If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  However, it seems he has been in trouble for spouting a lot of Greenpeace eco-babble instead of moving on to the next sea cucumber that can open tin cans with its hairstyle. People have been saying that it’s a Sunday night and, while they are sitting in front of the fire with a glass of sherry, they don’t want to be told by an old man that they should sell their Range Rover. And that using a BBC-funded show to get across his point of view is an abuse of power.

  I can see where they are coming from. I certainly don’t want to be told to sell my Range Rover because coral is so stupidly picky about what sort of temperature it likes the sea to be. If it heats up by so much as one degree, it squirts all its colour into the nearest current and dies. Well, diddums. If the sea’s too warm off Barbados, why doesn’t it come and live off Morecambe?

  When I was cold as a kid and would ask my dad to turn up the heating, he’d tell me to put on a jumper. And frankly, that’s what Sir David should be telling the coral to do.

  He was at it again a week later, showing us a whale swimming around with its dead calf and saying it may have died because its mother’s milk had been poisoned by plastic. That may have been the case, but scientists have been saying that he couldn’t possibly have known. It may have been shot by a fisherman, or died of boredom, or cancer.

  Yes, plastic is a problem in the sea. But, again, I don’t want to hear about it on a programme about pretty fishes. It’d be like Mary Berry popping up in the middle of a show about pastry to tell us that cargo ships should be fitted with hydrogen fuel cells.

  And, anyway, it’s an easy fix. I analysed all the plastic that washed up on the beach at my place in the Isle of Man recently and found that it’s mainly deposited by people who like milk chocolate Bounty bars and Flora spread. Tackle those two things and, hey presto, everything is tickety-boo. This is what Attenborough should have said: that poor people who eat spreads and milk chocolate are killing whales. But he didn’t. He said we are all to blame because we want easy, comfortable, disease-free lives.

  He’s been getting stick for that, and I understand why. Though at this point I should admit that I once concluded a TV programme in which I’d driven to the magnetic North Pole by saying there’s no such thing as global warming because I hadn’t fallen through the ice. But this wasn’t really abusing my powers. I was simply saying it to annoy the BBC.

  If you want to see the number-one abuser of his power in action, you should dig out a recent copy of Country Life magazine and have a look at what Prince Charles has to say about the British countryside. It’s so miserable it makes the average Philip Larkin poem look like a commercial for DFS.

  I was in the British countryside last weekend and it was so beautiful my knees kept buckling. The colours were spectacular, fieldfares danced about in the fruit trees, finches hopped hither and thither in the hedgerows and I saw a swarm – an actual swarm – of yellowhammers. I also saw some pretty partridges, which I shot and later ate.

  Somehow, though, when Prince Windsor looks at our green and pleasant land, he sees disease and pestilence. He sees withered oaks and fallen elms, and immigrant moths and beetles chomping their way through the woods, and he knows who’s to blame. You. And me.

  He says that when we go to the garden centre we don’t check to make sure the plant we are buying isn’t riddled with some foreign disease – and that because of this laziness on our part the country and the world will become a desert. I’m not quite sure how he’s worked this out, but he reckons trees cause rainfall. Maybe they do. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention but, whatever, without them we all die of thirst.

  I don’t doubt that, as Harvey Weinstein emptied his seed into a plant pot and Mr Spacey Invader did his thing, they thought that their power and fame would allow them to get away with it. But one day the little people reared up and said, ‘Actually, you know what, you bloody well can’t.’

  And that’s what Charles needs to remember. He needs to stick to opening cricket pavilions and stop scolding us for not recognizing Asian longhorn beetles or potato brown rot when we are buying shrubs at the garden centre. Because frankly, we have better things to do.

