen the news footage of such weapons being fired through the letter boxes of various baby-milk factories, so you know how they’re supposed to work. The man in the back of the plane – that would be me – lines up the camera on the target and releases the bomb, which goes to wherever the cross hairs are pointing.

These cameras have a phenomenal range. The distance they can ‘see’ is classified but I noticed the range dial went up to 160 miles. That means the plane which bombed Yorkshire could have been over Sussex at the time.

On my first run, the pilot, Gris ‘Maverick’ Grimwald, said he’d come in low and fast, jinking wildly as though we were under attack from surface-to-air missiles.

In the back seat, I tuned one of the three screens to give me a picture from the plane’s belly-mounted camera, which you then steer by moving a toggle on top of the joystick.

I’d had two days of training and figured it would be like playing on a PlayStation. And so it is. But can you imagine what it would be like trying to operate a PlayStation while inside a tumble dryer? Because that’s what it’s like trying to operate a remote-control camera in an F-15. More realistically, have your children tried to play on their Game Boys while being driven in the back of a car? And that’s at 60 mph in a vaguely straight line.

Grimwald was doing, ooh, about 600 mph no more than a few hundred feet off the deck, and to make matters worse he was flinging the plane from side to side so that one second the screen showed the faraway Appalachian Mountains and then the next, fields screaming past in a hyperspace fast forward blur.

By the time I’d finished being sick, we were over the sea doing a six-G turn to get back to the starting point again. ‘This time,’ said Maverick (or ‘Bastard’, as I liked to call him), ‘I’ll make it easier. We’ll go a little higher, a little slower and I’ll be less violent.’

It didn’t help. I saw the river where they filmed Deliverance, I saw the swamp that bogged down Jude Law in Cold Mountain and then I noticed the waterfall behind which Daniel Day-Lewis had hidden in The Last of the Mohicans. And then we were over the sea again and I was bringing up some cake that I’d eaten on my ninth birthday.

Bastard was not pleased. ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that each time we do one of these runs we’re costing the American taxpayer $7,000 in fuel?’

Do you know what? I don’t care about the American taxpayer. So there was no way I could summon up a tear from the back seat of a jet that was, at the time, pointing straight at the sun. We were 90 degrees nose high, climbing vertically at a rate that you simply wouldn’t believe.

Let me put it this way. The lift in the BT Tower is fast. It gives you a ‘funny tummy’ as it climbs 600 feet in 30 seconds. So imagine what it’s like in an F-15 that climbed 17,000 feet in 11 seconds. This was a cosmic zoom, made real.

It’s the F-15’s party piece. Because there’s so much thrust from its two Pratt & Whitney turbofans, it can not only do 2½ times the speed of sound and carry 9,000 lb more than a Eurofighter, but it can also accelerate vertically.

We’d gone high for the third run so I’d have plenty of time to locate the target with the camera, release the bomb and then hold the cross hairs in place as it fell to earth. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

And yet somehow I still managed to make a hash of it. Frantically I swivelled the camera around but could see nothing resembling a target, so I thought: ‘I know. I’ll drop the bomb anyway, because by the time it reaches the ground from this height I’m bound to have the cross hairs in place.’

I didn’t. Bastard felt the plane twitch as I pressed the release button and said: ‘You have the target?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, swivelling the camera some more.

But I didn’t, and to this day I have no idea where that bomb went. It certainly didn’t hit the target. I’m not even certain it hit North Carolina.

So who knows? Maybe the bombing of Yorkshire wasn’t incompetence. Maybe it was payback.

Sunday 18 January 2004

Sorry, Hans, brassy Brits rule the beaches now

When package holidays began, all of a sudden we could experience life at close quarters with people from other nations. We thought the Germans were the most ridiculous people on the beach.

As Monty Python pointed out years ago, they pinched the sun beds and barged into the queues and frightened the children. And if you weren’t at the buffet spot-on seven, Fritz had wolfed all the sausages.

But with the advent of the Boeing 747 came the long-haul holiday and we realised that the Germans were country mice compared with the Americans. No shorts were too large, no thong was too small.

What’s more, Hank does not like to sit on the beach and read a book. He likes to shout and play volleyball. When the Yanks are around, it’s like being on holiday in a primary school playground.

For years the Americans were in a class of their own, but then the Berlin Wall fell down and, as a result, from the Indian Ocean through the Middle East and the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, Boris and Katya were making all the running.

In many ways the Russians are like the Americans. They’re either far too fat or far too beautiful. There’s no middle ground. And again, like Uncle Sam, no part of the body is immune from man-made enhancement. The Americans go for surf-white teeth; the Russians for alarming special forces tattoos. And neither seems to see anything wrong with breast enlargement. I saw one Russian woman on the beach in Barbados the other day who had the body of a walnut and a chest that put Antigua in the shade.

However, where the Russians move into an easy lead is beach attire. For the men it’s the traditional Speedo, while the women seem to get their fashion pointers from internet porn sites. I haven’t yet seen anyone strutting down the beach in stockings and suspenders but it’s only a matter of time.

Today, though, a new contender has come along and blown the old favourites into the seaweed. The title of Most Stupid People on the Beach has gone in 2004… to Britain.

We were designed to make Spitfires and Beagles. We’re supposed to be in a shed, in gloves, inventing stuff. We therefore do not look good on a beach. We’re piggy white and if you expose us to the sun, we turn into Battenburg cake.

We’re designed for bracing walks along the front in Scarborough and wet camping holidays in Scotland. But our newly discovered wealth means we can now go to the tropics. Because it’s new money, we really have no idea what to do with it.

Women are the worst offenders. On the beach they have a swimsuit, a watch and a pair of sunglasses. Not much, in other words, to show other holidaymakers that they are ‘considerably richer than yow’.

It doesn’t stop them trying. Obviously they don’t go for the American thong or the Russian nipple tassels, but bikinis are held together with ludicrous gold clasps, sunglasses have absurd hinges which look as if they’ve come from a maharajah’s front door and as for the watches, they’re more like carriage clocks with straps.

At lunchtime things get worse because now there’s an excuse to cover up. So out comes the T-shirt telling everyone that you’ve been somewhere else and the bejewelled sarong.

I had to ask my wife where on earth these women buy their clothes, and she knew straight away. Dress shops. Specifically, dress shops in provincial towns that have been bought by husbands to stop their wives sleeping with the binmen.

So where do the dress shops get their stock from? She was stumped. Not Armani, that’s for sure, or any designer anyone outside Leicester has ever heard of.

You’ve never seen chintz like it. And whatever happened to the simple flip-flop? Now it cannot be considered footwear unless it has a flower on it and some high heels.

Then we get to the question of these women’s teenage daughters, who strut around with the word ‘Sex’ on their bikini bottoms. Or ‘Peachy’. This is unnerving. Try to read a book about steamships of the nineteenth century when you’ve got a 15-year-old advertising her backside nine inches from your face. It’s especially unnerving for the Russians in their tight, revealing Speedos.

Something must be done, so I’ve come up with a plan. When you’re in a shop buying an outfit for your holiday, apply this simple test: have you ever seen Victoria Beckham in anything remotely similar? If the answer is yes, put it back on the peg.

If this doesn’t work, the government must step in. Again, I have an idea. Airports already have the technology to screen luggage for nail scissors and tweezers, so surely it can’t be that hard to look for, and then confiscate, gold slingback shoes, overly complicated sunglasses and any swimsuit with adornments.

I don’t mind what provincial British women wear in their own homes. But abroad they’re not just letting themselves and their families down – they’re letting the country down, too, and that has to stop.

And men: the Burberry baseball cap. No. All right? Just no.

Sunday 25 January 2004

Learn to kill a chicken, or you’ll get no supper

When children from St George’s middle school in Norfolk went into the playground at break-time recently, a shoot at the nearby Sandringham estate had just begun and as a result it was raining dead and wounded pheasants.

This was a perfect opportunity for the teachers. The children could have been marshalled and shown how the birds should be plucked. ‘Right, now gather round, everyone. You, Johnny – put the pheasant on its back and stand on its outstretched wings. Now pull the legs firmly…’

It would have been a marvellous illustration of how animals get from their natural habitat into a lovely casserole.

Sadly, this didn’t happen. Instead, the teachers ran around wringing their hands.

The children all cried. And letters were sent to the estate managers at Sandringham asking that birds are not shot while the children are outside. This way, the little munchkins will continue to believe that burgers grow on trees and that Coca-Cola comes from natural springs in Wyoming.

After the incident, a woman in the Daily Mail said that she objected to organised shoots because the birds are bred specifically for slaughter. So how do you think bacon happens? Few people keep pigs for fun, you know.

I am becoming increasingly depressed at the way we’re trying to insulate ourselves from the reality of the food chain and the wonders of the natural world.

Last week a 55-foot sperm whale that had beached itself in Taiwan was being transported on a lorry when it exploded in Tainan city. Passers-by, buildings and cars were drenched by 50 tons of blood, goo and blubber. It can’t have been a pretty sight. And doubtless there will now be some kind of legislation banning biologists from taking dead whales through a built-up area.

Why? When an animal dies, or a human for that matter, the stomach fills with methane gas. Sometimes the pressure becomes so great that the carcass goes off like a bomb.

I’d like to think this explosive power could in some way be harnessed. I don’t want to get lavatorial, but the cows in New Zealand produce 900,000 tons of methane every year. It’s one of those little facts that I keep in my head for emergencies such as this.

Anyway, it would be nice to think that we could get milk from their udders, meat from their legs and electricity from their bottoms. But I know that in this day and age people would be reluctant to switch on the lights at home if they thought that the power was coming from Daisy’s farts.

We are seeing this kind of nonsense on the current series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! The contestants, with their man-made lifestyles – and in some cases their man-made breasts – are absolutely incapable of dealing with the jungle wildlife. Do they really believe that the producers would let them put their heads in a tank full of properly dangerous spiders and snakes? Of course not.

So if they’re not worried about being eaten or dying in screaming agony, what’s the problem? It’s not just creepy-crawlies that get them running around squealing, either. On Thursday the team were presented with a dead chicken for their supper.

‘Eugh. I’m not eating that,’ cried Kerry, predictably. Fine. Leave it out in the sun and let it explode.

The same thing happened recently on the American show Survivor. The starving contestants were given some chickens but couldn’t bring themselves to kill and pluck them. They’re chickens, for God’s sake. And chickens are basically vegetables. We’re talking here about a bird which is so daft, it can operate normally with no head. Anyway, while they were deliberating about what should be done, the birds were eaten by a couple of monitor lizards.

I remember watching a report about Malta on some televisual travel show. We’d seen the harbour, heard about the tedious local customs and were moving on to the indigenous food. ‘They eat rabbits!’ cried the presenter with the sort of tone I might have used if I’d found out that they eat each other.

For a moment I was baffled. They eat them whole and raw? They eat them alive? No. They kill them, skin them and put them in a pot with some onions, just like we do. And yet this woman, bright enough to be given a job in television, was astonished.

I honestly don’t understand this. Out there in the real world, away from the twenty-first-century supermarket/freezer/microwave chain of catering, there are insects which eat their partners after sex, there are turkey vultures that will vomit on you when threatened, there are cats that kill for fun. And there are leopard seals that play aquatic tennis, using penguins as the ball.

So in the big scheme of things, shooting a pheasant in the face or attaching a Friesian to the national grid really isn’t all that bad.

Of course, if you don’t want to be a party to the killing or the exploitation, that’s fine. Be a vegetarian. But if you’re going to eat meat, don’t stand on tiptoe and shriek when you find out how the cow became a McMeal.

Sunday 1 February 2004

To win a war, first you need a location scout

Hollywood’s powerful film and television workers’ union has called for cinemagoers to boycott Cold Mountain because this all-American Civil War story was ‘stolen’ by the British and filmed in Romania.

Brit director Anthony Minghella has hit back, saying that he shot the movie in Transylvania because these days North Carolina, the actual location of Cold Mountain, is ‘too full of golf courses’.

This isn’t true. North Carolina is a spectacular place with many smoky mountains, frothy rivers and spooky forests. It was the setting for Deliverance which, like Cold Mountain, needed huge vistas to give a sense of scale. But I don’t recall catching a glimpse of Tiger Woods wandering through shot as Ned Beatty was being asked to squeal like a piggy.

North Carolina was also used as an epic backdrop for The Last of the Mohicans, and again Daniel Day-Lewis did not have to worry about the French, the Huron and being hit on the head by one of Colin Montgomerie’s tricky little chip shots.

Nevertheless, Minghella insists that he went to Romania because the Carpathian Mountains more accurately reflect America in the 1860s. It’s hard to argue with that. Certainly the 1,200 extras he hired for the battle scenes were more realistic. None that I could see was to be found fighting with a pistol in one hand and a £3.99 McMeal in the other.

However, I suspect that the real reason why Minghella went to Romania rather than America is money. It’s reckoned that, because of the cost of living and the minimal fees charged by all those extras, he saved about £16 million. Seems like plain common sense to me, but that hasn’t stopped the Americans crying foul over the location, the Australian lead actress, the British lead actor and Ray Winstone’s amazing Deep South (London) accent.

