If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  I’m really not alone in this view. I took two bottles of Léoube to a friend’s dinner party the other night and before we’d even sat down it had all gone. No one there was drinking anything else. And yet here’s the strangest thing. Most restaurant wine lists have eight hundred pages of wine that’s red or white, and then a Post-it note on the back listing the two they have that are pink. British Airways doesn’t serve rosé at all. Not even in the lounge.

  I think that’s why it’s no longer the world’s favourite airline. Because it doesn’t serve the world’s favourite wine.

  29 October 2017

  Guy Fawkes was an amateur. You should have seen me and my friends blow up Hull

  I was once invited to spend Bonfire Night at a party near Hull. We were young back then – and poor – so everyone turned up with a party seven of Worthington E and a small box of Standard Fireworks. The sort that fizzes momentarily in a flowerbed and amuses no one at all.

  It was decided, therefore, that, rather than set them off individually, we would meld them together to create the mother of all Fireworks. The biggest rocket to be developed in Britain since Blue Streak. A bomb so big that it would make seismograph needles wobble as far away as Buenos Aires.

  The powder and the effects from each small firework were emptied on to the kitchen table; duct tape and a collection of cardboard boxes and tubes were found and shaped. A broom handle was sourced from beneath the host’s stairs. And eventually six burly men were summoned to carry the monster we had created out to the back garden.

  Everyone was invited outside to watch this thing strut its stuff in the crisp night sky. The blue touchpaper was lit and then … whoooooosh. Up it went. And then up some more. Soon it was out of sight. Moments passed. And then we waited a moment while some more moments slid slowly by. And then, after a long moment, someone suggested we should all go back inside, because, plainly, it hadn’t worked and it was too cold … And as everyone turned to do just that, Hull blew up.

  I’ve seen an Abrams M1A1 main battle tank unleash hell in a live-fire exercise, and I’ve worked with James Bond’s special-effects people. So I’ve experienced some fairly loud bangs, but nothing has compared to the explosion we created that night. Roof tiles were dislodged. Chimneys were bent. Windows were shattered. And for a moment, through the hole we’d punched in the atmosphere, we may have caught a glimpse of Guy Fawkes himself sitting up there in the heavens with a puzzled look on his face.

  The poor man must be constantly puzzled, because he and his mates were pretty useless. One wrote a letter to a parliamentarian, urging him to stay away from the Palace of Westminster on 5 November. This was passed to the authorities, which searched the cellars and found Guy guarding the gunpowder.

  His co-conspirators, meanwhile, had ridden north to start their Catholic rebellion, but they still had a fair bit of gunpowder with them and it caught fire, which meant some were smouldering gently when they were arrested.

  They probably thought things couldn’t get worse. But they did, because the men were stretched on the rack, hanged until nearly dead and then let down and made to watch as they were castrated. After that they were disembowelled and cut into four pieces and their heads were put on spikes.

  Fawkes was facing a similar fate but was lucky because he jumped, breaking his neck. So, while they still chopped him into quarters, he didn’t feel a thing.

  It can’t have been much fun, though, lying there, paralysed and ready to be cut up, knowing that your plot had failed and that the hated Protestants had won. He must have had a very real feeling that he’d be forgotten in a week … But no. To commemorate his failure, his effigy was burnt on 5 November for centuries. Then the Chinese firework corporations moved in, and now the date is marked by doctors having to work overtime to deal with burns victims.

  As legacies go, that’s fairly weird, but Christmas is weirder still. We gather to celebrate the possible birth date of someone who may or may not have lived by giving one another electronic goods. And then there’s Easter, when we stop work to celebrate the death of the man who may or may not have lived by eating eggs made from chocolate. I’m absolutely certain that if Jesus really did mooch about in the Middle East two thousand years ago, spreading his message of goodwill, and if he really did rise again to sit with God in the clouds, he’s going to be pretty pissed off to see the biggest beneficiaries of his endeavours are Nintendo and Cadbury.

  However, the weirdest legacy of all is what a few fancy-dress enthusiasts celebrated last weekend: Halloween.

  I thought it was some American thing, like Thanksgiving, when they all get together and eat turkey to thank the Native Americans for dying in such great numbers. But no. Halloween started on this side of the Pond, possibly in Scotland, where people would gather at the end of the harvest to give thanks.

  And yet somehow it’s become an excuse for young women to put on no clothes and go out after work on the pull. And for parents to send their children into the street to practise the art of extortion on frail old ladies.

  There’s a ghosts-and-ghouls element in the mix as well, and it’s hard to see what this has to do with Mrs McTavish and a bag of root vegetables. So I did a bit of checking, and it seems Celts celebrated Samhain, as they called it before the Christians came along and renamed it All-Hallows Eve, by communing with the dead. And the ghostly night in the graveyard was the afterparty to the rather nicer bring-and-buy festival at the village hall.

  This obviously excited America’s marketing departments, which said, ‘Yes, we have a small gap here between the end of the summer holiday and Thanksgiving. Let’s slot in a new thing where people can paint their faces with fake blood and go out vandalizing, and we can sell them plastic turnips and make a film about a man who won’t die.

