Born To Be Riled

Cable TVs and JCBs

Roads wear out and every so often we must expect the Cavaliers in the outside lane to be replaced by men whose trousers fail to cover all their bottoms. Cones will go up and the traffic will stop.

It may well be irritating to sit there, being gently marinated in your own sweat. But the fact is that roadworks are the inevitable result of a thriving society in which 42 ton trucks thunder up and down the highways and byways, bringing fresh produce to your corner shop. However, there’s a worrying trend. For the last four weeks, London’s South Circular Road has been closed due to an entirely new sort of roadwork. I have been marooned by gridlocked traffic for more than a month. And it’s not because the road had worn out or because some vital underground maintenance needed to be carried out. No, they have dug up the main artery between south-west England and the City because Cableguyz, our local cable TV company, decided to drive one of their JCBs through a water main.

You’ll know when the cable people are about to come round, because you’ll wake up one morning to find the pavement outside your house looks like one of Joseph’s more vivid overcoats. All the electricity, gas and water routes are individually marked out in different coloured chalk so that they know exactly where to dig when the time comes.

When the time does come, your street begins to look like the Somme. If they don’t park a JCB on your car, they’ll encase it with mud. And then, when all their carefully laid chalk marks are covered with more mud, they’ll wait for you to step into the shower before they drill through the water pipe. You get out and are half-way through writing a book on your computer and they’ll cut the power. Then, in the evening, when you have eight people coming for dinner, they’ll sever the gas. Outside, there will be troughs both at the top and bottom of your road, so even if you could get to your car, there’s no way you’ll be able to drive it anywhere.

A day or two after they finish, a man with a bad suit and a cheesy grin will knock on your door asking if you’d like the cable service which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is now available in your street. If this happens, there’s only one course of action – you must punch him straight in the mouth. What you must not do is invite him in and sign all the various forms which spew out of his plastic briefcase.

If you do, more men will come round to drill great big holes in your walls, just so that your television can show exactly what was coming in anyway, via the big council house wok on the roof.

I now have cable television and it is a disaster. It tells me what is happening in Lewisham, and at night it shows me a bunch of overweight German blondes with black pubic hair having simulated sex. There are two 24-hour-a-day news services, both presented by people whose teeth are so white I can’t look at them, and reruns of programmes which weren’t funny 25 years ago – and which are very not funny now.

I can see French game shows and, if I tune into QVC, I can buy a video recorder from Tony Blackburn. Yesterday, a woman spent one hour trying to sell me a necklace, so I tuned to MTV, where Prince was singing a song called ‘My Name Is Prince’. Blimey.

Most of the 36 channels on offer are scrambled, and if I want better porn or big bucks films or, perish the thought, football, I need to dig even deeper into my pockets. And I refuse to let my money be used to dig up your street. It’s not sociable.

To be fair, I do get a great deal of motorsport on my television these days, but car racing without the Murray Walker soundtrack is like holidaying in a caravan – it’s not really a holiday at all. The only advantage Eurosport has is that it covers post-race press conferences, whereas Grandstand switches immediately to cricket as the chequered flag falls.

But is this worth £168 a year, when you get the BBC for half that? Plus, the BBC doesn’t dig up your road, sever all your essential services, cut off your telephone for two days or send cheesy salesmen round wearing awful clothes.

Mystic Clarkson’s hopeless F1 predictions

Before giving the result of a football match which is to be televised later, news readers usually invite us to put our fingers in our ears and hum.

But this morning, as you lay in the bath listening to the radio, I bet it went something like this. ‘In Northern Ireland today, Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, likened the situation to… Hill won… the conflict in Israel…’

Bang. There was no warning and those two little words took all the suspense from the subsequent televisual feast. Plus, with Grand Prix, knowing who won the first race means you have a pretty good idea of who’s going to win the world championship.

Furthermore, when you know who’s won, there is little to be gained from finding out how he did it. He simply drove faster than everyone else.

But if I take my cynical trousers off for a moment, and slip into a nice pair of sensible slacks, in beige, from Marks & Spencer, it’s worth having a little look at what might happen in 1996.

The experts are suggesting that Michael Schumacher stands no chance in his all-new Ferrari. They point to the winter testing programme, saying that the car arrived too late to be shaken down properly, and that first indications suggest its new V10 engine is too gutless and too unreliable.

Well I’ve met enough racing drivers to know they don’t choose to lose. Michael Schumacher could have stayed with Benetton, a team he knows and enjoys, and very probably won the crown for the third year in succession.

No one with a ‘need to win’ like his is going to throw the chance of another trophy away because he feels like a change. He’s gone to Ferrari because he knows something we don’t. I have no idea how the car performed in Australia because I wrote this before the event but, mark my words, Schumacher – a man I hate more than butter beans and Jeffrey Archer – is my tip for 1996.

Damon Hill, we are told, has spent the winter psyching himself up for the battles that lie ahead. He is now a lean, mean fighting machine who will slice through the field in what everyone says is the best car.

Well Damon’s a nice chap and that’s where his problems start. Nice chaps with wives and children do not go wheel to wheel at 160mph in a fight to the death. To do that, you must be a berk, and Damon is not at all berkish, which is why he is destined to be the runner-up. Again.

Some are saying his new team mate, Jacques Villeneuve, is a more realistic bet. He, after all, is the son of possibly the greatest entertainer of them all – Gilles Villeneuve. Yes, well my dad understood how to do his VAT returns but that doesn’t make me a chartered accountant.

Damon’s fans hit back, saying he has trounced all-comers in the American Indycar series. Oh for heaven’s sake, that’s like saying you can be a Red Arrows pilot because you’re good at Monopoly.

We’ve seen these Indycar boys come over to F1 before – Michael Andretti was the last – and they make complete and utter fools of themselves. Look at Nigel Mansell. In America he became used to duelling with fat has-beens like Mario Andretti, so when he came back to F1 last year he looked as stupid as his facial topiary.

But back to F1 and Benetton. My sources suggest they do have some reliability problems and that Berger and Alesi are finding the car’s twitchiness a nightmare. And anyway, the likeable Gerhard Berger seems more interested these days in putting a plastic dog turd under your pillow than actually winning a race.

I hear that McLaren is now back as a force to be reckoned with. David Coulthard has promised not to spin off on the warm-up lap anymore, or run into the pit wall when coming in for tyres, and Mika Hakkinen is fit once more after his awful crash in Adelaide. Indeed, he smashed the lap record while testing at Estoril only last week.

This means he is more deranged than ever. He has an awesome reputation in Grand Prix as a madman and there is now talk that his head injury has made him even nuttier. I like the guy hugely, but don’t think he’ll win.

First, he will continue to crash a lot as he ekes out levels of grip which are not available; and second, while the new Mercedes engine goes like a bomb, it will also go off like one fairly often.

That will be mildly entertaining but it won’t really compensate for the tedium that will result from a new rule in 1996. No car is allowed to qualify unless it can get within 107 per cent of the poleman’s qualifying time. Thus, there will be no Fortis and Minardis cruising round to get in everyone’s way.

Being held up by a dawdling backmarker added some spice to the race, and gave Murray Walker something to shout about. But now it has gone, and next year Murray will go too.

There is some good news though, because when ITV takes over the reins in 1997, the BBC will have to concentrate its resources on the British Touring Car Championship.

This is 26,000 times better than Formula One, with more overtaking in one lap than you get in the whole Grand Prix Championship.

The Touring Car season begins on Easter Monday. You want to know who’ll win? Haven’t a clue. You want to know who’ll crash? Most of them. Can’t wait.

Commercial cobblers

Have you seen that hideous man in the Boots commercial on television? The one who spices up his tedious life by choosing a designer pair of spectacles. So that I can’t poke him in the eye should we ever meet in a lift, or on a railway station. ‘He’ll take care of that. And it’s good to know…’

Oh for God’s sake man, please shut up. We’ve got the message. Boots do designer glasses. If things get so bad that I can’t read a newspaper without being in another room, I’ll feel my way straight down there in my blazer and slacks.

This is the point, surely, of television advertising. In the tiny timeframe available it’s only possible to give the audience one little nugget. The product may be a dodecahedron, but in the ad slots, we only get an atom.

Unless the subject matter is cars, in which case the trick is to hand over absolutely no information whatsoever.

In a Volvo, it is possible to drive across the Corinth canal on railway lines should the more conventional bridge be blocked for some reason.

How much does a T5 cost? How fast does it go? Can you get a chest of drawers in the boot? Dunno, but if anyone ever starts to throw packing cases at me out of a DC3, I’ll wish I had one.

The point, of course, is that the advertising agency is trying to create an image. If you have a Volvo T5, you are the sort of person who is likely to be chasing Dakotas. And while your next-door neighbours are doing the garden, you’re out in the eye of the hurricane.

Buy a T5 and you’ll be at every dinner party in town, being anecdotal and getting laid.

Unless someone turns up with a Peugeot 406. This guy gets raped in a restaurant, just after he’s pulled a little girl from under the wheels of a truck. He plays rugby, is a mercenary and wears a sharp suit.

There’s no such thing as an average person. Absolutely. But there is such a thing as an average car, and the 406 is it. I’d rather have a Mondeo, but in the knicker-elastic snapping stakes, the 406 is streets ahead.

Today, the most important man in the car design process is the advertising copywriter. All cars in the mid-ranges are basically the same, so the only way people can choose is by selecting an image.

The 406 is an endearing and well-priced family saloon with the usual features, the usual economy and the usual performance. There are the usual mistakes too in the shape of poor seats, a lousy gearbox and rather too much noise from the 2.0 litre engine.

I am sure it will be a massive sales success for Peugeot though, and that is entirely down to the admen.

Look at the Vauxhall Vectra. Here is another dull and tedious family saloon car with all the usual features and all the usual mistakes. It is being annihilated in the sales charts. Why? Because the advertisements are crap.

In an attempt to encapsulate the essence of New Age imagery, the film director responsible has obviously studied every special effect in the book and, for the reputed cost of £1 million, has apparently ended up shooting the commercial through marmalade.

To date, Lowe Howard Spinach, the advertising agency responsible, has spent another £6 million to ensure that a whopping 96 per cent of the UK population will see the commercial 17.8 times. Ten per cent will see it 30 to 40 times and 1 per cent will see it over 60 times.

You will be able to recognize this 1 per cent in the streets. They will be gently banging their heads against brick walls.

As far as I’m concerned, we should bring the millennium forward by 45 months so that this stupid commercial can be taken off the air and out of the magazines, and put into the wastepaper basket.

Where it will nestle alongside the tripe without onions that Rover has served up just recently.

‘An Englishman in New York’ cost Rover £1.3 million to make. And the joke is that they don’t even sell their cars in the USA because Americans grew tired of the endless mechanical maladies.

When it was announced that BMW were to take over Rover, two senior executives were apparently heard discussing their futures. One said to the other, ‘Do nothing. That way you can’t be blamed for anything.’

If only he’d listened. But no. He sanctioned that ridiculous advert which served only to line the already bulging pockets of Sting’s accountant.

Where’s the image association? I can’t afford a parking space, so I watch television from inside my car. I’m a berk. Cross the road if you see me coming the other way.

Dear Rover. Large warehouse flats are out. The couple in the Findus advert had one of those back in 1987. Wall Street is in the discount bucket at my video rental shop. It’s 1996, boys, and Peugeot are making mincemeat of you.

Your engineers did a good job with the Rover 200, and your stylists were wide awake too, but your admen must have been having a large and luxurious lunch with plenty of wine that day.

Probably with the guys from Nissan. The Car They Don’t Want You To Drive. Good. I wasn’t going to drive it anyway.

Struck down by a silver bullet in Detroit

Last night, in one of the world’s five great cities, I shared an alligator with Bob Seger. Ever since that long hot summer of 1976, when I ricocheted around Staffordshire desperately trying to shake off those awkward teenage blues, I have worshipped the ground on which old Bob has walked. I know that it is desperately train-spotterish to have heroes, but here we have a man whose lyrics are pure poetry, whose melodies are a match for anything dreamed up by Elgar or Chopin and whose live act is, quite simply, the best in the world.

After a gig at the Hammersmith Odeon in London in 1977, the manager wrote to Melody Maker to say that in all his years he had never seen a better concert. I was there, and it was even better than that. And there I was, 18 years later, in a restaurant in downtown Detroit, sharing a piece of battered alligator with the man himself. My tongue wasn’t just tied – it looked like a corkscrew. I wanted to talk music but Bob’s a chatterbox with the laugh of a cement mixer, and he wanted to talk cars. He was born in Detroit and apart from a brief spell in Los Angeles, which he hated, he’s lived there all his life.

He argued, quite forcefully, that if you’re a Detroiter you are bound to be part man and part V8. The only jobs are in car factories, all your neighbours work there, and the only way to escape the production line is music. It’s no coincidence that Motown began in the Motor City.

The buses move around empty, as does the hopeless monorail. The train station is derelict. Everyone drives a car in Detroit because cars are everyone’s soul. And Bob Seger is no exception.

A point that’s hammered home by the GMC Typhoon in which the great man had arrived. He has a brace of Suzuki motorcycles on which he tears around the States, getting inspiration for songs like ‘Roll Me Away’, but for family trips to Safeway he uses the 285bhp, four-wheel drive truck – you may remember that we took its pick-up sister, the Syclone, to a drag race on Top Gear last year.

Bob’s mate, Dennis Quaid, has one too apparently, which made me itch to ask what Meg Ryan was like – they’re married to one another – but Bob was off again, telling us between mouthfuls of reptile how things used to be in Detroit, how he used to go and race tuned-up musclecars between the lights, how a side exhaust gave an extra 15bhp and how they posted lookouts for the cops.

This was heaven. The man I’ve most wanted to meet for nearly 20 years is a car freak, but the best was still to come. When we’d finished dinner, he sat back and pulled a pack of Marlboro from his pocket. He smokes, too! And so, he added, does Whitney Houston. By this stage, I had regressed to the point where I could easily have been mistaken for a four-year-old boy – I may have even wet myself slightly – but the full flood was saved until later that night.

Do they, I enquired gingerly, still race their cars on the streets. ‘Oh sure,’ came the reply. ‘Most Friday and Saturday nights up on Woodward you can find some races going down.’And this, I’m happy to tell you, was not just some rock-star-close-to-your-roots-SOB. Because they do. Big money changes hands as a hundred or more guys turn up in Chargers and Road Runners and God knows what else. And then, from midnight until dawn, they simply line up at the lights, wait for the green and go. We watched it all, and happily, from your point of view, we filmed it too, for a new series called Motorworld.

We learned, too, that in days gone by the big three American manufacturers used to take their new, hot cars to these races to see just how quick they were. And that, even today, engineers may sneak a new development engine out of the factory and down to Woodward to see if it can cut the mustard.

And all this is set to a backdrop of Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Don Henley, Ted Nugent and Bob Seger – plus the thousand or so other stars that were born and raised in the Motor City.

And we have Longbridge and Take That. Which makes me want to throw up.

You can’t park there – or there

Having tried to go shopping in Oxford last week, I now know why Inspector Morse needed to be a two-hour televisual feast. It took him that long to get across town.

On that inner ring road you get to be very good indeed at crosswords.

On paper, I’m sure the traffic management system looked like a brilliant idea. Remove all the on-street parking. Keep cars out of the town centre. And encourage vibrant bus companies to run shuttle services.

On the town planners’ maps, the pedestrianized streets would have been full of carefree shoppers and dainty trees, but in fact they’re choked with buses from endless different companies who, to stay competitive, run older vehicles that belch out blue smoke.

The end result is a cauldron of chaos and lost opportunities.

My wife was 8.9 months pregnant so, as a bus was out of the question, we were forced to park near Abingdon and walk. The Japanese tourists were hard enough to circumnavigate, but on the High Street there was a wall of buses jammed nose to tail for as far as the eye could see. The air was unbreathable and the distances were simply too great for someone who, in fact, gave birth that afternoon. We trudged back to the car, empty-handed, and headed for home.

On the way, we found a Toys Us on the outskirts, where I burdened my credit card to the tune of £275. That’s £275 which, thanks to the council’s idiotic transport policy, has been kept from the town centre shopkeepers.

I only live 17 miles from Oxford but I will never ever go back. I will never eat in an Oxford restaurant. I will never go to an Oxford pub. I will never buy anything from an Oxford shop.

I will go instead to towns where they are wise enough to welcome me and my car. Banbury. Cheltenham. London even.

This town planning business is becoming a triumph of vegetarianism over common sense.

Council people are obsessed with commuters, people who work in town centre offices, people who create the rush hours. But in their blinkered drive to solve this problem they’re forgetting that towns should be a hub for the outlying villages, centres where people go to shop and eat and be entertained. And these people, whether councils like it or not, need to come by car. You can’t take a fridge-freezer on a bus.

If the car is banned and out-of-town superstores are encouraged, town centres will die. Already, privately run bakers and haberdashers have been replaced with estate agents and building society offices. Oxford is spoiled because the Japanese tourists will keep on coming, but other towns whose spires are not quite so dreamy should be very, very careful.

If you hammer the commuters, shoppers will go elsewhere, and if you keep on hammering, business leaders will pack up and go too. What’s left?

I wouldn’t mind, but the solution is so desperately simple. Instead of removing parking spaces, councils should provide as many as is humanly possible. They should analyse every last yard of yellow line and wonder whether it’s absolutely necessary.

Stick up pay-and-display units. Charge us a pound an hour. It’s OK. We don’t mind.

If you make parking easy, you will automatically reduce congestion because you will not have cars going round and round the block any more. Seriously, I cannot think of a more idiotic use for a car than looking for somewhere to stop it.

But, of course, a town planner who admits this is talking himself out of a job, so over the coming years we’re going to be treated to a series of schemes which are, quite simply, bonkers.

Last week, a bunch of European ministers met to discuss the issue and heard that in Turin there is now an advanced booking service for parking spots, to prevent motorists from driving into the city on the off chance of finding a space.

Yes, but when I need some cigarettes, I want them now and not after Mrs Miggins has finished buying her cat food.

In the Netherlands, the city of Groningen is divided into four quadrants. Traffic can whiz round the ring road and enter one sector, but if you then want to go to another sector you must get back on the ring road again.

Why? I lay awake all last night trying to figure that one out and I can’t think of a single advantage.

In Zurich, sophisticated bus priority signals keep cars sitting at junctions for hours.

This is galactically stupid. A fat Swiss banker is not going to leave his Mercedes 600S at home and take the bus. He is just going to set off from home a little earlier to compensate, and then he’s going to sit in the jam with that huge, 6.0 litre V12 chewing up the world’s resources like Pac-Man.

And there’s the rub. In Britain, according to the RAC, 80 per cent of all journeys are dependent on the car. It doesn’t matter how much the government taxes motorists or how miserable life is made for them by councils, there is no alternative.

Yes, cry the dissenters, but what about the 20 per cent of journeys where there is an option. When I go into my local town I could easily walk, or use a bicycle.

But here’s the thing. I never ever will.

Sermon on Sunday drivers

There’s a bar in Austin, Texas where the locals gather on a Thursday to dance the night away… country style.

Strangely, even though some of the chaps are the size of a double garage and their womenfolk are even larger, it’s a graceful sight to behold.

