For Crying Out Loud!

I once saw a group of people who’d taken some magic mushrooms, lying on the floor laughing hysterically at a tube of toothpaste. And toothpaste, so far as I can tell, has exactly the same comedic properties as Russell Brand.

Magic mushrooms, then, do not make you clever, or horny, or buzzy, all of which would be fine. They make you mental, and that’s not fine at all.

I don’t even like to take alcohol in such large quantities that no matter how carefully I marshal my thoughts into a coherent sentence they come out as a stream of incoherent gibberish.

Once, in Houston, Texas, I arrived back at my very large hotel and couldn’t remember either what room I was in or my name. So I had to spend the whole night trying my key in each of the doors, a job made doubly hard because they each appeared to have 16 or 17 locks. Fun? No, not really, unless the alternative is being eaten by a shark.

The worst drug, though, by a mile, is the common or garden sleeping pill. I tried one once, on a flight from Beijing to Paris, and was so removed from anything you might call reality that to this day I have no recollection of the emergency landing we made in Sharjah. Being so out of it that you can sleep through a plane crash: that’s bloody frightening.

So last weekend, when I was offered a couple of pills for the flight back to London from South Africa, I smiled and said no. But the paramedic was very pretty and very persuasive and said they were only antihistamines rather than proper sleeping pills, so I relented and as the plane took off popped them into my mouth.

The first indication that something was wrong came 20 minutes into the Martin Scorsese film I was watching. It didn’t make any sense. Mark Wahlberg had become Leonardo DiCaprio who, in turn, looked just like Matt Damon. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t care. And then I fell into such a deep sleep that, legally, doctors would have been able to remove my spleen for transplant.

The next thing I knew we had landed at Heathrow and Richard Hammond – or it could have been Matt Damon – was shaking my shoulder, pointing out that I had to get off. ‘This isn’t the Circle line,’ he said. ‘You can’t just sleep till your stop comes around again.’

I vaguely remember collecting a bag from the carousel – I think it was mine – and driving into central London to the accompaniment of many blown horns and harsh words. And I dimly recall climbing into bed thinking, ‘I’ll just have an hour’s kip before I go to work.’

And then it was five hours later, and I still wasn’t entirely sure how the world worked. I stared at my coffee machine for what must have been 20 minutes until the sheer complexity of the thing made me feel all weepy. So I went to work, made a mess of everything, and then went home for more sleep.

I’d love to report that the next day I felt refreshed, but in fact everything was worse. I wanted to be well, but I couldn’t shake off the immense soggy blanket that had been laid on my head. Or the dead horse that had been nailed to my back.

And do you know what? I’d only taken a couple of anti-histamine tablets. Whereas in Britain 16 million full-strength sleeping-pill prescriptions are issued every year.

Only some of which go to Robbie Williams.

Research estimates that anything up to 1.75 million people are going through life in a state that puts them somewhere in the middle of the River Styx.

Which certainly explains why I meet so many bores in the course of a normal day.

Technically, anyone on temazepam is not really what scientists would call ‘alive’.

Certainly, I would like to see a law imposed whereby anyone who takes a prescription for sleeping pills is forced to hand over their driving licence. And their children, for that matter.

You may write to me saying that you have trouble nodding off at night but I have no sympathy because I too lie in bed every night, in a fug of smoking primrose oil, with a tummy full of lettuce, counting sheep, and I can’t sleep either.

But I know that getting through the next day on half an hour’s shut-eye is better than trying to get through it with the reaction times, humour and conversation of a boulder.

Sunday 18 February 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Drip-drip-drip of a revolution

The news last week that olive oil, Marmite and porridge cannot now be advertised during television programmes aimed at children confirms something I’ve suspected for a few months. There’s a revolution going on in Britain and no one seems to have noticed.

When the French and Russian proletariat rose up against the middle and upper classes, they made a lot of noise and used pitchforks. Whereas here the revolutionaries are using stealth and a drip-drip-drip policy of never-ending legislation.

It started when they let ramblers trample all over your flowerbeds and then, of course, there was hunting. We know that the antis couldn’t really have cared less about the well-being of foxy woxy, but they hated, with a passion, the well-heeled country folk who charged about on their horses shouting tally-ho.

Then came the attack on four-wheel-drive cars. ‘It’s the environment,’ they smiled, but it’s no such thing. Otherwise they’d be up north taxing people with clapped-out Ford Orions and telling fat people in council houses to get out of the chip shop and lag their bloody lofts.

No, they go after Chelsea Tractors because these are symbols of middle-class success. You have to remember that trade unionists and anti-nuclear campaigners didn’t go away. They just morphed into eco-mentalists because they realised that global warming was a better weapon than striking, or doing lesbionics for mother Russia in Berkshire.

Think about it. They tell you not to go to Tuscany this summer, and they throw withering looks at the Ryanair flights to Gascony. But when Kentucky Fried Chicken starts advertising a bucket of supper with disposable plates and non-biodegradable plastic cutlery so you don’t have to get your fat arse out of your DFS sofa and wash up, do we hear a murmur? You can cup your ears as much as you like but the answer is no.

Instead we get Ofcom listing what it considers to be junk food and therefore unsuitable for children. Chicken nuggets? Plain white bread? Oven chips? Diet drinks? Nope, along with a lot of oven-ready ‘meals’, these are all fine apparently.

