And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson

by Jeremy Clarkson

  However, what if the deal were to work the other way around? Instead of the army sponsoring commercial products, why not get the makers of those products to sponsor the army?

  Everyone looks up when an Apache gunship heaves into view, so why not sell advertising space along its flanks? Obviously, in times of war you’d have to cover up the Pepsi logos because they’re a bit bright, but in peacetime, why not?

  All the forces could join in. We could have easy-Destroyers and Lastminute.com transport planes. Marlboro, I’m sure, would cough up for the already Red Arrows, and local firms could get in on the act, too, sponsoring individual soldiers. Sergeant Brian Griffiths is brought to you by Cartwright & Jones – family butchers since 1897.

  It’s all very well saying this is a ludicrous plan, but what would you rather have? HMS Persil or no warship at all? Because soon that might very well be the choice we face. And let’s not trot out the tired old argument that sponsorship would undermine the dignity of the most successful armed forces in the whole of human history.

  Where’s the dignity in being allowed to fire only 10 live rounds a year? Where’s the dignity in not being able to afford to take the ships out to sea? And running them on one engine when they do? Where’s the dignity in flying a fighter that has no gun because the MoD can’t afford one? We keep being told that soldiers in Iraq use their own mobile phones because the army’s radio equipment can’t even pick up Terry Wogan, and I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound very dignified either.

  I’m not suggesting that a soldier should be made to wade into battle looking like a Formula One racing driver, but there is a happy medium. I’m thinking, as a guide, of the discreet but effective logos allowed at Wimbledon; a little patch on the epaulette that lets the watching TV cameras know that the wearer drives an Audi.

  Sunday 19 September 2004

  Go to school, see the world

  Every morning, it seems, I open the papers to be confronted with a photograph of yet another bronzed gap-year student ‘with the world at her feet’ who’s been murdered while trekking through some fleapit on the wrong side of the equator.

  If I were the parent of teenage children today, I’d advise them to stay home in their year off and experiment with heroin instead. It’s a lot safer.

  Happily, my children are far too young to be stabbed in the Australian outback and, even more happily, by the time they are old enough they will have been on so many exotic school trips that the world’s wildernesses are unlikely to hold much appeal. ‘Oh, not the Kalahari again. I did that in Year 2.’

  The trips run by my school, back in the 1970s, weren’t remotely exotic. Once we were taken to Matlock Bath with a Penguin biscuit, but this was an exception.

  Mostly, they’d load us on to the school minibus, which would then be driven by a certifiable lunatic to the Peak District, where we’d be made to walk five miles through a peat bog to look at a millstone grit outcrop.

  ‘In geology,’ the psychopath would bark, ‘this is a series of sandstones, grits and conglomerates, resting directly on the carboniferous limestone…’

  ‘Hmm,’ we’d all think, ‘but is it big enough to hide behind while we have a fag?’

  Then you had the Combined Cadet Force, which was public school code for genocide.

  Large numbers of boys were bussed in eighth-hand army lorries to the Yorkshire Dales, where we were told to leap to our deaths from cliffs, or walk around with millstone grit outcrops on our backs until we collapsed from heat exhaustion.

  Anyone who did actually die was given detention.

  Today, things seem rather different. My kids are only at prep school, and already they’re talking about whether they want to go bear-baiting in Alaska or skiing in the Urals. Or maybe both. ‘Oh please, Dad. Aramoctavethia and Phoebocia are going, so why can’t I?’

  Well, one of the reasons is that parents budget for the school fees without realising that, in fact, we’ll need half as much again for Icelandic windcheaters, horse rental in Argentina and a Unimog for the South Pole. Seriously, by the time my eldest leaves for ‘big school’ she’s likely to have more Air Miles than Henry Kissinger.

  And big school, of course, is much, much worse. School magazines in the olden days – i.e. the 1980s – used to show photographs of well-scrubbed boys and girls at their desks, learning algebra. Now, school magazines look like brochures for Kuoni.