This is rich. In fact, it couldn’t be richer if they weighed down the argument with five gallons of double cream and two hundredweight of butter. What about Pearl Harbor in which Ben Affleck managed, single-handedly, to win the Battle of Britain? I know Tony Blair once made a post-9/11 speech thanking the Americans for standing side by side with us during the Blitz, but then he doesn’t know the difference between a .22 air pistol and a Trident nuclear missile.

In reality, there were some Americans who came over here to help in the early days of the war – 244 of them to be precise. But don’t think they came in a state of righteousness. Most were wannabe fly boys and adventurers who came because they had been turned down by the USAAF for being blind or daft, and they felt that the battered RAF wouldn’t be so picky.

We are, of course, grateful to them, even though the day after the Japanese attacked Hawaii, just about all of them went home, taking their Spitfires with them and leaving us with the bill for their training. This point, I feel, wasn’t accurately made in the Affleck film, but that didn’t stop me buying the DVD.

Then you have Shaving Ryan’s Privates in which the American army won the war despite the British making a complete hash of things, and A Bridge Too Far, in which Ryan O’Neal failed to storm though Arnhem thanks to the incompetence of Sean Connery.

Oh, and let’s not forget U-571, where Matthew Mc-Conaughey bravely stole an Enigma decoding machine, thus clearing the way for Steven Spielberg to take his Band of Brothers through Belgiumshire.

And why was Steve McQueen wearing his home clothes in The Great Escape? What branch of the services allows you to face the enemy in a pair of chinos, a baseball jacket and a T-shirt?

Then there’s Vietnam. Not once, according to Hollywood, did the Americans lose a battle. So how they lost the war is a mystery. This, I suspect, is the main reason why Hollywood didn’t make Cold Mountain. Who’s the bad guy when both sides are, er… American?

It’s a good job Britain still had a proper film industry when Second World War films were all the rage. Otherwise we’d have had Captain Chuck Gibson bombing the Mohne Dam with Brad and Tod in tow. And what kind of a name is Barnes Wallace? We’ll call him Clint Thrust.

Hollywood’s record with the truth is simply abysmal, which isn’t so bad if you treat the cinema as a place of entertainment. But in America the multiplex is just about the only place where anybody learns any history. After Black Hawk Down the audience left the theatre with a sense that America had been in Somalia fighting the humanitarian fight. Not simply trying to depose a warlord who didn’t like the idea of US oil companies stealing all the oil.

This, surely, should worry the Hollywood film and television workers far more than where a movie was shot. In Saving Private Ryan the French beaches were Irish. In Full Metal Jacket, Vietnam was the London Docklands, and in boxing Lennox Lewis was British.

Who cares? I certainly didn’t mind where Cold Mountain had been filmed or how much the extras had been paid. I just thought it was one of the longest films I’d ever seen. Good, though.

Sunday 8 February 2004

Fear of fat can seriously damage your health

Scientists revealed recently that a child born in 2030 will live five years longer than a child born yesterday. So by the middle of this century there will be more people drawing a pension than people going to work.

This will have a catastrophic effect on the economy because simple arithmetic shows there won’t be enough money in the kitty to keep all these old people in hips and cat food.

So what on earth are we going to do? Make people save more so they’re self-sufficient in their old age? Get everyone to have more babies? Or ship in thousands of healthy young immigrants who can run around actually doing some work? A tricky decision.

But then last week along came a report saying we won’t be living so long after all. Thanks to the efforts of McCain with its oven-ready chips and McDonald’s with its McMeals, we’re all going to explode by the time we’re 62.

Now you’d have expected the government to greet the news with a sigh of relief.

But not a bit of it. John Reid, the health secretary, said a big debate was needed to challenge the problem of obesity.

So what’s going on here? One minute we’re told that we’re all going to live to be 126 and that we’ll have to eat each other to survive. Then we’re told that actually it’d be best if we ate nothing at all.

At first I suspected this might have something to do with cool Britannia. Tony likes his art galleries and funky bridges and frankly he doesn’t want the place cluttered up with a load of fat ankles and prolapsed stomachs.

Then I thought it was another bit of me-too-ism with Dubya. ‘Hey, George. We’ve got fat people as well.’

But then a man in a suit went on the television to say the government really ought to tax oven-ready chips, and suddenly it all became clear. They tax us when we move and tax us when we park. They tax us when we earn money and tax us when we spend it. They tax everything we put in our lungs and now they want to tax everything we put in our stomachs.

Well, I have some observations. First of all, the American idea of obesity is far removed from our own. They have people who have moved beyond the point where fat is a problem or a joke and into the realms where it becomes revolting. We do not.

I’ve checked, and in Britain I’d be officially obese if I weighed 18 stone. But 18 stone when you’re 6 foot 5 inches isn’t even on nodding terms with what the sceptics call fat: 18 stone would, in fact, make me Martin Johnson.

Last year, when Top Gear was running, life was so hectic that in one week I remember eating supper on a Thursday night, thinking: ‘God. I haven’t had a bite of anything since Sunday lunchtime.’ There just hadn’t been the time and, as a result, in just a few months I lost more than two stone.

Now Top Gear’s not on air, I can kick around the house in loose robes all day, looking in the fridge every 20 minutes for cold sausages and filling in the gaps by tucking into Jaffa Cakes and Penguin biscuits. I’m relaxed and happy and I’ve put on a stone.

So which is the healthier option? Stressy and thin or fat and happy? I’m not a doctor but I know what the answer is.

Plus, think what this fat phobia will do to children. None of mine is what you’d call a waif and I’m genuinely scared that thanks to the nonsense being peddled by these health-obsessed Nazis, they’re going to start throwing up their lunch in the bike sheds.

Perhaps then John Reid could admit that Norman Tebbit was right all those years ago and that we really should get on our bikes. Or maybe he might like to think about subsidising food that is good for us, rather than taxing food that isn’t.

Better still, he might like to address the real cause of misery and stress in this country today. A few years ago I took out an endowment mortgage of £75,000.

There was no mention in the sales patter that the investment company might lose my money, but that’s what it’s done. Last week I got a letter saying that there will not be enough to pay off the mortgage and that I’d better do something about it if I want to keep my house.

That’s why I don’t have a pension. It would be a complete and utter waste of time because you’re entrusting your money to a bunch of suits who are too stupid to get a job in banking or estate agency.

Look at their offices in the City. Big gleaming towers of glass and steel. Who’s paying for them? We are. And it’s the same with their soothing advertisements on the television.

You want my advice? Spend your spare cash on chips and chocolate because that way you’ll die the day you stop work with a smile on your face.

And being carted off in an enormous coffin at 62 is better than lingering on for 40 more years, hoping for a handout from the next batch of immigrants the government has shipped in to keep the country’s average age below 400.

Sunday 15 February 2004

Scotch – stop skiing and return to your sheds

For a while now, things have been going badly for Scotland. The shiny new parliament building is 10 times over budget and already three years late. The economy is stuttering, and all’s not well under the kilt either because the birth rate is almost elephantine.

Last week things got worse. The Welsh beat them at rugby and then again at football, and now we hear that the Glenshee Chairlift Company has lost £1 million in the past two years and must sell its two Highland ski resorts.

Apparently, global warming is to blame. In the olden days, the Scotch people got some respite from the weather every winter because the ceaseless rain turned to snow, which was at least pretty. But now it just rains all the time.

Good. I never really saw the point of skiing in Scotland. The tourist board says in its bumf that heading north of the border with your planks is a ‘really good way for novices to try out the sport before committing to a high-cost holiday elsewhere in the world’.

Really? I would imagine that anyone who tried skiing for the first time in the Cairngorms would come away from the experience with frostbite, hypothermia, iced-up hair and a passionate resolve to give up the sport for good. Learning to ski in Scotland is a bit like learning to scuba-dive in a quarry. You get the basics, but not the point.

Of course, I don’t much care for the act of skiing itself. As I’ve said before, I never understand why people ski down a slope to a bar and then go on a lift so they can ski down the same slope again. That’s like walking to the pub on a Sunday, then going home and walking to the pub again. Madness. I ski to a bar and then go inside for a drink.

This part of a skiing holiday I like very much. The crystal skies, the jaggedy mountains, that pin-sharp air and all those pretty girls in salopettes. It’s a fun-filled blizzard of primary colours and you get a tan.

Even the Val d’Isère doctor’s surgery – where I go, having fallen off my skis on the way back from the bar – is full of wondrous new injuries. I once saw a bloke in there who had a ski pole sticking out of his eye.

And then in the evenings you can drink wine until it’s coming out of your ears, knowing that the mountain crispness will zap your hangover in the morning. Lovely.

This, however, is not how I imagine a skiing holiday in the Highlands might pan out. I’m not sure anyone would get much satisfaction from executing a nice parallel turn on sheet heather. So, Scotland has to rely entirely on its après-ski activities and, er… Well, quite.

Sure, Val d’Isère is full of people called Bunty and Rupert who throw bread rolls at you and enjoy debagging one another, which can be wearisome.

But what do you have for company in Glenshee? A family of weird beards from Tipton and a pint of McEwan’s. Skiing is supposed to be sophisticated, and Scotland just isn’t.

Of course, you might say that Scotland is only 500 miles away and is therefore easier to get to than Val d’Isère, but actually both are an hour or so away by plane. Yes, it’s easier to drive to Scotland but you should be aware that if there is any snow on the hills, it will have blocked the roads. So you won’t get there anyway.

If you do make it, you’ll certainly find good access to the top of the mountains, thanks to the new Cairngorm funicular railway, which seems to have cost the taxpayer nearly as much as the Scottish parliament. And now isn’t really needed because, according to The Economist, the number of McPasses sold since the 1980s has halved.

The Glenshee Chairlift Company does believe a buyer can be found for its two resorts, but unless they can find someone who has the business acumen of an otter, I wouldn’t hold your breath. With cheap air fares and no sign of a recession, France and even Colorado are always going to be less wet.

This might be sad news for those who worked there but it’s good news for the rest of the world because John Logie Baird was Scottish. Alexander Graham Bell was Scottish. Alexander Fleming was Scottish. James Watt was Scottish. Charles Macintosh was Scottish. John Dunlop was Scottish. Scottish people invented everything: the kaleidoscope, paint pigment, carpet cleaners, the US Navy, adhesive postage stamps, hypodermic needles, anaesthetics, golf, paraffin, radar, hollow pipe drainage, breech-loading rifles. This list is simply endless.

Plainly, the Scotch were put on the earth to invent stuff. And for the past hundred years or so they have been sidetracked by this ridiculous flirtation with skiing, and getting their chairs back from Westminster Abbey. They took over every trade union and ballsed them all up, and now they’re making a pretty good fist of wrecking Westminster too.

Pack it in, the lot of you, and get back to your garden sheds with your spanners and your microscopes.

George Bush said recently he wants to go to Mars. So how about one of you forgets about winter sports for a while and builds him a spaceship.

Sunday 22 February 2004

My son thinks I’m gay, and it can only get worse

It was a perfect scene. My boy and me walking back across the fields from his Sunday morning game of rugby. The sky was bright. Lunch was in the Aga. And all was well with the world.

‘Daddy,’ he said, pointing at our new garden shed. ‘There are people in India who live in houses that are smaller than that.’

‘Huh,’ I joshed. ‘Never mind India. The first flat I owned in London was smaller than that. And even then I couldn’t afford it on my own, so I lived there with another boy.’

There wasn’t even a pause while his seven-year-old brain processed this information. He just came straight out and said, in the vernacular of youth: ‘So were you, like, gay when you were younger?’

A few days later, the subject came up again. Some homosexual people were on the television news complaining about George W. Bush’s views on same-sex weddings, and I thought: am I going mad?

Of course you can’t have same-sex weddings. It undermines the whole point of marriage, the concept that two people form a stable unit in which children can be conceived and raised. Arguing that homosexuals should be allowed to marry is as silly as arguing that I should be allowed to play for Manchester United.

I was born with the ball skills of an emperor penguin, so I can’t play football.

Andrew Lloyd Webber was born with a face like a melted wellington, so he can’t be a model. And if you’re born with a predilection for members of the same genital group, you can’t get married. Get over it.

And yet, actually, it’s me that will have to get over it because soon my children’s generation will be in charge and they see nothing odd about boys marrying their boyfriends. My son, as we know, thinks his dad used to be gay, and that’s fine with him.

It’s not just homosexuality. Any item from the news leaves me feeling bewildered and alienated, a stranger on my own planet. A government employee who passed secret emails to her mates isn’t to be prosecuted. Marks & Spencer has opened a Lifestore, America won’t intervene in Haiti because it’s an election year. Posh doesn’t want hair like Jordan. It’s all just too incredible.

The trouble is that I’m 43 and therefore past my dead-by date. I was designed to live until I was 40, and now it’s only central heating and Mr Sheen furniture polish that’s keeping me out of the crematorium.

So now we’ve got the young bloods raring to go, but they’re permanently at odds with the wrinklies who are still around, not really wanting anything to change. I have a name for this. Prince Charles Syndrome. He wants to get cracking with his vision of Britain but his mum’s still in charge, being cautious and opening day-care centres for the handicapped.

This is a problem. All over San Francisco there are lots of vibrant young men and women who think it’s perfectly acceptable for homosexuals to adopt babies. They think that having two dads or two mums would in no way skew the child’s view of life. But they’re being held back by an old guy in Washington.