But Marmite, porridge, raisins, cheese and manuka honey? ‘Fraid not. This is what middle-class kids eat so it’s all wrong, and now it can’t be advertised on television in the afternoon.

Meanwhile, you have John Prescott insisting that each new housing development can only get a planning green light if it ‘spoils some Tory bastard’s view’.

It gets worse. Ken Livingstone has not extended the congestion charge into Tower Hamlets or Newham. Nope. He’s gone for Kensington and Chelsea. And we learnt last week of plans to turn Sloane Square, the epicentre of middle-class shopping and conviviality, into a tree-free crossroads.

I’ve checked and strangely there are no plans to build a new road through the statue of Harold Wilson in the north’s equivalent of Sloane Square – George Square in Huddersfield.

There are, however, plans afoot to give Janet Street-Porter and others of a Gore-Tex disposition access to a 10-yard-wide corridor around all of Britain’s 2,500-mile coastline. So you worked hard all your life and saved up enough to buy a bit of seclusion by the sea? Well, sorry, but Natural England, a sinister-sounding bunch, has advised DEFRA, which sounds like something the Nazis might have dreamt up, that your garden should be confiscated and that there should be a ‘presumption against’ giving you any compensation.

You see what I mean? On its own, that’s no big deal. But lob everything else into the mix and it becomes clear that traditional Britain is under attack. It’s porridge and Jonathan Ross’s back garden today, but tomorrow Mrs Queen will be transported to Scotland and summarily shot. You mark my words.

I bet the chief executive of Barclays agrees. He announced last week that the bank had made record profits, and was probably feeling pretty chuffed, right up to the moment he was summoned to a television studio and presented as the unacceptable face of capitalism who goes round the countryside at weekends stamping on puppies.

I felt it too, on Thursday, because for reasons I can’t be bothered to explain I was in London with a Rolls-Royce and no one ever let me out of a side turning.

Why? As I’ve said before, Simon Cowell, who is a rich man, gives the exchequer more each year than is generated by all the speed cameras put together. If you combined the tax contributions of all those who have Rollers, I bet you’d have enough to pay for Britain’s air traffic control system.

And that’s before you start on how much Britain’s rich do for charity. Last year a bunch of hedge-fund managers raised £18 million in a single night to help Romanian orphans. At one party Lady Bamford’s mates stumped up £3 million for the NSPCC. And I had lunch on Thursday with a chap who, so far as I could tell, single-handedly looks after every disadvan-taged child in the land.

And yet, when he climbs into his Bentley to go home at night, a bunch of communists and hippies, egged on by faceless former Greenham lesbos in government think tanks, makes sure he can never pull into the traffic flow.

Not that he’s going anywhere anyway, because Ken Livingstone has taken £8 a day from middle-class Londoners and given it to a crackpot South American lunatic in exchange for cheap oil, which means the capital is choked with buses full of Bulgarian pickpockets fleeing from the police.

I notice this morning that the blossom is out on my trees. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t feel like summer’s coming.

Sunday 25 February 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Fear and loathing in Las Manchester

We keep reading about plans for the supercasino in Manchester, and everyone seems very bothered about whether it’ll be like Las Vegas or not.

Well, in one important respect it won’t be. Las Vegas is situated in the middle of the Nevada Desert, not far from Death Valley, the hottest place on earth. Manchester is known for its year-round drizzle and its summertime peaks of 57°F.

As you approach Vegas from Los Angeles, especially at night, it is a genuinely impressive spectacle. All that power. All that energy. And so many air-conditioning units that as often as not the city generates its own overhead cloud cover to cool the gamblers down.

As you approach Manchester you usually think, ‘I’ll turn my wipers on now.’ And then you keep right on going to somewhere better.

We can’t forget the police, either. In Vegas they wear shorts, ride bicycles and – I’m not kidding – have flashing lights on top of their helmets. And no one laughs at them.

Then we have the hotels. At the MGM Grand in Vegas there are 5,044 rooms and the turnaround time is phenomenal. You check out, and even if it’s three in the morning someone else will be in your room just 20 minutes later.

The last time I stayed in Manchester, my hotel room had nylon sheets that made my hair look like it had been styled by a Van de Graaff generator, and the biggest diversion was the Corby Trouser Press.

However, in one important respect Manchester’s supercasino will be very similar to Las Vegas. The customers will be poor and fat when they get there.

And a little bit poorer and fatter when they leave.

When I first started gambling, back in the early eighties, it was a rather elegant way of passing the time. I’d go to the Connoisseur on the Fulham Road, or Le Casino in a Lower Sloane Street basement. This was a wonderful spot, with just four tables, a fire and a maˆıtre d’ called Roget who’d always offer to find me a taxi at 4 a.m., knowing full well I was always penniless and would have to walk.

Then there was the Moortown Casino in Leeds, where I first encountered the cooking of Marco Pierre White. The only problem here is that it was always full of old Jewish ladies, and getting on the blackjack tables was a nightmare.

So we used to ring from the phone box outside and ask to speak to Mrs Cohen. An announcement would be made over the club’s PA and then we’d simply push past the crowd of old ladies coming to the reception desk and, hey presto, we could play where we wanted.

Vegas too, in those days, was a laugh. The Strip was a great place for cruising. You could stay at the Aladdin for $8 a night, see the Doobies, play a little blackjack, develop a rapport with the dealer and it was all jolly lovely. Even though you knew your losses were being used by men called Don to buy guns in Chicago and cocaine in New York.

