Those who’d failed to pull decided that the best and most amusing thing they could do was set off the fire alarm. And so there we were at 2 a.m., standing in the hotel lobby in our dressing gowns and our underpants, watching firemen doing their best despite a gang of vomiting Smurfs. It was an eventful and reasonably sleepless night, but no matter, at least tomorrow would be quieter.
It wasn’t. Tomorrow brought some girls from an endowment policy complaints call centre in Scotland and a huge number of men who may, or may not, have been involved in some way with fuel oil and tankers.
The courting ritual began again, but this time there was some celebrity spice. Yes indeedy. Bill Bailey, the bedraggled comedian, had appeared at the NEC that night with Jasper Carrot and was to be found at the bar, fighting off tanker drivers with a hard stare.
The call centre girls had zeroed in on my doe-eyed Top Gear colleague, Richard Hammond. At one point he was wearing about six of them, and two simply wouldn’t let go at all. At 2.30 a.m. I received a call from the distraught midget, saying they were following him up and down the corridor and he daren’t go to his room.
It didn’t matter, though, because at 2.35 a.m. some of the lads beaten off by Bill Bailey decided that the best and most amusing thing they could do was to set off the fire alarm. And so there we all were again, in our underpants, watching the firemen step over the vomit.
Then everyone sloped back to their rooms to finish cleaning the epiglottis of some accounts girl from Rhyl.
Of course, all hotels are an aphrodisiac and all business trips are similarly laced with possibility. So bring the two together, and it’s an inhibition-free zone. You check in to the Metropole as a perfectly decent, perfectly normal human being, but you’ll leave with an itch. God knows why televisual sex is provided in the rooms, because the real thing seems to be freely available at the bar.
Unlike a drink. At most hotels you simply tell the barman your room number and that’s that. But at the Metropole you must provide documents as well, and since my wife had changed my check-in name to try to get me some peace and privacy, and I had no idea what it might be, I couldn’t buy a beer.
I sympathise with the management here, because most of the guests are too drunk to know their name and certainly way too sozzled to remember that, while the bed and breakfast account is taken care of, they’re picking up the extras.
On the third night I couldn’t take any more, so our party went into Birmingham for a curry. We got back at midnight to find ourselves in the midst of what appeared to be every Christmas party ever held.
You can forget Ibiza or the streets of a provincial town on a Saturday night. For round-the-clock, seven-day-a-week drinking and debauchery, it’s hard to top the Metro-pole. If you’re young, free, married, old, pretty or blessed with the face of a bull elephant, you can have the time of your life. I mean, it was at the Metropole a few years ago that I saw a girl cartwheeling past the picture windows wearing nothing but a G-string. You don’t even get that sort of view at the Carlton in Cannes.
Sadly, though, I’m too old for it now, so on the fourth night I went back to the hotel to pick up my bags and go home. It took a while, because someone had set off the fire alarm.
Sunday 27 November 2005
When the fame game goes funny
Sadly, because of a few lunatics at the top end of the show business ladder – the ones who adopt dolphins and drink their own urine and have tantric sex with bits of furniture – we seem to have got it into our heads that all celebrities are completely bonkers.
Well, sorry, but they’re not. You may see Ricky Gervais strolling through London and you may imagine he’s off for lunch with Clint Eastwood, but actually he’s probably trying to find some filing cabinets.
You may see Steve Coogan driving down the M6, and you may wonder how many lap dancers he has in the footwell of his car, but in all probability he’s just spent the weekend at his mum’s house, talking about Mabel at No. 23.
People assume that, because I go on television and shout while driving round corners too quickly, I live in a leopard-skin house, being fed cocaine and peacock by girls in PVC. Whereas, in fact, I spend most of my time picking children up from parties. Just like you.
Normally, of course, the misconception is no big deal, but once a year I’m dragged round the nation’s radio and television stations to promote my Christmas DVD.
Called Full Throttle Power Hell Megablast, or something.
