If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  And nor does the German language cater for ‘striking junior doctor’ or ‘fly-tipping’ or ‘lying police officer’ or ‘the football ground failed to meet safety standards’.

  Nor would you be able to say: ‘It seems that when he was a young man at university, our prime minister went to a party and placed his gentleman sausage into the mouth of a dead pig. So now he must resign in shame.’

  Because when it comes to this sort of thing, the Germans are a lot more tolerant …

  A couple of years ago, someone posted photographs on the internet that appear to show a younger Angela Merkel enjoying a naturist holiday with a couple of female friends. And nothing happened. There were no strenuous denials from her office. No efforts were made to take them down. Because in Germany everyone knows that they are either fake, in which case, so what? Or they’re real, in which case people now know their chancellor – unlike her incongruous Barbie-doll double – once sported a 1970s welcome mat between her legs and a pair of excellent breasts. And again, so what?

  In the past I’ve mocked German lavatories, which come with a shelf to catch your stool and a supply of lollipop sticks that enable you to examine it for defects before flushing it away. But actually, it’s simply an early-warning system for colon cancer, and what’s wrong with that?

  It’s a question that cropped up time and again as my week in Bavaria rolled by. We laugh at the Germans, but why? Because it’s nothing more than a country that works.

  You don’t queue for security at the airports. You don’t spend half an hour in your hotel room trying to turn out all the lights. The hot water arrives instantly. So does your train. And shopkeepers don’t waste your morning with idiotic small talk. That’s why I’d put them in charge of a new, slimmer EU. The English would then do the banking and the jokes, the Dutch would organize the parties and the Danes would make the furniture.

  And think how good the football team would be, especially when it came down to penalty shootouts.

  1 May 2016

  Reception? Help, I need a manual on turning the light off

  On average I spend two or three nights a week in hotels, and until last weekend I hadn’t found one that wasn’t annoying in some way, or terrible.

  The worst, in the tea region of north-western Uganda, was very terrible. The bedlinen had plainly not been washed since Idi Amin went west, so I decided to discard it and sleep on the mattress. Which, when I removed the sheet, turned out to be the most revolting thing in the world. I shan’t spoil your breakfast by describing the nature or hue of the unpleasant stains. I’ll just say that I haven’t retched quite so violently apart from the time when I was in China and I saw half a dog.

  Then there was a hotel in Bolivia. I was woken up at 6 a.m. by one of the cleaners, who had come into my room without knocking. ‘Buenos dias,’ he said as he shuffled past my bed on his way to the bathroom. Where he enjoyed a noisy poo before shuffling back out of my room with nothing more than a mumbled ‘gracias’.

  The Thief hotel in Oslo was very different from this. It had a manager of unrivalled professionalism and was equipped with all the things you’d expect in a country where every child’s state-sponsored micro-scooter has Swarovski crystals in its wheel hubs. My room was fabulous. It even had a fire.

  And if I’d been moving in for a couple of years, I’d have been able to work out how all the features could be operated. But I was there for only a short time, and by the time I got to my room at night I was usually a bit too drunk to fathom out all the buttons, which meant I had to try to sleep with some of the lights on and the fire still blazing and the television still playing its ‘Mr Cluckson, welcome’ muzak.

  This is my main beef with hotels. In countries with a smooth flow of electricity and no beheadings, they are all far too complicated. The check-in procedure is too lengthy and, after you’ve walked six miles to your room, you find the electronic key you’ve been given doesn’t work, so you have to trudge back to reception, with your bags, to check in again. And then when you finally get to your room, it’s like finding yourself at the controls of a Boeing jet liner and it’s your job to land it. You just sit there thinking, ‘But I don’t know how any of this stuff works.’

  Take the shower as a prime example. You can see what goes through the mind of the management when it is choosing an attachment and the controls. ‘We are a good hotel and we must reflect that with a system that offers many jets and a sophisticated temperature-setting device.’