Last week you probably read about someone called the Fat Man who has dropped £23 million in the last few years at Aspinalls, a place described as lovely and luxurious and full of ‘the right crowd’. The way they talk, Lord Lucan is still in there chatting to Pamela Harriman, and so you probably think gambling is still a fun thing to do.

It isn’t. Le Casino and the Connoisseur were taken over, amalgamated and then resurfaced in a glittering, noisy barn under the Gloucester Hotel in South Kensington. I’ve been there a couple of times and it’s always full of Chinamen losing their tempers.

And Vegas. Oh. My. God. I went last summer and it’s now crammed.

You can’t move on the Strip, 24 hours a day, and as you sit at the bar being insulted by the uninterested staff you get the impression that it’s just a giant cathedral to the worst sort of capitalism. You know that it’s all owned by the corporations, who are using it to rape the terminally stupid.

They sit there, some of them on five or six bar stools, with a bucket of money on one phlebitis-ridden thigh and a bucket of lard on the other. And you just don’t want to join in.

I love playing cards for money. I really, really adore it. But that night I felt a bit sick watching the Sheriff of Nottingham simply empty the serfs’ pockets.

There’s no style any more. No panache. When you check in at the MGM there’s an army of valet parkers who direct you to one of the 16 lanes so that you are in the casino and at the tables that little bit faster.

In the past the receptionist would tell you about all the shows in town. Now you give them a credit card and you’re in your room, where the bed is still warm from the last sucker who breezed into town. It is horribly depressing.

And that’s what it’s going to be like in Manchester. Oh sure, you’ll get a handful of the nation’s orange people from Cheshire over there, dropping vast wads on black to make themselves more sexually attractive. But mostly it’ll be poor, fat people gambling away money they barely had in the first place.

And meanwhile, 160 miles to the south, Tessa Jowell will be sitting in an agreeable flat wondering what on earth became of her socialist principles.

I haven’t got any at all. Never had. But if I were her I’d feel a bit of a chump.

Sunday 4 March 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Bullseye! The pub is dying

Good news. It seems that the centuries-old tradition of being forced to pop down to the local for a pint and a game of arrows with your mates is coming to an end.

A survey of regular pub-goers last week found that only io per cent had played darts in the past year, compared with 41 per cent five years ago. Better still, four out often men in their twenties had never played in their lives and a similar number had no idea what a bullseye is worth.

I loathe darts. You settle down with your mates for a bit of a chat and a few drinks and then one of them suggests a game. Why? Why do I want to spend my time in the pub, standing up, doing maths?

Darts is a game for people who can’t make conversation, or who are so bored by seeing the same faces night after interminable night that they have to do something apart from talk.

We’re told that Henry VIII was a keen darts player and I can understand that. Because he didn’t have a PlayStation and he needed something to take his mind off an alarming collection of sores that were multiplying in his underpants, I can believe that throwing some shortened spears at the bottom of a beer barrel might in some way be deemed entertaining.

When syphilis became less popular, I can still see how darts might have flourished. You’d come out of t’factory with t’lads and there was no point going home because the bog was at the bottom of t’garden and half your children had rickets. So you may as well go to t’pub.

But now, anyone who can’t think of what to say to their friends while in a pub can spend their time texting other friends who aren’t there. Even that is better than bloody darts.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m not very good at it. My ability to hit the treble 20 is governed not by hand–eye co-ordination but by the laws of averages and probability. Mostly, I fail to hit the board at all, or the dart bounces back and pierces my shoe.

And then I’m expected to stand there, with my foot nailed to the floor, trying through a fog of pain to deduct 17 from 263.

Some people call this a sport. Rubbish. A sport is something that requires specialist clothing, whereas all you need to play professional darts is a loud shirt that you don’t tuck into your trousers, a stomach the size of Staffordshire and an idiotic nickname.

They’re all called ‘the Viking’ or ‘the Viper’ or ‘the Assassin’ when in fact they should all be called ‘the fat bastard who hates his wife and kids so much he’d rather spend his evenings throwing arrows into a bit of bristle with his fat and disgusting friends’.

Show me somebody who likes playing darts and I’ll show you a social misfit with so much worrying imagery on his hard drive that if it were ever discovered, the courts would lock him away for a thousand years.

That’s why I’m glad to see it’s dying out and that pubs are replacing their oches with abstract art and bits of furniture from Conran. But you know what? I won’t really be happy until the pub itself has gone.

People, normally those who have their own arrows and can get breaks of 50 or more in snooker, lament the passing of what they call ‘the rural drinking pub’. They paint a picture of traditional England with low ceilings, horse brasses, a fire and people from the village gathered around to swap stories over a pint of handmade beer.

‘Mmmm’ you might think. But the reality is that you have to stand up, the beer’s got twigs in it, the landlord is a psychopath, you can’t hear what anybody is saying, the fire’s too hot, you can’t stand at the corner of the bar because ‘that’s where Jack stands and he’ll be in in a minute’ and if you inadvertently spill someone’s drink you’ll be invited into the car park to do pugilism. Oh, and the only cigarettes in the dispensing machine will be Lambert & Butlers.

Often, these rural drinking pubs serve a selection of sandwiches and pies, but for nutritional value you’d be better off eating the little blue tablets in the urinals.

Then you have city-centre pubs where men go to meet girls, not realising that all girls in city-centre pubs have thighs like tug boats and morals that would surprise a zoo animal. Show me a man who married a girl he met in a city-centre drinking pub and I’ll show you someone who’s made to wait in the loft, playing darts, while she entertains lorry drivers in the front room.