Most of the big-name stars know the game and it’s all very jolly. You rock up, tell a short, amusing anecdote, they mention your new DVD/book/play, you talk about it without trying to sound like you’re plugging, then you get in the car and head off for your next appointment.
On Thursday last week I began at LBC, then moved to This Morning with Fern and Phillip, which is like spending 10 minutes in a warm, pink bubble bath, and then it was off to Simon Mayo on Radio Football.
Unlike anyone else in the business, Simon, who is normal and drives a Volvo, has actually read your book/watched your DVD/seen your play, so the chat is quite intelligent and pertinent, and then on the way out you bump into Ellen MacArthur, who’s dropped by to talk about her latest boat.
At Radio 2 you pass Gordon Ramsay, who’s doing the rounds plugging his hundred great football cock-ups video. Interestingly, he’s not hurling four-letter insults at the coffee machine. And then you’re on to Steve Wright, who’s genial and cheeky.
And you try to be genial and cheeky too, but it’s difficult because you have to remember it’s next Wednesday.
It really is next Wednesday in the mind of Danny Baker. Being interviewed by The Man is like having four million volts fed through your hair. Halfway through ‘Highway Star’ he winds down the volume, announces to his listening public that Franz Ferdinand are not fit to grease the tank treads of Deep Purple, and then explains why he hasn’t got a mobile phone and why pilchards have monocles and then, whoosh, you’re back on the street, back in the car and on your way to meet someone called Colin and someone called Edith who appear on something called Radio 1.
So, what’s the problem? Well, I’ll tell you what the problem is. Simon and Edith and Danny and Steve know you’re normal and that you’re just doing a job. But, at some point in the day, you have to be interviewed by provincial radio station disc jockeys and junior reporters on lads’ mags, and they think you live in a big house with Angelina Jolie and Harrison Ford and Kofi Annan, and you while away the hours shooting tigers and taking heroin.
So they try to humiliate you with idiotic competitions and stupid questions. I was interviewed over the phone by a boy from… Mars, I think… who wanted to know how homosexual I am. This involved answering some phenomenally personal questions about my sex life and, I’m sorry, but I ran away.
And straight into the clutches of some girl fresh from a Guardian-sponsored media studies course who didn’t want to interview me so much as lecture me on the evils of being male, having a car and wearing shoes. It was all she could do to stop herself actually calling me a bastard man-pig live on air.
One breathy chap from some godforsaken station in the north announced with the tape machines rolling that he was going to ring a local business at random and I’d have to use ‘my fame and celebrity’ to blag something from them.
Imagine that. Imagine the hilarity of getting Jeremy Clarkson to name-drop his way into getting four yards of plumbing or a photocopier for nothing.
I calmly explained that I don’t do blagging. The DJ would have none of it, though. Because he has a Rover 200 with his name, and the name of the dealer that gave it to him, emblazoned in foot-high letters down the side, he was adamant that I wouldn’t even buy my own milk. No, really, I explained…
But it was no good, I heard the phone ringing and knew that pretty soon I was going to be speaking with some hapless shop assistant who, in all probability, would have no clue who I was and no intention of giving me a rotary washing line for nothing.
I could see nothing but embarr
assment for her and nothing but humiliation for me.
So I’m afraid I removed my headphones and ran from that, too. And now the radio station has flogged the story to the local paper. Which will doubtless say I stormed out and ran back to my moated castle, where I keep bears and have a hallway full of stuffed German soldiers. If only they knew.
Sunday 4 December 2005
Cornered by the green lynch mob
Environmentalists, it seems, can’t argue like normal people. You may remember, for instance, back in the summer, that a vegetarian girl, whom I’d never met before, leapt from some bushes and plunged a huge banoffee pie right into the middle of my face.
Then a Liberal Democrat MP called Tom Brake, who has the silliest teeth in politics, said he was going to table an early-day motion and drag me to London to watch him doing it. Now look. I don’t want to see anyone’s early-day motion, least of all a Liberal Democrat’s, which would be full of leaf mulch. And I especially don’t want to see it on a table.