And so, during the week, are Britain’s motorways.

Stand on a service station footbridge and you are treated to what can only be described as automotive ballet.

Get yourself on to the M40 on a Tuesday and you will see a display of driving that would leave Damon Hill breathless. Sure, he can control a car at 180mph, but unlike the reps in their Mondeos and Vectras he doesn’t have a phone in one hand and a sausage roll in the other.

Formula One chiefs are concerned about the speed differential between the top cars and the Fortis, but guys, guys, guys. Mondeo Man is out there every day on the motorway, doing 90, juggling with juggernauts that can barely crack 50. And he doesn’t whinge.

He can’t because he has no grounds. British truckers are in a class of their own. Think. When was the last time one of these seven-axled giants caused you even so much as a moment of concern on the motorway network? It never happens.

They get on with their lives, getting lettuces to the shops before brownness sets in, and you get on with yours.

Of course, you’re good too. I drove up from London to Oxford last Tuesday and I have never seen such fine driving. These guys were harassed and bored but they made deft, precise and well-signalled moves. They kept up when it was right, hung back when it was necessary and, as a result, never gave any cause for concern.

Like anything, practice makes perfect. The more you drive, the better you’ll get. If you’re out there every day, be it in a truck or a Mondeo, clocking up 50,000 or more miles in a year, you will be damned good.

You’ll learn to recognize the danger signals. That’s a Datsun. He is likely to do the unexpected. That’s a T5 doing 50. It must be Plod. It’s starting to rain. I’m easing off now.

I use Britain’s motorway network a great deal during the week and it is like being part of a huge, perfectly synchronized, well-oiled dance routine. Everything is fluid. Everything is inch perfect.

Unfortunately, I also use Britain’s motorway network on a Sunday and it is an experience that takes me to the outer edges of fear and trepidation. Two miles and my colly is well and truly wobbled.

Last week, I found a Vauxhall Nova with a lone woman on board trundling down the outside lane of a dual carriageway at 15mph. What in God’s name was she doing in possession of a driving licence? Enid Nun 004. Licence to kill… and be killed.

Now I don’t believe there are many people left who, just for the hell of it, go out for a drive on a Sunday. And even if there are, I doubt they’d chance their arm on a motorway.

But there are undoubtedly a great many people who, after they’ve done the Mail on Sunday, head off to see Auntie Flo, via the garden centre. These people probably never drive during the week, and in a whole year probably clock up fewer than 2000 miles.

They’ve never been trained to drive on a motorway and they have had no practice. Allowing them out there is like letting me take the role of principal violinist the next time the London Symphony Orchestra is in town. I’d be crap and they’d sack me.

These people get into the lane they’ll want 20 miles early and will do everything in their mealy-mouthed little minds to ensure you and I do likewise. If they can get their wheezing asthmatic old crocks up to 70, they’ll sit in the outside lane making sure no one gets past. It’s against the law, you know.

They clutter up the petrol stations with their awful cardigans, putting unleaded in their diesels and Wendy’s Panties on their hideous, hateful children.

And then they crawl down the slip road at 4mph, joining the motorway when they’re up to 6.

Suddenly, the professional, talented, regular driver finds his space is full of no-hopers. The trucks may not be out to play on a Sunday but you still have an odd and dangerous cocktail.

On a Tuesday, 99 per cent of all the cars out there will do exactly what you expect them to do. But on a Sunday, half will do exactly the reverse.

I have discussed various solutions with all sorts of clever people but there don’t seem to be any that are practical. You can’t include motorways in the driving test because the good people of Norfolk and Cornwall would be stuck.

You can’t post lookouts at the top of every slip road to pull over people they suspect may be a nuisance when they get down there.

And we can’t encourage people in bad cardigans to drive around with a huge sign in their rear windows saying ‘I’m really no good at this.’

Or can we?

A riveting book about GM’s quality pussy

Quentin Willson has read a great many books and is prone to inserting large and complicated pieces of Shakespeare into normal conversation. My wife’s bedside book table, on the other hand, is filled entirely with those orange-spined Penguin Classics, all of which are about women in beekeeper hats who walk around fields full of poppies, doing nothing. These make for good bed-time reading, only on the basis that you need to go to sleep. ‘A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight and the vast, unenclozzzzzzz…’

With Quentin’s books I’d have to spend the whole time buried in a dictionary, finding out what all the words meant. The guy reads Chaucer for fun, for Chrissakes! All my books have either a submarine or a jet fighter on the front and they’re full of goodies who seem like they’re going to lose but who, on the last page, do in fact win. I like plots, and Hardy wouldn’t recognize a plot if one jumped out of a hedge and ate his foot.

A book is no good, as far as I’m concerned, unless I just cannot put it down. I missed a plane once – on purpose – because I was still sitting at home finishing Red Storm Rising. If Princess Diana had walked into my bedroom naked as a jaybird just as I was three-quarters of the way through The Devil’s Advocate, I wouldn’t have looked up long enough even to tell her to get lost. My wife, however, has just taken two years – yes, years – to read Wild Swans, which is about a woman in China who has a daughter who goes to live somewhere else.

But I have just read a book which has no plot, no F-16 on the cover, no goodies, no baddies, and I absolutely loved it. Which is a bit of a worry. It’s called Rivethead and it’s by an American person called Ben Hamper who, in the review section, describes it as ‘an enormously enjoyable read. I laughed. I cried. I learned. I got naked and performed cartwheels for my repulsed neighbours’. My kinda guy.

Basically, Rivethead is the story of one man; a man who gets up every morning and goes to work at the General Motors truck and bus plant in Flint, Michigan. Really, it should have an orange spine, but mercifully it doesn’t. Because if it did, I never would have heard about GM’s answer to the Japanese threat. You see, when American cars were being sold with tuna sandwiches under the driver’s seat and Coke bottles rattling in the doors, GM decided it must impress on its workforce the need for better standards. The workforce, largely, was a doped-up bunch of ne’er-do-wells who thought only of their weekly pay cheques and how much beer they could cram in at lunch time, which is why GM’s decision to have a man dress up as a cat and prowl the aisles, spurring people on, is a trifle odd. That they called him Howie Makem is stranger still.

Equally peculiar was the later scheme, which involved the erection of several sizeable electronic notice boards all over the plant. These kept the people informed of sales, production figures and such, but could also be used for messages. One day it would say, ‘Quality is the backbone of good workmanship’ and on another, ‘Safety is safe’, but Hamper saves his vitriol for the day when he looked up from underneath a suburban pick-up to see the sign: ‘Squeezing rivets is fun!’ He goes on to wonder whether, in the local sewage works, there are boards telling the guys that ‘Shovelling turds is fun’. And asks why, if the ‘demented pimps’ who had dreamed up this message thought riveting was so much fun, they weren’t all down on the line every lunch time, having the time of their lives.

Hamper also lays into the likes of Springsteen and John Cougar Mellonfarm, asking what they know about the daily grind. He says they should be forced to write about things they understand, like cocaine orgies, beluga caviar and tax shelters. I made an exception and read this book because I am interested in the car industry, but I can recommend it to you even if you have never been in a car plant, and don’t ever intend to.

I tried to get Quentin to read it, but as the first word is ‘Dead’ and not ‘Sibilance’, he said he couldn’t be bothered… and asked how Janet and John were these days.

Aston Martin V8 – rocket-powered rhino

From time to time I peer through Esquire and GQ to see what I should be wearing, but it’s hopeless. You can’t go shopping in a red plastic vest if you have a belly like a Space Hopper.

And I’m sorry, I just don’t like those jackets which have lapels like a butterfly’s wings. Nor will I ever do my top button up unless I’m wearing a tie.

Last weekend a footballer called Paul Gascoigne was in the News of the World wearing what can only be described as a dogtooth dog’s dinner. It was a suit, in that the top and bottom matched, but the jacket was down to his knees.

I have never seen such a ludicrous garment, and can only assume his mother had knitted it.

But then again, this Gascoigne person probably looks at my Lee Cooper jeans and Toggi shirts and thinks he’s been through a time warp. Away man, it’s 1976 all over again.

And that’s the point. Each to his own. Those of us with a penchant for chunky gold jewellery will go for a Toyota Supra. Paul Gascoigne would be bewitched by the Honda NSX whereas Clement Freud, obviously, has a Lexus. I have no idea what David Attenborough drives, but would hope it’s a Jaguar. A Bentley, these days, is a bit too Paul Daniels. Know what I mean?

So what about me? Well from a fashion point of view, it would have to be the new Aston Martin V8 coupé.

This is a brute of a car. It weighs 2.2 tons. It’s 17 feet long. It’s wider than an ocean liner and it has a monstrous, hand-built V8 which can propel it to 60mph in less than six seconds. It’s a rocket-propelled rhino.

Basically, what we have here is a Vantage without the artificial lungs. Aston has removed the superchargers but kept the high-performance pistons, camshafts and valves to create a replacement for the unloved Virage.

In terms of styling, it does without the Vantage’s hugely flared wheel arches and massive tyres, but the rear end is identical. To follow this car is to be in the presence of evil.

When you see it in your rear-view mirror, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Get out of its way or be prepared to look like a waxwork dummy at gas mark six as each of its eight lights begins to flash.

If you still choose to block its path, you should know that its driver could swat you out of his way and not even know. A big Aston could head butt a tower block and the tower block would lose.

Some say it’s nothing more than a bespoke Corvette, a big American-style tank with leather innards, and I say yes to all that. I can’t think of anything better than a V8-powered gentleman’s club.

I can, however, think of a great many cars which are nicer to drive. A Ferrari 355 will run rings round it and a Mercedes is not only more nimble but undoubtedly more reliable too. Round a race track, I doubt the big Brit could hang onto a Golf VR6.

But for all the reasons already outlined, the Golf had better hope the Aston didn’t catch up on the straight bits. Which it would.

None of this matters though. The point is that when I looked at my reflection in a shop window, I felt good. It is my automotive Lee Cooper and Toggi combo. The interior of the V8 may be surprisingly cramped but, despite that, this is not a car for small people. You’d look stupid driving this unless you were at least 6ft 3in and 14 stone.

Other people who would look stupid in it include Liberal Democrats, Freemasons, folk singers, nancy-boy footballers, vicars, scoutmasters, people who like DIY or Michael Bolton, women, environmentalists and anyone who has ever been to a poetry reading.

You can’t even think about driving this car if you like salad.

Socialists are right out. So are people who use the words ‘toilet’, ‘nourishing’ or ‘settee’. If you read the Daily Mail, talk about tasty square meals and country fayre then, along with ramblers and people with limp wrists, lisps, or sticky out ears, you must buy a Datsun instead.

Are you a new man? Do you like to help around the house? Are you proficient at changing nappies and running up a set of curtains? Have you ever read a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel? Well go and buy a Honda then, because the Aston will break your kneecaps.

The V8 is for those of us who like our beer brown and our fags to be high on tar and low on lentils.

What I love about this car is that while it does nothing to hide its immense power, it comes trimmed in the finest leather. The carpets are so expensive you wouldn’t fit them in your house, and the wood is lustrous enough to cause a mass fainting on The Antiques Roadshow.

You mustn’t be fooled though. If you slide a Phil Collins CD into its stereo, the airbag will spring forth to punch you in the face.

It likes Elgar and its favourite rock track is Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’, though Led Zep’s ‘Black Dog’ will do. If you treat it like a hard-drinking, hard-playing soul mate, it will reward you with a spine-tingling range of growls, and the power to knock down copper beeches as you fly by. The only trouble is that it costs £140,000 which is an awful lot of money. I have a suggestion though. To raise the funds, rob a bank. It would like that.

Caravans – A few liberal thoughts

After much careful thought in the bath this morning, I have decided that we don’t really need an elected parliament.

These 650 guys are concerned not with what’s good for the country or the environment, but with power. Every decision they make is based on a quest for votes.

I remain absolutely convinced that the Labour Party’s apparent shift to the right has nothing whatsoever to do with the elected members’ beliefs. They’re just saying what they think the middle classes want them to say.

And the Conservatives are no better. Here are a bunch of people who’d done all that was necessary by 1989. They could have just sat back and let things tick over, but no: half of them now want to privatize my shoes.

We should replace them all with a bloke who has a bit of common sense. Every Thursday, he would pop down to Westminster so that civil servants could ask for advice.

Should the Spanish be allowed to fish in our waters? No.

Should Peter Blake be allowed to keep his ninety grand? No.

Should we ban scoutmasters from keeping guns? Yes.

Should we shoot people who let their dogs crap in the street? Yes.

It’s all so simple. We don’t need 650 people making noises like farmyard animals five days a week, when most of the burning issues could be settled over a cup of coffee by a bloke in a cardigan.

Certainly, if we were to introduce this new system, and I really think it’s one of my better ideas, the roads would become free from caravans.

Should this question ever be brought before the Commons, the member for Devon North would argue forcefully that caravans form part of his constituency’s life blood, and that if they were to be banned so soon after all the cows were burned there’d be anarchy and looting on the streets of Minehead. And then someone else would rise to their feet and point out that some of his voters work in a caravan factory and that they’d be out of work, claiming benefit.

And that would be it. Caravans would stay.

Whereas under my system the bloke in a cardy would weigh up the issues over a slurp of Kenco and say, ‘No, they must go.’

In twelve years of writing about motoring I have only touched on this issue once because it did not seem important. I lived in London, and on the rare days when I sallied forth to the Provinces I was on a motorway.

But now I live in the Cotswolds and it’s unbelievable. I’ve just taken delivery of a new supercharged Jaguar, and so far I haven’t had it past 20 because round every corner the road is blocked by a Sprite Alpine.

I was stuck behind one called Sprint the other day. How can you call a caravan a ‘Sprint’?

And when they’re parked in a field they hardly blend into the environment. As Mark Wallington says in his magnificent book, 500 Mile Walkies, ‘Why can’t they be painted black and white, and given udders?’

As a child I went on a few caravan holidays and I remember wondering what we were doing there. I mean, we lived in a large farmhouse in the countryside and now, here we were decamped in a small box in the countryside – feet away from a fat family whose daughter, Janet, had woeful diarrhoea.

This, however, is not the issue. If people want to spend their precious vacation in a metal container, in a field full of other metal containers, eating shabby food and defecating in a bucket, fine.

The problem with caravans is that you can’t simply beam them to a site, Star Trek style. You must hook them up to the back of your wheezing, asthmatic car and, with absolutely no training whatsoever, tow the damn thing into some of Britain’s greener parts… like here.

People. As you look in your rear-view mirror and see a trail of cars stretching back to the horizon, do you not feel even the smallest pang of guilt? Do you not feel that it might be a good idea to pull over and let everyone by once in a while?

Do you not vow that next year you will undertake the journey at night, when you would be less of a bother?

Or do you secretly relish having the power of being part of a tiny, tiny minority who, for a few hours a year, can control something huge like traffic speed. Did you dream as a child of being a councillor? Or joining the parks police? Go on, admit it, you did.

You are a mealy-mouthed little twerp with no regard for others. In the last few weeks you’ve made me late for every single appointment, and you don’t give a damn.

If caravans can’t be outlawed, and without my new system of government they never will be, there should at least be some new rules.

Anyone wishing to tow one should be forced to take a complicated driving test. They cannot be towed by any car with less than 300 ft/lbs of torque. They can only be taken on the roads between 2 and 6 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. And they should incur road tax of £200 a foot.

Blind leading the blind: Clarkson feels the heat in Madras

This is what it said on the first page of my joining pack for the world’s weirdest motorsport event. ‘Rallying has never featured very significantly in the lives of blind people.’ No, and neither will it. Men can’t have babies. Fish can’t design submarines. BBC producers can’t make up their minds. And blind people don’t make very good rally drivers. However, they can navigate. More than that, in the last six years there have been 25 rallies in India where the co-drivers have had more in common with a bat than Tony Mason.

Now, to be perfectly honest, I’m not talking about the sort of rally where the car’s wheels only ever touch the ground in service halts. No, this sort is best described as a treasure hunt. Even so, disappointingly, there are rules, the worst of which is that all cars must be fitted with seatbelts. This meant that when I took part there were only 66 competitors, which isn’t good enough in a country with nine million blind people. But hey, I’m used to rules, and the best way round them is to indulge in a bit of Boss Hoggery. I figured that if I nicked the notes from the navigator, he’d never know and we’d win. But the organizers had that one covered; all the directions were in Braille, a language which means as much to me as Swahili or German. Like everyone else, we had to use the force. But unlike everyone else, we went wrong at the very first turn.

Let me explain. The Braille was in English and this was not a language that featured on my co-driver’s CV. So he spelled out each instruction, letter by agonizingly slow letter. Thus we left the base and headed off towards the centre of Madras in our Maruti Gypsy, with Mr Padmanabhan muttering t-y-r-d-i-n-a-k-l-m-t-e-y-r-l-e-f-f. Which, if you have a pen and a piece of paper, and a fortnight, you could work out meant turn left in a kilometre. Trouble was it took me nearly five miles to figure it out, by which time we were completely and hopelessly lost. Not only do I not speak Braille but my Tamil’s not that good either. And there I was, with a blind man, in a city that I’ve never been to before (and never want to go to again, incidentally), on the same land mass, worryingly, as Portugal and Yemen. Things could go wrong here.

We’d be drifting down a road and, all of a sudden, Mr Padmanabhan would look up from his notes to ask: ‘What is l-k-j-r-i-j-l-s-s-s-a-e-q-j-t?’ And to be honest, there isn’t really much of an answer.

But somehow, and I guess quite by chance, we did happen upon a checkpoint. Relieved, I wound down the window and asked just how far behind we were. But here’s a funny thing; they said we were the first to come through, which was strange as we’d been the last to leave. However, it all became crystal clear when they told us that we were at checkpoint six and that we had somehow missed one to five. I knew damn well how we’d missed them. We’d been in Tibet. Nevertheless, we ploughed on until suddenly I was told to stop. ‘We are now at checkpoint seven,’ Mr Padmanabhan said. But we weren’t. We were in the middle of an industrial estate, and it’s hard to point out to a blind man that he’s gone wrong. Again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but we’re not.’ ‘Yes we are,’ he insisted. And to avoid hurting his feelings, I had to leap out of the car to get my card stamped by a non-existent official at a checkpoint which wasn’t there. ‘Told you so,’ he said when I got back in the car.

Back at base, the event over, we learned that we’d been scrubbed from the running order altogether, on the basis that we’d only found one of the checkpoints. They all figured we’d given up and gone home. We didn’t even get any lunch, which was no bad thing because it seemed to consist of stillborn blackbirds which had been trodden on then coated with curry powder, bay leaves and ginger.

Oh how we all laughed as the navigators tried to pick bits of beak out of their teeth. And oh how they all laughed as they reminisced about how hopeless all their drivers were. We must see this sport in Britain. All you Round Table, Rotarian types, stop pushing beds up the high street, jack in the three-legged pub crawls and give the RNIB a call. And then call me to say where and when.

Norfolk’s finest can’t hit the high notes

In my early twenties I filled my days by spending money. Then, in the evening I went out and spent even more, often in a casino.

Inevitably, my bank manager wrote regularly. Now he could have called me all the names under the sun, he could have used language blue enough to make Quentin Tarantino blush. He could have made threats of violence and it would have had no effect.