Here, young people who only watch Buffy and Dec want to abolish the licence fee but find themselves at odds with old people who wonder what they’d do without John Humphrys in the morning and Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday afternoon.

If I were dead, the children would listen to Chris Moyles over breakfast and there would be peace. But since I’m not, the radio is in the bin and there is war.

A lot of people are asking whether Christians and Muslims can co-exist in our shrinking world. But I’m more worried about the cocktail of young and old. Of course, it’s bad enough for me at 43, but what must it be like for my mum, who’s pushing 70? There can’t be a single thing in her life that makes any sense at all.

We took her to a pantomime at Christmas and even that, so far as she was concerned, might as well have been performed in Klingon. ‘Why,’ she wondered as we came out, ‘don’t they do all the old songs?’ The same reason, I suppose, that M&S has Indonesian knick-knacks among the bananas and bras.

Here we have someone who can’t watch American television programmes because ‘I can’t understand what they’re on about’, and yet she’s living on the same planet at the same time as her grandchildren, who’ve watched so much Australian soap they go up at the end of sentences.

She takes them out for supper and all they do is sit in the restaurant with their big twenty-first-century thumbs playing on their Game Boys. This must be horrible for her generation, but it’s going to be worse for ours because we’ll live longer and the pace of change will get even faster.

You think it’s bad now, but imagine what will happen when your kids are in charge.

Gay vicars, internet reality TV from your next-door neighbours’, public inquiries every time anyone dies, satellite speed traps, thinking computers, cloned dogs, foxes on the parish council, Polish on the curriculum, holidays on Mars. The world is their oyster. But for the rest of us it’ll be a pearl-free barrel of bilge.

Sunday 29 February 2004

Sorry, but the public apology is a Big Lie

To demonstrate the toughness of a Toyota pick-up truck for a television programme, I found a tree and then crashed into it.

Unfortunately, when the film was shown an eagle-eyed viewer thought the horse chestnut looked just like one in his village, so he toddled across the road and, sure enough, there were smears of red paint on the trunk. Naturally he reported the matter to the parish council, which wrote a letter of complaint.

As a result I was summoned to the office of a BBC bigwig, where I spent half an hour looking at my shoes, saying, ‘I dunno sir,’ and, ‘It was only a tree.’ I also argued that if it were a parish council tree, this meant that it was public property and therefore I was entitled to drive into it.

But it was no good, and a letter was sent back to the parish council offering an unreserved apology and guaranteeing that in future Top Gear would try to drive through the village without crashing into anything.

I wasn’t really sorry and I’m still not sorry. I only agreed to say I was because then the situation would die down and we could go to another village and crash into something else.

Ever since Clint Eastwood ordered those gunmen to apologise to his mule in A Fistful of Dollars, there’s been a sense that saying sorry to make everything all right has been a bit of a joke. If the baddies had apologised, the film would have ended immediately. But they didn’t, so there was a lot of shooting and, in Clint’s case at least, plenty of squinting too.

But then along came Tony Blair, who, after the Hutton Inquiry, said that all he had ever wanted was for the BBC to apologise to his mule, Campbell. As a result of that, apologising has become a global obsession. Spurs players were recently castigated, not for losing a match but for not saying sorry that they’d lost.

I am afraid that His Tonyness’s attempts to appear as big-hearted as Eastwood may have set a dangerous precedent. What’s to stop Saddam Hussein apologising to his captors for all the genocide: ‘I don’t know what came over me. I really am most dreadfully sorry. Can I go now?’

No, really. In Pakistan a man responsible for selling nuclear secrets to Libya and North Korea has escaped prosecution by begging on television for the nation’s forgiveness. Oh well, that’s all right.

We occasionally see apologies in newspapers when they’ve said – oh, I don’t know – that Jordan has 17 A-levels and a degree in nanotechnology from Harvard. But it’ll be in a typeface so small that it’s not visible to the naked eye, it’ll be on page 38, next to a distracting shower advertisement, and it’ll have been written only because some hotshot lawyer was standing over the writer with a gun in one hand and a writ in the other.

Saying sorry because you’ve been forced to means you’re not sorry at all. An apology has to be real to heal. As G. K. Chesterton said: ‘A stiff apology is a second insult.’

Justin Timbertrousers apologised after baring Janet Jackson’s breast live on American television. But was he really sorry? Bill Clinton apologised after his game of hide the cigar became public – but only because he’d been caught.

And now that Jimmy Hill lookalike who’s running for president has apologised for saying all Sikhs are terrorists. But John Kerry is a politician, so actually he didn’t apologise at all. He said he was sorry if his remarks had been misunderstood, which is the same as saying ‘I’m sorry that you’re all too stupid to understand what I’m on about.’

As a word, ‘sorry’ is a useful get-out-of-jail-free card when you’re having an argument with your wife and there’s only 10 minutes before your favourite television programme starts: ‘Yes, I know I’ve dropped coal in your hollandaise sauce. I am a useless husband on every level and I’m sorry. Now can I watch 24?’

Sorry works when you tread on someone’s toe, or if a child accidentally burps after drinking too much Coca-Cola. Sorry is for minor indiscretions like being a bit late. When you need to squeeze past someone at the cinema to reach your seat, you say sorry because it’s another way of saying excuse me. And excuse me just won’t do if you’ve done something big: ‘I’ve just shot your husband in the middle of his face. I do hope you’ll excuse me.’

Of course, to bring a bit of gravitas to the moment of humiliation and to dispel the illusion that they’ve done nothing more than spill water on someone’s trousers, people who make public statements today have learnt to adopt a serious face and say that they are making an ‘unreserved’ apology.

But when you saw Lord Ryder making his ‘unreserved’ apology on behalf of the BBC to St Tony and the half-horse half-donkey Alastair, weren’t you reminded, just a little, of John Cleese dangling, upside down, from that loft apartment window in A Fish Called Wanda, apologising to the psychotic ex-CIA man played by Kevin Kline?

Elton John once said that sorry seems the hardest word. But that’s not true. A brave man, a man with a spine and some iron in his blood, would say: ‘I don’t accept your apology and I want you larched.’

Sunday 7 March 2004

Calling your kid Noah or Coke – how wet is that?

Lots of my fortysomething friends seem to be taking a leaf out of the Blairs’ book on birth control and squeezing out a last-minute baby.

There are two things you must remember when someone rings to say they’ve just produced an offspring. First, and for no obvious reason, you must ask how much it weighs, and second, you must try not to drop the phone when they tell you what name they’ve chosen. ‘Chardonnay?’ you have to say in measured tones. ‘How very, ummmm, oaky.’

The annual list of most popular names shows that the Bible is still a source of inspiration for most, and that the two names at No. 1 are the super-traditional Jack and Emily. But look beneath the top 10 and it’s a maelstrom of lunacy where working-class children are named after Australian pop stars and footballers’ wives. And the middle classes are no better, going for increasingly ludicrous handles. I mean, what kind of a name is Araminta?

We grew up laughing at Frank Zappa for calling his daughter Moon Unit, but today we’re naming our kids after remote Himalayan villages and exotic cheeses.

People have always named their children to reflect their aspirations – that’s why Ruby and Opal were so popular in the nineteenth century, and it’s why my poor old mum was named after Shirley Temple. I suppose it’s also why so many people coming from the Caribbean in the 1950s called their boy kids Winston.

This is no bad thing, being named after a prime minister or an actress your parents admired. But in America people aspire to goods and services, and that’s resulted in a surge in popularity for names such as Armani, Timberland, L’Oreal and Celica, which is a type of Toyota. One poor sod last year was called Del Monte.

At this point, I was about to launch into yet another attack on the Americans who regularly choose a child’s name by picking letters out of a Scrabble bag. But I’ve just remembered that over here Harvey Smith called his horse Sanyo Music Centre, so let’s move on.

Before naming a child Diet Coke or Josh Stick, it’s important to remember that the name you choose will have a huge impact on how the poor thing’s life will turn out.

When Mr and Mrs Gauntlet christened their son Victor, he was going to be the chairman of Aston Martin, and so it turned out to be. If Mr and Mrs Arkwright call their son Stan, he’s going to be a plumber. Mike Pemberton, on the other hand, is going to be a pilot and Brooklyn in all probability will be a bridge.

One of my friends was deeply concerned about this. He originally wanted to call his new boy-child Jack, because he said Jack Wilman sounded like a rogue CIA agent and he liked the idea of his son being endlessly lowered from helicopters into nuclear submarines. ‘Ah yes,’ I pointed out, ‘but I can also see “Jack Wilman” written down the side of a van.’

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If it’s written in squirly script and the van is full of home-made crusty-bread potted-meat sandwiches, that’s fine. But Jack Wilman? That’s the sort of van that would have ladders on the roof. So he’s gone for Noah, which means the boy will almost certainly grow up to be gay.

To make matters more complicated, a survey out last week suggests teenagers are a lot more conservative than we might think. They’re in favour of the monarchy, long prison sentences and patriotism, so this would lead us to believe they’d be against having silly names such as Rawlplug.

But my oldest daughter disagrees. On a really, really drunken night, my wife and I seriously thought about calling her Boadicea, but the following day over the Nurofen we went for Emily. And now she’s livid about it, riding around the garden with knives on her bicycle wheels, saying we were dull and unimaginative.

I am dull and unimaginative because when I was little two of my tortoises, Sullivan and Bubble, died. That left me with Gilbert and Squeak, which made me a laughing stock and gave me a profound respect for a sensible naming policy.

This is why I admire the Icelandic system so much. Up there, your surname is your father’s Christian name with either ‘son’ or ‘dottir’ tagged on the end. So Prince Charles would be Charles Philipson and Nigella Lawson would be Nigella Nigelsdottir.

It’s not a policy supported by feminists, but it has worked for centuries and they don’t want to see it being abused by people who suddenly get it into their heads that their son ought to be called Snowmobile. Because then his daughter, if he were similarly inclined, might well end up being called Fifi Trixibelle Peaches Snowmobiledottir.

That would be ludicrous, so the government has drawn up a list of approved names from which you must choose.

If we had such a system here, we could use it to maintain the beauty of traditional English names. There’d be no Tiger Lily and no Anastasia. Mr and Mrs Beckham would have been told to stop being so stupid. And my children would have been called Roy, Brenda and Enid.

Sunday 14 March 2004

Put Piers on a plinth, he deserves immortality

For 150 years, people have been arguing about what or who should be immortalised on the empty plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. And then last week came the news that we’re to get a statue of a disabled and pregnant woman called Alison Lapper.

My first reaction was: why not the Flying Scotsman? It’s for sale at the moment for just £2 million and would be ideal, since it fits in with Ken Livingstone’s much publicised love for public transport and genuinely reflects Britain’s glorious engineering achievements of yesteryear.

The trouble is that whatever you choose will be used as a pigeon perch and then vandalised. And it would be a shame to see the lovely old engine treated this way – so how about my next brainwave? If it’s to be a bird bog and a magnet for drunks and yobs intent on ruining it, then why not put a statue of Piers Morgan up there?

You may have heard that at the British Press Awards last week I strolled over to Piers, the editor of the Daily Mirror, and punched him in the middle of his face.

That, however, is only partly true. I also punched him on the jaw and on his cheek.

Why? Well, he seems to think that if someone appears on television it is all right to publish photographs of them kissing girls goodnight and appearing on the beach while fat.

I disagree.

Which is why I haven’t and won’t spoil his fledgling career on the box by revealing details of his complicated private life.

This disagreement has been running for some time. It all started when I refused to jump ship and write for the Mirror, saying I’d rather write operating manuals for car stereos, and the feud became public on the last Concorde flight, when I emptied a glass of water into his lap.

So when everyone noticed we were both at the press awards, an air of expectancy fell on the room like a big itchy blanket. In recent years this do has become a back-slapping festival of bonhomie and fine wines, and everyone felt that here, at last, was a chance to go back to the old days of fisticuffs and abuse. Journalists behaving like journalists and not businessmen.

Nobody came over and said, ‘Piers says you stink,’ but there was a playground mood nevertheless.

The problem was, I’d never hit anyone before. I may not have the intellect of Stephen Fry but the reason I don’t have his nose is that I have enough nous to know that if I punch somebody they will punch me right back.

Besides, fighting is so undignified. Who can forget John Prescott, his face all screwed up, as he lashed out at the protester in the run-up to the last general election? And then there was Jimmy Nail, who invited A. A. Gill outside for a spot of pugilism last year. You just wanted to say: ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’

The first time Piers and I came close, he was talking the talk of the terraces, saying that I might be big but I’d go down like a sack of potatoes.

Sadly, I don’t speak ‘football’ and by the time I’d worked out what he was on about, the editor of the News of the World had stepped in and was asking us to break it up.

I honestly can’t remember what it was that finally triggered the action. One minute we were trading insults and the next I felt the hot surge of adrenalin and punched him.

At this point the Sun’s diminutive motoring correspondent waded into the arena, addressing nobody in particular with a menacing: ‘I’m warning you. I’m from Newcastle.’

Off to my left, a fat man in a white tux and with a huge Cuban cigar was drawling, ‘Finish it. Outside. Finish it,’ over and over again.