Of course, these people would sneer at what they call gastro-pubs but I don’t see why. In a gastropub, nobody has their own tankard, nobody will throw a dart into the side of your head, there are no biker chicks who want to rape you, especially if you have a lorry, and there will be a chef who, sometimes at least, has a clue what to do with food.

Your darts player would poke his nose into such a place and then leave in disgust because it had arugula on the ‘menu’ and it was playing a chill-out CD.

What’s wrong with that? Moby is a better listening experience than the descant of a beeping fruit machine set to the bassline of some old bore in red corduroy trousers who’s regaling the landlord with a story from the golf course and keeps referring to Mrs Bore as ‘the wife’.

We shook off the culture of strikes, chilly winters and Michael Foot and now we must shake off the spectre of the pub and all that it stands for: beer with the consistency of Breezer.

Sunday 11 March 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

You can’t kill me, I’m the drummer

When the BBC asked if I’d become involved in the Comic Relief extravaganza, obviously my initial reaction was ‘no’. I saw no reason to give up my time so a couple of African dictators could buy bigger Mercs.

But then I was told the Comic Relief money doesn’t actually buy cars or bigger power tools with which Mr Mugabe can drill into his opponents’ heads. It buys useful stuff such as ambulances and help for the mentally ill of Britain.

And anyway, saying no to the Comic Relief team is a bit like saying no to the man at the Tube station with the stack of Big Issues. In fact, it’s even harder because you can’t smile and say: ‘It’s all right, I’ve already got one.’

So what did they want me to do? Wear a leotard and flail about on an ice rink? Sing? Stand in a school playground while children rubbed lumps of elephant dung into my hair?

It turned out the offer was even worse. Would the three Top Gear presenters like to appear on a humorous celebrity version of A Question of Sport?

As I’d rather have spent the afternoon sitting on a ham slicer, I came up with another idea. What about Top Gear of the Pops? It’d be like Top Gear, only instead of cars we’d have music. And then, I said jovially, we could finish with a tune from the Top Gear band.

The Comic Relief people loved this, and commissioned it immediately. And that was great, except for one teeny-weeny detail. There was no such thing as the band.

Yes, Richard Hammond used to play bass with a band 20 years ago but gave up when, in a fit of temper, he broke his guitar over the singer’s head. And sure, James May is an accomplished harpsichord player with a degree in the science of music. But while he’d be good at Brahms and Chopin, he’s not so good when it comes to what he calls ‘pop’.

And that leaves me. I took up the drums about six months ago and have had seven lessons. I practise infrequently and have become to the world of sticksmanship what Germany is to the world of cricket.

In my heart, I fondly imagined that one day, many years from now, when I’d become more proficient, I might team up with some like-minded souls and perhaps play a small gig to a few close friends in a pub. But here I was, volunteering to make my debut, in a week’s time, in a studio full of 700 people, to a television audience of maybe five million.

There’s no medical term for what I was going through. Doctors call it simply ‘shitting yourself.

And it became worse when we turned up, a day before the studio recording, to practise for the very first time.

I’d selected Billy Ocean’s ‘Red Light Spells Danger’, partly because it’s a good happy pop song ideal for ending a feel-good Comic Relief show. But mostly because there are only a couple of twiddly bits for the drummer. The rest, though fast, is all fairly straightforward.

Except it isn’t. Not when you put other instruments into the mix. I’d always thought the drums are a sort of noise that go on in the background of a song, but it turns out the drummer is the engine room. The man who keeps time.

The single most vital piece of the entire ensemble.

Unaware of this, I did my first twiddly bit and sort of picked up with the beat where I’d left off. Much to my surprise, the rest of the band stopped playing, lowered their shoulders and turned to stare at me.

Actually, Hammond sort of glared. There was a very real sense that if I did that again he’d kill me. And since I didn’t know what I’d done wrong this was worrying.

When you’re behind a drum kit, bashing away as though you’re in a cage, trying to get out, you can’t hear any of the other instruments. You kind of assume they’re playing the tune and all is well.

But no, rock music is not the anarchy I’d always assumed. It’s actually pure maths. I had to hit the snare at the precise moment Hammond was hitting some aspect of his guitar, and no, he couldn’t just ‘miss a bit out to catch up’. When I suggested this, he became even more angry.

To make matters worse I was supposed to be achieving 180 beats per minute. And I was… some of the time. Everyone shouted at me a lot for this.

And when I said: ‘Oh well. It’s for Comic Relief. Perhaps people will find my inability to keep time funny,’ they shouted even more.

Eventually, our singer, Justin Hawkins, formerly of the Darkness, turned up. He was a bit amazed to find the drummer and the bassist squaring up to one another, but after a couple of run-throughs said: ‘That’s as good as it’s going to get’, took over my drum kit and spent the rest of the day jamming with Hammond and May while I ate crisps.

And so the next day, after seven lessons and two run-throughs, we took to the stage and did our song.

And afterwards everyone was very kind to me, in the same way you’re very kind to a four-year-old who’s painted a picture of some flowers.

Even though they look like dogs.

The finished product was transmitted on Friday night at 10 o’clock. I hope you were all in bed and missed it.

Sunday 18 March 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

What the hell are we saying here?