Instead, he used the strongest word in the English language: ‘disappointed’.

‘I am disappointed to note…’ he would begin and my Adam’s apple would swell to three times its normal size. By saying he was disappointed, he was suggesting that he had had high hopes but that I, personally, had let him down.

Since those days I’ve been very careful about using the ‘D’ word. When reviewing cars, I’ve said that they were foul, or dull, or that they couldn’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s backside. But I have never used the word ‘disappointing’. Until now.

The Lotus Esprit V8 is disappointing. The cruellest six words you will ever read. I had high hopes of this car, and it let me down.

On paper, the car looked good. Here was a machine with OZ racing wheels and Brembo racing brakes. Here was a car with the latest generation of ABS and, to top it all, a twin-turbo V8 with 350 horsepower. Here, in short, was my kinda car.

When it arrived there was nothing to suggest anything was amiss. The Esprit may have been around since the Bay City Rollers, but with its curvier corners and its eyebrow wheel-arch extensions, it looked really rather good sitting in my yard.

I wasn’t entirely convinced by the leather and wood interior, which seemed out of place in a mid-engined supercar, but that’s like saying you won’t eat pizza because you don’t like olives.

I admit it: for a few brief moments, I actually thought about buying one.

Then I went for a drive and I was reminded of Top Gun, a film that, like the Esprit, promised so much. I’d seen the trailers and noted that there was unprecedented aerial footage of state-of-the-art American fighter planes.

I’d read reports which spoke of unparalleled access given to the producers by the Pentagon. And there was Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise to boot.

It all opened well too, with those slow-mo shots on board the aircraft carrier. There was purple haze and yes, from seat H16, a few excitable squeals. This was going to be two hours of kapow, whiz bang action.

But, in fact, it was two hours of sheer, unadulterated drivel during which time grown men punched one another on the shoulder instead of shaking hands, and talked nonsense. Furthermore, they were all called improbable names like Ice Man and Maverick and Goose.

When Maverick refused to engage the enemy because he’d killed Goose while trying to show off to Ice Man, I was nearly sick. And when he returned to the ship, and was given a hero’s welcome, I vowed that if I ever met Tom Cruise I’d hit him.

Then the little pipsqueak went and married Nicole Kidman, making the need to wallop him even more urgent.

I digress. The point is that the Lotus was as much of a disappointment as that film.

The reason why its 3.5 litre, blown engine only develops 350 horsepower is because the Renault gearbox would blow up if it were asked to deal with any more.

As it is, it feels like the lever is set in concrete. To get from third to second requires a two-week course on anabolic steroids. If you want reverse, you need the negotiating skills of an anti-terrorist policeman.

And when you get the beast rolling, another problem rears its ugly head: vibration.

The new engine has the same basic design as a Formula One unit, where refinement is not really an issue. In a road car though, the constant buzziness does get to be a bit of a bore.

When you take the motor past 5000rpm, the gear lever vibrates so much it feels like you’ve just grabbed a high-voltage cable. It’s a brave man who reaches for it, especially when he knows he can’t move it anyway.

Then there’s the noise. I was expecting one of two things: a V8 bellow or a crackly strum. In fact, you get almost nothing to write home about, a result, say Lotus, of forthcoming noise regulations.

Well listen here guys. When I hum gently, it’s an awful noise that makes the children cry. When Pavarotti hums quietly, people will pay £200 to listen. You can make a car sound nice and quiet.

You can see now, I’m sure, why the Esprit was such a terrible letdown. But unlike the Maserati Quattroporte I drove recently, there are at least some up sides.

First, it handles even better than any Esprit before, which is to say it handles absolutely beautifully. There is real class in the chassis here.

And second, it is truly fast, not daft like the F50, but quicker than a Ferrari 355, and that’s saying something. At less than £60,000, it is cheaper too.

But the Esprit has always been good value, fast and blessed with great, supercar handling. Its real problems in the past have been a poor gear change and not much aural excitement.

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

Car interiors in desperate need of some Handy Andy work

Televisions are grotesquely ugly but I have never even thought, for one minute, of hiding ours away in a reproduction Georgian cabinet.

We have no Dralon either, and button-backed leather furniture is a bit thin on the ground too.

Should you drop round at sixish, in need of a drink, it’s in a cupboard in the kitchen. I’m sorry, but we don’t have a globe which opens to reveal the bottles inside.

So why, then, do I rave about the interior of a Rolls-Royce? Only a footballer would ever dream of fitting inch-thick, royal blue shag pile in his drawing room so why is it acceptable in a car?

And look at the wood on that dashboard. Perfect. Unblemished. Polished like a guardsman’s shoes. Now look at the wood on your refectory table. Knackered. Riddled with sixteenth-century woodworm. Ill-fitting pieces. And worth ten grand of anybody’s money.

Then there’s the Roller’s seats. There’s no doubt that the contrasting piping lifts the magnolia trim, but would you buy a chair for your hall which had cream hide and pale blue piping?

Things get even worse down the automotive scale too because once you’re in Roverland the wood becomes plastic. You wouldn’t dream of having anything made out of plastic fake wood in your house and yet you’ll pay more for it in your car.

It’s madness and I don’t have an answer. I’m as guilty as the next man. I love the innards of my Jag but there isn’t a single square inch of it that would be allowed over the threshold of my house.

And as cars go, the Jaguar is good; tasteful, refined and, rarely for a car these days, fitted with a radio that anyone over 50 could operate.

But there are plenty of cars out there which not only have foul trim but which have been laid out by idiots as well.

Take Ford. It’s all very well designing a swooping dashboard which rises and falls like the distant hills in a child’s painting, but what if you want to put a can of Coke down somewhere? You wouldn’t accept curvy worksurfaces in your kitchen, would you? All your Brussels sprouts would roll on to the floor.

And sticking with the kitchen theme, there’s the Ford Galaxy people carrier. Whoever designed that upholstery had a cauliflower fixation.

It is a Dralon type fabric, textured like the walls in an Indian restaurant, but instead of fleur-de-lis sculptures, which might have been acceptable, they’ve ended up with something that looks like a fuzzy vegetable basket.

Renault, though, still holds the title of ‘worst ever fabric design’. Check out the seats on a Clio Williams to see what I mean. You could invite an entire rugby team to be sick on them and the owner would never know. Apart from the smell, perhaps.

One of the latest trends is to litter the interior with leather that’s not only grey – unacceptable on shoes and worse in a car – but perfect: smooth like Formica, and odourless too. Leather is a natural thing, so kindly leave the blemishes in place. We like them.

We do not, however, like your passenger-side airbags. These prevent owners from fitting baby seats in the front, and reduce the size of the glove box to a point where its description becomes literal. A glove box. Not a gloves box, you’ll note. And what, pray, is the point of an airbag for the passenger? A driver needs one so that in a frontal impact his head will not hit the steering wheel, but what is the passenger going to hit? Nothing. Two airbags are as unnecessary as two slippers by Douglas Bader’s fire.

Car interior designers would be better employed finding space for little cubbyholes where we may keep our telephones, cassettes and fags. Thank you for the fuzzy felt coin holders, but as most parking meters take pound coins these days it means leaving a fiver’s-worth of metal in plain view all the time. Which means you need a new side window every day.

Thank you too for making sun roofs such a common fitment these days. They don’t allow any breeze to get into the car, but if you open them at anything above 3mph your eardrums implode.

And as a by-product of their uselessness, sun roofs also rob up to two inches of headroom, which renders the car useless to anyone who’s registered at the doctors as a human being.

I’m 6ft 5in, so you might say I must pay the price for blocking your view in a cinema, but my wife is a 5ft 1in midget who has never blocked anyone’s view of anything. Yet despite her public-spiritedness, there are some cars – yes you, TVR – where she can’t reach the pedals.

Surely to God if a car firm can use platinum to extract poisonous gases from the exhaust, they can design an interior which can accommodate all forms of human life, and not just those that are average.

Yes, we’ve recently had the Fiat Coupé, which represented a significant step in the right direction but I really do think it’s time for car interiors to be radically altered. Why can’t we have raffia seats and straw matting on the floor? Maybe a real fire or a wood-burning stove instead of a heater. Why not?

Land Rover employed Terence Conran to design the interior of the Discovery, which showed spirit, but I was crestfallen at the result. I’d expected something really radical with new fabrics, new shapes, new ideas.

Instead, I got some map holders above the sun visors and a zip-up centre console bag. Wow.

New MG is a maestro

At a major league party, there are certain rules you won’t find in any book of etiquette. And the most important one is this: when called upon to move into the dining room for dinner, never arrive at the table first because you will have no control over who sits next to you. And don’t get in there last either, because when there’s only one space left you can be assured that the people on either side of it will be ghastly.

Unless you pay attention to these simple rules you could find yourself sandwiched between a footballer and a vegetarian. Or a homosexual and a lay preacher. Or a caravanner and a socialist. There are any number of shiversome combinations, but the absolute worst is finding yourself between two members of the MG Owners Club.

For a kick-off they will have beards, bits of which will fall in your soup. And because they like fresh air, they are likely to be vegetarians. This means you’ll be told, at length, about the plight of dewy-eyed veal calves and baby foxes with pointy ears and snuggly tails… and chicken feathers stuck to their rabid fangs. By the time their nut cutlet is served, the subject will have turned to their horrid cars.

Now you and I know the old MG was a gutless bucket of rust which leaked every time it rained, broke down every time it was cold and overheated every time the sun put his hat on. It turned with the agility of a charging rhino, stopped with the panache of a supertanker and drank leaded fuel as though it had a Chevy V8 under the bonnet. However, our bearded friends don’t see it quite like this. These people actually enjoy the frequent breakdowns because it gives them an excuse to get under the damn thing.

And then, in the pub that night, they can talk liberally about exactly what went wrong and precisely how they fixed it. To you and I a track rod end is very probably the dullest thing in the world but to MG Man it is a steel deity, an almost religious icon, an automotive Fabergé egg. MG Man can talk about a track rod end for two hours without repetition or hesitation. And the only reason he stops after two hours is because you’ve shot him. MG fanatics are the people that give all car enthusiasts a bad name. These days you only need mention that you like cars – meaning that you’d buy a Ferrari if you won the lottery – and the person you’re talking to will run away screaming. They’ll recall a conversation they once had about track rod ends and they will assume that you’re about to do the same, that you are a member of CAMRA and that you only drink beer if it has some mud in it.

For this reason, I am concerned about the new MG. If you can be labelled an anorak for simply liking cars, can you begin to imagine how you will be spurned if you walk into the pub brandishing an MG key ring?

Other people at the bar will conclude that you have a 1970s Midget in the car park and that you’re about to regale them with the interesting tale of how you adjusted the timing that morning. They will all feign illness or urgent appointments so they can get out.

Except, of course, for the landlord, who’ll be stuck. His only escape is suicide. He may even impale himself on his hand-pump levers and die horribly without even realizing that, in fact, you have a new MG. I don’t doubt that this is a wonderful car, what with its clever engine, cleverly arranged between the axles. It is lovely to look at too, and those white dials make what’s an ordinary interior look a bit special. I feel sure that the hood won’t leak and that, mechanically, the MGF will be as bulletproof as your fridge. And though no journalist has driven it yet – contrary to what many would have you believe – I don’t doubt that it will handle tidily and be fast. And it’s British – which automatically makes it better than the Barchetta and the Speeder and the MX-5 and the SLK and the Z3 and all the other roadsters that are due to be launched in the coming months.

The trouble is, though, that if you do buy one of the new foreign convertibles you will be perceived as someone whose feet are loose and whose fancy is free. But if you go, instead, for anything with an MG badge on the bonnet, people will think you are a git.

Darth Blair against the rebel forces

Anyone who wants to be a politician is very obviously unfit to actually be one.

The would-be politician is weak and craves power so that he may impose his will on the people who bullied him at school.

Of course, when he gets elected, he finds it doesn’t really work like that. Whether his boss is Mr Major or the Joker, he is told to sit at the back and shut up.

‘Your views are irrelevant. You do as we say. You agree with us publicly and we shall be elected. We shall have the power.’

He no more wants a single European currency than he wants his children to catch typhoid, but he knows that if he votes with his heart, he’ll go home that night with a cattle prod up his bottom.

At the next election there will be 650 Labour candidates, and if the Joker is to be believed, every single one of them agrees with his new transport policy. Of course they agree – it’s hard not to when the alternative is having a strimmer put down your underpants.

Well frankly, I’d rather feed my toes to a lawnmower than live in a country where the roads are run by Mr Blair who, it seems, wants to stabilize traffic levels by 2010 and reduce them to 1990s levels by 2020.

There would be taxes on the car parks at out-of-town superstores and anyone who takes their car to work would be forced to pay £8 per week, in tax, for the privilege of parking it on company premises. The extra cash will pay for the extra bureaucrats.

There’d be road tolls and local authorities would be given the power to introduce charges to manage traffic in their area. Well that’s brilliant. In my experience, most local authorities can’t even decide whether to put the lavatory seat up or leave it down.

Got a company car? Well you’re in it right up to your neck because the car police will be round to empty your pockets on the hour, every hour.

Oh and you can forget about harrying the fleet manager for a better set of wheels next time round because he’ll be under orders to buy cleaner, greener cars that run on manure or potato peelings or some such nonsense.

I’m damn sure there are a great many prospective Labour candidates who would agree that this is idealistic claptrap, but such is their fear they won’t dare speak out. Remember, the woman who thought it up was sacked for leaving an interview too early.

I loathe out-of-town superstores too, but they do make life easy for shoppers, and they keep traffic out of ancient town centres, so surely they’re a good thing?

Statistics show that a family’s weekly bag of groceries weighs a whopping 66 lb, so I wonder how Mr Blair thinks a woman with two children and a pushchair can get a load like that home on one of his infernal buses.

I guess the solution is to follow Harriet Harman’s example and cut the weight down – perhaps by sending your children away to a private school.

So, does anyone know where the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders is secreted? Because the very industry it is supposed to represent is under attack.

If someone threatened to burn my house down I would do everything in my power to stop them, but when Labour says it wants to damage the car industry the SMMT doesn’t even chirp.

It doesn’t even climb on a soapbox when stupid environmentalists go on the news to spout a lot of nonsense about pollution. The report tells us that cars are killing everyone, a man with a beard backs this up and then it’s back to the studio with Michael Cheerful Buerk.

Where’s the bloke from the SMMT, pointing out that cars do less damage to the environment these days than lawnmowers, or that houses produce more greenhouse gases than anything Ford has ever built? He’s in an office somewhere having a meeting. Or he’s taking a sympathetic MP out for lunch to indulge in a spot of gentle and pointless lobbying.

Meanwhile, every motorist in the land is on a massive environmental guilt trip, soaking up Labour’s new plans and accepting them as inevitable. If you commit murder, you pay the price.

The defence is left to a tiny little organization called the Association of British Drivers, who put out a scrappy little newsletter every so often. However, scrappy though it may be, it’s the best read since Alistair MacLean finished HMS Ulysses.

In the most recent issue it tells of an accident that was caused by a new speed camera, and of a speed trap near Dover which netted £7500 in fines in one hour.

They talk about how a Honda Accord costs £14,000 in the UK and less than £10,000 in America, and on the letters page a Mr Bishop argues that breaking the speed limit can be either a heinous crime or of no consequence at all, depending on conditions.

Labour’s plans are torn apart and the chaps mock Railtrack for urging its employees to use their cars.

And just in case you were thinking it’s a right-wing propaganda machine, I should tell you the government fares no better. Believe the ABD and you’d believe that the Tories’ plans for toll roads represent a bigger threat to the future of mankind than Aids.

They don’t of course. The biggest threat facing mankind right now is Tony Blair and his new Transport Division which, this week, is headed up by a man from Oxford East.

Riviera riff-raff

We’ve all been there. The stewardesses have taken your coat and you’re thumbing through the in-flight magazine to see which Godawful John Grisham film you’ll be watching this time round.

The bloke sitting next to you has already started to pick bits of fluff from his navel, and you’ve already spotted the Disque Bleu in his shirt pocket, but that’s OK.

What is definitely not OK is the family that’s just coming down the aisle. The family with the baby. The baby with the lungs like Zeppelins.

You don’t hear the pilot’s welcoming speech, and you would only have understood the safety briefing if they’d done it in semaphore.

As you pass through 15,000 feet and the screaming reaches a fever pitch, you feel like organizing a collection among fellow passengers, so that the child can be upgraded to Business Class.

You regularly trip over no-smoking flights these days, but I have never heard of an airline that runs a guaranteed baby-free service.

So I have taken the bull by the horns and vowed that I will never take any child of mine on a long-haul jet until he or she is 32.

Which is why I’ve just come back from a holiday in France – a pretty country spoiled, like Wales, by the people who live there.

With the money we’d saved by not going to the arse end of Chile, we decided that we’d gorge ourselves stupid, only eating in the very best restaurants.

So, for ten days, we became veritable Michael Winners, lurching from rum ba ba to sauce Siam in an orgy of four-figure bills and two-rosette excellence.

I know this is a motoring column but in case you’re interested, the Château Eze does the best view, and l’Oasis in La Napoule does the most wondrous food.

However, our enjoyment most nights was tempered by the maître d’s.

I learned, over time, that a jacket and tie teamed with chinos improved the welcome somewhat; in that they stopped looking at me like I’d just urinated all over their trousers. But we were still made to feel about as welcome as plague-carrying rats.

Then I worked it out. It’s the damn car. It’s the bloody diesel-powered Renault Espace that Hertz had rented to us – after we’d queued for nearly an hour.

These maître d’ chappies figure we’ve been saving for this meal for our whole lives and that we’re going to choose the cheapest things on the menu, drink tap water and not tip.

I began to form a hitherto unseen hatred for the van with electric windows. Not only could it not climb the hill to our villa, but using it to trumpet our arrival at a flash restaurant was like being introduced at a party by the master of ceremonies as Mr Syphilis Trousers.

I was still considering this as we arrived at the Domain de Saint Martin near Vence. The electric gates swung open and we parked in a car park far away… which meant no one knew whether we’d come by Bentley or Raleigh Wayfarer.

The maître d’, maybe coincidentally but I doubt it, was brilliant, effusive, obsequious, welcoming and efficient. He was the best maître d’ in the world.

Flushed with success, we tried the same thing again the next night at the Eden Roc on Cap d’Antibes. We parked outside and went down the drive on foot.

Well the welcome we got couldn’t have been more cold if it had been in the deep freeze for a week. The last time I was greeted like that, it was by my headmaster just before he expelled me. We were shown to the worst table, and sneered at.

I wouldn’t mind, but most of the customers in these places – not the Eden Roc specifically – look like Mafia hitmen and murderers. I know exactly where the Brinks Matt gold is. All of it is round one bloke’s wrist at l’Oasis.

But these overtanned, fat boys with trophy wives and big suits turn up in Ferraris and Dodge Vipers.

The car is the first thing the maître d’ sees, and way before he has a chance to clock the contents he must already have decided what table to give them, what face to pull as he opens the door and how big the tip will be.

A Ferrari gets you the sea view. A diesel-powered Renault Espace puts you in the broom cupboard with a lettuce leaf and a glass of Blue Nun.