And then there was the brother of a former famous editor of the Sun, rushing hither and thither as thought he had inadvertently trodden on 6 million volts. In other words, every single man in there was suddenly seven years old.

It’s funny. Over the next couple of days women asked with a look of disdain why I hit him. Men, on the other hand, asked with barely disguised glee where I hit him.

Piers fell into the man camp magnificently. Much as I don’t like him, I have to hand him full credit for saying after the third punch: ‘Is that all you’ve got?’

Later, he explained he’d had worse drubbings from his three-year-old son.

And me? Well, I seem to have broken one of my fingers. It’s bright blue, won’t move and looks like a burst sausage. How can this be? Bruce Willis finished off a whole skyscraper full of baddies without so much as tearing his vest, whereas I hit one middle-aged bloke and came away broken.

I’d like to say this is because I’m weak and fragile and unskilled in the ways of the ruffian. But actually I suspect it has more to do with the strength of Mr Morgan.

That’s why it’s such a good idea to immortalise him with a statue in Trafalgar Square.

You can insult it, throw things at it, get birds to foul it and punch it from now to the end of time. But it’ll always emerge completely undamaged.

Sunday 21 March 2004

Hurricane Hank pulls a fast one on the scramjet

So Nasa has smashed the speed record for plane flight. In a test last weekend, an unmanned ‘scramjet’ was dropped from the belly of a B-52 bomber and reached a speed of Mach 7, or almost 5,000 mph.

Pundits are talking about planes that could get from London to Sydney in two hours and from Paris to New York in 30 minutes. So well done, America, for making it work and God bless Mr Bush.

Except for one small thing. Two years ago a British scramjet quietly, and with no fuss, reached similar speeds over the Australian outback. Yup, like everything else, scramjets are one of ours.

For 40 years scramjets have been the holy grail for the world of aviation. Unlike in a normal jet, air comes into the front of the engine, is mixed with hydrogen, ignited and then hurled out of the back. There are no moving parts, no harmful exhaust gases and, best of all, the faster you go, the faster it goes.

Theoretically, they have a limitless top speed.

The British version was developed by an operation called QinetiQ which, over the years, has come up with stuff like microwave radar, carbon fibre and liquid crystal displays.

Today, in their unheated pre-war prefabs, with nicotine-yellow walls and damp concrete stairwells, men with colossal brains and plastic shoes are working on power systems for America’s new joint strike fighter and a huge sail that harvests fog. (It’s based on a sub-Saharan beetle, the stenocara, which collects moisture from the night air on its back and then has a handy water supply through the day.)

Do you remember reading recently about the millimetric scanning device that can see through clothes? It was designed for airport security, but there was much tittering about other applications. Either way, that was one of theirs, too, so I should imagine that a simple little thing like a scramjet gave them no problems at all. They probably did it in a coffee break.

The big question, however, is why they didn’t make more of a fuss when the test was successful. Is this a return to the days of the jet engine and the hovercraft, yet another example of British inventiveness being thwarted by British corporate and governmental apathy?

No. No fuss was made because, contrary to what you’ve been told by the over-excited Americans, you will never go to Australia or anywhere on a scramjet.

‘Anyone who tells you different is in an election year,’ one expert said last week.

Here’s why. First, the hydrogen needed for a 12,000-mile trip to Sydney – and hydrogen is light, remember – would weigh more than the plane it was fuelling.

Next, scramjets start to work only when the plane is doing Mach 5 (3,810 mph). And how, pray, are you supposed to reach that kind of speed?

The Nasa plane in last weekend’s test was taken to an altitude of 40,000 feet by the B-52, where it was dropped. A rocket then took it up to 90,000 feet and Mach 7. At this point the scramjet took over and yes, there was minimal acceleration, but it was out of fuel in just 11 seconds.

You may recall the British Hotol project from the late 1980s. This, it was said, would use scramjets and rockets. Brilliant. Sydney would be just 45 minutes away.

But not even Britain’s boffins could figure out how it would get off the ground in the first place.

I don’t want to sound like a doom-monger, but think about it. You have a 15-minute bus ride from the car park to the terminal, a half-hour queue for check-in, another half-hour being laughed at by security staff as they ‘look’ through your clothes, and then an hour’s walk to the gate.

Here you’ll board a bomber that will take an hour or so to reach the right altitude, before you are loaded into a rocket which shoots you up into space. You then career back down again in scramjet mode, landing in Australia at about 14 million mph. Where you’ll be eaten by a crocodile.

‘Scramjets will never happen,’ one expert said. I told him never was a big word, but he was adamant: ‘Not just not in your lifetime. Never.’

Nasa has to smile sweetly when people talk about getting to the moon in 30 minutes because they have to whip up the imagination of Hank from Minnesota. They know that, with no bucks, there’s no Buck Rogers.

The British team members, along with their Australian partners, never made a big deal of their success because they knew it would work only on cruise missiles and tank shells. I’m afraid that we’re still stuck on our Airbuses and jumbos, lumbering through the ozone layer at a miserable 500 mph.

Don’t despair, though. While the Americans are busy congratulating themselves for their 11-second leap into the record books, the boffins at QinetiQ have moved on to the next stage: a plane that will cruise at Mach 5. It’s called the sustained hypersonic flight experiment, it uses the proven ramjet from a Sea Dart missile and the first model, they say, will be airborne in 18 months’ time.

Expect to read about it in about five years when the Americans make it work too.

Sunday 4 April 2004

Health and safety and the death of television

At the Last Supper Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, and for 2,000 years Christians have followed suit, going to church at Easter so the vicar can move among them with a wet towel.

This week, however, at the Maundy Thursday celebration in Sheffield Cathedral, the Revd Jack Nicholls had to use a different towel for each member of the congregation in case he passed on a bout of athlete’s foot. Welcome, everybody, to the mad and dangerous world of the Health and Safety Executive.

This is a world where army training courses in the Brecon Beacons must now be fitted with handrails in case the soldiers fall over and where baby walkers are banned in case the toddler topples into the fire.

I need to be careful at this point. The Health and Safety wallahs are a touchy bunch, saying they do important work such as stopping nuclear power stations from exploding. Almost certainly they would say, if Jesus came back to Earth tomorrow and washed two people’s feet with the same towel, that they wouldn’t prosecute him.

Unless one of them had leprosy, of course, in which case they’d have no alternative. And no, Mr Christ, we won’t take into consideration the fact that you have in the past brought people back from the dead. Also, can you stop walking on water, because that’s just stupid.

I don’t deny that the Health and Safety Executive stops children from going up chimneys, but mostly what it does is infect the nation with a sense that ‘being safe’ is more important than being happy. They even argue that ‘health and safety is the cornerstone of a civilised society’. But this couldn’t be more wrong.

Health and Safety is the cancer of a civilised society, a huge, ungainly, malignant, pulsating wart.

In the past, companies used to live in fear of the trade unions, who would walk in through the front door and usher every worker they found out through the back.

We thought the Arthur Scargills and Jimmy Knapps had been killed off by Margaret Thatcher; but no. They have simply metamorphosed into the Health and Safety Executive, and now they’re back, sticking their trouble-making noses into every single aspect of every single thing we do.

Only last week it was revealed that in the past three years 15 people have been killed on a single stretch of road in Wiltshire. One road safety campaigner greeted the news by saying, ‘It’s the same as a jumbo jet crashing every year.’

I’m sorry, matey, but if you do the maths it just isn’t.

Today, companies can get a government bribe of up to £100,000 if they employ workers’ safety advisers. But don’t be tempted, because these idiots will argue that your office carpets are more perilous than a terrorist bomb.

No, really. We’re told that 95 per cent of major slips at work result in broken bones. (Is that so?) And that somebody falls over in this country every three minutes, which, they argue, incurs an incalculable human cost.

No it doesn’t. The human cost of the Holocaust was incalculable, whereas I fell down the stairs only yesterday and it cost nothing. There’s more, too. Just last week the lift doors at the BBC’s White City building closed on my knee and wouldn’t open again. And the bruise I received was completely free.

Still, the HSE says that simple cost-effective steps can be taken to ensure that nobody trips. Spillages, they say, must be managed, suitable footwear should be fitted, effective matting systems must be used, offices must be redesigned and workers must be retrained. Cost-effective? How can it be when the staff do nothing all day except work to stay upright?

Health and safety is now so out of control that I find it nearly impossible to do my job. Certainly the series I made a few years ago called Extreme Machines simply couldn’t be produced today.

Back then, we gave the sound recordist a heart attack when we asked him to abseil off an oil tanker at 3 a.m. in the middle of a Cape of Good Hope storm. We put the cameraman in such a position that he fell off a 1,000-bhp swamp buggy in Florida and then, after we got the mud out of his lungs, we wedged him in a two-seat Spitfire that ran out of fuel at 5,000 feet.

I climbed into drag-racing snowmobiles and fighter jets without a moment’s thought. Yes, it was dangerous, but it was fun. We knew the risks and we took them because a) it was a laugh, and b) hopefully it made great telly.

Nowadays, though, producers must fill in a hazard assessment form before they go on a shoot. They have to show that they’ve thought about all the safety implications and if there’s a breach, they – not the BBC – are liable. Result: they won’t take any risks at all.

On Top Gear, we refer to the Health and Safety people as the PPD. The Programme Prevention Department.

Sunday 11 April 2004

Getting totally wrecked at sea isn’t a crime

Oh no. The government has begun a four-month consultation period to see if weekend sailors pottering about on the Solent or the Norfolk Broads should be stopped and breathalysed.

Now, I can see that it might be difficult to drive a tank while under the influence of heroin. And I understand that Huw Edwards would find it tricky to read the Autocue if he were off his face on acid. But sailing a boat, on the sea, after a few wines? I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound hard at all.

Sure, there was the case of the drunken Icelandic trawlerman who crashed into a British couple’s yacht, causing damage that cost £25,000 to put right. A year later he sailed over to apologise and, having drunk some wine on the voyage, crashed into their boat again.

I think that’s quite funny, but of course those of a busybodying disposition won’t.

And then they will point to the recent case of a captain who smashed his dredger into the pier at Hythe, having downed six pints of lager. The Methodist Mariners will also mention ‘drunken yobs’ on jet skis terrorising swimmers.

All very worthy, I’m sure, but unfortunately the consultation paper also implies that ordinary sailors will be entangled in the legislation. And that would be a shame.

Only the other day I went for a small sail. We set off at the obligatory 45 degrees, an angle at which it’s impossible to drink, as your glass keeps falling off the table. And anyway, every time you fancy a swig, the captain decides to ‘go about’ or ‘gybe’ and you have to rush around pulling the wrong rope.

Still, at lunchtime, we parked, broke out the rum punches (it was Barbados) and spent the afternoon getting plastered in the sunshine. Is this not what sailing’s all about?

Certainly, Olivier de Kersauson, the eminent French yachtsman, thinks that’s what the British do. He took me out on his huge trimaran a couple of years ago and explained why all the big races and records are won and broken by French and American people these days.

It’s a far cry from 1759, when our navy pounced on the French fleet as it attempted to break the blockade. In the ensuing battle off Quiberon, Britannia really did rule the waves.

But not any more, and de Kersauson thinks he knows why. ‘These days, you British all sit around in your yacht clubs, in your silly blazers, drinking gin and tonics. No one actually goes out there and sails,’ he said.

So, new drink-drive limits for sailors may put us back on the map vis-à-vis the Jules Verne Trophy, but there must be more to it than that.

What, though? It’s not as if Britain is out of step with the rest of the world. So far, only Finland has placed alcohol restrictions on sailors but no one has been arrested yet because the police can’t think how the law might be enforced.

We’d have a similar problem here. It would, inevitably, be the job of the Hampshire police to cruise around on the Solent, but I feel sure that senior officers could find better things for the force to do than harass Colonel Bufton Tufton for taking a sherry on his Fairline Targa 48.

Furthermore, who would be deemed responsible? Certainly, if I were to be apprehended by the River Filth while weaving out of Cowes harbour, I’d say my completely sober five-year-old daughter was in charge. Then I’d invite them to go away and catch some burglars.

There are a quarter of a million shipwrecks off the coast of Britain, and almost all of them were caused by one of four things: incompetence, bad weather, the French, or the Germans. Banning alcohol from the high seas to save lives is therefore pointless.

Perhaps it was dreamt up because the infernal health-and-safety, fresh-air, vegetarian Nazis are running out of ways to make our lives miserable on land. But why is it being seriously considered?

To get an answer, we need to think about the potential punishment. You cannot remove a sailor’s licence if he’s found to be drunk because he doesn’t have one.

And you cannot realistically send Bufton Tufton to jail for sailing while under the influence of Harvey’s Bristol Cream.

The only realistic punishment is a fine and there you have the appeal for Tony’s slack-jawed sidekick in No. 11. Explain that drinking and sailing must be outlawed ‘to save children’s lives’ and watch the money come rolling in. It’s the speed-camera syndrome. Tell us that speed kills, then ‘tax’ us when we’re caught proving it doesn’t.

That said, I would be enormously peeved if I were the winchman on a rescue helicopter, dangling on a rope in atrocious weather trying to save the skipper of an upturned yacht who kept saying ‘You’re my best mate,’ and, ‘I f****** love you.’