Why can’t these people write me a letter saying, ‘I don’t agree with you’? Why do they have to pie me and make me stand around watching a Liberal with mad teeth doing his number twos? It’s beyond comprehension.
But last week the environmental protest about my way of life took an altogether more sinister turn when a Labour MP called Colin Challen made a speech in which he said he wanted me to be killed. No more pies. No more early-day motions.
Executed. Maybe he was joking, maybe he wasn’t.
Strangely, he’s on record as saying he doesn’t believe in capital punishment, so he doesn’t want Peter Sutcliffe dead. He doesn’t want Ian Huntley dead. And he thinks Gary Glitter should evade the firing squad. But he does want to see me swinging from the rafters in Wormwood Scrubs. He wants to see the faces of my distraught children on the television news and laugh at my wife as they cut me down and feed my limp, lifeless body to the prison pigs.
Now, presumably before calling for my death he’d have done some research, in which case he’d have noted the way I use sheep to keep the grass down on my land rather than driving around in a lawnmower, which uses fuel and minces all the beasties that so amaze us in David Attenborough’s new programme.
What’s more, a man who charges the taxpayer £64,000 a year to pay for staff would surely have had the human resources to find out that this year I grew some totally organic, fertiliser-free barley. It didn’t go well. Come autumn, I had six acres of what looked like soggy grey drinking straws, which I sold for exactly £325 less than it cost to buy the seed and rent a combine harvester.
But no matter. I didn’t do this out of the goodness of my heart, and nor did I do it to save the world or the whale. I did it because barley attracts lots of interesting birds that I like to look at. Selfish, I know, but, ecologically speaking, I like to think I achieved a little bit more than Colin Challen, who stomps round the Yorkshire Dales in a hideous purple cagoule, dreaming up new and interesting people he’d like to kill.
So is he mad? Well, he can’t be a complete window-licker because he managed to convince 20,570 people in the last election that he should be a member of the governing party. But then again, he does have a beard, he is called Colin, and he is a member of something called the Socialist Environment Resources Association.
This is the key. On the face of it, SERA sounds like a fairly benign organisation – it raises sponsorship, for instance, for people to host low-carbon-transport dinners. Mmmm. They sound like fun.
But nothing with the word ‘socialist’ in its name can ever be truly benign. You may remember the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for example, where people were sentenced to death for arguing with the leadership. That’s what Beardy is doing here. Like that fellow member of the face-hair owners’ club, Stalin, he wants me dead for disagreeing with him.
I love arguing. I love filling my dining room with social workers and foxhunters so everyone can roll up their sleeves and have a damn good row. That’s because I believe in freedom of speech.
Plainly, the honourable member for Morley & Roth-well does not. And nor does Tom Brake from the Liberal Democrats, and nor does that girl with the big bum who pushed a pie in my face. In fact, no one from the environmental bandwagon has even half an inkling about the concept of debate.
I do not believe that man is responsible for global warming. There are many eminent scientists who would agree. And I believe that western governments are in the process of spending billions of pounds trying to stem something over which we have no control. I believe that this money could be used to make the world a fairer, more peaceful place.
I would much rather bring clean drinking water to an impoverished village in Sudan than bring a wind farm to the shores of Scotland. You might not agree, but surely you can see it is a reasonable argument.
Tom Brake can’t. That bird with the pie can’t. And certainly Colin Challen can’t.
Plainly, he doesn’t mind if all the Africans die of disease and hunger because, like all socialists, he wants to help the poor only about half as much as he wants to hurt the rich.
I respect that argument. I respect the people of Leeds who listened to it and voted him into office. And I’d love to chat to him about it. But that’s hard when you’ve got a face full of banana pie, you’re faced with a pile of Mr Brake’s veggie droppings and you’re dead.