A few weeks ago I became a businessman, which means I’ve started going to meetings. Or, as they should be known, ‘places where nothing happens and nothing gets done’.

Here’s how they go. Each of the people round the table expresses their opinion on a particular subject, and each of these opinions is completely different. Then, after you’ve drunk a cup of what might be coffee, but could be oxtail soup, a biggish woman – and it’s always a woman – says: ‘Well, we’re outside the box here with a new kind of hybrid venture and we can’t know what the result will be until we’ve run the flag up the flagpole and seen which way the wind’s blowing.’

Plainly, you want to argue with this, but as you draw breath to speak you realise that what she just said didn’t make any sense. And anyway, she hasn’t finished.

‘It’s mission critical that we use blue-sky thinking and that we’re proactive, not reactive, if we’re to come up with a ballpark figure that we can bring to the table.’

Again, you raise an index finger to make a point. But you don’t know what that point might be, so you pour yourself another cup of winter-warming coffee broth, help yourself to another triangular tuna and cucumber sandwich and wait for the pastry-faced woman in culottes to finish.

‘We must maintain a client focus so that we can incentivise the team and monetise the deliverables, and only then can we take it to the next level.’

You look round the table at all the old hands, the sort of people who whip out their laptops every time they’re at an airport and know what a Wi-Fi looks like, and they’re all nodding sagely, so you stop yourself from actually saying: ‘I’m sorry but what the hell are you on about?’

Later on in the day, you ring the person who called the meeting and in less than a minute decide on a course of action. And then, when you get home, you wonder why it was necessary to have the meeting at all. So you can listen to a farmyard animal in a power suit turning nouns into verbs and talking rubbish for half an hour to mask the fact she hasn’t got a single cohesive thought in her head.

To get round this problem, a friend and I developed a new scheme to make meetings more interesting. We would give each other a band as we walked through the door and then we’d compete to see how many of their song titles we could lob into the conversation without anyone noticing.

That’s why, last week, I actually said: ‘Every breath you take is like an invisible sun. We are spirits in the material world, or, as they say in France, Outlandos d’Amour.’ And do you know what? Nobody batted an eyelid.

And nor did anyone cotton on when my friend replied by saying: ‘We’re on the top of the world looking down on creation, and we are calling occupants of interplanetary craft.’

Eventually, though, even this became wearisome so I went on holiday, but even in the Caribbean there was no escape. A fax arrived from my new business colleagues advising me that there was to be a conference call at 2 p.m. Barbados time between people in Los Angeles, Aspen, London and Cairo.

I’ve never felt so important in my whole life. Me? On a conference call? Spanning the globe? Wow. I was so excited that I completely forgot about it until 1.55 p.m., by which time I was very drunk, and on a sailing boat.

No matter, I dialled the number, entered the security pin I’d been given and was asked to state my name so I could be introduced. ‘Beep’ went the phone, and then on came an electronic voice to say: ‘Captain Jack Sparrow has joined the conversation.’

Conference calls are great. They’re exactly like a normal meeting in that nothing happens and nothing gets done and everyone talks rubbish, but you don’t have to sit there remembering not to fall asleep or what Culture Club did after ‘Karma Chameleon’.

You can just pour yourself another rum punch and look out of the porthole. At one point, when the boat went about, or whatever it is sailing boats do when they turn round, I fell off my chair, dropped the phone and couldn’t find it for five minutes, and when I finally rejoined the conversation nobody had even noticed I’d been away.

Unfortunately, one of the decisions made in a follow-up phone call to the man who’d hosted the conference chat was that we’d have to go to Los Angeles.

Hollywood. America. And have meetings, there, face to face with the people we hadn’t been talking about because they were in the box and we were outside it, at the top of a flagpole seeing which way the wind was blowing.

Gulp. American business meetings. That’d be scary. A whole new raft of power women and even more white-collar nonsense. I’d better get sober.

Strangely, however, the Americans have got meetings down to a fine art, which is probably why they have NASA and Microsoft and we have Betty’s tea shoppe. You walk in and the receptionist asks if you’d like some ‘wadder or something’. You are then ushered into a conference room where you say your piece, and when you’ve finished, their top man stands up, thanks you for coming and leaves.

They’ve realised that the meeting is useless for getting anything done, so they listen’n’go. And move straight to the follow-up phone call where the decisions are made.

I therefore have a new rule. If I go to a meeting, only I am allowed to speak. And then something happens.

Sunday 15 April 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Hell is a tent zip in the snow

I have spent the past three weeks in a tent. And I have decided that anyone who does this kind of thing for fun must be either nine years old or absolutely insane.

What disturbs me most of all is that all tenting equipment is obviously designed specifically to not work. Let us take the zip as a perfect case in point. For 47 years I have raised and lowered the flies in my trousers without getting it caught in the fabric once.

And yet, in the world of tenting, every single zip gets stuck all the time. So there you are, outside in the freezing cold, jiggling the damn thing backwards and forwards, knowing that with each tug, and each muttered expletive, more and more of the tent is being swallowed by the fastener.

Eventually, and often with the help of a knife, you get through what tentists laughably call the door – it’s a cat flap – and you are presented with your sleeping bag, into which you must climb as quickly as possible because tents are essentially heat exchangers.

They are always seven degrees colder than the ambient temperature outside. And that was a particular problem for me because on my tenting holiday it rarely rose above minus 17.

So, you dive into your bag, yank the zip and instantly the entire bag disappears into it. And you can’t fish it out because your fingers are bright blue and have become what a horse would call ‘hooves’.