There is a way round this one, though. Rescued sailors who turn out to be drunk should be made to pay for the cost of plucking them to safety. This way, the fine would serve a purpose and there’d be no need for pricey police patrols.

What’s more, the freedom of the open seas would still be a blessed relief for those who, like me, increasingly believe we’re no longer living in a free country.

Sunday 18 April 2004

We used to work to live, then we gave up living

There is no doubt that, economically speaking, the country’s in rude good health at the moment. We have lower unemployment than most other major industrialised nations, we have among the highest house prices in the world, we are drowning in venture capital, and we are all fat.

When pushed, many experts credit Gordon Brown for the endless parade of good news stories, thanking the good Lord that we have his canny, cunning, dour, Presbyterian, wily, Scottish hand on the tiller.

Rubbish. Britain’s metamorphosis from lame duck to golden goose has nothing to do with Brown and everything to do with your eating habits at lunchtime.

In the olden days, people used to go to the canteen on the dot of one to unwind with mates over a plate of something big in pastry. Now everyone gets their lunch from the Grab ’n’ Go shop.

Do they have Grab ’n’ Go shops in Italy? I rather think not. Over there, they’re still downing a couple of bottles of wine at lunchtime, and then sleeping it off until six.

If we do go out for lunch in Britain, it’s only an excuse to get some more work done. And so is dinner, and so, increasingly, is breakfast. In fact, we’re running out of meals over which we can do deals. Soon, people will be buying and selling products over a midnight feast.

And who drinks at lunchtime any more? The other day, in a Notting Hill restaurant, where people were planning TV shows and new ad campaigns, I ordered a glass of wine, and a deathly hush descended.

‘I could never drink wine in the day,’ said my horrified guest. ‘I’d never get anything done in the afternoon.’

And there you have it. Back in the early 1980s you worried about your performance at work because you knew that if you were kicked out, you’d be jobless until the end of time.

But now people worry about their performance at work because, unlike the continentals, we no longer work to live.

We live to work, and you can’t function properly with a glass of Chablis swilling around your arterial route map.

Ten years ago you knocked off at 5.30, irrespective of what you happened to be doing at the time. Shops went in for half-day closing. You always took your holidays, and if you felt a bit peaky you went to bed for a month.

Oh, how times have changed. Now, when the guys on Top Gear call a car firm in the sticks at 7 p.m. and get a message saying, ‘I’m sorry, the office is closed for the day,’ they slam the phone down and spend the rest of the evening muttering about what they call ‘provincial sloppiness’.

People go to work, having been savaged by Bengal tigers. If you catch ebola, you must get the deal done before your liver liquefies. And half-day closing? Now, you can buy arugula at 3 a.m. seven days a week.

Today, and this has nothing to do with Mr Brown or his warmongering boss, the entire British workforce suffers not from absenteeism but presenteeism. When I began in local newspaper journalism, it was 1978 and the country was a complete shambles. Dead rats, big piles of rubbish and a limited choice of crisp; salt, vinegar, or neither. And I was happy to contribute to the general feeling of malaise by working a 3½-day week.

No really, we were out of the door on a Thursday lunchtime when the paper went to bed, and we didn’t start again until Monday.

If the news editor wanted me to cover a parish council meeting in the evening, I’d spend the whole day harrumphing and lobbying my union representative to get me time off in lieu. Now, I work seven days a week, every week.

And how did Gordon Brown effect this change? Well, it’s hard to say really, since he was on paternity leave at the time.

How can this make the country strong and prosperous, for crying out loud? A dad’s role in the birth of a child is to ensure the infant has the right number of fingers and toes, then get back to work. If we all took a week off to mop up baby sick and do night feeds, we’d be back to 1978 in a jiffy.

It’s not just blokes, either. My wife, who is also my manager, found time during her third caesarean operation to discuss a new contract she’d been sent that morning. I’m not joking. She was lying there, with her stomach open to the elements and needles in her spine, wondering if 15 per cent of the back end was good enough, or if she should push for 20.

That’s the sort of attitude that has made the country strong. We work now, all the time, even during childbirth. We go out at night with Borg-style mobile phone headset attachments in case the office wants to get in touch, and as a result we make more money, which we spend at a greater rate than at any time in history.

And are we thanked? No. Brown comes back from his paternity leave, or his six-week summer holiday, and lets it be known that it’s all down to him. Yeah, right, and victory in the First World War was all down to the generals.

Sunday 25 April 2004

You’re all on probation, this is the British nation

A survey last week revealed that the top 10 things that best define Britain are roast beef (which will give you CJD) fish and chips (which aren’t available any more), the Queen, Buckingham Palace, cooked breakfast, the Beatles (half of whom are dead), Constable (who’s completely dead), the Houses of Parliament, Marks & Spencer and drinking tea.

Is this why half of eastern Europe is on its way here over this weekend: because they fancy a cup of tea? Because they want a new pair of underpants? Because they like to start the day with a hot meal?

I can only assume that the people who responded to this survey are living in the past or living in Worthing. Anyone who’s seen a newspaper recently would come up with some very different ideas about what defines Britain. With apologies to E.J. Thribb, I’m going to have a stab:

The Tipton Three, deep-fried brie

A difficult charter renewal for the BBC

Hospital rashes, endless train crashes

And a spot of closing-time thuggery.

Everyone’s at university so you can’t get a plumber but school leavers are getting dumber and dumber.

Footballers are roasting, cars are coasting and exactly when will we get some summer.

Teenage girls with ‘juicy’ on their arse and let’s not forget the Tony Martin farce.

Provincial chefs cooking, traffic wardens booking, sneak into the bus lane when no one’s looking.

The cameras will catch you if you go too fast, buildings are never meant to last, here comes a soap star with her knickers on show, too much sex, Beckham’s bloody texts, and the one-eyed mullah refuses to go.

We suck up to the Yanks, we’ve closed all the banks, and everyone talks like an EastEnder.

Our idea of a real night out is a complete and utter bender.

When the world was in trouble, we were there in a trice, we’ve beaten the Germans solidly twice.

But now in battle our guns don’t work and the guys on the subs have started to shirk.

We still like to think we’re a major world power, but in a war today we’d barely last an hour.

Yet again the Social failed to come up with the goods, government scientists dead in the woods, cockle-pickers, rate-capping bickers, and the CCTV defeated because the thieves were in hoods.

Plus we’re happy to sit and work at the bureau, but there’s no way we’re having that bloody euro.

No one makes things any more, it’s all call centres; what a bore.

By day the streets are full of PC bull, at night they’re full of lads on the pull.

You can’t post a letter, it won’t get there at all, and bosses are sued should a worker fall.

Talk proper on telly and Cilla will call you a nob and you daren’t go out because of the mob.

Dido’s warbling on Radio 1, and now what’s this?

Oh, Concorde’s gone.

I’m a celebrity and I want to get out, have your face altered, get a trout pout, be famous for doing nothing at all, get called a hero for kicking a ball. While you, dear reader, are out chopping logs, the whole damn country’s going to the dogs.

You like to think in your middle-class home that all is well, apart from the dome.

But the whole place is wounded and the wound’s starting to swell.

The Band-Aid’s failing and it’s beginning to tell.

I therefore have a message for you, if you’re arriving here to begin anew:

France is wonderful, France is best, from Alsace in the east to Brest in the west.

Their wine and fizz are second to none and remember the footie they’ve recently won.

Their cheese is completely out of sight and St Tropez’s a lot better than the Isle of Wight.

They’ve sunshine and châteaux and tits on the beach.

When you’re down in Provence, life’s really a peach.

Go there instead and leave us alone.

We’re rubbish, you know it, we’re pared to the bone.

If you don’t believe me, consider this tome:

We may have ID cards – but we’re fresh out of bards.

Sunday 2 May 2004

Comrade Clipboard won’t let me crash the car

Making Top Gear used to be easy. I would drive a car round some corners, spin its wheels on the gravel, make a couple of cheap sexual metaphors and then garnish the result with a spot of Bruce Springsteen. Today, though, things are very different.

The new series returns to your screens tonight, but in Tony Blair’s weird world the sheer effort of getting it there would have defeated Hercules.

You see, the problem is that, while we weren’t looking, an insidious coup has taken over all our main institutions: schools, government, television stations, the police and even the army. Yes, it’s not the head teacher or the general who’s in charge any more; it’s that quiet little man (or woman) in the bad jumper, the one nibbling away at his (or her) one-world, fair-deal polenta crisps.

As a result, the gallery at a modern television studio is like the bridge on an old Soviet submarine. Even the director is now under the direct control of a political commissar whose sole job is to make sure that nobody falls over, trips up or says anything which might possibly cause offence.

So, during the recording on Wednesday, when one of the presenters used the phrase, ‘taking the mickey’, the lights went up, the shutters came down and the cameras were turned off. With klaxons blaring, we surfaced, special forces took the presenter away and now he, and his family, are living with Ron Atkinson and Robert Kilroy-Silk in a Siberian gulag.

Why? Well, we’ve known for some time that n***** is the fourth most offensive word in the English language and, of course, saying all Arabs are terrorists is as silly as stripping in front of a webcam. But now someone has decided that ‘taking the mickey’ might upset the Irish.

In fact, the Mickey in question has nothing to do with Micks in general. It’s an abbreviation in cockney rhyming slang for Mickey Bliss. Taking the mickey is therefore an inoffensive way of saying taking the piss.

But there we have the problem with political commissars. They are not bothered about truth or accuracy: they’re there to right the wrongs perpetrated by Oliver Cromwell and General Dyer at Amritsar, and to find all the little problems that Health and Safety have missed.

Ah yes. Health and Safety. For one programme in the new series, each presenter bought a car for less than £100. We filmed a series of tests to prove they were roadworthy and reliable. As a finale, we decided to show their integrity by driving them into a brick wall at 30 mph.

Can you see a problem with that? I couldn’t. It’s not as if we were asking black or Irish people to have the accident on our behalf. But that didn’t concern the political commissar, who called in Health and Safety, who thought we were taking the mickey.

We promised we wouldn’t sue if we were injured. Our wives promised they wouldn’t sue if we were killed. We produced letters from the head of safety at Volvo, saying there was no danger whatsoever, and we talked to James Bond stuntmen, who agreed. But Health and Safety were not interested. They knew, because they’d read about it in the Guardian, that crashing a car into a wall at 30 mph was dangerous, so they insisted that we spent £8,000 – of your money, I hasten to add – moving fuel tanks, employing paramedics and buying neck braces.

Great. If we abandoned the project, we’d have wasted the money already spent. If we went ahead, we’d be wasting even more on ludicrous safety features that every expert said were simply not necessary.

I offered to stage the crash in my free time and to employ a camera crew myself. I said that I would give the resulting footage to the BBC for nothing. But the political commissar referred to his little red book, smiling that cruel KGB smile, and said, ‘No.’

In the end we went ahead, crashed the cars on his terms and, as a result, had no money left to make any more items. Result: a show where nobody was hurt. But a show that nobody wants to watch.

It gets worse. Before anything can be transmitted these days, you have to fill in a compliance form which makes sure that you’re complying with every single piece of PC nonsense, no matter how stupid or trivial. The trouble is that, by the time you’ve done this, and the health and safety form, you have no time left to film the programme.

Actually, you don’t even have time to fill in the forms because usually you’re away on a course, watching safety films of Anthea Turner catching fire. I thought that it would make the cornerstone of a great show – When TV Stars Combust – but apparently it’s supposed to demonstrate how things can go wrong.

My latest plan is to take part in some Siamese banger racing. You race in pairs with your car chained to your partner’s. I knew Health and Safety would have a fit but, long before they could step in, the plan was quashed by the party commissars. ‘We’re worried about using the word Siamese,’ they said. ‘Could you call it “conjoined” banger racing?’

Not really, no.

Sunday 9 May 2004

Noises off can turn a man into a murderer

On Thursday a group of hot-air fanatics floated seven enormous balloons over the centre of Birmingham and, as dawn broke, drenched the city with music that had been specially composed to change the way people sleep.

I should imagine that the change was profound. Instead of waking up dreamily at about seven or eight o’clock, it seems entirely likely that the city’s 2 million inhabitants were out of their beds at 6.30 a.m., wondering what harebrained lunatic had sanctioned such a thing.

That these balloonists lived to reach land shows the people of Birmingham to be exceptionally tolerant. If the Sky Orchestra had bombed my house with its ‘audio landscape’ at dawn, I would have shot its members out of the sky.

I do not mind if something makes a noise while engaged in a pursuit that is practical and useful. People, for instance, who buy houses near Heathrow and then whinge about aeroplane noise need to be larched.

I also despair at those who complain about low-flying RAF jets. One farmer in Wales became so fed up with the sound of the man-made thunder that he wrote ‘piss off Biggles’ on the roof of his house. Happily, every fly boy went over there for a look-see.

And as for the man who complained last week that Paul McCartney’s rehearsals at the Millennium Dome were too loud: come on, mate. Complain about ‘Ebony and Ivory’ by all means, but don’t complain about an event that brings life to Tony Blair’s great white elephant.

It’s the same story with traffic noise and the din made by farmers when it is time to harvest the crops. These are simply by-products of the modern age. I don’t even mind other people’s mobile phones, unless they’re using the Nokia ring tone.