  26 November 2017

  Eat your heart out, Dyson – the Surrey space cadets are hoovering the galaxy

  Last week my stern words about Sir David’s eco-preaching on the fish programme went down badly with one reader, who wrote to say that Sir Richard is a national treasure and that I was just a smartarse. That made me laugh. But the truth is Sir David – as opposed to his brother, who has no opinion on the matter because he’s dead – is quite right to say we are dropping too much junk in the sea. We are. But it’s nowhere near as disturbing as the amount of junk we are dropping in space.

  When we watched the space shuttle take off, we saw its solid rocket boosters fall away a couple of minutes after launch and, if we thought anything at all, we assumed they’d burn up on re-entry. But they didn’t. They fell back into the sea, and then they were recovered, rinsed out and used again. So that’s all very lovely.

  The space shuttle, meanwhile, would drift about doing science until it was time to come home. And that’s lovely too. The idea that Johnny Astronaut was up there lobbing crisp packets and fag butts out of the window is preposterous. But, actually, he sort of was.

  Somewhere in the heavens is a hammer that someone dropped a while back. An actual hammer. And there are countless nuts and bolts as well. Today, the faecal matter of astronauts is bagged, compressed and brought back to Earth, but that wasn’t always the case. In the past it was chucked overboard to float around for decades in the big nothing. Urine too. One astronaut described a sunset pee dump as the most beautiful thing he’d seen.

  Over time, some of that crystallized pee crashed into the Mir space station, causing a fair bit of damage. And that’s the nub of the problem.

  A problem that’s getting bigger. In 2007 China destroyed one of its own satellites with a missile, and the mess – from both the satellite and the missile – is still up there somewhere. Then, two years later, a US communications satellite hit a Russian one, and all the flotsam and jetsam from that crash is still having to be monitored.

  It’s estimated that there are currently about 5,500 dead satellites and more than 20,000 bits of debris bigger than four inches across whizzing round the Earth, and you probably think this is no big deal because space is really huge and the chances of crashing into someone’s lost spanner are quite remote.

  Not so. One shuttle returned to Earth with a chipped window after hitting something we’d left behind. Another was actually holed. A European space agency satellite has a big dent in one of its solar panels caused when it hit a bit of dust.

  You may think a bit of dust is no big deal. But when it’s travelling at 17,500mph in one direction and you’re travelling at 17,500mph in the other – trust me on this – it’s going to sting. Dust? No one knows how much of that’s up there.

  What we do know is that soon we’ll get to the point where there’s a very real risk that every launch will fail because the spacecraft is bound to hit something. And when it does, and it shatters, you’re going to end up with more bits of debris. You’ve seen the film Gravity. Well, it’s like that.

  And then there’s the business of this rubbish coming back to Earth and landing on someone’s head. The chances are remote, of course, but it has happened. A Turkish woman was hit on the bonce once by a bit of heat shield that hadn’t burned up properly. If we don’t watch out, we’ll need to start walking around under steel umbrellas because it’ll be raining Neil Armstrong’s matter pretty much constantly.

  Naturally, the problem will be solved at some point by Norwich Union, which will refuse to insure space launches. So they won’t happen any more. Which will mean we have no internet, or satellite navigation, and that, if you’re twenty, will be like going back to the Dark Ages.

  We need the sea to be clean and shampoo-advert fresh so we can enjoy snorkelling when we are on holiday. But we need space to be clea
n too because, if it isn’t, everything we hold dear these days will not work any more.

  Happily, help is at hand from the Surrey Space Centre – no, me neither. But, whatever, it has built an orbital vacuum cleaner that will be launched next year and is designed to whizz about up there being Wall-E.

  Like everything made in a British shed these days, it doesn’t look very impressive – think twin-tub washing machine from 1964 – but the Borg’s spaceship was pretty cool and that wasn’t exactly sleek either. It’s called, imaginatively, the RemoveDEBRIS, and what it does is tow a net around, like a trawler, collecting rubbish. When it gets to a big bit, it uses a harpoon to spear it and reel it in. Then, when it’s full, it will deploy a sail and float back into the atmosphere, where it and everything it’s collected will be turned to ash.