Sunday 11 December 2005
What happened? I’m not grumpy
For the past five years I’ve come into your world on a Sunday morning and moaned about pretty well everything. I’ve complained about the wings on an Airbus and the way foxes keep eating my chickens. I’ve whined about people who turn up late to parties and the stickers they put on spectacle lenses so you can’t see what you look like in the shop. I’ve looked under every conceivable stone and been grumpy about everything I’ve found.
Well, not today. As I write, the sky is a vivid blue and it’s so beautifully warm, all the leaves are still on the trees. In my house a big log fire is roaring and the Christmas decorations are shiny and bright.
My book is still at number one in the charts, my annual DVD is selling well, the children are healthy, my wife is happy and tonight I’m going to a dear old friend’s birthday party, which will be fun.
So, as a result of all this, I’m in something quite unusual. I’m in a good mood.
I looked at the huge explosion that took out half of Hertfordshire last week and didn’t think, ‘Oh no, what about the pollution and the effect on people with breathing difficulties.’ I just thought, ‘Wow. That’s fantastic.’
Normally, of course, I could have filled my little corner of the page with lots of grumpiness about why the police reacted by shutting all roads in the area; but hey, they are paid to protect and serve. And they wouldn’t be fulfilling their remit if they let people drive near some smoke.
I can’t even get my knickers in much of a twist about the Space Cadets show on Channel 4, either. Good luck to all concerned is what I say.
Good luck, too, to David Cameron as he marches into the spotlight and announces that he’ll be pursuing a range of green policies with lots of sustainable, wholemeal growth. Why not? He’s not going to get elected if he comes out saying he’s going to bring back flogging and national service.
It’s the same story with Tony Blair. It must be hard running the country while trying not to laugh at your son’s new face-hair. I think he’s done a pretty good job these past few years. Certainly, I doubt if I could have done any better, chiefly because when I say I’m going to do something I usually do it. It can’t be easy saying every day you’re going to do something and then doing the exact opposite.
Usually I can whip up some ire about his wife, but not today. How would you like to go through life with that mouth? How long would it be before you were taking a big fat fee that left peanuts for a kids’ charity? How else can you be expected to pay for your new house?
Even the news on the state of the planet is cheery this week. It seems the
magnetic north pole is moving away from Canada so fast it could be off the coast of Russia within 50 years. So, within our lifetime, the people of northern England will get regular views of the aurora borealis. Unless, of course, they’ve all been killed by bird flu in the meantime, which, to be honest, seems unlikely.
There’s more good news from the top of the world, too. Scientists have found that killer whales in the Arctic Ocean have overtaken polar bears to become the most contaminated creatures on earth. Analysis of their blubber has shown an extraordinarily high concentration of man-made chemicals, including pesticides, PCBs and flame retardants. This means they’ll never get a headache and they’ll never catch fire. And isn’t that a heart-warming tale in this festive season.
It’s nearly as cheery, in fact, as the conversation I had just last week with Britain’s leading expert on face transplants. Apparently it would be very easy to transplant a whole head, which means I could have mine sewn on to Kate Moss’s body, and how much fun would that be.
Obviously, it wouldn’t move about, so I wouldn’t be able to play with the more interesting parts, which is a bit of a shame, but it would keep me alive. Better still, it would even be possible to take the head off a diseased body and keep it for a while on your mantelpiece. Imagine that – being able to chat with a loved one’s head if there’s nothing on television.
You think I’m joking, don’t you? Well, I’m not. We live in an age when surgeons can remove a head and keep it alive. Doesn’t that make you feel proud and happy to be a human in the early part of the best century there’s ever been?
Of course, musically it’s not so good. The battle for the Christmas number one is being fought out by a boy band, the England cricket team and some chap who’s written a truly woeful song about a boy getting a ride in his dad’s JCB digger.
Van Halen it isn’t. But, since I don’t really listen to Radio 1, I don’t really care.
And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Page 24