  They’re full of boys and girls building box girder bridges in South Africa and sensitive radio telescopes in the jungles of Costa Rica. I’m not sure this is a good idea, because if a child has tackled the Zambezi, rescued 14 Colombian tribes from McDonald’s and colonised Mars by the time they’re 18, what’s left?

  Mostly, when I was young, we went on holiday to Cornwall, although, once, I seem to remember spending a fortnight in the shadow of a gasworks just outside Jedburgh.

  So when I reached adulthood I went berserk. The stamps in my passport became so prolific that I needed another, and because that was always away having visas stapled in place, I had to get a third. In the space of 10 years, I visited more than 80 countries and spent at least one night in each of the US States. I made Hemingway look like an agoraphobic and Alan Whicker like a slugabed.

  As soon as the door to China was just slightly ajar I was bounding through the Forbidden City with my Nikon, and it was the same story in Vietnam, and Cuba. I went to Norway once, simply because it was the only European country I hadn’t visited, and I vacuumed up the Mediterranean islands like a dog vacuums up the crumbs from a five-year-old’s birthday party.

  Eventually, though, the ants in my pants settled down and I realised that, while the world can offer many beautiful and wondrous experiences, home is where your friends are. And no experience is ever quite as rewarding as being in the gooey, firelit bosom of your family.

  As a result I now sigh and mooch around with shoulders like a bent coathanger if I even have to go to Oxford; but that’s fine. I’m 44 and that’s a sensible age to pack away the pith helmet and pick up the secateurs for a spot of light gardening.

  But 18?

  I have a horrible feeling that my kids are going to leave school not prepared for the world but sick of it.

  Obviously they will be far too tired for any further education, which doesn’t matter because by then universities will be allowed to take only working-class children. That means there will be no gap year either, and that means they won’t be stabbed in Sudan.

  Instead, they’ll come home from their A-levels having done much too much, much too young. This will mean they’ll spend the next 10 years of their lives eating crisps and drinking beer while shooting aliens on the PlayStation.

  Sunday 26 September 2004

  Space virgins need chutes

  If someone were to build a passenger-carrying rocket for joyrides into space, would you go? Of course you would, unless you’re a farmyard animal or A. A. Timid Trousers Gill.

  So let me put it another way. If Richard Branson were to build a passenger-carrying rocket for joyrides into space, would you go? Hmm.

  In the ’90s, barely a week went by when we weren’t treated to the unedifying spectacle of Branson’s rat-like little face being winched, at our expense, from some vast expanse of ocean. His speedboats kept running into lumps of wood, and his balloons were always too heavy for sustained flight. ‘Shave off the face fungus, Beardy. That’d lighten things up,’ I used to shout as his capsule plummeted into the oggin yet again.

  Secretly, though, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for His Richardness.

  Despite his Virgin Cola, which is an affront to the sensibilities of any twenty-first-century being, I like the way he’s made it in business without a pinstripe suit or an obvious predilection for golf and freemasonry. And despite the often disastrous attempts to go across the Pacific on a small horse, or up Everest in a washing machine, I do like the way he kept on trying.

  There are those who say he’s a publicity-hungry monster but, you know, there are easier
ways of getting your phizog in the papers than hurtling across the Atlantic at 50 knots. He could have chosen to sit in a jungle while two goblins from up north pour maggots into his ears, for instance. So let’s give the poor bloke a break and look more carefully at this space programme of his.

  He says that within three years he’ll be in a position to offer seats on a spaceship at something like £150,000 a pop. Apparently it’ll be no more risky than early commercial jet flight, which, if you remember the Comet, means it’ll be extremely dangerous and very many rich people will be killed.

  But once we’ve buried what’s left of Elton John and Bill Gates, the economies of scale will kick in, and soon poor people will be able to die in the freezing radioactive wasteland of space, too. The idea of putting ordinary punters into space was kick-started by the $10 million Ansari X prize for the first private venture that could put a passenger-carrying craft 62 miles above the Earth, twice, within two weeks.