  ‘And then let’s export it to Englandland, so they can have two weekends on the trot when no one gets any bloody sleep.’

  5 November 2017

  Injured at school, the Famous Five go in search of a no-win no-fee lawyer

  The Famous Five enthusiast who is now running Ofsted announced last week that children should be encouraged to run about until they are exhausted and explore caves, even if there’s a chance that they’ll be captured by smugglers and tied up.

  Amanda Spielman said nursery schools that do not allow kids to be tied up by burly men in caves could actually be harming children’s development and has called for climbing frames not to be removed from playgrounds so that they can understand what it feels like to break an arm.

  Because we are broadly the same age, I know exactly what she means. When I was small I was encouraged on icy mornings to go into my nursery school’s playground and do slides, even though I couldn’t and always fell over. I spent hours climbing on precariously balanced haystacks, stealing rhubarb from the local nuns and playing Hide and Seek in various bits of 1960s farm equipment. The teachers would look on and squeal with delight as blood spouted from our severed arteries, and you could barely hear the screams of pain because of all the breaking bones.

  Like all old people, I can sit here now saying it never did me any harm and rolling my eyes at the news that the bestselling toy this Christmas is likely to be a £35 drone that can be flown from the comfort of your sofa. But only if there’s experienced adult supervision, because the blades could cause light bruising. Tragic.

  Certainly, if Enid Blyton were to write a Famous Five book today, there’d be no ginger beer because Red Bull is nicer, no Uncle Quentin because he’d be in jail for child abuse and no smugglers because, obviously, that would be racist in some way. The kids would just sit around smoking weed until one day Timmy made George pregnant. No, hang on. Timmy was the dog. I meant Julian.

  I used to encourage my children to play in the fields when they were young, but they looked at me as though I might be mad. They simply couldn’t see how a field could possibly compete with Call of Duty, and I fear they may have had a point.

  I’d wail about how we’d moved out of London so they co
uld get rosy cheeks and make dens in all the fresh air and they’d look wistfully at the wi-fi router, wondering if any of the lights would ever turn as green as they’d been in Battersea.

  So I wonder. If nursery schools were to follow Mrs Spielman’s advice and keep climbing frames and all those things that used to fill our childhood with pain and misery, how much would they be used? How would you get a child to stop Snapchatting their mates and get on a seesaw? I’m not sure you could.

  Or should. Because let’s just paint a picture of how things would turn out. Little Johnnie would have his telephone confiscated, which in itself is bound to contravene some kind of human right, and then he’d be forced to play on the climbing frame. And because he’s fat, he’s going to fall off and break his wrist.

  Now, in the past, the parents would have taken the child to hospital, they would have been strapped up and that would have been that. But not any more. Today the parents would take him straight to a lawyer, who would explain that the enormous orb of fat and tears would have become a Wimbledon champion were it not for the school’s insistence that he play on a climbing frame under the supervision of someone who that morning had arrived in Britain on the underside of a Eurostar train.

  And so, yes, he would gladly take the case on a no-win no-fee basis. The parents will hug him and sob and express their gratitude, not realizing that there is literally no chance in hell he will lose and that when he wins he will take about all the money that the court awards. Which will be a lot.

  The school will have known the lawyer’s letter was on its way because the fat kid’s father will have said as he picked up his blubbing, blubbery son that he’d sue it for every penny it had, so it will have launched an investigation. Translators will have been found for the woman in charge of the playground that day, and counsellors found for the children who heard the fat boy’s wrist snap. The headmistress, meanwhile, will be outside giving her fortieth interview of the day to a reporter whose initial soppiness will have turned into mock-incredulity: ‘Are you seriously suggesting you didn’t know that a climbing frame would be …’ and so on.

  Eventually, after the head has been sacked and the teaching assistant deported and the school closed down, the case will reach court, where the lawyer will deploy yet more mock-incredulity, wondering out loud and with a lot of pomposity how on earth a school could possibly have been so reckless as to install a death trap in its playground. And having heard from a ‘tennis coach’ that the fat kid could have beaten Roger Federer, the court will award the parents about eleventy million pounds. Which will have to be sorted by the taxpayer.

  So I’m afraid Mrs Spielman is fighting a war on all fronts here. Children don’t want climbing frames because they prefer Snapchat, and schools don’t want climbing frames because they know that, sooner or later, no matter how many precautions they take, they’ll get sued.

  So if Mrs Spielman really wants kids to get off their fat arses and party like it’s 1961, she’s going to have to address the root cause of all the safety and health nonsense that’s keeping them glued to their screens.

  And the only way of doing that is by explaining to the nation’s no-win no-fee lawyers that, if they lose, they’ll be taken to the nearest zoo and fed to the lions.

  2 November 2017

  Sorry, kids, but Britain will be the next Vietnam, with you as the cheap labour

  When you go out these days you are picked up by an Uber driver who’s Syrian and taken to the restaurant, where a pretty young Latvian woman shows you to your table and introduces you to your French waiter, who explains what specials the Italian chef has prepared.

