In other words, in a single day I will break 14 laws and seven social taboos that simply didn’t exist before Tony came along. And I shall do so with impunity because there’s no way in hell he can possibly enforce all his Big Ideas.
Sunday 12 December 2004
Sharks, you’re dead meat
Last Thursday an 18-year-old Australian surfer boy was eaten by two great white sharks which, according to onlookers, tore his body in half and then spent a few minutes arguing over who’d get which bit.
As usual, various wildlife experts were interviewed, and they all said the sharks in question should be let off with a caution, partly because they’re protected and partly because such attacks are extremely rare.
But they’re not. In fact, not even a week had passed since another surfer had been eaten on exactly the same piece of coastline. Meanwhile, in California the surfing community has reported that shark attacks have tripled in recent years and it’s a similar story in South Africa.
So what’s going on? Well, some say the great white has developed a taste for humans because we’ve eaten all their usual prey – tuna and so on. Others argue that it’s because boards look like seals from underneath. Or it could be these shark attacks are simply God’s way of telling surfers to get a job.
But I think I’ve worked out exactly who’s to blame… and it’s the soppy sentimentality of the National Geographic Channel with its Disney-style ethos of ‘no animals were harmed in the making of this programme’.
When David Attenborough does a wildlife show on the television, we see nature in the raw. We see the little thing’s big dewy eyes and its wobbly legs when it’s born. We see it finding a mate, and relaxing in the sun after a hearty meal. And then we see it being eaten by a lion.
Who can forget the horror of that poor little penguin in The Blue Planet? He’d gone off to find food for his wife and been attacked, in gory, close-up detail, by a leopard seal. Terribly wounded, he tried his hardest to make it home, but the journey was too long and the slope too steep. So he died, pitching, beak first, into the ice.
Now, had this been made by the Americans, Mr Penguin would have found lots of food, all of it organic, successfully swum past the waiting leopard seals and made it back to the rookery where he and Mrs Penguin would have opened a fair trade shop and lived happily ever after.
I watched a wildlife show the other night which had been infected completely with the American Way. It was all about the Andes, and guess what? None of the animals had any sex and none of them ever died. Not even the fish. The gannets dived into the water and came out again.
Pumas chased llamas pointlessly. And the foxes just hung around, looking cute.
This is why we now have a hunting ban: because we’re living in a world where foxes have vegetarian cubs that frolic around in the woods, playing non-competitive tag.
Certainly, I have never seen any footage, ever, of a fox breaking into a chicken run and killing the lot. And it’s why the world is full of surfer boys who scour the planet for decent waves, oblivious to the peril that lurks beneath the surface.
Today, great white sharks are always called ‘magnificent’, and now we have Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, saying he wished he’d never written the book because it gave everyone a sense that the great white was ‘a bad guy’ when really it was ‘fragile’. One can only guess, of course, but I bet the 18-year-old who was pulled in half by sharks this week didn’t think, as those teeth sank into his thighs, that the shark was magnificent or fragile.
It’s the same story with the mosquito. But because it’s never been the subject of a soppy, tree-hugging, natural history show, even the biggest veg-head weird-beard is at liberty to run around his bedroom at night with a rolled-up newspaper and a can of bug zap, shouting: ‘I’ll get you, you little bastard.’
A great white is no different. It’s a dangerous, ugly, killing machine that takes a chunk out of you and lets you bleed to death before coming back and deciding that actually it doesn’t like human very much. It’s a 23-foot aquatic mozzie, an underwater monster with razor-wire teeth, and it should be treated as such.
We should therefore turn the tables round. Instead of letting the damn things cruise around eating us, we should start eating them. Of course, this would mean hunting them to extinction, which would cause all sorts of loonies to wave their arms around, saying that we were changing the world. To which we could reply: ‘Absolutely. We’re making it better. And then we shall start on the tigers.’
Sunday 19 December 2004
The ghost of wife’s present
Obviously I know you should never buy your wife anything that needs a plug, but this has always presented a problem. Because I’ve always had some understanding of stuff that needed electricity to function, and had no clue about stuff that didn’t.
Scent, for example. Have you actually been into the perfume department of a shop recently? Not only do you have the traditional choice of about 10,000 from the well-known names such as Chanel and er… Charlie, all of which, to a smoker at least, are exactly the same, but now you have celebrity-endorsed products as well.
Does your wife want to smell like Beyoncé or Celine Dion?
Or would she like to spend the year strutting around with a whiff of Cliff Richard behind her ears?
Horrified that you might trip over the great smell of Kilroy – or Cuprinol, as it’s known in hardware stores – you make a beeline for the clothes department; but this is an even bigger mistake, because you’ll Buy the Wrong Thing. And, to make matters worse, you will Buy the Wrong Thing in the Wrong Size.
So, jewellery then. Well, no, because for reasons I’ve never fully understood jewellery shops never advertise their prices. Which means you need a basic grasp of the Stanislavski technique as you try to pretend the reason you don’t want the necklace is because of the clasp, not because it costs £16,000.
Personalised luggage or stationery is fine, but this needs to be ordered in March.