What I cannot abide, however, are people whose hobbies are solely designed to make a noise. I’m talking about born-again motorbikers who come to the countryside on a sunny Sunday specifically to make as much racket as possible. One day I will silence them by stretching a piece of cheese wire across the road.

I’m also talking about campanologists who wait for the country to have a monumental hangover before polluting the Sunday morning stillness with their infernal bells.

Why? If God thinks getting a bunch of beardies to play ‘Home Sweet Home’ on six tons of brass at seven in the morning is a sensible way of summoning his flock, he can get lost. It’s all very well banging on about peace and love, but what I want on a Sunday is a bit of peace and quiet.

I wouldn’t mind, but church congregations are now so small that everyone would fit in the vicar’s Ford Fiesta. So why doesn’t he pop round to pick up everyone personally? And quietly. No leaning on your horn like an idle minicab driver, thanks very much.

I also think it’s about time that something was done about microlights. Sure, an RAF jet is much louder, but by the time you’ve got back on to your chair, it’s already knocking people over in Cornwall. A microlight, on the other hand, struggles to make headway in even the gentlest of breezes so it just sits above your garden all day.

I think it’s fine for people to have their own aircraft but I would impose a minimum speed limit up there of, let’s say, 600 mph. This minimises the inconvenience for those of us on the ground.

That’s a simple solution. What’s not simple is what I should do about the blackbird that has nested in the eaves, just six inches from my pillow.

This morning its chicks woke me at 5.20 and I spent the next two hours trying to think of what might be done.

My wife suggests that we get a cat, but this is impossible because I hate the way their bottoms look like dishcloth holders. Mostly, though, I hate them because they give me asthma, which would keep me awake even more than the birds.

It would be much easier to blow the nest, and everything in it, to kingdom come with my 12-bore. Yet I cannot bring myself to do that. I’m not even certain it’s legal.

It probably is legal to remove the nest gently and put it in the dustbin. But, again, it seems wrong. Weird, isn’t it? I would enjoy beheading a biker but I cannot bring myself to kill five baby blackbirds.

I thought about taking a leaf out of the Birmingham Sky Orchestra’s book and bombarding them through the night with old prog rock from a Sony Walkman, in the hope that they would sleep during the day.

But I’m told that baby blackbirds aren’t like baby people and that this won’t work. Nor will milk laced with heroin, apparently.

So what I’m going to do is feed them with lots of grain until they’re really fat.

Then I shall drown them in armagnac. And then, after they’ve been in the Aga for eight minutes, I shall pop them into a baked potato and eat them.

It’s called payback and, if it works, I shall try the same thing with the bell-ringers.

Sunday 16 May 2004

The lusty lads have left me feeling exposed

It’s easy for women. When they are in the newsagent’s at a railway station they can buy pretty much any magazine that takes their fancy, safe in the knowledge that they will be able to read it on the forthcoming train journey.

Woman and Home. Home and Garden. Garden and Hair. Hair and Beauty. Beauty and Slimming. Slimming and Slimmers. Slim Women. Slim Home. Slim Garden. Slim Hair.

They’re all fine.

It’s not so easy for a man. We know we should pick up The Spectator or a book on Victorian poetry because this will make us appear sensitive and clever. And yet, what we really want is to spend the journey looking at naked Australian surfers, especially if they have been the victims of shark attacks.

That means buying a lads’ mag, which used to be fine. But now, unfortunately, it’s no longer possible to do such a thing, not if you want to read it in public.

The first time I saw a photograph of someone who had been eaten by a shark, I was pretty impressed. The second time was enjoyable too; but now, thanks to the proliferation of the lads’ mags, I’m bored witless by South African lifeguards who have lost their torsos.

Shark attack photos have been the staple diet of men’s magazines since they arrived on the scene, 10 years ago. But with the launch, and apparent success, of Zoo and Nuts, which are weeklies, the old monthlies have had to up the ante a bit.

With a circulation of 600,000 or so, FHM, the biggest seller, has the most to lose, so this month you can feast your eyes on a cow with two extra legs growing out of its neck, and a man who was born with his head on back to front. Also, there is a horse-shaped boy, a bloke with testicles the size of prize-winning pumpkins and a man with what appears to be a sack of red potatoes growing out of his face.

Fine, but this kind of stuff doesn’t really work on a train. I mean, it is hard to savour the shots of a man with elephantiasis when you have a stranger who may be a nun sitting next to you.

And it is no good turning the page because whoa, it’s a double-page spread of Abi Titmuss wearing nothing but a sheen of baby oil.

This is another problem. In the early days of lads’ mags, it wasn’t hard to find someone from a soap opera or the pop charts who, for a small fee, would appear in the centre pages, wearing nothing but a swimming costume. But now, with paparazzi on every beach in the world, the tabloid newspapers and celebrity glossies can quench our thirst for shots of G-list celebrities in their G-strings. So the lads’ mags have to go further.

That frightens away serious actresses from Casualty and Coronation Farm and means we are left to gawp at girls who once went out with someone who sold a dog to someone who lives next door to Richard and Judy.

This week, for instance, Zoo has printed a picture of Lisa Snowdon’s bottom. Who is Lisa Snowdon? I have absolutely no idea. Nuts, meanwhile, has pics of Anoushka and Steph who, we are told, are presenters on MTV.

Would you read Asian Babes on the train? Would you pull out the Playboy centrefold and nod appreciatively? Precisely. And it’s no different with Anoushka and Steph, even though, it turns out, they have been to a 40th birthday party, hosted by someone called Shane Richie.

So this brings us back to the newsagent’s at the railway station and the quandary of what to buy.

GQ has columns by Boris Johnson and Peter Mandelson, which gives it an upmarket, serious feel, but there are visual landmines in there, too. You turn the page expecting to find a piece on starvation in Africa, but oh no, it’s Kate Winslet’s thrupennies, and the nun’s giving you daggers.

So what about the New Statesman? Well, yes, but it pretty much guarantees that you’ll wake up in Wakefield, 200 miles from your intended stop, with a bit of dribble hanging down from the side of your mouth.

Specialist publications do have a certain allure. Sit on a train reading What Computer? or Autocar and you can be pretty much assured that nobody will sit next to you. The downside, of course, is that you will have to read What Computer? or Autocar.

All specialist publications assume the reader knows as much about the subject as the staff. I recently bought a home cinema magazine and there was not one single word that made any sense at all.

Socially, it is possible to buy a magazine such as Arena or Wallpaper* but it’s hard to work out what they are about. Mostly, they seem to be full of rather trendy people leaning on bicycles in alleyways, and they are not what you’d call funny – which brings me to the solution.

Being British, and male, we may like reading about gardening or food, and we do have an extraordinary appetite for television listings magazines. But what we like most of all is a damn good laugh.

This means that when I get to a railway station I always buy the two funniest magazines you’ll find anywhere in the world: Viz and Private Eye.

Sunday 23 May 2004

Mobile phones that do everything – except work

After Margaret Thatcher announced she’d be privatising water, she probably thought there was nothing left to sell. But there was – the air.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were quick to realise this and so, in 2000, they sold it at auction to a group of multinational companies for a whopping £22 billion.

Now those multinationals are selling it back to us in the shape of third-generation (3G) mobile phones that allow you to check prices on the Italian stock exchange, email naked girls in Vietnam, watch the BBC news, and remind you that next Saturday is your wedding anniversary.

In essence, if you buy one of these phones, you are getting a Filofax, a television, a cinema, a portal to the internet, a computer, a video camera and a photograph album. Great, but is it necessary?

My mobile phone man tells me that, according to his accounts, only 3 per cent of his customers use their current phones for sending photographs. So why should anyone, apart from Rebecca Loos, want a 3G phone that lets you talk, face to face, on a video link?

On Tomorrow’s World years ago, Raymond Baxter told us that such a thing was possible. So did Judith Haan. And so did Philippa Forrester. But video calls never caught on, because we use the phone primarily for lying and it is much harder to tell porkies when you’re being watched.

So why, if we don’t want video phones at home, might we want them when we are out and about? And how long do you suppose the battery will last?

What’s worse is that you still won’t be able to use the phones as phones because, as has always been the way with mobiles – except the Nokia 6310 – people on the other end sound like Daleks and, just before you have a chance to sign off, the call will end. So you have to ring back just to say goodbye.

It is easy to see what is going on here. Having spent a Nasa-sized fortune on the radio waves to handle all this data, the mobile phone industry is attempting space travel before it can walk.

When the motor car was invented, people did not sit around, wondering how a washing machine and a tumble drier could be attached to the back. They honed it and refined it. Only now, 100 years down the line, are we seeing the fitting of extras such as television screens and satellite navigation.

This is plainly not happening with mobiles. Last year, I bought my wife a Sony Ericsson Something Or Other for about £1 million. It turned out to be a fantastic personal organiser and video game console, but for speaking to other people she might as well have used a chair leg.

‘Ah, yes,’ said the man in the shop, when I complained. ‘That particular model isn’t very good.’

Not very good! For the past 12 months, she’s rung me up, we’ve said ‘What?’ at the top of our voices a lot and then, when she’s inadvertently moved more than two inches from a base station, the line’s gone dead.

I have a Motorola that has several thousand features, all of which are jolly useful, I’m sure. But the speaker is so quiet, I can’t even hear the beeps and static coming from my wife’s Sony. The damn thing would make Brian Blessed sound like a hamster.

It will have to go, which means the two hours I spent reading the instruction manual will have been a waste of time, and now I’ll have to spend another two hours reading a booklet about whatever I buy instead. But I don’t have time to do that because I’m in the middle of the book about my wireless internet. Honestly, that’s all I read these days – instruction books for gadgets that don’t work.

What I want from a cooker is the ability to cook food. What I want from a washing machine is the ability to make clothes clean. And what I want from a phone is the ability to speak with someone else without them thinking I’m the love child of an unusual relationship between Stephen Hawking and Telstar.

I want a telephone that is full of telephone technology, not cameras and internets. I want it to be a Ryanair-no-frills phone. A Ronseal communicator that does only what it says on the tin. In other words, I don’t want it to stop working every time I go behind a tree.

I’m not kidding. My phone cuts off – at least I think it does; it’s so quiet, I can’t be sure – where the M40 meets the M25. This is not the middle of the Gobi Desert. It’s not the bottom of the Mariana trench.

Predictably, health and safety is the problem here. The reason why our phones are so useless as communicators is because if they were more powerful they’d fry our heads.

Fair enough, so how’s this for a plan? When we go abroad, our phones hook up to whichever service provider has the strongest signal at that time. So why can’t they do that when we’re at home? When I’m in Devon, where Orange is strong, I want to talk via Orange; and when I’m in London, where Vodafone provides the best coverage, I want to use Vodafone. Is that impossible?

Technically, the answer is no. But financially it’s ‘difficult’, so we’re stuck with phones that shtwang lang. krzzzzz. Hello. Hello, hello…

Sunday 30 May 2004

We really have to draw a line under tattoos

As the rugby World Cup drew near, Jonny Wilkinson upped his training regime a notch. He was at the ground 12 hours a day for six days a week so that when the big day came he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, miss.

David Beckham seems to have taken a rather different approach as he prepares for the forthcoming Euro 2004 football tournament. Instead of wasting his time at the training camp, he has got himself another tattoo. His tenth, apparently.

Worryingly, it didn’t seem to do him much good last week when England were held to a one-all draw by a Subbuteo team of Japanese little people.

But then it’s hard to see how a tattoo might improve anyone’s footballing skills.

In fact, it’s hard to see the point of a tattoo at all.

I remember, when I was a local newspaper reporter in the late 1970s, writing a piece about unemployment in the wake of some strike or other. One interviewee told me he had all the right qualifications but was always rejected after an interview. He couldn’t see why, but I could. It was the enormous spider’s web that had been tattooed on his face.

There was a time when a tattoo would demonstrate that you had been in the nick or the navy, but now pretty well everyone I ever see has what looks like a huge Harley-Davidson motif peeping out of their trousers.

Has Camilla Parker Bowles got a giant eagle with a man’s skull eating a snake on her backside? I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

No, wait. Actually I would be surprised because despite the notable exception of Lord Lichfield, who has a seahorse on his arm, and Sir Winston Churchill’s mother, who had a snake round her wrist, tattooing is still very Club Yob. It’s still the preserve of pole dancers and people with England flags fluttering from their car aerials. Abs, formerly from the band Five, has a tattoo on his nipple and I think that says it all.

Of course, when I was 16 I fancied the notion of having a small red Che Guevara-style red star permanently etched into my left buttock.

I didn’t, for two reasons. First, the law states that you can’t get a tattoo unless you are drunk. That’s why 18 is the minimum age.

Second, a tattoo artist once ran his needle over my forearm to show me just what a painless experience it was. He was lying. It felt like I was being stabbed in slow motion.

What would I have ended up with? Aids, probably, and a smudge on my bottom. What’s the point of that? Why endure all the pain and expense when you’ll have something that you’ll never see. That’s like manhandling a giant Bukhara rug all the way back from Uzbekistan and then using it to carpet your loft.

You see these people, in Heat magazine usually, with half a yard of gothic symbolism plastered all over their back and you think: Do you hang your curtains pattern-side out for the neighbours to admire?