And this is all very disappointing because it turns my view of France upside down. I’ve always figured that the French had cars all sussed.

Even in the leafier bits of Paris, people who could well afford a ship are happy to run around town in a battered Peugeot diesel, while a lowly secretary might have a BMW. A car, out there, I always figured, was not a measure of your wealth, only of your interest in motoring.

But the South is very definitely different. It’s the cousin that’s done rather well for itself. It’s the family rock star, the orphan Annie that became a Hollywood celebrity. It’s part of France in the same way that Elton is part of the Dwight dynasty.

For all that though, I simply love it down there. The food, the weather, the light and my starter at l’Oasis make it all worthwhile.

But to enjoy those restaurants properly, you need a real car. I saw on the way home that Europcar can do a BMW Z3 for 700 francs a day.

With a car like that you could go to the Eden Roc, park on the maître d’s foot, and still get a kir royale on the house.

Objectivity is a fine thing unless the objective is to be first

No journalist has driven the new MGF yet, but already I know that it throttle steers very neatly, that it grips like a limpet and that there’s a whiff of initial understeer on turn-in.

Wow, sounds like quite a car. And there’s more. The MGF combines the best handling features of the Mazda MX-5 and the Toyota MR2, gripping well but offering adjustability at the same time. And it rides far better than its two main rivals.

I know this because I read it in Autocar magazine, who, in turn, were enlightened by that most balanced and unbiased of sources: Rover.

‘How do we know all this?’ they ask, in print. ‘Because Rover’s engineers told us and, in our experience, engineers never lie.’ Dammit. All those years I’ve spent on frozen hillsides trying to work out why the car behaves the way it does have been wasted.

Instead of agonizing over a verdict, I could have simply telephoned the manufacturer and asked for its impressions. Lada, undoubtedly, would have told me that the Samara was a modern, front-wheel drive equivalent to the Escort, and that it offers unrivalled value for money. Volkswagen would have claimed that their new diesel Golf was fast, and instead of calling the new Scorpio ugly, I’d have said it was bold and imaginative. The Saab convertible was conceived as such from the very early stages of the model’s design and suffers no scuttle shake whatsoever. And the best car in the world is a Ferrari, an Aston Martin, a Mercedes, a Bentley, a BMW, a Lexus, a Cadillac and a Jaguar.

Engineers never lie, my arse. They’re hardly likely to spend the best part of eight years working on a new car and then present it to the press as ‘a bit of a duffer’. When I was at the launch of the Escort a few years ago, I never heard anyone on the podium say that it ‘handles like a dog’. Not once did the people at McLaren say the F1 was ‘a bit pricey’.

The worrying thing is that Autocar may be on to something here. I mean, every popular newspaper in the world relies on gossip, most of which is untrue. Divorces and affairs can happen entirely in the imagination of the writer, in the same way that handling problems and steering stodginess can happen entirely in the imagination of a car journalist.

Look, if you are a gossip writer on the Sun and you see Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman having a row over lunch in San Lorenzo, you’ve got a story – even if they were merely arguing over what colour to paint the west wing’s sitting room.

Same goes with cars. You feel a bit of a wobble over a particularly nasty pothole and as far as you’re concerned, the car is crap. I’ve said it before; car testing is an inexact science, same as writing gossip stories.

But then along came Hello! and all of a sudden celebs were queuing up to open their hearts. Here, at last, was an outlet where they knew they could put their side of the story without fear of contradiction. As a result, Hello! gets into everyone’s lovely homes while the rest of the paparazzi are camped outside looking at the action through a Nikon F2. Hello! buys up all those photographs of Diana with her breasts out to ensure the world never sees them – the bastards – but you can be damn sure that Diana now owes them one. When she’s ready to talk about the new man in her life, Hello! will get the story first.

And it’s basically the same with cars. Every magazine fights to be first with the road test of a new car – and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Autocar beats everyone to it with the new MGF. The trouble is, how do we know that what they’ll write about it isn’t total bollocks? We don’t.

Take Paula Yates. I suspect she’s a silly two-timing bird who ditched her husband and children for a fling with a hirsute Australian who looks like he needs a good bath. This is a line most newspapers are free to take. But in Hello! we get her side of the story, which isn’t quite the same. And nor, frankly, do I find it rings very true. Bob Geldof deserves better.

And you, the reader, deserve better than what Autocar has in store. They may get the stories first, but if you want opinions rather than public relations puff, stick with the Beeb.

Kids in cars

So what’s the daftest lyric you ever heard? I always go for Mink Deville’s immortal ‘He caught a plane and he got on it.’

Or what about McCartney’s magnificent ‘In this ever changing world in which we live in’?

Ten years ago, some would undoubtedly have cited Mungo Jerry’s ‘Have a drink. Have a drive. Go out and see what you can find.’

But not any more. The war has been won. Nobody in their right mind even thinks about drinking and driving any more.

Oh sure, we need the occasional prod and at Christmas time victims are wheeled out to get the message across a bit more. The police step up their vigilance but the hit rate is miserable.

They pull over anything that moves, and in some regions only 8 per cent of drivers are found to be watching the world go by through haze-coloured spectacles.

Britain’s drivers are about the safest in the world. Well done. Let’s hop on a bus, go down the pub and get rat-faced.

But no. The thought police decided that a new menace must be dreamed up. No one is drinking and driving any more so let’s point our big guns at… eenie, meenie, minie, mo… people who drive around talking into mobile phones.

Unfortunately, Nokia and Ericsson and all the other mobile phone manufacturers were too quick. Before the government could get into its stride on this one, the boffins came up with the new digital phone… which doesn’t work.

Today, my airbag is better at communicating messages than my phone so I simply talk into that. This may look funny but it’s not against the law.

So the eenie meenie game began all over again and settled on people with bad tempers. Yes, you. You keep losing your rag while behind the wheel and you are therefore suffering from road rage.

Then it was E and then it was joy-riders and then it was youngsters who’d just passed their test and were driving at 80 on motorways. Then it was old people whose reaction times were measured in light years.

In recent years, the thought police have had a go at just about everyone. No one is safe. But, astonishingly, they’ve missed what is easily the biggest menace the roads have ever seen. It tends to affect sensible, mature people in their early thirties. Law-abiding citizens who read the Daily Mail and vote Conservative.

Never mind drink driving. Never mind E. Never mind mobile phones or speeding or road rage. I’m talking about… children.

According to the RAC, 91 per cent of parents admit that they have been distracted by children while driving, and 7 per cent have crashed as result.

They list the top five distractions as children crying, kicking the back of the seat, fighting, throwing toys and pulling hair.

And they give us case studies to contemplate. Rebecca, aged three, threw a toy which jammed under the brake pedal. Jake, aged five, kept climbing into the front seat and changing gear. Antonia, aged four, had a mint imperial stuck up her nose. Let me add some of my own observations. Emily, my two-year-old, can produce such vigorous and sustained bouts of vomiting that the entire car is full of sick in three minutes.

Finlo, who’s my boy child, can cry so loudly that the front windscreen regularly shatters. Only last week he perforated his nanny’s ear-drum.

I freely admit that his 400-decibel chants drive me to distraction. In Antibes the other day I leapt from the car while it was still moving and buried my head in the sea, telling my wife that I wouldn’t come out again until he’d shut up.

Let me tell you this. In a country with no drink driving laws, I have driven a car while so drunk I couldn’t talk without dribbling. I have driven while bursting for a pee. I have done 90 while attempting to talk on the phone. And after 40 aborted attempts to get through, I suffered from road rage so badly that I pulled the steering wheel out of the dash.

But on each occasion I was a lily-white angel compared to how I am when driving around with the children.

I know of one woman who turned round to slap one of her kids while driving down a motorway in a Range Rover. She veered off course and, in trying to straighten up again, rolled the car into a bridge parapet.

So what can be done? It’s no good giving them toys because in a car the most harmless Fisher Price drawing kit becomes more deadly than a thermonuclear missile.

It’s no good giving them nothing either, because they then scream with boredom, and don’t try taping up their mouths with duct tape. This doesn’t work. I’ve tried it.

Noddy cassettes shut them up for a bit, but how many times can you hear that infernal signature tune before you start to foam at the mouth? Frankly, I’d rather let them scream. I’d rather listen to Radio One even.

It’s taken a couple of years to work it out but my wife and I now use heroin. Before we go anywhere we slip a little smack into their peanut butter sandwiches and they’re good as gold.

You might think us a little irresponsible but the goverment doesn’t. Drug smugglers now get let out of prison after just one year, leaving more cells free for people who drive without due care and attention.

Brummie cuisine is not very good

This week, I shall herald the arrival of the British Motor Show with an even bigger sigh than usual.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love the whole glitzy shebang. I love the old cars. I love the new cars. I love the dancing girls. I love the kids running round collecting brochures. It’s a billion-dollar party thrown by a multi-billion-dollar industry.

And this year, the girls should be even prettier and the metal even more gleamy because 1996 is the hundredth year of car production in Britain.

But unfortunately, on a global scale, Britain’s annual showcase is as highly regarded as an Albuquerque tractor pull.

Today, the major shows are Frankfurt, Tokyo and Geneva. That’s where the important cars are launched. That’s where you bump into the mandarins and the moguls. That’s where you’ll find on-stand special effects which make EuroDisney look like a garden shed.

At this point, I guess you’re sighing too. Yes, yes, yes, you’ll be saying, but that’s the price we must pay for our industrial unrest in the Seventies. If you want a strong motor show, you must have a strong motor industry.

To which I say pah, and then pah again. Geneva doesn’t have any motor industry at all, and Detroit – Motown itself – has a motor show which feels like it was put together by Blue Peter.

No, if you want to know why the British Motor Show is so widely ignored by the world’s motor industry, you need look no further than the Michelin Guide.

Turn to the section marked ‘Birmingham’ – whoa there, you nearly missed it. And there’s the problem: not a single restaurant you would actually choose to eat in unless your children’s lives were at stake.

So, what about hotels? Well there’s the Swallow which I can’t afford, the Hyatt which is always full and a wide selection where the rooms are too hot and three photocopier salesmen are having a fight in the bar at 2 a.m.

So, what if Hank J. Dieselburger Jnr, main board director of General Motors fancies a little late-night action? Again, a great many pubs which can do you a fist in the a face or a head in the basket, but that’s about it.

Here’s another odd thing. There are no signposts around Birmingham to the ‘City Centre’. There are signs to Kidderminster and Wolverhampton and Stratford. There are signs directing you away from the place, but nothing at all enticing you in.

Which is OK because if you do end up parking where the centre should be, your car, absolutely definitely, will be stolen.

And it will be recovered several weeks later in one of the suburbs which sit like a ring of scum round the empty centre – Birmingham is a rugby team’s bath after they’ve let the water out.

And as a little drop of icing on the cake, the National Exhibition Centre, home to the motor show, isn’t even in Birmingham. It’s merely near it.

The motor show should be held in London, which fizzes and effervesces with life and action. There are thousands of restaurants and hotels, there are nightclubs to cater for every musical taste, and for Kim Ho Lam, guards that change, big red buses and the Queen.

In the eyes of Johnny Foreigner, Britain is London, so why then, you may be wondering, does the motor show fare no better when it’s held at Earls Court?

Easy. Earls Court is a relic from a time when cars were black and people walked quickly.

Sure, they’ve added an extension but it’s still the wrong shape and getting exhibits in and out is harder than getting directory enquiries to give you Salman Rushdie’s phone number.

Visitor parking? Er, have you tried Slough?

Plus, you try working in there. Human beings need oxygen to survive but this is the one gas denied to people in Earls Court. If Spock beamed in to the motor show with one of those Star Trek atmosphere testers, he’d dismiss the place as uninhabitable.

Last year, my co-presenter Quentin Willson claimed he’d caught consumption, and I saw viruses flying around brandishing knives and forks.

Scientists are said to be baffled as to where ebola lives between strikes. Well hey guys, have a look in Earls Court. After a day in there your skin dries up and you go home all covered in sores and boils.

What the British Motor Show desperately needs if it’s to get back on the world stage is a new venue. I hear they’re building a million-square-foot monster in the Docklands and that sounds just fine.

Groovy reflective architecture, waterfront bistros, a nearby airport for Ford’s fleet of company jets and a £7 cab ride from Soho’s fleshpots. The Koreans will be over in a flash.

Sadly, this project hasn’t even started yet, which means that the show, even in such an important year for the British motor industry, is at the NEC.

And as a result, the show-stopper is expected to be the Morris Minor.

Ford has developed a new car which runs on water, does 2000mph, costs £4 and can generate 4 g in a 90 degree bend, but they’ve chosen to exhibit it instead at the Lubbock show.

And Lubbock, in case you’re interested, is a small Texan town about 45 miles from the middle of nowhere.

Last bus to Clarksonville

When I was at the launch of the Escort a few years ago, I never heard anyone on the podium say that it ‘handles like a dog’.

History has produced many fools. Alfred may have been great but he couldn’t even cook. Dan Quayle couldn’t spell ‘potato’. Colin Welland thought Chariots of Fire heralded the triumphant return of British movie-making. But if you want to see contemporary idiocy on a scale so vast it beggars belief, I urge you to sit in on a Hammersmith and Fulham Highway Committee meeting. Forrest Gump meets Worzel Gummidge isn’t in it.

Being Labour-controlled, you expect the town hall to be full of dimwits, but these guys set new standards. Ask them to spell ‘potato’ and it would come out as ‘grpfing’. Let them loose on the roads and all hell breaks loose.

A few months ago they decided it would be a good idea to put a bus lane up the Fulham Palace Road which, as anyone who has ever been to London will tell you, is the busiest road in the world. You will never see an M-reg car down there because nothing has moved since last August.

Anyone with even half a brain could stand on the Hammersmith flyover, gawping at the resultant carnage, and announce that the scheme had been a failure. But not the chaps and chapesses on the council. Oh no. They’ve gone bus lane crazy. Temporary bus lanes have become full-time bus lanes. Cycle ways are bus lanes. Buses coming out of the station have right of way and their own set of lights. In Fulham the bus is king and the bus driver is Craig Breedlove.

Richard Noble should not worry about American competition for his new land speed record attempt. Nor should he concern himself with technical difficulties. His biggest threat is that, every morning, buses in Fulham are reaching speeds of 900mph.

So why don’t I get on board? Well, a) they don’t run a service from Battersea to Edgbaston, and b) I don’t want to. However, the council is winning. On roads where there are no buses they’ve built speed bumps. Who cares that they wreck cars, or that they add to pollution as people speed up between them, or that they are a problem for ambulance and fire crews?

Fulham has become so hard for car drivers – and I have to drive through it to get out of town – that I am now seriously considering leaving London for good. Yes, we’ve started taking Country Life and making ‘ooh’ noises at just what you can get for your money in the shire counties. We even had a practice run last weekend, up in Scotland. We drove from the hotel for five miles before we saw another car. It was heaven. I could have done 100mph. If I’d had a bus, I could have done 900.

For sure, the fields were all green, which is a hateful colour, and there were trees everywhere, rustling and snuffling in the breeze. Then there was the mud, which is what makes the countryside such a foul place. There is no mud in Jermyn Street.

Country pubs are pretty nasty too, full of people in chunky jumpers drinking beer with beetles in it. And I can’t think of anything worse than having to get on with my neighbours, or having to talk to the postman in the morning. But the simple fact of the matter is this: you can at least move around, which you cannot do here in London, where my postman could be a green monster from the planet Zarg for all I know.

You can also park. In Fulham residents spend eight hours a day at work, eight hours asleep and four hours looking for somewhere to park. The remaining four hours are spent popping up the Fulham Palace Road for a packet of fags. In the country, people have drives so they can park right outside their front door every night. You can even have a garage without having to sell your children into slavery.

The only way someone can raise enough money to have a garage in London is by becoming a rent boy. Or a stockbroker. Neither of which appeals terribly. Eventually, of course, everyone will see things the same way and the gradual shift to the south-east will be reversed. Everyone will move back from whence they came and the idiots from Hammersmith and Fulham Council will look down from the top floor of their red-flagged town hall and marvel at what they have done. The buses will have the roads to themselves. But there will be nobody on board.

Land of the Brave, Home of the Dim

My seat was in its upright position, the table tray was folded away and all my electronic games were off.

But despite this, the stewardess was coming down the aisle like an Exocet missile. ‘Sir,’ she smiled, ‘you’re going to need to uncross your legs for take off. It’s a federal requirement.’

This was a new one on me but comparatively speaking it’s a pinprick. Earlier in the day, I heard a security guard in a Las Vegas mall tell a group of weary shoppers to put their shoes back on.

Our cameraman had been dumbfounded in an Albuquerque supermarket when, after asking for a pack of Marlboro, he’d been told, ‘This is a family-oriented store sir. We’re not allowed to sell you cigarettes.’

Shall I go on? OK, how about this. A sticker affixed to the side of a huge rubbish skip warned passers-by not to clamber on the refuse collecting device. That bit was odd enough but underneath it said, and I quote, that ‘It is unlawful to tamper with or remove this notice.’

This means that someone has called a meeting and voted to make it illegal to remove warning notices in the state of Texas. Illegal, you’ll note. Not inadvisable. Il-bloody-legal.

But the best I’ve saved till last. My waitress in Reno said she could not serve me with a second beer until I had finished the first.

Naturally, I asked, despairingly why this should be so and was told, simply, ‘It’s a rule.’

And that’s it. No argument. No truck. You can’t line your beers up. You can’t cross your legs on a plane. You can’t tamper with notices. You can’t buy cigarettes in supermarkets.

And the decent Christian folk of middle America just seem to accept it. Now, these people may be fat and their hairstyles need to be seen to be believed but they did invent the space shuttle so they’re not stupid.

And yet they’re quite happy to put their shoes on when asked to do so by someone in a uniform. Why?

When the French government tried to increase tolls on lorry drivers, they blockaded the autoroutes.

When the Maggon came up with the poll tax, people set fire to Trafalgar Square.

When the Italians are asked to pay VAT they lose all their books, remind the bloke from the tax office that he’s ‘family’ and pop into town for a coffee.

I suspect that inner-city America has become so out of control that the only way you can be marked out as a law-abiding citizen is to obey every rule that comes along no matter how daft or ill conceived.

And if you want the most ill-conceived law of the lot, you need look no further than the new speed limits. This is not some trifling rule about crossing your legs. This is life and death.

An entire generation of Americans has grown up knowing that it’s entirely possible to die while driving and coast to a halt before you hit anything.

Roads that are wider than they are long were subject to a blanket 55mph speed limit, meaning that you could get in the back for a snooze or perform complex operations on your passenger’s adenoids without fear of crashing.

Your car could weave from lane to lane but this was no big deal because the guy behind had all the time in the world to get out his car’s manual, see where the cruise control off button was and take avoiding action.

But now, most states post a 75mph speed limit, meaning that it all happens so much faster.

The drivers still allow their hearts to beat once every fifteen minutes or so, but they don’t realize they’re teetering on the edge of a holocaust.

And the cars don’t help either. In recent years, American automotive design has leapt to a standard only seen before in Italy – the latest Chrysler line-up is staggeringly good-looking – but dynamically, they’re still in the dark ages.