  What this invariably means is that you turn it on and immediately get a jet of ice-cold water in your face. You know that you must turn the temperature up a bit, but the controls are located behind the jet of cold water, which, by the time you’ve found your spectacles to see which knob does what, has become hotter than molten lava. And your specs have steamed up and you’re blind.

  Until last weekend the only hotel I had ever encountered with a decent shower was in Red Deer, in Alberta. That’s because there were so many holes in the ceiling I could just stand underneath one of them and wash my hair there. Although I almost certainly washed it in mouthwash because I was unable to read the microdot labelling used on miniature hotel bathroom products.

  However, operating a hotel bathroom is nothing compared with the problems you encounter when you try to turn out the lights. There will come a point when you think you’ve cracked it. You’ve unplugged the lamp by the chair, drunkenly tripped over your suitcase, resorted to smashing the table lamp because it appeared to have no switch at all and then crawled back between the sheets thinking that you had only the bedside lamp to go.

  But no. You’ve forgotten the wardrobe light, haven’t you? And by the time you’ve figured that one out, dawn is breaking and you discover to your horror that the electric curtains that took four hours to close have been made from tracing paper.

  Some hotels helpfully provide one big switch by the bed that turns everything off. Including power to all the electricity sockets. Which means that when you wake up in the morning your phone hasn’t charged.

  It has always made me wonder: what do people actually learn on hotel-management courses? Wear a tie. Stand up straight. And make sure the porn isn’t identified on the bill. I’m sure all this is very important. But do they learn that there’s no point providing guests with a television remote control if there are no instructions on how to use it?

  All of which brings me to last weekend. Everyone in the country, it seemed, was going to a wedding in Winchester, which meant that every room in the city was booked. Apart from one at a hotel called The Winchester.

  I arrived and my shoulders sagged. There was a wedding here too. The sort where all the men turn up in patterned satin waistcoats. Or a kilt, for no reason. The carpets were hideous, and the wallpaper looked as though it had been chosen from Osborne & Little’s Liverpool Lottery Winner collection.

  But the check-in procedure took four seconds, the electronic key worked – that’s a first – and the mattress in the room was comfortable. What’s more, there were instructions in the bathroom for the extremely simple shower controls, there were light switches by the bed that turned the lights off, the curtains were thick enough to stop shrapnel and, joy of joys, there was no temperature in the room. It wasn’t warm and it wasn’t chilly. That’s another first.

  I do not know who manages this hotel, but if you are running the Carlton in Cannes or London’s Dorchester you should call them immediately and offer them a job.

  15 May 2016

  Sex is running riot on TV – and I fear Countdown’s next

  A new period drama started on the television and, while I didn’t watch it, I have seen all the coverage about how it was full of grunting Frenchmen playing Hide the Sausage and a pretty woman wandering about dreamily in a set of wet net curtains.

  This seems to have annoyed large numbers of tweedy people who think that sex is a chore. They dismiss claims that it’s natural by saying, ‘So is defecating and menstruating, and we don’t want to see that on t
he television either.’

  Or do we? When I was growing up in the 1970s the BBC used to screen something called Play for Today in which there was some talking followed by a huge amount of sweaty sex. Then there was Bouquet of Barbed Wire, in which Susan Penhaligon found a variety of different reasons each week to remove her shirt. And on it went. Sex and nudity were so commonplace that I wouldn’t have been surprised if Valerie Singleton had turned up on Blue Peter in a peephole bra. And nothing else.

  At the cinema, things were even more free and easy. People queued round the block to see Emmanuelle and I wasn’t even mildly shocked in Young Winston when a topless woman suddenly appeared in shot for absolutely no reason at all.

  Nor did I bat an eyelid when, in the middle of Battle of Britain, Susannah York decided to slip out of her air force uniform for a moment and wander about in her stockings and suspenders.