And it’s much the same story with furniture. Plus, it’s hard to carry a tallboy home on the train.
Of course, the shop can deliver, but this involves filling out a form, and then another. And then some more. And then the information has to be typed on to a computer, and by the time that’s been done the daffodils are out. Why can’t they just write your address down on a scrap of paper and give it to the van driver?
At round about this point the modern gentleman will start to think about getting some candles. We all know that girls like to spend hours having baths in the semidarkness, and we cannot imagine what they might be doing in there. Well, we can, actually, which is why I always say no to candles.
I’m afraid I’m similarly selfish when it comes to music. My wife is forever buying CDs by bands I’ve never heard of and I know she wants the new Killers album, but if I were to buy it for her, she’d play it, and then I’d have to listen to it as well.
Books? Oh, come on. It seems a bit mean to spend only £7.99, especially as the sort of books my wife likes don’t even come with a plot.
This is why I didn’t even bother window-shopping for my wife this year. I just headed straight for the electrical department in Selfridges, where I knew I would feel safe and warm and comfortable.
Unfortunately, I must have blinked and missed some kind of technological burp, because it was full of various brushed aluminium boxes that didn’t seem to do anything even remotely worthwhile.
In essence, there are three things you can do with all this modern technology. Listen to music. Take pictures. And communicate with other people while you’re out and about. But the combination of these three things has driven the world’s techno-nerds into a complete frenzy.
Take the much-talked-about iPod as a prime example. Even if my wife had 5,000 songs in her mysterious CD collection, and even if she had the time to copy them all on to the chip, what would be the point exactly? Why copy something you already have?
So we move on to the new breed of three-chip
digital video cameras. Yes, the quality is vastly improved, but answer me a straight question. Have you ever watched anything you’ve ever shot on your Handycam? Thought not. So who cares if you can now zoom in on your husband’s nose hairs from six miles away?
And why would you want a phone that can download clips of movies from the internet? When have you ever been in a position that you’re on a moor and suddenly feel the need to watch three seconds of Tom Cruise dangling upside down?
I suppose it might be quite fun to video your genitals and send them to your lover. But if I did that to my wife, she’d think I’d gone mad.
Disappointed, I came out of the electrical department fearing that, while I wasn’t looking, the world had moved on. And that it was still moving on, towards Christmas, and that I needed to get something. So I ended up buying my wife a dead rabbit.
Doubtless when the shops open on Wednesday she’ll quietly take it back and exchange it for ‘Saigon’, the great new smell of Henry Kissinger.
Sunday 26 December 2004
Who’s afraid of the nice wolf?
With devastating but quiet savagery, the countryside is being destroyed by a million-strong herd of marauding deer. Surveys have shown their numbers are spiralling out of control and that they’re now tearing through crops and woodland like a pack of horned locusts.
Worse still, deer were responsible last year for 15,000 road accidents in Scotland alone. Ten people died, pinned to their headrests by those antlers after the animal came through the windscreen. Not a nice way to go.
A similar number were killed in East Anglia, and on one stretch of road through Cannock Chase in Staffordshire a deer is apparently hit once every three days. He must be getting awfully fed up with it by now.
Anyway, the government has decided to act. Amid howls of protest from gamekeepers, ministers have decided that a well-orchestrated nationwide cull is needed. But this being New Labour, they’ve got themselves into a right old lather about it.
If it were a bacterium, or a Conservative, that was eating all the trees and killing 50 people a year, they’d act instantly to wipe it out. But deer have big, brown, soulful eyes. And that gives the luvvies a problem.
I mean, this is a government that has publicly declared undying love for foxy-woxy, so even though the deer is engaged in wholesale slaughter of mankind, you can’t really visualise Tony Blair running around the Highlands in a pair of stout wellies, hosing down Bambi’s mum with a hail of machine-gun fire.
As a result, ministers are going to great lengths to point out that the deer is a fine animal and must not be viewed as a pest or a nuisance. But that hundreds of thousands must, nevertheless, be shot in the face.
They’re even talking about allowing carefully selected and heavily licensed deer killers to roam the Highlands in the close season, shooting expectant mums. Quite something for a government whose local councils all over the country employ ‘deer liaison officers’.
Quite what a deer liaison officer does, I’m not sure. Personally, I’d rather spend his wages helping victims of the Asian earthquake, but there you go.
My favourite part of the government initiative is watching them agonise over what should be done with the mountain of carcasses. Because, of course, they’re all vegetablists, and as a result it simply hasn’t occurred to them that they could be garnished with onions and eaten.
You can even eat the muntjac, which looks like a big rat and barks like a dog. But, like crocodile and snake, it tastes of chicken.
This would be an ideal solution. Fat, poor people who spend their limited resources on crisps and lard could be encouraged to roam around the woods at night, killing deer. This way they’d get some exercise and a free meal.
But I fear that it won’t catch on, so I’m drawn to an idea that was first mooted two years ago by a wealthy Scottish landowner called Paul van Vlissingen. He spent £300,000 of his own money looking into the deer problem, and has decided that the best way of keeping their numbers in check is by reintroducing wolves.