  Because we’ve all grown up with Nasa absorbing more money than the Third World, the notion of any individual doing space travel on the cheap seemed as preposterous as DIY brain surgery. But back in June, a machine called SpaceShipOne, funded in part by one of Microsoft’s founders, managed to break the 100-kilometre boundary.

  It was an elegant solution. A conventional plane took off with the spaceship on its back. And then, at 47,000 feet, where the air is already thin and the fuel-consuming part of a journey is already done, the spaceship lifted off and was blasted by a rocket motor out of the atmosphere. It then glided back to Earth, ready to go up again.

  It didn’t, because the pilot reported several anomalies, chief among which was a huge bang midway through the flight. Finding out what it was, and fixing it – which they did by painting one of the panels white to reflect heat – meant the second flight was delayed to this week. Early reports suggest that this went flawlessly, apart from the mother ship going into a perilous spin after separation.

  So now we have Branson stepping into the breach, saying that by 2007 Virgin Galactic will be using larger versions of SpaceShipOne to transport paying passengers. I do have some concerns about this, none of which has anything to do with perilous spins, loud bangs or Branson’s previous failures. No, my main worry is that the passengers will conform to Branson’s relaxed style and be allowed to fly in jumpers and corduroys.

  If I went, and I would, I’d want the full Michelin Man suit, with an aqualung and a parachute. And I’m not being silly.

  Back in August 1960 an American pilot called Joe Kittinger climbed into the open gondola beneath a balloon called Excelsior III and floated up to 102,800 feet. At this point, 20 miles above the Earth in what is technically space, he jumped.

  Moments later he became the first man to go through the sound barrier without the benefit of a plane. It was, and still is, the highest parachute jump ever, and it proved you can ‘abandon ship’ even when you’re in space.

  I met Kittinger a couple of years ago and he’s adamant that if the crew of the Challenger had been equipped with chutes, some might well be alive today.

  Branson ought to bear this in mind. It’s all very well promoting a relaxed service; but passengers are going to look pretty silly if they’re stuck in space wearing nothing but a nice V-neck and a pair of slacks.

  What’s more, a 62-mile parachute jump through the furnace of re-entry would certainly add pizzazz to what otherwise might be a once-in-a-lifetime op…

  Sunday 3 October 2004

  Call that a list of best films?

  Another day. Another chart listing the best British films ever made.

  The last time I looked, the British Film Institute was busy claiming that something called The Third Man was at number one, though I couldn’t for the life of me work out why, since it was about a man who went to see a friend who was dead.

  In second place it was Brief Encounter in which a man meets a woman in a railway station, and in third we had David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, which was about a homosexual who rides a camel round the desert. And then crashes his motorbike and dies.

  I can’t be doing with David Lean. First of all, his ears were far too big, and secondly all his films feature lots of locals in loincloths and too much dust.

  And as for The Bridge on the River Kwai. God almighty. Jesus took less time to die than Alec Guinness.

  Last week, however, Total Film magazine said that the best British film ever is Get Carter, in which Michael Caine wears a mac and goes up north.

  Other notables in the top 20 are The Wicker Man, in which we saw someone pretending to be Britt Ekland banging on a wall, A Clockwork Orange, which was mad, and If, which I always thought was a scientific experiment to see if you can actually die of boredom.

  The only Bond film to make the grade was From Russia With Love, which came in at number nine. Why? With the possible exception of Moonraker, this early Sean Connery flick was one of the worst 007 adventures.

  Of course I know these surveys are supposed to prompt debate down at the pub. I know that listing the top 10 coolest windmills and the top 10 zaniest animals are all meant to be the start of an argument, not the end.

  But when it comes to British films there is no debate because the best one ever made, without a doubt, is The Long Good Friday. A movie that Total Film doesn’t even put in the top 25.