There are other problems, too. Tattooing has been around since the dawn of time, but if we examine the work of all the great artists – Leonardo da Vinci, van Gogh, Monet – we find they would apply their skill and dexterity to just about any surface: walls, ceilings, canvas, paper. But not the human body.

At no point did Constable ever think, ‘I know, I’ll paint The Haywain on Turner’s arse.’

Tattoo art is invariably awful. David Beckham today is beginning to look like an Iron Maiden album cover. But then, look at the average tattoo artist.

Maybe, if my children were being held hostage, I would let Tracey Emin loose with the needles, but not a bald, 18-stone Hell’s Angel with most of Travis Perkins’s stockroom stuck through his nose.

I wouldn’t mind, but most proper artists spend weeks thinking about their work and how it should be approached. What you get from the Hell’s Angel is a five-minute consultation, and what you end up with is a doodle. Furthermore, most successful artists learnt their craft by wearing berets and walking along river banks. These tattoo guys, you know, learnt their craft by customising vans.

The only good thing is that when the subject dies, the tattoo dies too. Except in Japan, of course, where you can buy dead tattooed people to turn into furniture.

Interesting idea: yakuza scatter cushions.

I doubt if anyone would believe that a friend of mine’s love for Ferrari was so intense that she had a prancing horse tattooed just above her G-string. Now, whenever she bends over, people say, ‘Er, why has someone drawn a donkey on your back?’

It’s rubbish, and she is stuck with it for ever. Oh, I know there are all sorts of procedures these days for having tattoos removed, but they cost – and hurt even more than having the damn thing implanted in the first place.

Do they work? Well, you only have to examine a blotched and botched London Underground train that’s had its graffiti washed off to see the answer is no, not really.

Sunday 6 June 2004

Life itself is offensive, so stop complaining

Following two complaints from outraged Muslim leaders, a poster showing four young ladies in nothing but Sloggi G-strings has been removed from sites near mosques.

It’s jolly easy to get all frothy about this. There will be those who will say that if Muslims don’t want their children to see pictures of girls in their underwear they should have stayed in Uzbekistan. And doubtless those of a Daily Mail persuasion will point out that if a British person moves to France and complains about the local café serving horse burgers, he’ll be told where to get off.

There are other issues, too. Christians claim that they’ve been complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority for years about ‘lewd posters’ to little or no effect. And yet all it takes is a raised eyebrow from a mullah, and Sloggi gets an eviction notice.

Sloggi, of course, maintains that it’s difficult to advertise underwear without actually showing it. Although it could take a leaf out of Superman’s book and have someone wear their thong on the outside of their trousers.

My problem with this, however, has nothing to do with race or positive discrimination or even the ASA. No. My problem is with the sanctimonious, mealy-mouthed, holier-than-thou, underemployed twerps who do the complaining.

Remember that ‘Hello boys’ advertisement for Wonderbra? That got 150 complaints.

Then there was the ad for Velvet toilet tissue with the slogan ‘Love your bum’; 375 complained about that. Five hundred moaned about FCUK’s logo and 275 worked themselves into a dizzy lather about Club 18–30’s ad: ‘Discover your erogenous zones’.

What you have to remember here is that all these people had to telephone directory enquiries for the number for the ASA, get the address, write a letter, buy a stamp and walk to a postbox.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they merely wished to register their disapproval but, having gone to so much effort, they always say they want action and results.

It’s not just in the world of advertising, either. Only this week the Points of View programme on BBC1 brought a dribble of complaints about excessive speed and what-have-you to the producer of Top Gear and asked if, in the light of these letters, he would be effecting changes in how the presenters drive and treat speed in future. Happily, he was bold enough to smile and say, ‘No.’

But let’s just imagine for a moment that he’d said yes. Let’s imagine that we lived in a world where a handful of people could have something altered or banned by saying in a letter: ‘I don’t like this very much and I want it stopped.’

I could write to the Church Bells Standards Authority and, as a result of my complaint, campanology would be outlawed immediately. And after a second letter, all American tourists arriving at Heathrow would be turned away. How long do you think Bill Oddie would last in a world like this?

And not just Bill, either. I’m sure that the Queen, with her palaces and servants, upsets and annoys someone somewhere so let’s ban her, too, and her family. And while we’re at it, I know a handful of people who don’t like that enormous new gherkin building in London, so let’s pull it down, along with the British Library and Preston.

Cats give me asthma and I find their bottoms offensive, so everyone would have to put their beloved moggy in a sack and bash its head in with a croquet mallet.

Providing, of course, croquet hadn’t upset someone in the meantime. In which case you’d have to use a frozen leg of lamb. Or, more likely, a nut cutlet.

Oh no, wait. Nuts can make some people swell up. So you see, already we’ve run into a problem. You’ve got your cat in a sack but no way of killing it.

I’m struggling to think of anything which would be permitted in a world where nothing was allowed to cause offence to anyone. Cars, condoms, Christianity.

Everything would have to go, except perhaps Michael Palin and maybe David Attenborough.

You probably think this is silly but I’m afraid it’s not. When you go to the cinema these days, you’re given a synopsis of the movie before the MGM lion has roared.

‘This film contains scenes of flashing lights and strong language, and there’s a bit of mild violence when the German’s goggles fill with ketchup. Oh, and there’s some semi-nudity when we see Susannah York in her stockings and I’m afraid there’s a dog called Blackie.’ This is because the audience may contain nuts.

And let’s not forget, shall we, where this whole thing started. Following just two complaints – that’s two, not 2 million – the ASA has asked Sloggi to be more careful in future about where it places posters featuring girls in their underwear.

Happily our great leader, Tony Blair, is still a beacon of hope in this sanitised world. A million people complained, in person, about his plans to bomb Iraq, but he paid not the slightest bit of attention. We should all take a leaf out of his book.

Sunday 13 June 2004

Put the panic button down now and walk away quietly

A friend called last week in some distress to say that his VAT bill was a little larger than expected. Then I had lunch with somebody who spent the entire meal agonising over which school is best for his daughter.

Meanwhile, in Lambeth Palace the Archbishop of Canterbury is to be found, pacing his sitting room, wondering whether or not to make a guest appearance on The Simpsons. It’s not exactly up there with Thomas à Becket’s problems, is it?

The trouble is that, after about four billion years of worrying about sabre-toothed tigers, the plague, having your heart ripped out by religious zealots and being bombed by the Germans, we’ve been left with an inability to stop worrying when actually everything’s fine.

We worry today about the onset of baldness and cellulite with the same intensity as people in 1665 worried about the Great Plague. Today, for instance, the sun is shining, the sky is a cobalt blue, the thermometer is nudging 75°F, I have received an unexpected windfall from a video distribution company, there are three parties lined up for the weekend and the children are well. Yet I’m sitting here worrying about the amount of junk there is in space. Only the other day a French rocket was destroyed when it hurtled into a partially eaten hamburger left in orbit by one of Neil Armstrong’s mates. Or it could have been a speck of paint.

There are apparently 100,000 pieces of flotsam and jetsam whizzing round the Earth; and soon, experts say, somebody will be killed when his spacecraft crashes into a spanner dropped by some clumsy Russian, back in 1969.

I’m also worried that my daughter’s skirt is too short, that Nigella Lawson may be turning into a man, and that the enormous quantities of Diet Coke that I drink in a day will give me tooth cancer. And I don’t even read the Daily Mail.

The Mail sees terror and pain in just about every aspect of our lives today. Cornflakes will kill you unless an immigrant from Albania gets you first. Farmed salmon will rot your children’s eyes, genetically modified wheat will invade your garden and eat your pets, and heaven help those who don’t maintain an efficient oral hygiene programme. Because they’re going to have killer mushrooms growing out of their gums.

I’d like very much to blame the newspapers for whipping up our worry genes into an undoable knot, but actually, I fear, the real culprit here is everybody aged over 40.

I, for instance, am plodding through middle age, convinced that the perfect world we enjoyed in, oh, about 1976 is being taken away and ruined. I don’t see a need for speed humps and navel piercings, and I can’t understand why I have to be called Jezza.

Every day I read the newspapers with a growing sense that the lunatics have taken over the asylum and that every single thing, from the Kyoto treaty to the endless bans on garden weedkillers, is designed to put the world into reverse.

It’s sad, but older people always believe that life was better when they were younger. Hearing tales of my mother’s upbringing is like being immersed in a warm bath with Enid Blyton. It was all one big Noddy story, with ruddy-faced constables chasing ragamuffins for scrumping apples.

The thing is, though, that her mother will have painted an equally fuzzy picture of her childhood, and so on. But in every single way, life at this precise second is better and more comfortable than at any time in the whole of human history.

We’re told that entertainment is getting worse but even Big Brother is better than sitting in the front room watching grandad washing in a tin bath. My granny may have enjoyed her sun-drenched Cider with Rosie romps in the haywain, but when she had a toothache she had to go to the local barber, who hit the tooth with a hammer. When her husband lost his job, the family starved. And when her friend had a placenta previa, she died.

Back then you didn’t worry about the Sats at your daughter’s school or the length of her skirt, because the chances are she would have succumbed to something unspeakable at the age of four. And even if she did make it into double figures, she wouldn’t have been allowed into a school or a polling station.

I look today at those people on Oprah prattling on about their tormented love lives and I can’t help thinking: ‘Yes, it can’t have been nice to come home and find your son in women’s underwear, but not that long ago you might have come home to find him in the sabre-toothed tiger.’

Then we have today’s army of stress counsellors, who are on hand to iron out the emotional creases after some minor accident at work. They tell us that life in the twenty-first century is more complicated than ever before, but it just so isn’t.

By encouraging us to fret about minor injuries and bits of the international space station dropping on our heads and the threat posed to mankind’s very existence by farmed salmon and cornflakes and bloody global warming, we’ll all be completely unprepared for the day when Saudi Arabia goes pop and we really do have something to worry about.

Sunday 4 July 2004

Yes, it used to be grim up north – now it’s grimmer

It didn’t take long. Just a few days after a report said that the north–south divide in Britain was getting wider, all sorts of commentators have leapt into print to say it isn’t.

Bill Deedes, grand old man of the Daily Telegraph, argued that life up north in the 1930s was far worse than it is now; estate agents pointed to the burgeoning property market; and Ken Morrison, the supermarket chief, said shelf-stackers up north work harder than shelf-stackers down south.

We’re told that Corby, in the London ‘catchment area’, has the highest percentage of unskilled workers, and Peterborough, just 50 minutes from King’s Cross, has more business failures than any other town in the country.

So, people of Richmond-upon-Thames, you can relax. The gritty souls of Sheffield are not being forced through hunger to sell their children for medical experiments, so there’s no need to drown in guilt. And there’s no danger any time soon of being presented with a German-style reunification tax to keep the north afloat.

Actually, I wouldn’t be so sure. I think we’re heading for a genuinely serious problem. Because I think the north is in real trouble. When I was growing up in Doncaster, trips to London weren’t much of a culture shock. Yes, it was big, but the food was just as lousy, the service was just as hopeless and the carpets were just as patterned.

In those days the people of Doncaster dug coal and operated power stations and built trains and tractors. Sure, they didn’t earn as much as the people who ran banks in Tunbridge Wells, but the gulf wasn’t that wide. It is now. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks in my home town and nobody over 40 seemed to have teeth, just the occasional lava-black stump. Worse, those under 40 who asked for an autograph hadn’t the faintest idea how to spell their names.

It’s all very well saying the housing market has boomed just recently, but the houses in question were going for £500 just four years ago. That they’re going for £7,500 now in no way implies that the north–south divide is narrowing. Then there are the towns. Deedes may paint a gloomy picture of life up north in the great recession, but I urge him with all my heart to look at somewhere like Conisborough today. There is nowhere – absolutely nowhere – down south which is quite so desperate.

First of all, on a Tuesday morning in term-time the place was full of children, all of whom tried to sell me stuff – wheels, car radios, security, anything. I’ve seen this kind of thing in Chad and India and Cuba, but I’m talking about a town that’s just 150 miles from Marble Arch.

Of course there are poorer places in London – Hackney, for instance, but in Hackney the badly-off are just part of the mix. In Conisborough there’s no Hoxton Square to bring a bit of light relief. It’s just mile after mile of broken windows and the bloody Earth Centre.

If a child from Doncaster were to visit London today, he’d have palpitations. He’d notice that everybody had teeth and Range Rovers and could write. He’d peer into the low-voltage world of the capital’s restaurants and wonder what on earth people were putting in their mouths. And what, pray, would he make of a Lulu Guinness handbag?

I know, of course, that local newspapers up north, supported by people from Harrogate and Altrincham, will dismiss what I’m saying as the rantings of a spoilt southern media poof. But please don’t get all cold prickly, because then everybody down here will continue to think you’re all right. And you’re not.

I know the north is friendly. I know about the community spirit in places like Conisborough. I know about the gritty resolve. I know about the joyous countryside. But what would you rather have: teeth or a nice view?

There have been calls for some of Tony’s barmy army of civil servants to be moved up north, and there has been talk of the BBC shifting some of its services away from the capital. But I think they mean Amersham.

This sort of thing isn’t enough. For the past century the south-east has had a gentle gravitational pull on the north, but now it has the tug of a black hole.