There’s no doubt that a pack of wolves gallivanting around the Highlands would keep deer numbers down, and this would save the trees and crops. But I can’t help wondering what else Mr Wolf might eat.
Obviously Johnny Fox would be a tasty target, which is fine, now that man isn’t allowed to hunt him any more. But what about the sheep? In the Alpine region of France, a pack of just 30 wolves does its level best to keep lamb off the menu in most local restaurants; and we see a similar problem in Sweden, where wolves, tired of eating deer, are helping themselves to pretty well anything that moves.
This brings me neatly to the wolf’s favourite amusebouche – us. Van Vlissingen says humans have nothing to worry about, because in the last hundred years there hasn’t been a single recorded case of a person, or even a part of a person, anywhere in Europe, being eaten by a wolf.
He also argues that in Alaska and Canada humans and wolves live happily together.
True, but that’s because in Alaska and Canada most people pack some kind of heat in the parka. Here, however, we’re not allowed to walk around with a blue-steel .44, so I suspect the reintroduction of wolves would mean the odd rambler would go west.
This means everyone wins. The government keeps deer numbers down without turning its deer liaison officers into murderers. We will be able to drive faster in greater safety on the roads; the countryside gets an interesting new animal; and the rambling queen, Janet Street-Porter, gets eaten.
Sunday 2 January 2005
Bowling for the beautiful people
You’d imagine that the world ladies’ bowls championship would be a genteel affair, brought to you by Werther’s Originals, Rover, Saga Holidays and Thora Hird’s stairlift.
But no. Seven of the eight quarter-finalists chosen to represent Britain are aged between 21 and 37. One, an extremely comely young lady, was pictured in the newspapers last week wearing an unzipped leather biker’s jacket and very little else.
This has prompted commentators to come out from behind their tea urns and remark that the team has perhaps been chosen for its televisual appeal rather than its ability. I’m sure they have a point.
You see, in the olden days, when most bowls players were born, there were no photographs in the newspapers, so people were allowed to be fat and ugly. Joseph Whit-worth, the great gunsmith, was a national hero because no one knew he had the face of a baboon. Isambard Kingdom Brunel achieved success because the great British public had no clue he was a midget.
Back then, skill and intelligence were what you needed to get on. But now, with the zoom lens and the tabloid newspaper, neither thing matters a jot.
We’re entering a whole new world where, to get on, it’s not what you know or who you know, or even what you know about who you know. All that matters is what you look like.
David Beckham, I’m told, is far from Britain’s best footballer. But he has become a global success because he’s a handsome chap. Then you have Tony Blair. He became leader of the Labour Party simply because he is better looking than Robin Cook and John Prescott. What’s more, he will win a third term because he has more sex appeal than Michael Howard. And Gordon Brown will never be prime minister because the hinge on his lower jaw appears to be loose.
Then there’s Sienna Miller. Who, I hear you ask. Well, she’s the bit-part star of two films you haven’t seen, but because she’s so unbelievably pretty her engagement to another woman called Judy managed last week to knock the Asia catastrophe off the front pages.
I understand all of this. You wouldn’t deliberately buy an ugly sofa or an ugly car, so why would you invite an ugly person to peer at you from the other side of the electric fish tank?
By the same token, I’d rather watch my new crush, Fiona Bruce, reading out the Cumbrian lambing reports for 2004 than Reginald Bosanquet, with his florid nose, telling me about the tsunami. I have a friend whose car dealership was staffed entirely by astonishingly good-looking girls. When asked why, he said with a gri
n that pretty ones cost the same as ugly ones. I understand that, too.
There is, however, an enormous drawback to all of this. You see, Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Denzel Washington may look good in leather miniskirts and Roman armour, but where would we have been 30 years ago if the only qualifications needed for Hollywood superstardom were perfectly square, perfectly white teeth and big arms? Without Gene Hackman, that’s for sure.
You can be assured, too, that the over-hootered Dustin Hoffman would still be eking out a living in some New York dive, along with Jack Nicholson and Anthony Hopkins.
At the moment the only possible hope for the facially challenged or the stomachularly enormous is comedy. Good-looking people only had to smile to climb into a stranger’s pants, whereas the Stephen Frys and Jimmy Carrs of the world needed to tickle the humour bone before they were allowed near another person’s pelvis.
I’ll give you a challenge at this point. Name me one slim, attractive girl who’s famous for being funny. Dawn French? Jo Brand? You get my drift here.
Comedy, however, has only a limited number of openings, which is why, in the not too distant future, I can see a backlash coming. It used to be the case that a person’s social standing caused jealousy and bitterness. People would wonder why the idiotic fourth son of the Duke of Nether Wallop could have peach and peacock for supper while his bright manservant had to make do with a cup of mud.
Well, how long will it be before the world’s ugly people start to wonder why Kate Moss is a millionaire and why their television screens are full of orange men and pneumatic blonde girls when their own children, who have double firsts in Latin, can’t get a job on the bins?
Certainly I hope the backlash comes soon because, unless that bowling bird unzips her jacket and puts the other competitors off, Britain is very likely to get knocked out of the tournament.
And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Page 13