  They credit Michael Caine with genius in Get Carter, but for real simmering violence you just can’t beat Bob Hoskins and the immortal ‘I put money in all your pockets’. As a general rule, I like to watch this film at least once a month.

  The second-best British movie was Local Hero, starring no one you’ve ever heard of, apart from Burt Lancaster, who was brilliant, and set right up at the top of Scotland.

  There have been (a very few) funnier films, but none has been quite so touching.

  When I first saw it I left the cinema, turned round and went straight back inside to watch it again.

  In third place it’s The Killing Fields, which was about… well, just about everything actually. Hate, war, friendship, hope, desperation, evil, incompetence, genocide, journalism and platonic man-love, all crammed into 141 spellbinding minutes.

  It took David Lean 141 minutes just to get Peter O’Toole’s camel from one side of a sand dune to the other. And it took even longer for Alec Guinness to fall on that plunger.

  Like many British films, The Killing Fields was gently peppered with actors from the small screen. We had Bill Paterson from Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Patrick Malahide, who was Detective-Sergeant Chisholm in Minder. This would normally be something of a credibility hurdle, but I was so wrapped up in the story I wouldn’t have minded if Amos from Emmerdale Farm had wandered into shot.

  In fact I could make a fairly watertight case that The Killing Fields, along with Local Hero and The Long Good Friday, are not just the best British films of all time but the best from anywhere in the world.

  Obviously there have been many wondrous cinematic events from America but, generally speaking, Hollywood movies are designed for 15-year-old youths from North Dakota who, intellectually speaking, are on equal terms with a British zoo animal.

  As a result, US films tend to be rather too full of explosions and everyone’s teeth are too white.

  Then you have French cinema, in which a man meets a woman. They spend about two hours looking at one another, in black and white, over a cup of coffee. And then the man goes off with another man to have some graphic sex.

  I would never argue that all British films are better than all foreign films. As often as not, our directors and screenwriters got their funding from FilmFour, handed in their notice at the Guardian and went off to make what looked like a social services training video.

  Of course it always got rave reviews from the frizzy-haired critics and the compilers of best-film-ever surveys, but in America the audiences were usually not that interested in the fortunes of a Manchester drug addict. They would have preferred it if Manchester had simply exploded, and as a result the
film almost always flopped.

  Trainspotting was only rescued because the writer remembered to include a plot.

  Trainspotting, by the way, was the fourth best British film. And you can work out the rest over a pint at lunchtime.

  Sunday 10 October 2004

  Two fingers to the pension

  Life used to be so easy. At the age of 65 you retired with a nice carriage clock and went home to spend your pension on potting plants and pipe tobacco. Then, 10 years later, you died.

  Now things are very different. You retire at 63 and go home to spend your pension on kickboxing classes and cocaine. You have no plans to die at all.

  This, as I’m sure you read last week, is having a dramatic effect on pensions. The country can afford to keep its senior citizens in old shag for 10 years but not coke for 30. Not when the number of retired people exceeds the number working.

  As a result, the young people of today have been told to expect some harsh changes. They will have to save 30 per cent of what they earn and hand over 70 per cent to the government. They will be expected to work down the mines until the age of 127 and even then they will be expected to die, in poverty, in a puddle of vomit.

  Stern-faced men are saying the country must find an extra £57 billion a year for pensions by 2050 if old people are to enjoy the same standard of living that they have today.

  It all sounds very gloomy, but £57 billion is nothing. We learnt last week that the government has spent £30 billion on a computer system for the NHS.

  In the past few months I’ve watched Oxford Council spend what must have been £57 billion inserting bollards to make life harder for motorists, then taking them away, then building them again.

  Thanks to changes made by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, we’re going to fall short of the pensions bill by only 5 per cent. In France they’ll miss it by 105 per cent. In Germany it’ll be 110 per cent. Then there’s the United States.