To warm them up, you must light the stove. Simple, you might think. In the civilised world there are many burners that light at the touch of a button, or with the merest hint of a match. But this is tenting, so the stove you’ve been given is designed to not light at all for two hours, and then blow up in your face.

First of all, you must fill the fuel tank and then pump it to create some pressure.

That’s a) pointless and b) extremely dangerous in cold climates because skin sticks to metal and can be removed only with the aid of a chain saw.

Finally, though, after you’ve used 600 matches and emptied your Zippo, you get a flame. Which grows bigger and bigger until it engulfs the pressurised fuel tank.

This does at least mean some feeling returns to your hooves, which means you can feel the agony as you plunge your hand into the inferno and carry the bomb back through the slashed cat flap and into the snow outside. So now you have no heating, and your sleeping bag is still stuck in its own zip.

I do not believe that these design flaws can be accidental. I believe that people who manufacture tenting equipment deliberately make their products useless and dangerous because anyone who wants to live under canvas plainly wants their life to be as harsh and as uncomfortable as possible.

That’s why the tent and sleeping bag come in condoms that are slightly too small, so you can never get them back inside again.

It’s why your backpack and trousers have straps and fasteners that serve no purpose except to get tangled up in one another. It’s why the fabric for the modern tent is designed to burn with the savagery of petrol and flap noisily whenever there’s even the hint of a breeze.

And it’s why the sleeping bag is so slim that it is impossible – impossible, d’you hear – to do up the fastener once you’re inside.

You get it so far and then realise that if you keep going, your left hoof will end up deep inside your right nostril. So you attempt to zip it up from the outside, which means your entire arm is left sticking from the bag like the aerial on a satellite phone.

I didn’t find a single piece of tenting equipment, in three weeks, that worked properly. I had to eat from a plastic dog bowl that shattered when you sat on it.

And when you’re trying to get out of a sleeping bag, with a frozen joint of lamb sticking out of your shoulder, in a tent that’s just a few inches tall, and lined with ice, and you’ve had no sleep because of the flapping, it is impossible not to sit on absolutely everything.

Then you have the mattress, which rolls up into an impressively small sausage. But it will not remain flat when it’s unfurled.

You have to put a weight on the far end, which means crawling into your tent with snowy boots. The snow then falls off, melts when your heater explodes and then freezes in the night so you awake to find you’ve been set in aspic.

Food? Well, obviously you could take beans and sausages. But no, tentists choose instead to feast on dried-up copies of the Guardian. You simply add water, which you get by melting snow, and hey presto, you dine on Polly Toynbee’s column garnished with a hint of George Monbiot.

You can’t even go for a pee properly because tenting trousers have no zip. God knows what they’d eat if they did. This means you must pull down each of the eight pairs you are wearing to keep out the cold.

And I can guarantee that when you pull them back up again one or two will remain below your arse, which makes walking difficult.

Needless to say, the only way you can do your number twos while tenting is to squat, like an animal.

And because tenting is so weak when it comes to personal hygiene and washing facilities, I came home after three weeks with a peculiar growth on my face.

Doctors tell me I may have grown a beard.

Sunday 13 May 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

If you’re ugly you’ve got to be funny

As I career towards old age, there are many things which frighten me. All the hair on my head will start to grow out of my nose. My ear lobes will swell up. My bladder will cease to function. I will become even more baffled by new technology.

And then there will be the inevitable onset of cancer.

But the greatest fear I face is not that I might lose my sense of sight, touch or smell. No, it’s that people, once they reach the age of 50, seem to lose their sense of humour.

John Cleese is a prime example of this. One minute he’s strutting about in a Torquay hotel and the audience is reduced to Smash robot hysterics. The next he’s in a supermarket advert, barking at customers, and everyone is behind their sofas quietly dying of embarrassment.

Then you’ve got his old colleagues. Michael Palin is charming and warm, but as he trundles through India on yet another old train does he make you laugh? Eric Idle is responsible for Spamalot and that’s about as funny as a bout of chlamydia.

Terry Jones is wrapped up in 14 layers of Chaucer and we haven’t heard a squeak from Graham Chapman for years. Though this might have something to do with the fact that he’s dead.

Woody Allen springs to mind as well. In Sleeper and Play it Again, Sam, I honestly thought that I might need the services of a doctor to sew up my sides. But in his more recent films I’ve wanted to sew up his mouth. I’ve leant on funnier trees.

The funniest man I’ve ever seen on stage was Jasper Carrott. His act was so hysterical that halfway through I was taken out of the auditorium by a chap from the St John Ambulance because I had lost the ability to breathe. I honestly thought I was going to die. But is Jasper funny now? I doubt it.

And the reason for this, I’ve decided, is very simple: sex.

I remember vividly, back when I was at school, competing with a friend to chat up a girl. He was captain of the football team and was therefore equipped with a triangular torso, firm thighs and shoulders broad enough to double up as a runway for light aircraft. Me? Well, I looked like a telegraph pole on which a stork had made its nest.

The only way round this was to try and make the girl laugh. And so, even when she’d gone off with my footballing friend and was in the bushes, moaning at the glare from his sapphire-blue eyes, I was standing nearby prattling on about Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, horses with long faces and planes with only one parachute. This is the last, and indeed only, resort of the hideously deformed.