  On the way home you buy some milk from a Pakistani shopkeeper and then find the Estonian babysitter has broken the lavatory, so you call the Polish plumber and, as you sit waiting for him to arrive, you find yourself wondering when you last spoke in normal, non-enunciated English with anyone you encountered in your workaday life.

  The man who runs my off-licence is French, my cleaning lady is from Estonia, the traffic warden with whom I have a daily row is Nigerian, the man at the garage is Indian, the chap who mends my wi-fi is Armenian … I cannot remember the last time I spoke to someone in a London shop or restaurant where I didn’t have to speak slowly and clearly, like it’s 1970 and I’ve just gone abroad for the first time.

  I should point out that I don’t really care about any of this. Why should I be the slightest bit bothered about what language the girl at the supermarket checkout uses when she gets home? Just so long as she’s quick at her job and pays her taxes, it’s irrelevant.

  What’s interesting, however, is that the vast majority of people who live in Britain are actually white British. There are regional differences, of course – it’s less than half in London and more than 99 per cent in the Lake District or northern Norfolk – but the fact is that the last time anyone counted, there were more than 51 million white British people in the UK, and I have a question. What the bloody hell are they all doing with themselves?

  We are told by the government that, despite Theresa May’s best efforts to make everything worse, there are now more people working than at any time in the country’s history. Well, I’m sorry, but that’s about as believable as its claims that Brexit is going very well and the Cabinet is united on all fronts.

  Yes, my accountant is white British and so, despite a French-sounding name, is my lawyer. But not everyone can be a lawyer or an accountant. Not everyone has that sort of mind. Some are fit only to be cobblers, but there’s no such thing any more. We don’t mend shoes because we don’t keep them long enough to break: they get thrown out when they go out of fashion, which is every three months.

  We don’t mend anything, so you can no longer earn a living with a television-repair shop or an under-the-arches garage. Heavy industry used to soak up the masses but, by and large, that’s gone, as are all the mines. And who works on the land? Well, I have quite a big farm and it’s all looked after by one man, except at harvest time, when he gets a mate to help out.

  The armed forces? Hmmm. I listened to a senior officer on the radio last week and, from what I could tell, the Royal Navy today has a smaller, less powerful fleet than the row-boat hire company on the Serpentine in Hyde Park.

  It’s not even possible these days, really, to be a shop assistant because in the first half of this year fourteen high-street stores closed down every day. Because why go to town when it can come to you?

  Hairstyling will survive, naturally, because only James May has worked out how this can be done remotely – and the results are not successful. But this line of work is only for those who are too dim even to get a job in a nail salon.

  I did actually encounter a young white British person in a working environment recently. I was staying in a hotel in Yorkshire, he was working as a waiter and he was completely useless.

  He wore his supposedly smart black trousers in the manner of a Los Angeles remand prisoner, with his underpants sticking out over the top of the belt line, and he leaned on everything when he wasn’t doing anything, which so far as I could tell was all the time.

  When he did finally arrive to take my order he said in a completely flat, nasally way, ‘Do you want a cooked breakfast or owt like that?’ Since I couldn’t think of anything that was ‘like’ a cooked breakfast that wasn’t a cooked breakfast, I had one of those.

  And off he went to lean on a wall while the chef made it. I suspect he’d only managed to get the job because his mum and dad knew the hotel’s owner. And secretly, I suspect, she would rather have employed a Hungarian.

  I look at my friends’ kids who are now leaving university and, while many have used nepotism to get a job, the job in question is invariably an internship. Which means they are working twelve hours a day for no money and can only exist on their parents’ backs.

  A lot of them, however, have decided that they don’t want to work for other people, for no money, and have started blogs, which means they are now working for themselves, for
no money. I feel for that generation, I really do, because it is becoming used to this state of affairs.

  And think about it. When Britain has left the EU and we can no longer offer the bosses of foreign manufacturing companies a nice place to live and lots of golf courses, as well as access to the single market, we will have only one fiscal way of attracting investment: cheap labour. We will become the next Vietnam.

  Your kids, then? They’re at university now, studying hard for a 2:1 in archaeology. But if they want a job that pays money down the line, their only option will be in a factory, putting the laces in training shoes for a gigantic Chinese corporation.

  19 November 2017

  Stick to pretty fish, Sir David Attenborough, and stop blubbing about dead whales

  We have learned in recent weeks that people in a position of power should never use that power to influence their underlings. Many people have been caught up in this sea change and the latest, tragically, is none other than Sir David Attenborough.

  I am a huge fan of his new fish programme and I’m in awe of the people who make it. They sailed for four thousand miles to film some grouper fish – which once a year spawn wildly before being eaten by sharks – and they missed the moment. So the next year they sailed all the way back to try again. That sort of devotion to the cause is almost beyond comprehension in today’s televisual world of orange and pink, that’ll-do, bish, bash, bosh.

  Then there’s Sir David himself, a towering colossus, a giant among naturists. Or is it naturalists? I can never remember. But, whatever, his enthusiasm and passion for the fish, no matter how puny or how stupid they look, leaves me begging for more each week. And I salute him as a broadcasting god because, if it were me behind the mic, I’d be tempted once in a while to say, ‘God almighty, that’s an ugly f*****.’