  In every bus stop and every lay-by, there was invariably a large collection of mildly used pornographic magazines, and at the theatre, all the girls had their 1970s welcome mats on display all the time. The first time I saw Glenda Jackson wearing clothes, I was genuinely amazed. Helen Mirren too.

  But then, one day, it all just stopped. We had Dallas and Dynasty and EastEnders and there wasn’t even a whiff of rumpy-pumpy in any of them. We got so used so quickly to actors and actresses wearing clothes that we all ran around in a tizzy during Baywatch because Pamela Anderson nearly wasn’t.

  Paul Raymond was driven out of Soho, along with all the shops where you could buy a smutty VHS. And at the newspaper shop the Daily Mail decided that all nipples were revolting and must therefore be pixellated.

  What happened is plain for all to see. Television audiences began to decline. Newspaper circulation figures fell off a cliff. Nuts shut. Theatres began to close. And all the while, sex on the internet was becoming more and more popular. I read the other day that one of the most visited sites in the world right now is Pornhub. That’s why no one is going out to play, because they’re all at home, playing with themselves.

  Plainly, television executives have noticed this, which is why, all of a sudden, the nipple and the lady garden are back with a vengeance. We have Game of Thrones, which is just rampant candlelit lesbianism interspersed with some light murder. And Orange Is the New Black is much the same, only with different lighting. Ray Donovan is a favourite of mine and the second series opened with a lengthy sex scene, just to make sure fans stayed hooked.

  House of Cards saw a threesome involving the president and the first lady. Breaking Bad had public masturbation. Transparent took it even further and, as a result, television is once again keeping people glued to the screens.

  The only way mainstream television can keep up with this festival of indecency is to join in, which explains why the BBC drama Versailles was so full of couples making the two-headed beast. There will be more of this kind of thing, I can assure you. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Rachel Riley doesn’t do Countdown in the altogether fairly soon. Or is that just me?

  The big question, however, is this: should we be alarmed? Is the rise and rise of sex on television a bad thing? Well, you may be surprised to find that, actually, I think it could be …

  I’m not the sort of person who gets hot and bothered by the glimpse of an ankle and I have absolutely no problem with the sort of sex you saw in Versailles or even the House of Cards Kevin Spacey threesome. It’s a bit awkward if you’re watching with your kids, but these days we’re told before any show starts how much swearing and hitting and flashing lights there will be, so no one can claim they were surprised by the sudden appearance of some breasts.

  However, television is perhaps more competitive now than it has ever been. Which means that soon, normal sex won’t be considered enough of a pull. So it’ll have to become abnormal. And where will that end?

  There’s no point relying on censorship because that’s impossible these days. It’ll be governed only by public taste and decency, and that’s a worry because, generally speaking, the public doesn’t have much of that. Hear at the office water cooler that some beautiful young starlet is to be seen in the latest box set making love to a snake, and people will find an excuse to go home early for a gawp. Which means the next beautiful young starlet will be forced to make love to a goat, and so on.

  We’ve seen this happen with violence. James Bond used to get by with a small pistol and a rudimentary knowledge of karate. Whereas now he gets tied to a chair naked and has his privates mashed to a pulp with a knotted rope.

  In video games the action used to be cartoonish but players now are invited to stroll through an airport, armed to the teeth and shoot realistic-looking innocents. And that’s the sort of thing that encourages fools to hop on a plane to Syria to try it out for real.

  That’s what will happen with sex. People will try out things they’ve seen on the screen, and that’s a worry. Especially if you are a goat.

  5 June 2016

  At last, a folly to love from the EU do-gooders

  In 2006 a Baltic mayor with an unpronounceable name helped persuade the EU to reward cities that have shown commitment to the ecological cause by creating the Green Capital Award. Each year the winner would be given a lump of money to further its clean-living endeavours with exciting new projects involving leaves and sunshine and ethnically diverse people smiling and holding hands. It all sounds too revolting for words.