I mean it. Do you look at Stephen Fry and think ‘Phwoar’? No? So what about Ben Elton or Paul Whitehouse? Did you ever think Bernard Manning was Johnny Depp in a fat suit? Paul Merton is no prettier than the town from which he takes his name and Ian Hislop looks like he ought to spend his day in a wheel, squeaking.

I could go on, so I shall. Steve Coogan looks like a plumber. Jimmy Carr looks like a moon. Rowan Atkinson appears to have been made from polyurethane. And precisely because of this, they’re all funny.

They’ve all lost a girl to the captain of the football team. They’ve all stood in front of a mirror, thinking: ‘Well, there’s nothing for it. I shall have to be a homosexual.’ Or was that just me?

I think, and I hope I don’t get clobbered for this, that the evidence is even more acute for women. Jo Brand. Dawn French. Victoria Wood. Notice anything they have in common? Yes, you’re right! They’re all much funnier than Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightley and Uma Thurman.

At dinner parties I look around at the yummy mummies in their short skirts and their flirty tops. And I hope and pray that I will end up sitting next to the fat bird, because that way there’s at least a chance that I’ll have a laugh.

So, if it’s true that good-looking people aren’t funny and that fat, ugly people are, then it stands to reason that humour is essentially used as a tool for whittling out a bit of sex that might not otherwise be available. And that brings me neatly to the problems when we reach 50.

No one, not even Sean Connery or Joan Collins, can stand in front of a mirror, naked, when they’re starting to sag and think ‘mmmm, yeah’.

I stand there and think, ‘How the bloody hell can a telegraph pole with a stork’s nest on top get pregnant?’

By rights, then, older people should try to compensate for their withered looks and wobbly skin by being funny. But what’s the point? Chances are you’re married; and anyway these days there are many, many things you would rather do at night than have sex. Sleeping. Reading. Being dangled from a tall building by what’s left of your hair, even.

So, if you’re not after a mate and you’re not motivated by the need for rumpy-pumpy every minute of the day, then you may as well give up trying to be funny and start writing Abba musicals.

The only hope that we all have is Viagra. Because it keeps the old chap working, even when everything else has broken down completely, it means there is still a point to making people laugh.

This probably explains why Adrian Gill can still dole out the giggles at the age of 52.

Sunday 20 May 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Why Brits make the best tourists

Can you imagine the horror of being able to read other people’s minds: to find out what they really think about you? Well, last week we were able to do just that, as 15,000 hoteliers from all over the world explained exactly what they thought of the British.

We harbour a cheery notion that Britain and its people are a shining beacon of hope and goodness to the dirtier and less well educated. We assume that when our glorious island nation is mentioned, people all over the world imagine us going to work in bowler hats and volunteering to be out in a game of cricket, way before the umpire has actually made up his mind. When they think of us, they think of Kenneth Kendall reading the news on the BBC. In a tie.

‘Fraid not. It turns out that, mostly, they think we’re arrogant, badly dressed, untidy, loud, drunk and nowhere near as much fun to have around as the Japanese.

It turns out that hotel staff in Corfu don’t actually like it when we do the conga through reception at two in the morning and then rush into the gardens with one another to catch chlamydia. They think this sort of thing is antisocial.

Further digging reveals that while we spend quite a lot of money while we’re on holiday, it’s mostly on beer, burgers and Satan’s favourite snack, Cheez Whiz.

This, according to another report, from the Lonely Planet guide, is because we are all obsessed with celebrity, we worship people who have no talent, we’re all binge drinkers and that back at home there’s a general air of disillusionment in the wake of the London Tube bombings.

Small wonder that the people who write this book are lonely. You won’t get any friends if you mooch about all day in an Eeyore blanket of drizzle. Cheer up, for God’s sake.

The fact is that Britain, right now, is a jolly place to live. Tony Blair is going. Everyone’s house is worth a million pounds. And the summer, thanks to a few dedicated souls like me and that chap at Ryanair, is likely to be warm. That’s why we do the conga at two in the morning: because we’re happy. And that’s why the hoteliers don’t like us: because they’re jealous.

They have to live in a country where the wine’s made from creosote, the women don’t shave their armpits and you need to bribe the plumber with something from Faberge to get him to mend your dishwasher.

And they can’t cope when they see us lot bouncing into the hotel with our sexually liberated girlfriends and our big strong pounds.

I know this to be true because anyone who’s ever been abroad knows full well that on any international league table of bad behaviour, we are a long, long way from the bottom.

Have you ever shared a hotel swimming pool with a South African? What they like to do, and you’ve got to remember they’re all fairly big-boned, is climb to the top of the diving board and jump on your head. And as you helplessly flop about with a broken spine, the rest of their equally big-boned family hoots with derision and orders another round of Castle.

Or what about the Swedes? You think we can drink. Ooh you ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen a party of Thors locusting their way through the swim-up bar. The only difference is that when we get drunk, we like to catch a venereal disease. When they get drunk, they like to commit suicide.

Apparently, the hoteliers like the Germans very much. They say they’re very quiet.

Well, yes, they would be. They have to stay sober and be in bed by nine because, as we know, they do like to get up early…

Interestingly, the Americans come second in the poll, behind the Japanese. They’re billed as polite, interested in new cultures and good at tipping. I agree, but sharing a restaurant with a party of nasal septics with their two-stroke vowel sounds is like sharing a restaurant with a Flymo. And they do have the most annoying habit of talking to their friends as though they are 600 yards apart.