On my recent trip I rented a number of different cars, which ranged from foul to the Buick Le Sabre.

This compact sedan is 22 feet long and 14 feet wide and I don’t doubt was easily capable of handling 55mph, while returning four or even five miles to the gallon.

But now, the dowager is expected to heave itself along at 75 and it just can’t cope. The suspension is way, way softer than marshmallow which means there is no jarring but even the smallest pebble causes the car to rock sickeningly for miles afterwards.

Ask it to handle a corner – even a gentle one on an interstate – and it just won’t. I’d have more luck getting my two-year-old daughter to speak Greek. Turn the wheel and it adopts a crazy angle but doesn’t really change direction.

After a mile or so, the tyres start to squeal but it’s still going in a straight line. No kidding, I’ve driven hover-crafts which respond more quickly to messages from the helm. This is a hateful car.

The only time I felt even remotely safe in it was outside Arizona’s schools, where lollipop ladies erect temporary width restrictions and impose a 15mph speed limit.

As I gratefully slammed on the anchors and wound the car down to this more sedate pace, I even had time to think that here, at last, was a law that made sense.

I also thought that if you’re going to America soon, do not allow them to rent you a Buick Le Sabre, and that Montana should be avoided at all costs.

You see, in Montana, they’ve done away with the speed limits altogether.

Only tyrants build good cars

Last week, Michael Aspel jumped out of a cupboard, holding a big red book, and announced that I was to be the subject of This Is Your Life.

My mind was in a whirl. I have no friends who work in television, so they can’t wheel any celebrities through the sliding doors. I have no war medals. I do nothing for charity. I’m only 36. I haven’t done anything yet.

I was completely at a loss for words which, as it turned out, was good practice because three days later Suzuki delivered one of their new X-90s to my house.

Ordinarily, the road test starts to form immediately in my mind. With normal cars, I’m starting to think about who might be tempted by such a machine and what sort of things would interest them. Should I major on performance, or style, or economy or roominess?

And that’s what bothered me with the Suzuki. Exactly who would be tempted by this weird little car? Me? No. My mother? Absolutely not. The woman in Safeway? Michael Jackson? The Ayatollah? My bank manager?

It’s taken a couple of days to work out that in fact no one will be tempted by it for the simple reason that it’s the most stupid-looking piece of machinery of all time.

It is almost as though the designer dreamed up the front to a point half-way down the roof and, to save time, did exactly the same with the back. Were it not for the lights, you could drive this car forwards or backwards and no one would be any the wiser.

In essence, it’s a two-seat, targa-roofed version of the rather nice Suzuki Vitara. They cost about the same, have the same 1600cc engine and are aimed, I guess, at the same sort of people – hairdressers.

But no hair cuttist I know would dream of buying the X-90. And that brings me back full circle.

Now, Suzuki is a large and clever organization so how on earth did this absurd little car ever slip through the net? Simple. They had a meeting.

If I ran a company, meetings would be banned. Meetings are for people who are under-employed. Have a meeting and you’ll end up with the Child Support Agency. Or an ECU. Or Birmingham city centre.

I went to a meeting for the first time in years last week, and was staggered at how little we achieved in five hours.

This was entirely my fault, but then there’s always someone like me in a meeting who has an opinion on everything and wishes to share it.

Trouble is, there’s always someone with an equally large mouth who disagrees, and that’s it. Everyone else is left to do their fingernails while two people call each other names and consider throwing water at one another.

When the bar opened we called a halt, decided we were doing a good job, and no conclusions were needed. Had we been running Suzuki, the X-90 project would have sailed through unscathed.

I remember in my early days as a reporter for the Rotherham Advertiser, covering the local parish council meetings. One, in particular, spent 45 minutes wondering whether they should have a glass or a plastic water jug, and ended up deciding to have both.

In the early days of motoring, car firms were run by one man with a vision. Colin Chapman founded Lotus so he could make small, light, agile cars. Sir William Lyons knew exactly what a Jaguar should be. Ferdinand Porsche was a proponent of air-cooled engines slung out at the back. Henry Ford wanted to pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap.

Now look at Japan. With the exception of Honda, all oriental car firms were founded by large corporations whose sole aim is to keep the shareholders happy. Hundreds – if not thousands – of people are involved in every decision, and the management lives in constant fear for its jobs.

Had Suzuki been a dictatorship, the X-90 would never have happened. Mr Big Cheese would have strolled through his designers’ office, seen the drawings, and fired everyone responsible.

But in committee culture, it’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes. No one dares speak out and the project gains so much momentum it becomes unstoppable.

And if even if someone like me does stick his hand up, the people responsible will fight back. Result: deadlock.

Europe’s car firms are in the same boat today. All the founding figures are dead and committees have taken over. That’s how we got the Scorpio and the Vectra.

Single ruling figures are out of the equation. No one is prepared to trust gut feeling and instinct any more, because in the meeting the guys from the market research department demonstrated that the Scorpio, or the X-90 or whatever, had clinicked well.

Then the designer stands up and explains how the push-me-pull-you look will be in for 1998. Or that the wide-mouth frog face is a happening thing in 1996.

Rubbish. The motor show finishes today and few would disagree that the most exciting car there was TVR’s new 7 litre V12 coupé.

It looks and goes like it does because TVR is run by one man who dreams things up on the back of a fag packet and sets fire to anyone who thinks he’s wrong.

Democracy. Pah. Never trust anything invented by the Greeks.

The principality of toilets

It seems to me that the closed circuit cameras which are sprouting out of every town centre vantage-point these days are pretty much useless.

Everyone I’ve ever seen on a still from a security camera looks like Cyrano de Bergerac. And he always appears to be standing at the counter in a bank, brandishing a banana. This, I’m fairly sure, is not a crime. Either that or the supposed criminal has had the foresight to wear a parka with a hood – so we can only see his preposterous nose. And the fruit.

I mean, if you were out robbing, you would be fairly sure that some kind of video recording was being made, so you’d wear a crash helmet or a trilby or anything which would thwart subsequent police enquiries. And if they did come round to your house with some difficult questions, you’d only need say that you were elsewhere at the time but you had seen Gerard Depardieu in town that afternoon, looking a bit shifty. Sure, there are some cameras, way up high, overlooking the most unlikely spots, but the footage from one of these was played the other day on one of the countless new crime programmes and the thieves looked like small mice with enormous conks.

It was all very dramatic, as they ram-raided their way out of a car park with policemen trying to kick in the windows, but the viewer hadn’t a hope of identifying the baddies. And that makes the cameras pointless.

Now I’m not one of these weird beard lefties who thinks that Sony is a Luciferian code for some kind of Orwellian police state. If you’re just walking along, picking your nose a bit and scratching your backside, who cares if it’s all caught on Beta?

The cameras are only there to nail people from the sewers – thieves, murderers and blackguards. But they won’t work unless we take a leaf out of Monaco’s book.

This tiny principality, just two miles long by as little as 300 yards wide, is watched over by 160 security cameras, not counting the privately run video monitors in car parks and entrance halls.

Coming out of my hotel every morning, there were two which could watch me all the way to the door of the car park and, once inside, there were cameras on every floor and in each of the three lifts. As A.A. Gill wrote in Tatler last month, you don’t need a holiday camera in Monte Carlo; just stop off at the border on your way out and ask for edited highlights of your visit.

But onanists beware! If they go to the trouble of fitting cameras in car park lifts, you can be sure your nocturnal habits are being monitored too.

Now, there is no crime in Monaco. Half the residents may have made their millions through some sort of rule-bending exercise, but there is no petty theft. One lady regularly walks home alone from the casino after nightfall wearing jewellery worth $3 million. And she’s never been touched. People say that this is because of the cameras, but that’s nonsense. And neither is it because there’s one policeman for every 40 residents. Sure, with hardly any crime to solve, they have nothing to do all day except enforce a dress code. Try walking through Monaco with the hood on your parka pulled up and see how far you get. I’ll give you a tenner for every yard you manage before Clouseau interferes. These guys won’t even let you shuffle along head down, with your collar turned up. They’re like stage managers, making sure you look good for the cameras. And if you refuse to look up, they will escort you politely back to France, where you can convalesce.

Every night, we watched them salute drivers of Porsches and Ferraris and hassle anyone in a dodgy-looking van. Hitchhiking is banned. If you don’t look right you don’t get in.

And now we’re getting nearer the real reason why there is no crime in Monaco – no riff-raff. Before you go and live there, you have to produce a letter from your bank explaining that you have enough money to live on for the rest of your life. And, let’s face it, people with £20 million in the bank are not big on mugging. Couple that to the police with their anti-shabby laws and the cameras, and then you get a crime-free state. Lovely. And so simple.

Except for one small thing. Monaco is a lavatory and if I could find the chain… I’d pull it.

Clarkson the rentboy finally picks up a Ferrari

Two years ago, I drove a car which made my life hell. The Ferrari 355.

Oh I’d driven all sorts of supercars before, including a great many Ferraris, and they’d been fun. But I hadn’t actually considered buying one.

Frankly, even if I could have afforded such a thing, I’d have needed another car to handle the days when it was wet, or when I had to carry more than one person, or when I put my back out. On top of all this, super-cars tend to be as brittle and as vulnerable as baubles on a Christmas tree.

All these things apply, of course, to the 355 but it didn’t seem to matter. I wanted one. I needed one. It was like meeting the girl who one day will be your wife. Friends may point out that she has spots and a temper and costs a fortune to run but you don’t worry about practicality when you’re in love. And I was completely smitten with the 355.

The first step was to leave London. People think I gave up 15 years of fun and games in the capital for the sake of the children but that’s not entirely accurate. I did it because I needed a garage.

But the new house meant that my wife had to ricochet between Peter Jones and Osborne & Little, spending what little money we had on curtains and fridge-freezers.

Every day I’d come home and there’d be another cardboard box in the yard, another poignant reminder that the day when I could buy a Ferrari had just been pushed back.

I became desperate. I took my box full of foreign banknotes to the bank and raised £47. I looked down the back of the sofa, and went through old coat pockets. I considered holding up a sub post office. I even started doing advertisements on local radio.

But it wasn’t until my wife found me watching a documentary on rent boys in King’s Cross that she ordered me to buy the damn car and cheer up.

Fifty-seven minutes later, I was in a Ferrari dealership matching carpets up to bits of leather and wondering how it would all look when teamed with scarlet paint.

It seems just about all first-time Ferrari buyers choose a red car, even though you can have blue, green, black or yellow. The choice of interior specification is even more limited though.

I’d always wanted cream sports seats, which add £2000 to the price and, despite the salesman’s misgivings, that’s what we settled on, along with carpets the colour of claret.

And so, after an hour of toing and froing, the order form was brought out and I found myself on my knees, putting the shakiest signature of all time to the document.

And yes, I really was on my knees because there is no chair on the customer’s side of a Ferrari salesman’s desk.

Rowan Atkinson complained bitterly about being asked to wait until his cheque cleared when he bought a 456 recently but I had no worries as I handed over the £5000 deposit. Now there’d be no going back.

And there wasn’t, because in the garage right now is a bright red Ferrari 355 GTS – that’s the one with the lift-out roof panel. The GTB is a hardtop, and the Spyder is a full convertible for hairdressers from Altrincham.

The first month with my 355 was, to be honest, disappointing. First, it had come without a radio. Second, it felt strange to be driving my own car after years in press demonstrators.

And third, it needed to be run in, which meant keeping the revs below 4000. That’s OK on a motorway, where in sixth gear you can do 90, but on country lanes overtaking was nigh on impossible.

The 355’s five-valve-per-cylinder V8 revs so quickly that in a full noise take-off I needed to change gear every half a second.

After I’d covered a thousand miles, the car was taken back to the dealership for its free first service and for a radio to be fitted. It’s an Alpine by the way, and it’s £800 worth of junk.

Today, it’s heading towards the 2000 mile mark, which is a bit of a worry because I’ve told the insurers I’ll only do 5000 a year. In exchange, they only charge me £850.

That’s cheap, but the fuel bills are not – it does 18mpg – and nor will future services be all that Asdaish. In order to change the cam belts, which must be done regularly, they have to take the engine out of the car.

Nevertheless, to date it hasn’t put a foot wrong. Oh, the carbon fibre seats squeak against the back of the leather-lined cockpit and the roof panel creaks and groans, but when the revs build up past 6000, you really don’t care.

The point is that this supposedly brittle piece of millimetre-perfect engineering appears to have been hewn from a solid piece of granite.

And best of all, I still love it. I’ve learnt to keep the suspension in its comfort setting, knowing that it automatically switches to sports mode if I start to go quickly.

And I now know how easy it is to graze the undersides on speed bumps, but let me tell you this: when the road is empty and the sun is shining, there is no better car on the planet.

I’ve always said I’d sell it to pay for the boy child’s school fees but I’ve changed my mind. Sorry Fin but you’ll have to go through the state system like everyone else.

Hate mail and wheeler-deelers

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that Birmingham city centre is a sort of culinary black hole with few decent restaurants and even fewer hotels.

Harmless stuff, you’d have thought, especially as it’s true, but the locals went ape. Indeed, I am actually looking forward to the postal strike so the supply of vitriol is halted.

The leader of the city council, who has extraordinary hair, led the charge, suggesting that I shouldn’t peddle such insulting rubbish in a London-based newspaper. Ooooh. Touchy.

She went on: ‘So, if you ever do venture north of Watford Mr Clarkson, I would be happy to show you round Birmingham and the error of your ways.’

Well, sorry to disappoint you Theresa, but I don’t live in London, or even near it. And I spend a damn sight more time in your city than anywhere else. And that’s how I know it needs more restaurants.

I will not, as many people have asked, publicly apologize but I do feel the need to get on my knees and grovel at the feet of Eric Ferguson.

Eric reminded me of a piece I wrote back in March, where I made some predictions about the forthcoming Formula One season.

If I’d said Murray Walker would be eaten by aliens, it would have been more accurate. In fact, I said Michael Schumacher had gone to Ferrari because he knew something that we didn’t. I insisted he would be the 1996 world champion.

I said that Damon didn’t have enough bottle and would be runner-up, that Jacques Villeneuve would make a complete fool of himself, and I dismissed Mika Hakkinen as deranged. All this from a man who, in private, was hurt that ITV never even asked him to get involved with their new assault on Grand Prix racing.

Mr Ferguson suggests I know less about motor racing than I know about motor cars, a point that rankled at first but, having thought about it, he may have a point on that front too.

I, after all, described the Ford Escort, on television, as a terrible, disappointing dog, and it went on to be Britain’s best-selling car.

When I reviewed the Toyota Corolla I said it was dull and, to make the point, fell asleep on camera while reading a brochure about it. And the Corolla is now the world’s best-selling car.

How about this for a gaffe? I once waxed lyrical about the Renault A610, saying that it was a fabulous car offering hitherto unseen levels of performance for a bargain basement price.

And in the first year, Renault sold six of them.

I am not finished yet. I completely misjudged the Peugeot 306, saying that it lacked sparkle and that it was boring. Ooops. It is, in fact, a wonderful car that I enjoy driving very much.

Then there’s the Vauxhall Frontera. On first acquaintance I liked it, but since then I’ve discovered it’s very probably the nastiest new car you can buy.

Yes, Mr Ferguson, sometimes I get it wrong and sometimes I don’t. And that automatically makes me a damn sight more reliable than most car dealers.

You see, hate mail comes and goes but there is always a steady stream of letters from people who are being taken to Sketchley’s by garages.

Every morning, it’s like ‘Dear Deirdre’ in metal. Today, someone wrote to say they’d spent £16,000 on legal fees, fighting a dealer who refused to mend their car.

Then there’s a couple who say Nissan won’t honour a warranty on their Micra.

I see in the papers this week that a well-known BMW dealer from Yorkshire, have been fined for knowingly selling fake BMW wheels for real BMW prices.

And my sister, who bought a Mondeo on my recommendation, has vowed never to touch anything with a Ford badge again after the dealer told her a barefaced lie.

The trouble is that, judging by the letters I get, all car dealers are as bad as each other. There’s a report in one of the motoring rags this week which tells of a man who bought a £61,000 Daimler only to find it was an out of date model that had been sitting in a field for two years.

When he complained, he was offered a vastly inferior model as a swap.

This whole state of affairs is shambolic. I’ve spent the bulk of this column apologizing for the error of my ways, and I would like to think that car dealers think hard about doing the same.

I know margins on new cars are tight but a little courtesy and some honesty costs absolutely nothing.

I really do believe that people in the motor industry sometimes forget what a huge purchase a car can be.

My wife bought a new vacuum cleaner this week and was treated like a goddess by the salesman. And yet if she sauntered into a car dealership with £10,000 in her pocket, they’d only just stop short of calling her a bitch for wasting their time.

Here’s a tip guys. When a customer comes in, offer them a cup of tea. And if you have premises in Birmingham, offer them biscuits too. It’ll have been a while since they ate out and they’ll be grateful.

They’ll buy a car from you, and be happy, and then they’ll stop writing to me. This will free up more time for research and make my pontifications more accurate. As it is, I reckon Damon will be the champ in 1997 and that the Scorpio’s a real beaut.

No room for dreamers in the GT40

Back in 1962, Enzo Ferrari was trying to sell his company and Henry Ford was in the frame to buy it. The talks were going well and a deal was only days away when the old man decided that his pride and joy would wither and die under the weight of Ford’s global bureaucracy.

Mr Ford was livid and told his Brylcreemed designers to build a car that would make mincemeat out of the Ferraris at Le Mans. He was going to teach that eye-tie dago a lesson he wouldn’t forget.

The bunch of fives came in the shape of the GT40 which, in various guises, won the 24-Hours four times.

Now, ever since I was old enough to run round in small circles, clutching at my private parts, I have been a huge fan of Ferrari and especially the 250 LM. But here was a Ford that was beating it. The GT40 became my favourite car and I would plead with my dad to buy a Cortina, to replace the last one he’d crashed. Ford need the money, I’d argue, to build more GT40s. I had three Dinky toy GT40s and my bedroom wall was plastered with pictures of them. I even sat in one once, when I was eight or so, and decided there and then it would be the car I’d have one day. Like the Lamborghini Miura, which was also built to spite Enzo Ferrari, it came from a time when car design was at its peak. Look at a McLaren or a Diablo today and tell me they have the sheer sexiness of a 1960s supercar.

There have been loads of good-looking cars since but none had quite such dramatic lines as the GT40 – I’m talking about the racers, not the elongated and muted MkIII car.

I was at the Goodwood Festival of Speed earlier in the summer and, though there were many stunning cars squealing up that hill, I maintain that the GT40 was best. Yes indeed, the best-looking car of all time. And fast, too. Nought to 60 took 5.4 seconds and you could get the needle round to the 170mph quadrant on the M1, should you choose. There were no speed limits then, because homosexuality hadn’t been invented.

It was also a proper engine. I’ve always subscribed to the view that there ain’t no substitute for cubes and here was a car with 7000 of them in a rumbling V8 package. And there it was, in the grounds of the Elms Hotel in Abberley, fuelled and ready. The keys were in my hand, the sun was shining, the temptation to run round in circles was large. I was going to realize a 30-year-old dream and actually drive a GT40; and I didn’t really care that it was a 300bhp, 4.7-litre, Mustang-engined road car with a boot. Ford had only made seven of the things before the American magazine Road and Track said it was a badly made crock of donkey dung and the plug was pulled. And I, the man who loves the GT40 the most, was going to use it to tear up some tarmac.