  It sounds very simple, and I hope it works. It’ll be nice to think that, while the Russians and the Americans and the French are busy making a mess up there, a bunch of spacemen from Surrey will be hoovering it all up. Maybe that’s a metaphor for what Britain will become post Brexit: the world’s cleaning lady.

  If it doesn’t work, I see two possible solutions. First, stop employing clumsy astronauts. We really can’t have people up there who can drop a hammer and then not notice.

  Or introduce a one-way system. At present, satellites go in whichever direction the maker chooses, which means they can have head-on crashes.

  This is madness, so why not force them all to go the same way? Just a thought.

  3 December 2017

  The girls, the gambling, the gin – I’ve gone galloping mad for horse racing

  When you watch horse racing on the television you’re told by hieroglyphics on the screen and by the commentator that the action is coming from the 3.20 at Lingfield. But is it? Because Pontefract and Lingfield and Wetherby? Only a very small number, of very small people, would be able to tell the difference.

  I’ve thought for a long time that when colour television was invented a horse race was filmed and they just use the same footage over and over again. Because can you tell Graphic Decapitation from Telltale Skidmark? Of course not. Claiming that horses are all different is like saying ants have recognizable faces. They’re all just milk bottles. Identical.

  And there’s more. We are expected to believe that a television cameraman or cameraman woman spends years being an assistant. He or she humps tripods up and down hills, drives vans through the night and learns about all the latest breakthroughs in digital technology so that one day they can sit in the mist, on top of a Citroën, filming a sport being watched by only half a dozen red-nosed drunks in betting shops in the north.

  Think about it. Every single horse race is filmed, apparently. That means at least six sound recordists and six cameramen at four different courses, six days a week. If that were really happening, there would be no crews left for anyone else. David Attenborough would have had to film his nature programmes on a cameraphone.

  This Friday you will not be able to watch Fleetwood Town play Gillingham on the television, but you will – we are told – be able to watch the action from Uttoxeter and Wolverhampton. And that makes no sense. Because in horse racing there never is any action. It’s just meat running about. As a sporting spectacle, it’s even more dreary than Formula One.

  Of course, it works if you have some money on Womble Boy and it’s leading by a nose with a furlong to go. But if you are betting on a race in Wolverhampton, on a Friday evening, then you are a friendless drunk and you should get some help. What’s weird, though, is that horse racing does work extremely well if you watch it live.

  I went to Newbury the other day and had lunch in the royal box with various owners who were competing with one another to see who had the fastest pet.

  I’d like to say this was all rather tragic, but the truth is that I have a shoot and I’ve been known to just fire my gun repeatedly into the air so people who run neighbouring shoots think, ‘Clarkson’s having a better day than me so I’d better kill myself.’

  It’s all part of growing up and being a man and having an ego. Which is why, in horse racing, people will spend millions – lots of millions – on a horse with a fast dad. Just so they can have a faster pet than Sheikh Hakeem Makeem Dhakeem. Or Mr O’Reilly from Kildare.

  Outside the royal box, it was a scrum of tweed and red noses and people queuing for the cash machine. It was an alloy of hope and drink and fur. And at one point I was taken into the paddock so people could take my picture.

  After a little while, some horses were brought out and, somehow, we were expected to be able to tell which ones stood a chance and which ones were going to limp home last in the race after the one they’d started. They all looked exactly the same to me. So I picked one that was running at 8–1 – I always do that, even though it has never, ever worked – and went off to give Honest John from Liverpool some of my money. He took it gratefully and gave me some banter and a bit of paper, which I put in the bin because it would never be worth anything. And then the race began.

  There’s no getting round the fact that it’s all very brilliant. Fuelled by sloe gin and whisky and beer, people begin to make noises that rise in volume to become, in the final few moments, like the sound of 4 million startled geese. And then it’s done and Jeremy Kyle is dancing around because his pet has won and no one hears the vet shoot the 8–1 outsider that fell over at the first fence.