At the other end of the scale we find the French. Apparently, they are the worst holidaymakers. The pits. Except for one thing. Stop carefully and think: have you ever seen a French person on a foreign holiday? Italy is full of Germans. Spain is full of Brits. Greece is full of dust and homosexuals. The Dutch are everywhere. The Swedes are all dead, and is that someone with a strimmer? Oh no, hang on. It’s a party of Americans coming up the hill.

But the French? They don’t seem to do foreign holidays and with good reason. Does God leave heaven every August and take a vacation in hell? No. Well, why would anyone go abroad if they live in France?

The fact of the matter is that the French are nowhere to be seen and that means – no arguing please – the Russians are the worst tourists in the world. Of course, they spent most of their childhood eating concrete and trying not to be tortured so who can blame them for exploding onto the world’s beaches in a tizzy of frills, Versace sunglasses and extraordinarily tight Speedos.

The only problem is that they all look so sinister with their pastry complexions and their special-forces tattoos. You get the impression when they look at you that they’re imagining what you would look like with no head.

A lout from Liverpool may vomit on you and that’s nasty. But a Russian would happily garnish your pizza with a dash of polonium. And that’s so much worse.

Sunday 27 May 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Save the planet, eat a vegan

Good news. It seems that your car and your fondness for sunken light bulbs in every alcove are not warming up the planet after all.

In fact, according to new research, power stations and transport produce lots of carbon dioxide, but in addition they also produce lots of aerosols that, in the short term at least, help keep the planet as cool as a deodorant model’s armpits.

So who has come up with this new theory? Some half-crazed nitwit with a motoring show to protect? George Bush? A bloke in the pub? No. In fact, it comes from an organisation called EarthSave, which is run and funded, so far as I can tell, by the usual array of free-range communists and fair-trade hippies.

The facts it produces, however, are intriguing. Methane, which pours from a cow’s bottom on an industrial scale every few minutes, is 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And as a result, farmed animals are doing more damage to the climate than all the world’s transport and power stations put together.

What’s more, demand for beef means more and more of the world’s forests are being chopped down, and more and more pressure is being put on our water supplies.

Plainly, then, EarthSave is encouraging us to go into the countryside at the first possible opportunity and lay waste to anything with more than one stomach. Maybe it wants me to shoot my donkeys. Happily, what it’s actually saying is that you can keep your car and your walk-in fridge, but you’ve got to stop eating meat.

In fact, you’ve got to stop eating all forms of animal products. No more milk. No more cheese. And if it can be proven that bees fart, then no more honey either. You’ve got to become a vegan.

Now, of course, if you don’t like the taste of meat, then it’s perfectly reasonable to become a vegetablist. It’s why people who don’t like, say, John Prescott become Conservatives. But becoming a vegan? Short of being paraded on the internet while wearing a fluffy pink tutu, I can think of nothing I’d like less.

Eating a plate of food that contains no animal product of any kind marks you down as a squirrel. Eating only vegetables is like deciding to talk using only consonants. You need vowels or you make no sense.

Of course, there are certain weeds I like very much. Cauliflower and leeks particularly. But these are an accompaniment to food, useful only for filling up the plate and absorbing the gravy. The idea of eating only a cauliflower, without even so much as a cheese sauce, fills me with dread.

There are wider implications too. Let us imagine that the world decided today to abandon its appetite for sausage rolls, joints of beef and meat-infused Mars bars.

What effect would this have on the countryside?

Where now you find fields full of grazing cows and trufliing pigs, there would be what exactly?

Hardcore vegetablists like to imagine that the land would be returned to the indigenous species, that you could go for a walk without a farmer shooting your dog, and that you’d see all manner of pretty flowers and lots of jolly new creatures. Wolves, for instance.

In fact, if animal farmers were driven away, the land would be divided up in two ways. Some would be given over to the growing of potatoes – the ugliest crop in Christendom – and the rest would be bought by rock stars. Either way, Janet Street-Porter and her ridiculous gaggle of ramblers in their noisy clothes and stupid hats would still get short shrift.

What’s more, there’d be no grassland because there’d be no animals to graze. And there’d be no woods either because without pheasants what’s the point? I’m sure EarthSave dreams of a land as pristine as nature intended but it’d be no such thing. Within about three weeks Britain would look like Saskatchewan.

So, plainly, the best thing we can do if we want to save the world, preserve the English countryside and keep on eating meat, is to work out a way that animals can be made to produce less methane.

Scientists in Germany are working on a pill that helps, but apparently this has a number of side effects. These are not itemised, but I can only assume that if you trap the gas inside the cow one of the drawbacks is that it might explode. Nasty.

And unnecessary. We all know that the activity of our bowels is governed by our diet. We know, for instance, that if we have an afternoon meeting with a bunch of top sommeliers in a small windowless room it’s best not to lunch on brussel sprouts and baked beans.

Recently, I spent eight days in a car with my co-host from Top Gear James May, who has a notoriously flatulent bottom. But because he was living on army rations – mashed-up Greenpeace leaflets to which you add water – the interior was always pine fresh and lemon zesty.

So if we know – and we do – that diet can be used to regulate the amount of methane coming out of the body, then surely it is not beyond the wit of man to change the diet of farmyard animals.

At the moment, largely, cows eat grass and silage, and as we’ve seen, this is melting the ice caps and killing us all. So they need a new foodstuff: something that is rich in iron, calcium and natural goodness.