Actually, I wasn’t. For the first time in 10 years of road-testing cars, I had to admit, after desperate struggling, that I am just too tall. And no, it wasn’t a Mansell whinge about being uncomfortable. I was simply unable to get my knees under the dash, my head under the roof or my feet anywhere near the pedals.

If you’d put a pint in front of John McCarthy when he stepped off that plane from Beirut and then peed in it when he was about to take a swig, he would have been less disappointed. But now I’m glad. Yes, I’m happy that Ford made the car only suitable for hamsters and other small rodents. I’m happy that my trip to Worcester was a waste of time and that I had to rewrite the item I’d written for the programme. I’m delighted that I shall go to my grave never having driven a GT40. Because the dream will never be tarnished with a dose of reality.

Vanessa Redgrave was my childhood film star idol and now I’ve learned she is the sort of woman who probably doesn’t shave her armpits. Then there was the Ferrari Daytona, another car I’d wanted to drive since I was old enough to use crockery, but which actually feels like it should sport a Seddon Atkinson badge.

So, if you’re a child longing for the day when you can get behind the wheel of a McLaren or a Diablo, may I suggest you stand in a bucket of Fison’s Make it Grow. Because by the time you’re old enough they will have been made to feel old and awful by the hatchback you use every day.

A rolling Moss gathers up Clarkson

You can see him coming from a mile away. He is wearing a blazer and cavalry twill trousers. The tie is undoubtedly regimental as is the stance – either that or someone has sewn a broom handle into the back of his Harvie & Hudson shirt. This guy talks pure home counties with a dash of Queen. He doesn’t have a plum in his mouth: it’s a banana.

Now, we are not dealing here with a car bore. Car Bore Man has a beard and oily fingernails. Car Bore Man has an MG and drinks beer with twigs in it. Car Bore Man feels a genital stirring whenever you whisper ‘track rod end’ in his ear.

Whereas Mr Blazer and Slacks would not be able to identify a track rod end if one were to leap out of a hedge and eat his foot. Mr Blazer and Slacks would have trouble telling the difference between a Humber and a humbug.

Mr Blazer and Slacks, however, is even more boring because his specialist subject is… motor racing of yesteryear. Ask him who set what lap record for what team in the 1956 Cuban Grand Prix and he’ll know. In fact, there’s no need to ask because he’ll tell you anyway sooner or later.

As far as Mr Blazer and Slacks is concerned, real motor racing stopped when tobacco sponsorship and seatbelts moved in. Today, he maintains, F1 is just a business where people with regional accents are paid huge sums of money to do something that’s no more spectacular than ironing.

Real motor racers were gentlemen who used their family’s money in the pursuit of the ultimate lap. Real motor racers did the decent thing and died whenever they crashed, which was every weekend.

Unfortunately, I’m a soft touch for these people. They assume that, because I know how much an Audi A3 costs, I must be on first name terms with Archie Scott Brown and Donald Fotherington Sorbet who, don’t you know, set the lap record in 1936, etc. etc. etc.

At this point I discover horse-like qualities and manage to fall asleep while standing up.

There is nothing in the world quite so dull as trips down memory lane, especially when the lane in question is Silverstone.

Or so I have always thought. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been researching a programme I’m making about Aston Martin, and in among the snot-like offal I’ve encountered some three-quarter inch pearls.

Then I met Stirling Moss who, in less than ten minutes, managed to convince me that Fifties motor racing was more exciting than watching an Apache helicopter gun-ship trying to get a Hellfire missile up the exhaust of a well-driven Dodge Viper.

This is because you never knew what would happen next. There was a driver in the 1930s who, as night fell, pulled into the pits while racing in the 24 hour race at Le Mans.

He changed out of his sports jacket and suede shoes into a dark suit and formal black lace-ups so that he should be properly dressed. And the following morning he changed back again.

His team, it seems, didn’t mind one bit. Indeed, on the very last lap of the race, they hauled him in to the pits again, saying they were nearly out of champagne and did he want the last glass?

And then there’s the sportsmanship. Stirling once travelled all the way to Indonesia so that he could engage some long-forgotten adversary in mortal combat on the track.

When Stirling’s axle broke half-way through the event, things looked bleak. But the other chap lent him one – a kindly gesture which Stirling repaid by beating him.

This was the old way. In the final round of the 1959 World Sports Car Championship Aston Martin set fire to their pit garage, which would have been curtains. However, the team next door pulled its car out of the race so the hot favourites could carry on.

At around the same time, a driver called Peter Jopp – you simply must know him – suffered a mechanical failure and sought assistance from a fellow competitor who was lounging around on the grass. ‘Only too delighted,’ said the other chap, summoning his parents’ butler. ‘Courtney,’ he barked at the old retainer, ‘after you’ve poured Mr Jopp a Pimms, perhaps you’d be good enough to mend his clutch.’

The spirit was matched only by the amateur nature of technological developments. When Ferrari developed a flip-up rear spoiler on the back of their racer, they told the other teams it was a device to prevent fuel spilling on the hot exhausts. And everyone believed them.

Cooper found one of its racers wouldn’t fit on the trailer so they sawed the rear end off, only to find that it went faster as a result.

Now when you’ve been brought up on a diet of Schumacher and launch control devices, this is just delightful. Drivers racing for no money. Team bosses helping one another. Pulling into the pits for a glass of fizz. It’s all too agreeable.

But what was the motivation? Stirling Moss doesn’t even hesitate. ‘I did it because I loved driving a good car quickly.’

It’s funny. He was standing there in a blazer and slacks. He had a clipped accent and a smart tie. I felt my eyelids getting heavy, but the man takes the era and brings it alive.

Some say he is the greatest driver that ever lived. Well I don’t know about that, but I do know this. When he starts to reminisce, I start to feel like I’ve got a wet fish down the front of my trousers.

Can’t sleep? Look at a Camry

By ten o’clock in the evening these days my body is no longer capable of movement.

If you were to use sensitive military equipment you might detect a slight rise and fall of the chest, and perhaps a gradual downward trend in the eyelid department, but that’s about it.

If you were to use ordinary medical techniques you’d pronounce me dead, and take away my eyes and liver for transplant purposes.

Tiredness comes in great waves, reaching a point where even speech is no longer possible. Uttering a simple ‘uh’ is out of the question. I am, quite literally, dead to the world.

It’s a condition that lasts right up to the moment when my head hits the pillow, and then BANG: the eyes flash open, the heart begins to beat like a Deep Purple drum solo and my mind could beat a Cray supercomputer at chess.

I write scripts. I think of new story ideas, and already this year I have six plots for new books. As the digital clock continues its remorseless march past 4 a.m., I’m sitting up bathed in sweat, wondering why the vicar had popped out of the wardrobe at that precise moment.

And what were Genesis thinking about when they decided that they were lawnmowers and it was time for lunch… wait a minute. I wonder if anyone knows what the car was on the cover of Peter Gabriel’s first solo album? I could do a story about that.

The story is then written and mentally logged by which time it’s 5 a.m. and I’m starting to get angry. In 90 minutes, I shall have to get up and go to work. I can’t do a day’s work on 90 minutes’ sleep. Not when I only had 34 minutes last night.

I’ve tried everything. I’ve done the unspeakable and taken up decaffeinated coffee, which is like liquid lettuce. I’ve tried drinking huge quantities of Scotch. I’ve counted sheep, but that all went terribly wrong when I started to wonder whether other farmyard animals could bound over fences. Can pigs jump? That’s a big, big question.

I’ve tried herbal remedies, though they also keep me awake, worrying that someone will find out. Clarkson’s on herbal medicine. Must be a poof.

The problem is that I will not use prescribed drugs. Once, on a long, no smoking flight from Beijing to Paris – don’t ask – I took a Mogadon and was still wondering how such a tiny, tiny tablet could possibly work on a 15 stone adult… when I went unconscious.

I was in a coma all through the stopover in Sharjah, and at French customs I thought I was the captain of a federation starship. Do NOT take a sleeping tablet, unless you have nothing on for about two weeks.

The worst thing about insomnia is that no one sympathizes. Tell someone you can’t sleep and they’ll give you chapter and verse on how easily they nod off. Why do they do this?

When I meet a blind person, I don’t tell him that I can see just fine.

But now it doesn’t matter any more, because for the past week I’ve been getting the full eight hours a night. I’ve been waking up each morning well able to handle all manner of heavy machinery.

The cure is not, I’m happy to say, a dangerous and addictive drug. It is not some dubious root from Mongolia. It is not alcohol either, unfortunately. No, the cure comes from a most unlikely source – Toyota.

You only have to mention the word ‘Camry’ and I’m long gone. Indeed, I had to get a colleague to type ‘the C word’ just then because if I’d done it, I’d have been unable to finish the story.

I want to make it plain that this is by no means a bad car. For the money, you’d be hard pressed to find a better built machine on the road. It’s quiet. It’s comfortable, and it’s incredibly easy to drive.

But all this engineering whiz kiddery is shrouded in by far the dullest shaped body I have ever seen in my whole life. There is no single feature that is in any way even slightly outstanding. There is a bonnet because you need one to hide the engine. There is a passenger cell where people sit, and there is a boot for luggage.

All I need do now is think about the shape and I come over all drowsy. If, while cleaning my teeth at night, I glance out of the bathroom window and see it in the yard, that’s it – I’m a goner.

Now obviously, we can’t all buy a C**** just to help us sleep – I mean the 2.2 litre base model is £19,000 and that’s a hill of money. But I suspect a photograph of such a car pinned to your bedroom ceiling would work.

Or cut out this next bit of the story, and read it before you go to sleep every night. The C****, you see, has HSEA glass to reduce glare and eye fatigue and cut down on heat build-up. HSEA cuts ultraviolet by 86 per cent and solar energy by 74 per cent. The stereo has autoscan… feeling drowsy yet?

What if I tell you the engine and transmission is mounted in its own cradle-type sub frame and that the suspension geometry has been fine tuned to raise the rear roll centre? Gone yet?

OK then, and this is all you’ll need. The rear wheels have been set with initial negative camber.

It’s marvellous; the first ever car with medicinal properties. But it’s not alone out there. Next week, I’ll tell you all about the Nissan QX and how it put me into a deep, hypnotic trance.

Big foot down for a ten gallon blat

After a million or so years doing nothing, man really seemed to be coming along in the last hundred or so. He motorized his wheels, sprouted wings, went to the moon and, best of all, he invented the fax. But in the last 20 years it all seems to have stopped. Where’s the follow-up to Concorde? When are we off to Mars? What comes after rock ’n’ roll?

I blame miniaturization. Clever people have stopped inventing things and started making what we’ve already got, smaller. When I had a hi-fi system in the 1970s, it was a massive, teak thing with an arm like something from the Tyneside docks. But today, you need tweezers to hit the buttons and Jodrell Bank to see the read-outs.

Then there are cameras. I saw a guy in the States last month with a device that was actually lighter than air. Had he dropped it, it would have floated, which is perhaps a good thing, but honestly, you can’t beat my Nikon which needs its own team of baggage handlers at airports.

And then there’s Kate Moss. Well look. I like big breasts, a big amount of food on my plate and I’d much rather watch Terminator 2 at the cinema than on video. I also like big cars, a point rammed home this month when I drove Big Foot. First of all, its nine-litre V8 gets through alcohol at the rate of 5 gallons for every 300 yards. This is good stuff. This is 29 gallons to the mile and that makes it by far the least economical vehicle in the world. It’s fast too. No one has ever done any performance tests, but having done a full-bore, full-power standing start I can report that we are talking 0 to 60 in about four seconds. This is impressive in any car but it’s especially noteworthy in something that has tyres that are over 6 feet tall. To get in, you climb up through the chassis, emerging into the cockpit through a trap door in the Perspex floor. Everything about the pick-up truck body perched up there on the top is fake. It’s just a plastic facsimile of a real Ford F150 – not even the doors open. There’s just one centrally mounted seat with a full, five-point racing harness and about 2500 dials in front. There are warning lights too, each of which was carefully identified by my tutor before I was allowed to set off. But I didn’t listen to a word he said. Nor did I pay attention when he talked me though the gearbox. It’s an auto but, though there’s no clutch, you do have to pull the lever back each time you want to shift up. And that was the problem: pull is the wrong word. You are supposed to wrench it back, as I’d soon discover.

With the lecture over and my neck brace in place, the instructor was disappearing through the trap door when he turned and said: ‘Have you ever driven a fast car before?’ I told him I’d driven a Diablo and he left, wearing a peculiar smile on his face.

To fire that mid-mounted tower block of an engine, you just hit a big rubber knob and then thank God you’re wearing a helmet. It’s loud like a hovering Harrier and when you hit the throttle it sends your vision all wobbly.

About one second into what felt like an interstellar voyage, various dials and the noise suggested a gear change might not be such a bad idea, so I eased the lever back. Nothing happened. The revs kept on building, so I tried again. Nothing, except this time a selection of warning lights came on. By now I was in a temper so I yanked the lever back and the truck just seemed to explode forwards. This could catch a Diablo and run over it.

And even though it was on wet grass, it seemed to ‘dig and grip’ pretty well. I never did find out how well, though, because by then I was struggling for third and may have hit first instead. I was in Vermont but people in Gibraltar heard the bang. They gave me another five minutes before the people from Ford hit their remote shutdown button and the engine died. I was going to give them hell but decided to run away instead when I noticed the rev-counter telltale said I’d taken the £100,000, nine-litre motor to 10,000rpm.

I didn’t stop running until I was in Chicago, where I decided that Big Feet (is that the plural?) are wasted at exhibitions, jumping over saloon cars. We should use them for trips into town. I’m about to move to Chipping Norton where, I’m sure, it’ll go down a storm.

Car chase in cuckoo-land

Over the years James Bond has been Scottish, Welsh, Australian, and English. I tell you this because for no particular reason I was lying in the bath this morning thinking about Pierce Brosnan who, of course, is Irish.

I guess he was on my mind because like every other small boy I was given Goldeneye for Christmas, a 007 video in which Sean Bean attempts to break some computers.

The film is not bad, actually, but there are two problems. First, Brosnan delivers all his lines in a curious high-pitched squeak, making him about as frightening as Willie Carson.

And second, Goldeneye plays host to the most preposterous car chase of all time.

Bond, in an old Aston Martin DB5, duels with a Russian fighter pilot in a Ferrari 355 and the two screech, neck and neck, through Alpine passes in a flurry of tortured rubber and wailing engine notes.

Well now, look here chaps. If you put Tiff Needell, who is the best driver I know, in a DB5 and Stevie Wonder in a 355, Stevie would be tucked up in bed at home, after a good supper, long before Tiff got into second gear.

To make things even worse, the music was all wrong and the whole thing was intercut with a series of glib one-liners from Brosnan, which were only audible to dogs.

There are so many things to love about Bond films, but the car chase sequences are always wrong. Who can forget that speeded up nonsense in Goldfinger, or the way his trick Aston V8 skied its way out of trouble in The Living Daylights?

The first thing a decent car chase needs is plausibility. I mean, look at The Rock, a Hollywood blockbuster in which Nick Cage, a timid little man with pipe cleaners where his arms should be, leaps into a Ferrari 355 and sets off in pursuit of Sean Connery in a Hummer.

Now even though Sean had been in jail for 30 years and would never have driven anything remotely similar to a Hummer before, and even though Cage had a vastly superior car, the 355 ended up crashing out of contention.

It’s the same deal in Ryan O’Neal’s film – The Driver. I know the Pontiac Firebird is slow and truculent but there is no way, no matter how good you are, that you could keep up with one if you happened to be in a pick-up truck at the time.

Why, I whisper to myself, do they not put the combatants in similar cars? That’s exactly what they did in Bullitt and that’s one of the many reasons why this is still regarded as THE best car chase of all time.

The baddies have a Dodge Charger and Steve McQueen has a Ford Mustang – two cars which are evenly matched. Both have V8s, which provide all the aural backdrop you could possibly want, and as a result the director, Peter Yates, decided no musical accompaniment was necessary.

When the baddies finally went off, into a garage, which explodes, it was for a very good reason and not because the driver had suddenly decided to apply the handbrake.

Why do they always do that? Why, when there’s a corner to be negotiated, does the baddie always travel a little way beyond the apex and then attempt to turn?

This is forgivable if you’re pottering along at 30, listening to The Archers, but when your life is on the line and you’re doing 90 down Regent Street, I suspect you’d be concentrating pretty damn hard on where the road goes next.

The point is, of course, that a car skidding into an ammunition dump is good cinema. A car skidding into a pile of boxes is good television. But a car just stopping is what happens when directors try to stage a car chase for £4.50.

When the two drivers career into a side street and every parked car is a 1972 Hillman Avenger, you know someone has been skimping.

This is at its best in The Bill, when from time to time Metro panda cars are to be seen in hot pursuit of a suspect in a stolen Montego.

Now we’ve seen enough Michael Buerk 999 crash emergency paramedic programmes to know that in real life thieves don’t care two hoots about the car they’ve nicked. They’ll ram anything that gets in their way.

But in The Bill they indicate when turning left, stop for old ladies and, when there are width restrictions ahead through which they can’t quite fit, they’ll stop and run off on foot. That makes the subsequent arrest dull but much, much cheaper to film.

Car chases should only be attempted when the producers have found a spare million down the back of the sofa.

But, that said, money is no guarantee of success. You see, Days of Thunder with Tom Cruise and Vanishing Point with Barry Newman both featured the classic car-chase mistake.

Here’s the scene: the road is straight as far as the eye can see and both combatants are flat out, alongside one another.

It’s stalemate, or so you’d think, but wait, what’s this – the goodie has just changed gear and whehey, his car has roared ahead.

What?!… did he just forget there was one more gear still to go?

Small wonder joy-riders feel a need to go out at night provoking the police to chase them. If only they’d start putting decent car scenes in films again, there’d be no need to do it for real.

Frost-bite and cocktail sausages up the nose

In 1996 I remember hearing that the commandos are having to lower their standards in a bid to attract new talent.

Spotty sixth formers were asked why they didn’t want to pursue a career in this most élite division of the army. They were told that it would involve getting up at 4 a.m. and running to Barnsley with a 200 lb pack on their backs. They’d be expected to eat leaves, wipe their bottoms with smooth stones and shoot down helicopters a lot.

Having listened with a gormless expression that only teenagers can muster properly, one said, ‘It sounds very tiring’.

And I reckoned he had a point. Why push your body to the limits when you can get a nice job in a bank, and flirt with the cashiers all day?

It gets worse. Did you read all that stuff by Ranulph Fiennes in the News Review section a couple of weeks ago? The man was trying to walk across the Antarctic, towing a sledge that was even heavier than a night storage heater – but less useful. He had pus streaming down his chin and every night he’d pull off his socks to find another toe had come off.

Then there was whatsisname in that upside-down boat. He’s my new hero for eschewing counselling, saying he’d rather go to the pub for a couple of pints, but that still doesn’t explain what he was doing down there in the first place, attempting to get a sailing boat through seas that could smash Manhattan.