  All this noise and excitement and gunfire is infectious. And that’s before we get to the summertime events such as Royal Ascot or the Melbourne Cup in Australia, where women decide that, in order to watch a horse running along, they must not wear knickers and should fall over in the paddock every five minutes.

  I don’t know why they do this. I think it’s because they have it in their minds that horse racing is posh, which it is, of course. But what makes it posh is that you have the lords and the ladies and the groundsmen and the dry-stone wallers and none of the idiots in between. You and me? We are just there to make a noise and fill the tills.

  And it works. We go there, into the olden days, and we have no idea what’s going on. We place our bets for reasons that make no sense, which gives us something to cheer about when the race happens, and then we have an egg sandwich and some more sloe gin and then another girl falls over and, when it’s all finished, it’s cost us whatever we chose to spend and that, for an exciting day out, is not bad value.

  When we get back we don’t feel compelled to watch the highlights on television because the sport’s not important – and it wasn’t really televised anyway. No. It’s because we could spend a day dressing up and sounding like geese and having a drink with our friends. And there’s always a chance that you could go home with a wallet so full that it’s actually uncomfortable to sit on. This, I’m told, is the most wonderful feeling in the world, because winning £50 is better than earning £100.

  Thanks to tax, actually, it amounts to the same thing.

  17 December 2017

  I had fun with acids at school; now I want them kept under military guard

  I used to enjoy chemistry lessons at school because there were never-ending opportunities to cause explosions and ‘accidentally’ drop big lumps of sodium into a bucket of water. Plus, whenever a master noticed yellow nicotine stains on my fingers and accused me of smoking, I could claim I’d been handling potassium permanganate and the stains had come, in fact, from that.

  But by far the best way of enlivening the lessons would be to pour a cup full of sulphuric acid into one sink, wait a moment and then get a friend to pour a cup of nitric acid into his sink. And then all we had to do was contain our mirth for a few seconds until the next sink along exploded, causing the boy standing beside it to get some detention.

  My teachers would claim afterwards that I had learned absolutely nothing from my chemistry lessons, but this isn’t true. I learned how to sleep with my eyes open and that acid is extremely weird and should never ever be thrown into someone’s face.

&n
bsp; Today, though, children are not allowed to play with acid when they are at school. They are too busy being told to stay at home because it’s a bit chilly or too hot. So they have no idea about the havoc it can wreak, which means that in many parts of the country it’s considered an amusing game to squirt it on to the head of someone who was looking at you funny.

  Between 2012 and 2016 the number of acid attacks in Britain rose by 500 per cent. This is largely because of gang people who like to melt the arms off someone who’s stolen their phone or their moped. Or their girlfriend, if she decides that, on balance, she’d rather go out with an estate agent.

  The BBC is telling us that, contrary to what we thought, the acid problem in London isn’t caused by Asian immigrants doing so-called ‘honour’ crimes on girls who won’t marry them. Nobody thought it was, you halfwits.

  We know that sometimes the attacks are for fun. At the Notting Hill Carnival this year it was used to mark out territories. And last week a man was sentenced to twenty years in jail for spraying the dancefloor with acid at an east London club. There was no suggestion he’d targeted anyone in particular.

  Recently, in a shopping centre not far from the nightclub, gang members decided to have a water fight. That would have been quite a laugh if they really had used water. But they used acid. And that wasn’t a laugh at all, as six passers-by were caught up in the action.

  And now, as a result, London is the world capital of acid crime. A title it hasn’t held since Victorian times.

  More recently, acid-throwing has been popular in Asia, but governments in that neck of the woods came up with successful solutions. If you threw acid at someone in Pakistan and were caught, the authorities would tie you down and drip acid into your eyes. In Bangladesh, they now go one step further and kill you.