The latest figures suggest that if current levels of migration continue, nobody will be left in the north within 40 years.

You have only to look at my family tree for confirmation of this. Since 1780, every one of my forefathers was born and lived in Yorkshire. That’s five generations on both sides of the family – maybe 2,000 people – all of whom were born, married and buried within 12 miles of one another.

Today I live somewhere else and so do all my cousins.

Even my mother, after 70 years in Doncaster, upped sticks last week and moved down south. There are many things which could be done to reunite the United Kingdom, but rather than preach I’ve been sitting here thinking about what it would take to entice me back there again.

I’m afraid it’s a long list and it starts with ‘£1 million’. What about you? Are you a lapsed northerner? What would it take for you to go back? Let me know.

Sunday 11 July 2004

Stars staying alive is really killing rock’n’roll

When I heard that Morrissey was to re-form the New York Dolls for a concert in London this summer, I must confess that I raised a bit of an eyebrow.

The Dolls, when they met in the early 1970s, had absolutely no musical ability whatsoever. None of them could sing, none of them could play an instrument and, perhaps as a result, none of the albums they released was what you would call a commercial success.

Today, however, they are seen by many as one of the most important pieces of the rock’n’roll jigsaw.

In essence, they are credited with being the bridge between glam and punk rock, the band that spawned the Sex Pistols and the Clash in England, and the Ramones and Television in America.

They were punks before punk rock had been invented, so it was only right and proper that Morrissey should invite them over for a reunion gig. What puzzled me was how he intended to do it, because, put simply, most of them were dead.

First to go was the drummer Billy Murcia who, while supporting Rod Stewart on a tour of England, decided that it would be a good idea to make a champagne and mandrax cocktail. While unconscious, his friends put him in a cold bath and poured so much coffee down his throat that he drowned.

Undaunted, the Dolls replaced him with a chap called Jerry Nolan who could actually play the drums. This caused so many rows that he left the band and moved to Sweden, where he died from meningitis.

Meanwhile, the guitarist Johnny Thunders had expired in a blizzard of drugs, which brings me back to this reunion gig in London. Who, exactly, was going to be on stage?

Well, Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane, the original bass player, was there, but only just. He was completely bald and apparently heavily sedated. This was seen as normal. In the early days he was often so drunk that he had to mime not being able to play the bass, while a roadie actually did play it behind a speaker stack.

It wasn’t normal, though. Unfortunately, Killer was suffering from leukaemia and last week he went west, too.

Often there are documentaries on ITV called The Most Dangerous Jobs in the World, but it’s hard to conceive of any that are quite as perilous as being in the New York Dolls. In fact, being in any band in the 1960s or 1970s made nineteenth-century tunnelling look safe. The Who lost their bassist and drummer and the Beatles their guitarist and song writer. Maybe they should team up and form the Hootles. It’s an idea.

Then you have Phil Lynott, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Bonham, Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan, Eddie Cochran, Brian Epstein, Duane Allman, most of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Cozy Powell, Alex Harvey, Ricky Nelson, Pete Ham and Tom Evans from Badfinger, Tim Hardin, Steely Dan’s drummer, Bon Scott from AC/DC, half of the Grateful Dead, Chas Chandler, Johnny Kidd, Rory Gallagher, James Honeyman Scott and Pete Farndon from the Pretenders, John Belushi, Elvis, Patsy Cline, Brian Jones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Terry Kath from Chicago, and Sid Vicious. Even the Carpenters weren’t a safe haven.

Of the 321 well-known musicians who died prematurely in the glory days of rock’n’roll, 40 were taken by drugs, 36 by suicide and a whopping 22 by plane or helicopter crashes. Thirty-five died in cars, 18 were murdered, nine drowned in their own vomit and five in their own swimming pools. Picking up a guitar in London in 1972 was more lethal than picking up a rifle in Stalingrad in 1942.

Coming home from school back then and saying you were going to be a Formula One racing driver would have prompted a sigh of relief from your mum: ‘Well, thank God you’re not going to be in a band.’

Now, though, things are different. With the notable and noble exception of Kurt Cobain, who blew whatever it was he had inside his head all over the wall with a shotgun, and Michael Hutchence, who went to meet his maker with an orange in his mouth, today’s rock stars seem to be in rude good health.

So far as I’m aware, nobody in Duran Duran is dead and, the last time I looked, all of Busted weren’t. Pink is in it and even Oasis have managed to steer clear of their swimming pools.

Perhaps this is the problem with music today. Perhaps the declining audience for Radio 1 and dwindling album sales have something to do with a lack of danger. Back in 1975 I would rush to see a band, partly because I liked the energy of a live concert and partly, subliminally perhaps, because there was a sense that they would all be dead by the following week. Usually they were.

You certainly don’t get any of that from Will Young. I saw him perform at the Cornbury music festival last weekend, and while the tunes were perfectly jolly there was no sense that he might be found the next morning in a hotel room full of hookers and cocaine.

I see him as a perfect role model for my 10-year-old daughter. But I suspect she’d like him more if he filled his head with heroin and flew his private jet into an oil refinery.

Sunday 18 July 2004

Hoon’s thinned red line is facing the wrong way

Three hundred years ago Europe was embroiled in a particularly complicated conflict called the Spanish War of Succession. I have no clue what it was all about – God, probably – but I do know that Britain walked away from the peace talks with a shiny new colony: Gibraltar.

Today, the 30,000 residents who cling to this rocky outcrop are still fiercely British, so, to mark the tercentenary of their liberation from Spain, the RAF is sending, er, its brass band. Which, after the defence cuts last week, is pretty much all it has left.

The navy was planning to send a hunter killer submarine, but that has been melted down and turned into Corby trouser presses. And the army? Well, they have sent their excuses, saying that they’re a bit busy at the moment.

Geoff Hoon – how did we end up with a defence secretary called Geoff? – says his dramatic cuts will attune our armed forces to the threats of the modern age – and, of course, he has a point. Why spend billions on extravagant homeland security when the countries that are capable of staging an invasion won’t and those that aren’t can’t?

People say we now have a smaller navy than Johnny Frog, but so what? We realised long ago that you don’t have to fight the French for control of Gascony. You just have to find a decent estate agent and buy it.

And while the new socialist government in Spain is jolly angry about the Gibraltar issue, the only armada that it could muster these days has fishing nets.

We know the Germans are capable of atrocities but, honestly, can you see them firing up the Panzers any time soon? It’s the same story with the Dutch, who are too busy buying Cuba to be a threat, and all is quiet on the Falklands front, too.

So all we have to worry about are a few disaffected Algerian youths and, frankly, using a nuclear submarine to deal with an angry teenager in Sidi Bel Abbes looks like overkill.

But we’re looking no further than the end of our noses. Hoon is trimming the armed forces to meet the threats and responsibilities that he can see today, but trouble usually comes from the most unexpected quarters. Who could have guessed in 1918 as we celebrated our victory over the Germans that, just 21 years later, they would be back for more?

Better still, who in 1970 would have bet that the next three countries to face Britain’s military might would be Iceland, Argentina and Iraq? And who could have known, as the 1990s wafted by, that Canada and Spain would be up for a spot of mid-Atlantic gunboat diplomacy?

How can Hoon possibly guess who’s next: Belgium? Sudan looks likely but it could be Cambodia or, take a big gulp, Russia.

It’s all very well saying that the Soviet empire has crumbled but have you not seen Fatal Attraction? You thought Glenn Close was dead, you relaxed and then, whoa, she reared up out of the bath with that big spiky knife.

Hoon seems to think that Russia is safe, though, because he has thrown doubt over hundreds of Eurofighters, believing that this extraordinary plane was designed to meet a threat that no longer exists.

We originally wanted 232 of them but have placed firm orders for only 55. What’s more, he has asked for the planes to be reconfigured as ground-attack mud-movers rather than dogfighters. His reckoning is simple. Algerian youths do not have MiG-29s, nor do the Sudanese Janjaweed militia and nor does Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. What they have are headquarters that need blasting to kingdom come from hundreds of miles away.

Unfortunately, the Eurofighter was not built to do this. It was built for air-to-air action against Ivan. It was designed to win a knife fight in a phone box; and trying to convert it into something else is as silly as buying a washing machine and then using it as a sandwich maker.

I wouldn’t mind, but Hoon has also decided to drop the Jaguar from Britain’s arsenal even though it has just been through a massively expensive programme to fit better radar, better weapons and better display facilities for the pilots.

It’s hard, therefore, to see what the RAF does have left. I read last week that they’ve found an old Mosquito in the Wash but, while there’s some hope that its mighty Merlins can be coaxed back into life, after 60 years in the oggin its balsa wood body has pretty much rotted away.

Of course, these days you could argue that Britain hardly needs any armed forces at all because we’re little more than a bird, riding around on the back of the rhinoceros that is America. We get to feast on the fleas that live in its hide and, in exchange, the mighty US military will stick its big horn into anything perceived as a threat.

That’s fine, but what if the day comes when the rhino is no longer a responsible democracy? What if it one day elects a president with an IQ of 92 who decides to pick a fight with some large and fairly harmless state in the Middle East?

We’d have to trudge along, and it would be so expensive that the RAF would even have to think seriously about selling its trombones.

Sunday 25 July 2004

Whee, there’s a golden apple in my family tree

It was announced last week that the highlight of your viewing pleasure in the autumn will be a series in which 10 people you’ve never met trace their family trees. You’ll learn all about Moira Stuart’s great-great-grandmother and discover that Bill Oddie had a sister he never knew about.

Sounds dull, doesn’t it? It certainly sounded dull when the producers approached me last year, asking if I’d like to be one of the 10.

Initially I said no. Your own family tree is a sort of personalised version of Simon Schama’s History of Britain, and that’s fine. But someone else’s? That would be as meaningless as Simon Schama’s History of Malaysia. And watching it on television? That would be like watching a stranger’s holiday video.

Of course, I can understand why people trace their own ancestors and why the 1901 census website crashed so spectacularly when it went online a couple of years ago.

It’s for the same reason that scientists study black holes. Wanting to know where we came from is what differentiates us from the beasts.

Over the years I’ve occasionally thought about looking into my family’s history because, like everyone, I harboured a secret desire to find it was John of Gaunt, then Warwick the Kingmaker, and then me.

But the reality is that we come from a long line of dullards, so I’ve never bothered. And I really could not see why my family history should form the basis for an hour-long television programme. Unless it was going to be called Revealed: Britain’s Most Boring Man.

Actually, it could have been called Revealed: Britain’s Biggest Inbred because preliminary research showed that my ancestors back to 1780 – and there were about 2,000 of them – had all been born within 12 miles of one another. It’s a wonder I don’t have one eye and a speech defect.

I argued and argued that there was no point going any further with the programme because none of these people had ever done anything remotely interesting; but my mind was changed when the producers revealed that my maternal grandmother was a Kilner. And the Kilners had been nineteenth-century zillionaires. Rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Owners of mills, ships and half of the warehouses that lined the Thames. Wasn’t I just a little bit interested, they asked, to discover what had happened to the money?

Damn right I was, so for the past six months, motivated entirely by greed, I have been charging up and down the M1, unravelling a truly epic tale about the meteoric rise, and calamitous fall, of Britain’s manufacturing industry.

While Bill Oddie found that he had a sister he never knew about, I found I’m related to the actor Keith Barron. So stick that in your binoculars and smoke it, beardie.

What amazed me, as the months flew by, is just how easy it is to unearth history in this country. I had a team of researchers to point me in the right direction, but even this would have been no use in, say, Scandinavia. There, all the ancient records were stored in wooden churches which over the years have burnt down. This means all the records are gone.

Here, I was able to stroll into Huddersfield public library and help myself to the original court records from an environmental lawsuit that had been brought against my family in 1870. Then I drove to Warwick University and read all about the strikes that plagued their mills in 1880. I even found the record of a fishing trip in 1780 on which the founder of the Kilner dynasty discovered the site for his first factory.

You can send off to the Probate Office for copies of your great-great-great-grandfather’s will, and you can find out from the National Archives in Kew where he lived. Go there and, as often as not, the current owners will have photographs of the people you are researching.

I found one of my great-great-grandfather from 1901. He was sitting in a car he had bought, which then would have been like owning a Gulfstream V business jet. So he didn’t give a damn about the environment and he was a petrolhead…

Of course the science of genealogy is fraught with difficulties, chief among which is the internet. Some say it’s an invaluable resource tool, but the only Kilners I could find on Google were members of an American high school baseball team. This didn’t seem relevant.

There are many companies in cyberland who promise to prove that you are the rightful Duke of Devonshire, but when you give them your money all you get back is some half-arsed coat of arms which proves only that you’ve been suckered.

Even in the real world, life for the history sleuth is hard because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century handwriting and spelling were lousy. I spent one afternoon reading what I thought was a history of glassmaking, but it could have been a recipe for baked Alaska.

Also, while record keeping has always been meticulous in Britain, people were not forced to register births until 1875. Worst of all, you can spend thousands of pounds and travel thousands of miles, only to find you are from a long line of farm labourers. Or, horror of horrors, that you are Bill Oddie’s lost sister.

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And Another Thing

And Another Thing: The World According to Clarkson Volume Two