And what about Branson? Richard, my dear chap, you have it all. Why risk life and limb trying to get a helium balloon round the world when you have a fleet of 747s which are so much more appropriate?

And the same goes for his American competitor, Steve Fossett. Now I met this guy last year, and he’s done everything; swum the Channel, raced twice at Le Mans, climbed six of the world’s seven highest mountains and sailed across the Pacific faster than anyone else.

But he has $600 million in the bank. Can’t he just learn to play the piano?

While driving to work the other day I was thinking about all this, wondering what drives people to go further and faster, to boldly go where no one has wanted to go before. And then I turned on to the M40 at junction 15 and cursed slightly. It had been 31 minutes since I left home and that’s a very average time indeed. On the way home, I’d try and do better.

Aaaaaaargh. It hit me like a juggernaut. In my own small way, I’m no better.

When you do the same journey, day in and day out, you start to set yourself little targets – can I be in Shipston by twenty past? Damn, I’m late and now I’ve got a minute to make up before I get to Halford.

The only rules of engagement are that I don’t exceed the speed limits in villages but that’s it. In between the built-up areas, I drive like I’ve accidentally set fire to my hair and tried to put it out with scalding hot water.

I stir the gear lever like I’m trying to beat an egg and stamp on the pedals as though they’re funnel web spiders. I know this is dangerous, but there is a feeling of elation when you arrive at a predetermined point in the fastest ever time.

I’ve tried pointing out to myself that it doesn’t matter; that Chris Akabussi and Sarah Green won’t be waiting with The Record Breakers team. I’ve tried considering the cost, telling myself that when you really give an XJR some stick it uses a pint of petrol every 3000 yards.

At full moo, the fuel injectors begin to look like a collection of firemen’s hoses, but it doesn’t matter. And nor does the pointlessness of it all.

In my Ferrari, in the middle of the night, I’ve done the trip in 29 minutes. But yesterday I was in a diesel-powered, left-hand drive Renault Espace. I didn’t have the power to get past lorries, but this didn’t matter because I couldn’t see past them in the first place. And the time: 30 minutes, 22 seconds.

The most important thing is that every day we need challenges. For some, that means chatting up colleagues at work or making the ultimate ratatouille. Others though need to balloon round the world or walk to Mars, or drive faster than anyone else.

Richard Noble is working right now on a new car which, later this year, should break the sound barrier on land, achieving a speed in excess of 700mph.

It is powered by two jet engines, which are mounted right up at the front to make the car-nose heavy like an arrow. Driver Andy Green is going to light those afterburners and sit there in what is basically a controlled explosion on wheels, hoping that he’ll get a three-line entry in The Guinness Book of Records.

He knows, too, that just a few weeks after his attempt it may well be beaten by an American outfit headed by Craig Breedlove, and that his fifteen minutes of fame will be just that.

But he’s going to try for it anyway, and in so doing he’s going to make our lives seem just that little bit more puny.

Certainly, he will make my efforts to get to the M40 quickly look ever so inconsequential, which is why I’m going to pack it in and do something constructive. Tonight, I’m going to see how many cocktail sausages I can get up my nose.

Bursting bladders on Boxing Day

Christmas is a religious festival where Christians celebrate the birth of their spiritual leader by getting together with their families, giving one another socks and arguing. There is usually finger pointing over the turkey, and after lunch warring factions gather in different parts of the house, whispering about how they never want to see one another again. Mostly though, families can keep smiling through gritted teeth, never actually saying ‘Auntie, I hope this cracker blows your hand off’. On Boxing Day, everyone climbs into their cars and heads for home.

This is when it starts to get difficult. I have driven up the side of cliff faces in Iceland, and I have survived the Bombay to Pune highway in India, but for sheer lunatic driving you can’t beat the M1 on Boxing Day. Husband is sitting there in his brand-new woolly pully, telling his wife that he never wants to go to her parents again. After 15 years, he has just admitted that her mother is a fat, interfering cow who, he hopes, contracts BSE very soon. She is crying and accusing him of not making an effort: ‘You know Daddy hates it when you call the Queen a lesbian.’ The upshot is that he is not paying the slightest bit of attention to the road and hasn’t noticed that visibility is down to two inches. He is still doing 90, relying on the glow from his new jumper for guidance.

No kidding. Last year I was crawling down the inside lane doing 30mph, and there was a constant stream of over-burdened Volvos screaming past doing 90. And then, south of Northampton when the fog lifted, I was making up lost time, going past the Volvos; and they had the audacity to indulge in some major-league finger wagging. Well, they would have, except the row by this time had gone nuclear. She was on the mobile to the solicitor and he was admitting to eight affairs.

Even if there was a lull in the fighting up front, it would be filled with squawking from the back. Daughter had just broken the son’s train who, in return, vomited on her new doll. Further back still, the boot was loaded to the point where the car weighed more than an Intercity 125.

I find it little short of amazing that we can’t drive while drunk, because alcohol impairs our judgement, and yet we are at liberty to drive around while getting divorced. You are also allowed to drive while wanting a pee. When I go past a sign saying ‘services 30 miles’ and I need to go, I will admit here and now that I will let my speed creep up to 130 and I will overtake on whichever side of the road I see fit. It becomes all-consuming to the exclusion even of life preservation. And when I finally make it, I will screech to a stop in a disabled parking bay. I do not think I am alone in this.

And I am certainly not the only person ever to have driven while suffering from hay fever. Last summer, I drove an 850bhp Nissan Skyline GTR even though I was virtually blind, a condition that became complete when I sneezed every four seconds. Here’s a fact: if you have a three-second sneeze at 60mph, you are blinded for a staggering 264 feet. I will also admit to driving around while enraged by something on the radio and yes, I’ve turned round to check my daughter is OK on the back seat. I have also driven with a splitting headache. Only the other day I had to pull on to the hard shoulder of the M40, where I fainted.

In fact, the days when I climb into a car feeling refreshed and ready to cope with diesel spills and people in hats are pretty few and far between. And what about old people? If good driving is all about awareness and speed of reaction, then they should surely be taken off the roads. A 17-year-old youth just over the legal drink limit is going to be better able to deal with an emergency than the average, sober 70-year-old. But there are no laws about driving while under the influence of Anthony Eden, or having a hay fever attack, or with a bursting bladder.

Which is why, when I hear the police are cracking down on people who drive around while talking into mobile phones, I laugh. In the big scheme of things, this is not really so bad.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

I’ve just spent two delightful weeks in Barbados where the sun shone, the diving was fine and the jet skis were fast.

But I had time for none of this nonsense because I had taken by far and away the best read of the year so far.

While everyone else on the beach was tucking into the new Patricia Cornwell, hoping that Lucy will get into a juicy lesbian affair some day soon, I was ensconced in the annual Lex Report on Motoring.

Written after exhaustive research with 1209 drivers including 160 truckers, it is intended to show how our attitudes change from year to year.

I’ll start you off with a simple, and obvious, one. Eighty-one per cent of all those questioned said the newly introduced written part of the driving test is a good idea. Of course it is: ‘those questioned’ don’t have to take it.

Then there’s the old chestnut. Thirty-three per cent of motorists, says the report, think that driving standards in Britain are bad or very bad and 36 per cent think they’re only average.

However, a whopping 74 per cent said they were good or very good. Only one per cent admitted to being hopeless behind the wheel.

That doesn’t add up, until you consider another statistic that floated across my desk a couple of years ago. It said that something like 80 per cent of the British population had never been on an aeroplane, which means that the vast majority of those questioned are comparing our driving standards to… what?

Had they been to India, or Greece, or New York, or Italy, or pretty well any damn place, they’d know that the standard of driving in Britain is outstanding and that about 90 per cent of our drivers rank as either superb or unbelievably gifted.

Speed rears its ugly head in the report too, with some people saying they never break the limits. Presumably, they form part of the 11 per cent who were not aware of the existence of speed cameras.

My favourite bit on the question of speed, though, is that 66 per cent of motorists did not feel speed bumps would slow them down. Well now, look here chaps; would you please write and let me know what sort of cars you have, because if they can get over those ludicrous humps without shaking the dashboard from its mountings, I want one too.

Here’s another one. Sixty-four per cent of motorists wouldn’t slow down if heavier penalties were imposed, even if there were a three-month ban for exceeding the urban limit by 10mph or more.

I see. So if the penalty for speeding were the loss of your eyes, the burning of your house and the rape and pillage of your children, you’d still sail through villages at 50 would you?

People are telling porkies here, a point that becomes obvious when you get to the section on rubbernecking. Forty-three per cent of drivers admitted to slowing down to look at an accident with 37 per cent saying they look without slowing down. Two per cent say they’ll go so far as to change lanes for a better view. Which leaves 16 per cent who can sail past what looks like the conclusion of a Sam Peckinpah film without gawping a bit. Sorry guys. Not possible.

If you do believe in statistics the section on drugs and drinking makes for alarming reading, because it says two million people have been in a car when the driver was over the alcohol limit, half a million have been driven by someone on cannabis, 250,000 when the driver had taken speed and 100,000 where ecstasy, cocaine or heroin was involved.

Well now, that is extraordinary. All those people charging around either asleep, very wide awake indeed, or being chased by giraffes on surfboards, and so few accidents. We’re even better drivers than I thought.

I do wonder, however, whether if I did a survey into market research I’d find that a majority of respondents were drunk or stoned out of their minds at the time.

Or reading a map while on the phone. Here’s a good one – only 13 per cent of people admit to driving while talking on a hand-held phone. They’re lying because, as we all know, mobile phones don’t work.

Back to the story. Only 9 per cent of drivers said they’d been in an accident in the last year, but there are some gender and sex differences here. The figure shoots up to 13 per cent when you’re dealing with 17 to 34-year-olds and 14 per cent when company car drivers were quizzed.

Here’s the best bit though. Only 35 per cent of women drivers have ever had a crash compared to 53 per cent of men.

And yet, when asked to sit the new written driving test, only one in five women passed compared to one in four men. It seems then that women don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re doing it very well.

It’s easy to get depressed by some of the findings but we should all remember that market research said, categorically, that Labour would win the last election.

This is why I always treat any form of survey as a work of fiction. On that basis, the Lex effort easily beats Tom Clancy’s new book, Executive Orders.

To save you the bother of reading it, the two hillbillies don’t get their bomb to Washington and the ebola virus goes away all on its own. Oh, and the Arab baddie winds up dead.

Radio Ga Ga

So, you’re settled in front of Des O’Connor and whoops, half-way through, along comes a car commercial which costs about twenty times more than the programme.

But when you’ve finished watching that Audi A3 charging around in Iceland, or the Ka in la-la land, or the Volvo in Palm Springs, what have you learnt?

Well you might have an idea what it looks like, though this is by no means certain, but that is it. You don’t know how much it costs, whether it has a warranty, whether it is safe or whether it is fast.

In the past this hasn’t mattered. The agency bought space on television to let us know the car exists, hoping that we’d all be captivated enough to read more detail in newspaper and magazine advertisements.

But they don’t do this any more. My favourite press advertisement at the moment is for Peugeot’s wonderful 106GTi which is seen about 500 feet in the sky, and still heading upwards, having driven over a humpbacked bridge.

There is a hint here that the car is exciting and fast, but you need Jodrell Bank to read the small print where a price is quoted.

Same goes for the splendid press advertisement for the Mercedes SLK. The car is parked at the side of the road, alongside a series of skid marks, the idea being that everyone is slowing down for a better look. Great, but are there any seats in the back? And how long’s the waiting list?

We are not told; well not in print anyway. No, that is now the job of local radio, in which the entire technical specification of the car, the price and the discount offers are crammed into 26 seconds of garbled nonsense. That leaves four seconds for the jokey pay-off.

At the moment they’re running one round these parts for the Fiat Ducato van, in which a Scouser is trying to buy the said vehicle from a homosexual gentlemen’s outfitter. The customer asks whether he can fit his drainpipes inside, and we think he’s talking about trousers. But he isn’t. It’s hysterical; nearly as funny, in fact, as having a vasectomy.

Then there’s an advertisement for a Saab, in which a salesman is telling his colleague all about his new 900 and how it’s just set a world endurance record. But all the way through, the colleague thinks he’s talking about ‘Melanie’, the office crumpet.

Brian Rix couldn’t stretch a joke further, but you haven’t heard the punch line yet.

Ready? Saab-man says he’s going to show his new car to the aforementioned Melanie, and his colleague is heard to remark, in an amusing, sceptical voice, ‘Must you now?’ I nearly crashed I was laughing so much.

These days, television and press advertisements treat the viewer and reader with respect. We are shown subtle images and are expected to work them out for ourselves.

But the banal is acceptable and even welcome in a medium that plays Phil Collins all day long, a medium that whooped for joy when it heard about the balding one’s latest marriage rift. It means more soppy songs, and more excuses to never play anything else.

And then there are the otherworldly disc jockeys. Why is the breakfast presenter always having a suggested affair with the bimbo in the traffic helicopter, that’s what I want to know?

And why can’t they ever say something a teeny bit controversial? Actually, to be fair, they do from time to time. But after Phil has sung about leaving a wife, there’s always a little apology.

Just yesterday, a lad phoned in from his bedroom to request ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ and the presenter berated him for running up his parents’ phone bill. But, after the tune, she was back to say that calls to her radio station were of course free, so everyone was happy and no one’s armpits smell.

Local radio presentation is so bland I bet they never get any letters at all. I bet that if you asked a postman where the town’s FM station was, he’d have no idea.

He certainly won’t be listening any more because he’ll have been annoyed by the car advertisements and completely bamboozled by those from local garages.

It’s bad enough when a major car firm, using the very best Soho agency brains, turns to local radio, but when the advertisement is paid for by the managing director of Rotters Autos, who thinks he can do the job just as well, the results are catastrophic. And they’re even worse if he tries to write a jingle where ‘autos’ and ‘customer’ are somehow made to rhyme.

He knows that in the real world people are interested in price, and he feels it’s entirely appropriate to tell everyone about all the deals he can offer. There are quite a few, but if he speaks quickly he can get them all in.

Then he learns that by law there have to be disclaimers after any advertisement where money is mentioned, and that another voice must explain that offers are subject to status, that written details are available on request and that the typical APR is 14.3 per cent.

He therefore has to speak so fast that he’d even make a Noddy story sound like mumbo jumbo.

I’ve been listening to local radio for a couple of years now, but the advertisements in general, and the car advertisements in particular, have forced me back to the BBC. I even thought about giving Chris Evans a try, but he seems to be on holiday.

Anyone know when he’ll be back?

Spooked by a Polish spectre

I don’t doubt that you go a bit red round the gills every morning when you find that Postman Pat has filled your hall with junk mail. You don’t want to win a tumble dryer, you don’t need an Amex card and you’d rather buy Razzle than Reader’s Digest. But consider for a moment what life would be like if you actually had to read everything that came through your door. Imagine if you were forced to open bank statements and bills, rather than simply feed them to the waste disposal unit.

Well, that’s what happens at Telly Towers every morning. I have to scoop up the debris that Pat has fed to my doormat, and read it. I’m talking about press releases from the world’s car companies – tomes that redefine the concept of dull. They are more boring than a Jane Austen novel, more shiversomely tedious than a parish council meeting. Just last week, Nissan changed the radiator grille or something on the Micra and poor Pat gave himself a hernia lugging the press pack up my drive. Seventeen pages in, I’d already worked out that the whole thing could have been done in one sentence: ‘We’ve changed the Micra a bit.’ But today, in amongst the encyclopaedic volume on the Corsa’s new engine and a gushing diatribe about the new Hyundai Lantra Estate, was something that stopped me dead. FSO is not dead. The Polish car company has managed to survive the transition from Communism to Lech and back to Communism again. And more than that, the cars are still being imported to Britain. Oh no. I still maintain that the Nissan Sunny was the worst car of all time. It had no redeeming features; nothing that you couldn’t find better and cheaper elsewhere. But the worst car in the world to drive was the FSO Polonez.

It did have a redeeming feature – it was cheap. But it had to be, because it was a car that wasn’t really a car at all. It was a box under which the careless car-buyer would discover a 1940s tractor. The styling was enough to put most people off, but it only had to compete with the Wartburg and the Trabant, neither of which will ever feature in a book called ‘Beautiful Cars’ by Jeremy Clarkson.

You cannot begin to imagine how bad the ride was on this truly awful car, and just as you were marvelling at its ability to bounce so high off the ground, you’d find its steering didn’t really work because the front wheels had been concreted on. If Karl Benz had invented its engine, he’d have given up on the whole concept of internal combustion. The noise frightened birds and the fuel consumption read like the spec sheet from an Intercity 125.

The last time I actually went in a Polonez was last year. It was a minicab and it broke down in Heathrow’s tunnel. Then I had an argument with the fat driver when I point-blank refused to pay. But since that long, fume-filled walk to the terminal, I’ve not heard anything about this wart on the bottom of motoring. Until now. It seems FSO has a new car called the Caro which has met with some success in Britain. Last year 480 were sold here, but I can only assume that the owners limit forays onto the road to the hours of darkness. I’ve certainly never seen one.

I’m sure that it’s a pretty hateful machine. But there’s no denying one thing. At £4527, it is cheap. Also, it can be ordered with a 1.9-litre Citroen diesel engine and it will eventually get ZF power steering and Lucas brake systems. It may then become a half-decent car, but I’m also sure its price will rise. They’ll end up with a half-decent car at an indecent price. Except they won’t, because this press release says that Daewoo has taken a 10 per cent stake in FSO, and that in the next five or six years the Korean company’s share will rise to 70 per cent.

The idea is simple. Daewoo will ship bits of old Astras and Cavaliers from Korea to Poland where they will be nailed together to form a vague, but inexpensive, interpretation of what motoring should be all about in the next millennium.

We know all about that already, of course, because Vauxhall has shown us. No more fast cars. Birds in the trees and the good people of the world transported to and from work in Vectras. God Help Us.

Boxster on the ropes

I should make it plain, right at the outset, that I was born in Yorkshire, but don’t worry. Because I can’t play cricket, I don’t suffer from that most hideous of diseases – Professional Yorkshireman Syndrome.

Even so, I do love the place. I think it’s hard to find scenery anywhere in the world quite so inviting as the Dales, the people are chummy and Leeds is just plain outstanding.

The best bit of the county is to be found by going to Hull and turning left; up through Driffield and on towards Scarborough and Filey.

If you removed all the people and their yellow houses from the Cotswolds, you’d be getting near the mark. It is chocolate-box pretty and you don’t even have to fight with a coachload of American tourists for the hazel nut crunch.

Now this, of course, means you can unleash the beast under your bonnet on some of the smoothest, best maintained and almost completely empty roads. East Yorkshire is petrolhead heaven.

And I was in a car to suit the mood – Porsche’s new two-seater, mid-engined convertible – the Boxster.

It was fabulous. There is a delicacy to the steering that you simply don’t find in lesser machinery, which meant that on the moorland roads north of Pickering the car was a dream.

And the roadholding is absolutely sublime. Even if I stabbed the throttle midway through a corner, the inside wheel just spun the unnecessary power away with the careless disdain of an Australian bushman whooshing away a fly.