  But inevitably it caught on, and in 2015 Bristol became the first place in the UK to win the £7 million award. By the time the council had chipped in, the city’s lunatics suddenly had access to more than £12 million that they could spend on all sorts of harebrained ideas and projects.

  Immediately they decided to wire up a beech tree with a sound-and-light system that would be activated by falling nuts. I’m not sure I follow the logic of this idea because either the tree would be far away from people’s houses, in which case no one would ever see the sound-and-light show. Or it would be in a residential area, in which case everyone would get a full-on Jean-Michel Jarre experience every time the tree decided to shed a bit of its fruit.

  Neither option seems terribly sensible, but it was all academic in the end because it turns out that beech trees drop their nuts every two years. And 2015, for the tree selected for the sound-and-light show, was a year off. So that was £37,000 of our money up the Swanee.

  And I’m afraid the lunacy didn’t stop there: £49,000 went on a solar-powered hot-air balloon, £3,800 was spent on pies for guests at the launch party and Sir Fiennes trousered five grand for turning up to tell everyone the Poles aren’t as cold as they used to be. They even gave Aardman Animations £18,000 for the right to use something called ‘Shaun the Sheep’ in promotional material.

  And they contributed towards a £49,200 system that shrouded one of the city’s foot bridges in mist. Who thought that would be a good idea? ‘I know. Let’s drench everyone when they’re walking to work.’ The only reason they didn’t come up with an exhibition on slavery to make people in the city feel guilty is that such a thing already exists. Of course it does.

  However, they did make a video showing lots of volunteers doing good works. And we were told that a thousand children visited an exhibition on sustainability. Yes. On school trips. But they don’t count because the children had no say in the matter.

  As I watched them playing with the interactive displays, their faces etched with an urgent need to slip outside for a cigarette, and maybe a snog, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was just like the Millennium Dome. A power station for turning money into absolutely nothing at all. It was, I reckoned, exactly the sort of EU-inspired nonsense that will cause millions to vote ‘leave’ on 23 June.

  However, there is one legacy I reckon makes the whole project worthwhile. It’s an enormous pair of wicker whales that appear to be half submerged in a field. You can see only the head of one and the tail of the other and it’s brilliant. Provided the whole thing isn’t burned to a crisp by vandals,
which is a very real possibility, it will live on for many years, bringing joy to people’s lives.

  And therein lies the problem with all the criticism of Bristol’s year as Europe’s Green Capital. Yes, a lot of money was pissed away by idiots and communists who hate commercialism and shampoo and anything that makes things better and more comfortable. But the city did end up with wicker whales. And in the future it’ll be grateful for them.

  Today no one is building stuff for the sake of it. They daren’t. Because they know that someone will pipe up and say, ‘Do you know how many incubators the NHS could have bought for what you’ve spent?’ This saddens me.

  Every weekend people flock to Broadway Tower in the Cotswolds and stand in its shadow, oohing and ahhing and marvelling at its splendour. Many wonder why it was built, and the answer is simple. It was built by a rich woman who wanted to find out whether it could be seen from her house twenty-two miles away.

  Britain and France are littered with other examples of this madness. We call them follies and we love them. There are castles that were built to look as though they’d fallen down hundreds of years previously, and Gothic temples and pyramids and rocks upended by Druids in Wiltshire, and in South Yorkshire a Tuscan pillar that was built by someone to celebrate the fact his best mate had got off a court-martial. Nobody said when it was finished, ‘Yeah, and how many incubators would that have bought?’ Mostly people wrote to its creator to thank him for the work.

  I have thought often about mounting a replica Spitfire on a plinth on my farm, but I know that, if I do, the planners will tell me to take it down and the Daily Mail will say that I should have spent the money on something more productive and in the end it won’t have been worth all the heartache.

  That’s why I’m in favour of ideas such as this EU Green Capital malarkey. Of course, because it’s an eco-thing, it attracts madmen and unwashed women who will waste most of the money they’re given, but occasionally they’ll come up with something wonderful. Such as the wicker whales.