As far as ride comfort is concerned, it’s just unbelievable. The Boxster’s suspension is like the perfect secretary, dealing with the dross and making sure that only the really important information reaches its boss.

You can have big fun in this car, revelling in the crisp bark of that 2.5 litre, six-cylinder engine as it rasps past 5000rpm, snicking the gear lever from fourth to fifth, and then down to third for the next bend.

The brakes wash away the excess speed, the big tyres grip, the sports seat holds you firmly in place and then, as you marvel at the complete absence of scuttle shake, it’s time to nail the throttle again. And don’t worry: even if you drive like the illegitimate son of a madman, you’ll still get 25mpg.

You’ll even get home with enough energy left to press a little button and put the roof up.

A clean bill of health then for Porsche’s mainstay into the next century? All you people on the year-long waiting list can sit back, safe in the knowledge that the car you’ve chosen is spot-on? Er no, not really.

You see, it’s all very well thumping round East Yorkshire in a Boxster but don’t forget, you have to get there. And that’s not so much fun.

First of all, you’ve got to buy it, which will set you back £37,000 if you specify big wheels and leather seats. This is a lot of money, especially when you remember that an MGF VVC is less than £20,000.

And no, I’m not being silly. The MG is also a mid-engined, two-seater convertible which, in the real world… wait for it… is actually faster than the Porsche.

The Boxster’s biggest problem is that unless you drive like your hair’s on fire, it’s JCB slow. In-gear acceleration times show an ordinary Rover 620i is faster.

And to make matters worse, the Boxster has an irritating habit on the motorway of gradually slowing down. Drive any expensive car down the M1 and you’ll find it gets faster and faster. At turn off 32, you’re doing 70. By turn off 28, you’re up to 75. When you go past Leicester, you’re up to 80. And by Watford, your sonic boom is breaking people’s windows. Next stop, Hendon magistrates court. I know. I’ve been.

But in the Porsche the reverse happens. I started out at 70 and would find, ten miles later, that I was down to 50. Half-way up the M18, you would have needed a theodolite to ascertain that I was actually moving at all.

And on the M62, I think I started going backwards. It was hard to be sure, though, because the front and the back of a Boxster look like Siamese twins.

I think this licence-saving trend is the result of a wonky driving position which means your right foot is never quite comfortable on the accelerator – it tends to lift, little by little. You have to concentrate, all the time, on maintaining a single speed, and this gets wearing; so wearing, in fact, that on the way home I ended up with a headache in my back.

Overall then, the Porsche was a disappointment. On its day, it’s as much fun as an evening with Steve Coogan, but most of the time it’s as dreary and as plain as his alter ego, Alan Partridge.

The good news for Porsche fans is that it will stay in production for 20 or more years, and that in the fullness of time they’ll up the power, fix the driving position and lose the push-me-pull-you looks.

This is great if you’re planning on buying one in the next millennium, but if you want a sports car now there’s the Mercedes SLK for pansies and the TVR Chimaera for people who like their meat still mooing.

The trouble with the TVR though, is that it’s made in Lancashire, which is on the wrong side of the Pennines, the side where they can’t play cricket and… cont. in Michael Parkinson’s column every week.

Concept or reality?

I’m thinking of having Rover’s board over for dinner and, when they’re all seated, I shall produce braised pork with apples and cider.

I shall regale them with tales of exactly how this mouthwatering concoction had been made; which tiny little specialist shops in Soho had provided the juniper berries and how I’d marinated the meat for a week. I’ll even give them the actual name of the pig that had found the truffles.

But then, just as they pick up their eating irons, I’ll whisk their plates away and produce, instead, a baked potato that hasn’t been in the microwave quite long enough.

Perhaps then they will understand the folly of producing concept cars that they have no intention of making.

Everyone knows that a new Mini is on the drawing board, and we are sure that it will be bigger and more expensive than the current incarnation.

But we have no idea what it will look like, what sort of engine it will have or even where that engine will be. Somewhere in the car is a safe guess, though.

So Rover is teasing us. A few months ago they wheeled out a sporty-looking little thing in Monte Carlo rallying colours, and people in the specialist motoring press had to spend the entire day in the lavatory, whimpering gently.

When these guys came out some were blind, but Rover admitted the concept was just that. It will never be made. They were just fooling around.

And now they’ve done it again. At the Geneva motor show they whipped the covers off another new Mini, which they explained was a mid-engined, rear-wheel drive sportster that, in five-door form, had more space on the inside than an S Class Mercedes Benz.

‘And,’ they added, ‘it could be a production reality tomorrow.’ Everyone was impressed, right up to the point when they announced that it won’t ever happen. So what’s going on here?

It seems that Rover’s new masters at BMW were worried that the intriguing Mercedes A Class would steal all the headlines at Geneva. Here was Merc’s first-ever front-wheel drive machine, which is even smaller than a Ford Ka. It would be a big story.

So BMW decided to relieve themselves all over Merc’s bonfire by instructing the bright young designers at Rover to come up with something even cleverer. And it worked. Merc’s A Class, which is going on sale in the next few weeks, was eclipsed by a car that’s nothing more than a hallucinogenic vision.

However, I suspect Mercedes will enjoy the last laugh because in three years’ time Rover will have to stop giving us concept cars and unveil the real thing.

They’ve been showing us they can make the most amazing hollandaise sauce, but in reality they’re going to serve up a slightly underdone potato. Marvellous.

Now this is bad, but it’s worse when a manufacturer shows us a concept car that can’t be made.

My favourite was a Peugeot that did the rounds ten years ago. It was startling. Small boys were captivated by its swooping lines. But the reason they were so swoopy is because there was no room within the framework of the car for an engine.

Now I’m sorry, but if I were running a car firm and someone brought me a design which precluded the fitment of a motor I would sack him immediately. I would not instruct him to go away with several hundred thousand of my shareholder’s pounds, demanding that he builds a mock-up of the damn thing.

And even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t let the public see it because then the shareholders would sack me. A car with no engine Jezza? Great work, idiot. Now get out.

Then there’s the fascination with the rear-view mirror, a device that I think works rather well.

But no. It is almost always ditched on a concept car and replaced with an expensive television camera that feeds its signal to a screen mounted on the dash. Mmmm? I see, but what happens when the lens gets dirty? People who keep plugging away at this ludicrous idea are obviously mad and should be quietly murdered.

So what about doors? The hinge is a good idea. It was invented several years ago and works in all sorts of different applications – your fridge, your rabbit hutch and your canal.

But car designers are obsessed with alternatives. There was a Cadillac I saw at the Detroit motor show in 1989 where the door popped away from the body, electrically, and then slid forwards to let you in. It worked… but only in the same way that you can use a urinal while doing a handstand.

There was a car at this year’s Geneva show whose name has gone from my mind. It had chunky four-wheel drive wheels and, I suspect, the running gear from a Mercedes G Wagen. But instead of a boxy, practical body it had a sleek, two-seat layout – sort of Robbie Coltraine in lace panties.

I know it’s vital that car designers keep an eye on the furthest horizon, and that it’s a good idea to constantly challenge accepted wisdom.

But can’t this be done quietly, behind the scenes? That way, when something turns out to be impossible they can forget it, and when something, like the latest Mini concept, turns out to be a goer, they just go right ahead.

I mean the old Mini has now been around for very nearly 40 years. I really don’t think anyone would accuse Rover of rushing into things.

Top Landing Gear – Clarkson in full flight

Go on, ask me whether to buy one of the new Peugeot 406s or a Rover 600 diesel and I’ll surprise you with my answer. I haven’t driven either of them. And nor, I’m ashamed to say, have I tried a Daewoo Espero, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, a Nissan Almera or a Hyundai Lantra. Wanna know about the Seat Cordoba? I’m not your man. So it’s a toss-up between the Toyota RAV4 and a Vauxhall Tigra. Well I’ve seen lots but, to date, neither has been to Telly Towers for evaluation. But ask me whether to fly to the USA on Virgin or Delta, and I’ll be in like a shot. Ask me how a smoker can get to Australia without eating their own seat and I’ll have a starter for ten. In the last two years I’ve been so busy making 12 Motorworld programmes that I’ve rather lost touch with what’s what in cardom. But at 30,000 feet I’m on Mastermind with no passes. Did you know, for instance, that if a fresh-air fanatic sits in a smoking row on an American airline that row, under federal law, becomes no smoking?

And I have worked out why Australia failed to beat us in the rugby world cup. They’re all wimps. I know this because under state law baggage handlers are not permitted to accept any suitcase which weighs more than 32 kilos. And though you may know how to change the plugs on a 1983 Citroen CX, I know how to smoke on a Cathay Pacific 747. It’s not terribly dignified, but what you do is bury your head in the lavatory, keeping your knee on the vacuum flush button. That way, the smoke is sucked into the bowl and away from the infernal detectors. This is important stuff. Well, as vital as knowing how to turn the wiper off in an Audi Coupé, and even the road testers on this magazine can’t do that.

As far as quality is concerned, British Airways is simply head, shoulders, torso and thighs above the competition. No matter where you are, when you step on a BA jet it feels like you’re home already.

If I can liken airlines to car companies, BA has the efficiency and reliability of Mercedes Benz with the quiet dignity of Bentley. The Far Eastern carriers used to have things sewn up with their devastating stewardesses and tasty titbits. But today MAS – the Malaysian outfit – is the only one worth writing home about. If you need to get to the Far East, and British Airways is full, go via Dubai and use Emirates. I can’t say that I care very much for the tan and red uniforms, or the decor, but they have television screens for everyone; even in the back, with the cattle. If you’re going the other way, to America, the first thing you must do is ignore any US carrier. Without exception, they are brash and their stewardesses need Zimmer frames.

South Western, from Texas, has a remarkable ticketing system which makes most airports look like bus stations, but when you get on board and are served a cup of warm brown water by a woman in specs the size of a Triumph Herald, you know it’s doing it all wrong. However, even Americans are better than the Third World. In Vietnam, the pilot made a number of attempts to hit the runway in Hué, finally opting to land his jet near it instead.

In Cuba they fly planes that would be rejected by Fred Flintstone. One had no windows, and filled with smoke 15 minutes after take-off. Another had windows but was flown by a fully paid-up member of EXIT. He knew his engines were on their last legs but, even so, he flew right into the biggest thunderstorm I’ve ever seen. We went in at 2000 feet and came out through some bushes. However, while Cuba may be the FSO Polonez of airlines, it is not the worst. The Nissan Sunny award for hopelessness goes to… Qantas. They are incapable of getting a plane off the ground on time. The staff are ruder than French waiters and the food is inedible. Even the appropriately named CAAC – China’s airline – which shows 12 hour animated kung fu films through loudspeakers, has them licked.

I’m sorry if you think you’ve been reading Top Landing Gear this month. However, fear not. Judging by my drive, which is now full of cars, and by my diary, which shows no trips abroad ever again, normal service will be resumed shortly.

A fast car is the only life assurance

Between 1982 and 1985 I used to play a great deal of blackjack, and it almost always made me miserable when I lost. Which I did. All the time.

Nowadays, however, I have learnt to approach the table fully expecting an hour’s cards to cost me a hundred quid. Which it does. All the time. By abandoning hope, I’ve removed the despair.

This is a very important philosophy when you’re confronted with someone who’s trying to sell you a pension. Do not listen. As soon as they open their briefcase, put your fingers in your ears and hum Bruce Springsteen ballads.

A pension is by far and away the most stupid thing ever to hit the civilized world. You scrimp and you save for 30 miserable years, hoping that you’ll live to reap the rewards.

And what, pray, are you going to do with those rewards at the age of 92? Buy a gold-plated Nebulizer? Luxuriate in some silk-lined incontinence pants?

They say you’re investing for the life you don’t yet know, but that can work both ways. What if, after a life of deprivation, you are eaten by a tiger? Or what if, just a week before the big pay-out, you get an even bigger one from Camelot.

Pensions are all about planning, and planning is all about hope. And hope, invariably, leads to despair.

Tonight, I’m off to New Zealand to race a V8 jet boat up some rapids, and that’s an experience to beat any 4 per cent growth on capital, believe me.

They say pensions are tax-efficient but, quite frankly, they’re so dull I’d rather give my money to the government. So long as they promise to spend it on F-15s and nuclear submarines. Things I can be proud of.

The whole point of having money is to have fun. That’s it. There is no other reason, which is why you must also slam the door on anyone trying to tell you that a PEP or a TESSA is a good idea. It is not.

You give your cash to someone who, in return, sends you statements once in a while saying that you now have more money than you had when you started. But you haven’t, because it’s locked away.

Some would argue that the stock market provides a better alternative because the money is always available. But I’d be grateful if all talk of EC1 were kept out of the equation just at the moment. Even the most idiotic gambler can see the Footsie is at its highest level ever, and that Mr Blair is at the gates. The only way is down.

I have thought about this quite carefully and it seems to me that all investments do nothing to enrich your soul. And I don’t care what the grinning salesman says, they’re all risky. Remember, pensions have a habit of falling off boats.

You will spend your life hoping this doesn’t happen. You’ll wind up frightened and alone, shivering in the corner of a one-room bedsit, unable to afford a single-bar fire because some City institution is playing the silicone gee-gees with your cash.

My advice is simple. Remove the risk. Invest your money… no wait, spend your money, on something you know will lose. A car.

Now at this point, a few people will raise their hands and draw my attention to the Mercedes SLK, which, when it was launched at the beginning of the year, came with a two-year waiting list. Secondhand values went through the roof, up the chimney and in some cases right to the top of the television aerial.

SLKs were being advertised at £45,000, which is £10,000 more than they’d cost a patient man. But pretty soon everyone was trying to sell their Merc, and in a matter of days prices settled down again. The SLK was a freak.

And I see no new cars on the horizon which will perform a similar trick; certainly not the BMW Z3. Last weekend, I counted 26 in the secondhand columns, giving it the exclusivity of a packet of biscuits.

Cars were an investment once, but too many people walked away from those late-1980s boom years nursing fingers that were burned through to the bone. However, and this is the key, they may have paid £100,000 for a Ferrari 308 GT4 which is now worth £20,000, but at least they still have a Ferrari.

I know of two chaps who clubbed together in the height of the madness and bought an Alfa Romeo SZ thinking it was their passport to a life of rum punches in Barbados. However, as they took delivery the bubble burst, and they’ve been wearing margarine trousers on a slide into oblivion ever since.

But who cares? If it had been a stock exchange deal that had gone wrong, they’d have a worthless piece of paper. But they’ve still got a Group A racing chassis, those wonderful looks and that magical 3.0 litre V6 engine. They did all right.

I was flicking through the small ads in this paper last week and found that for, say, thirty grand you could have a Jaguar XJR or a low-mileage BMW M5 or, staggeringly, a Bentley Turbo R.

Sure, when you’re 90, a pension would keep you in panty pads and a Bentley won’t, but at least you’ll have had a life. You’ll be seen as wicked and interesting, and as a result no one will care when you simply wet the chair.

Rav4 lacks Kiwi polish

Last night, I found myself at the Auckland Travelodge, tucking into a bed of wilted leaves and chicken served with ‘jus’.

To be honest, there’s nothing much wrong with Travelodge – except they always put me in a room that’s two time zones away from reception – but I would like to know how on earth the word ‘jus’ wormed its way on to one of their menus.

In the very recent past, ‘jus’ was only to be found at the very finest restaurants in France, but in just a few years it’s filtered down the food chain, through bistroland and onwards until it ended up in New Zealand, in a Travelodge, under my chicken.

Where it tasted pretty ropy actually. I knew it would, because it just doesn’t belong. I go to a Travelodge when I want a pasta salad, and I go to Château du Domaine St-Martin when I want ‘jus’.

In carspeak, this is even easier. I go to Land Rover if I want an off-roader, and I go to VW if I want a hatchback. So would someone please explain to me what the Toyota Rav4 is all about?

When it was launched in Britain a couple of years ago, I think I was going through a rough patch with Toyota. I wasn’t speaking to them, or they weren’t speaking to me, but either way I never actually drove one.

I heard it was an attempt to marry the Camel Trophy to Marks & Spencer, which seemed a bit unlikely, but press reviews were favourable and it sold pretty well.

Thus, when I came to New Zealand last week, and needed a car that would travel great distances and do some off-roading, all on a BBC budget, it seemed like the ideal solution. In fact, I’d have been better off renting a space hopper.

Most of the roads here are single-carriageway, so you need plenty of overtaking punch which the 2000cc engine simply can’t deliver. When the road ahead is empty, you drop a cog, mash the throttle and yes, yes, yes, you are gaining and you’re pulling out, and a few minutes later you’re alongside, but you’re never going to make it before the next bend, so you drop back again, a beaten man.

I know of no road, anywhere in the world, where there is a long enough straight for a fully laden Rav4 to strut its stuff in the overtaking lane. And the roads in New Zealand are bent like the wires in a Brillo pad.

This, however, does mean I had a chance to check out the handling. And yes, I’ll admit that for an off-roader it steers and rides and corners with a surprising degree of comfort and agility. In saloon car terms, it’s right up there with, say, a Lada Samara.

Now, of course, all these drawbacks are to be expected in a car that’s been designed to drive through swollen rivers and up sheer cliff faces. But the Toyota, sadly, can’t do either of those things. Indeed, with its road tyres, even a gently undulating grassy field proved too much.

I stabbed away at the centre differential locking button like a dying man trying to restart the engine on his crippled submarine, but it was to no avail. With insufficient grip, and even less torque, I was merely digging a hole that eventually would have taken me back to England. I’m afraid that despite a high ground clearance, the Rav4 is about as much use in backcountry New Zealand as an aqualung made of cheese.

Toyota has simply tried too hard. By trying to make an off-road ‘car’, they’ve ended up with something that’s no good at anything.

Now this applies equally well to Suzuki’s Vitara, but at least this makes up for its numerous shortfalls by being handsome in a hairdressery sort of way.

I’m forced to say the same applies with the three-door Rav4 too, but I had a five-door version, which is a terrible, terrible mutation that looks like it was styled by a World War Two plastic surgeon.

And the interior was done by someone who obviously works in a poorly lit room. The dash is so bland that my colleagues resorted to drawing extra dials and switches on it with chalk. And because we couldn’t overtake anything, and therefore each journey took an age, we ended up with six boost gauges, a rev counter, an eight track, a CD autochanger and, if memory serves, a fart counter too.

Worse than the tedious innards, though, is that, unlike any other off-roader, it doesn’t have a high driving position, so you can’t sneer at other drivers. Not that there’s much to sneer about in a car with almost no redeeming features.

Certainly, you can’t sneer about the price. The five-door Rav4 is an almost unbelievable £17,000, making it the most preposterously overpriced piece of under-powered, nausea-inducing nonsense ever to hit Britain’s roads.

Hard words, but just to make sure Toyota and I don’t have to do pugilism again, I’ve now swapped it for one of their Land Cruisers – a huge diesel automatic, and I love it. Sure, it won’t go round corners, but each time it ploughs off the road it just ploughs through whatever it hits.

It knows its place in the world. It doesn’t try to be something it’s not, and concentrates instead on simply being big. If the Rav4 is ‘jus’ in a Travelodge, the Land Cruiser is gravy in a transport café.