by Ned Boulting
And on we go.
We learnt long ago to switch off the voice on the sat nav. Our own monotonous blather is bad enough. There’s no need to add another voice to the drone, especially if it belongs to someone who doesn’t actually exist and can’t chip in to buy the coffees. The downside is that we often sail blissfully past our motorway exit, adding an instant 30km to our journey. But it’s our choice, and frankly we’re too proud to accept the error of our ways. Besides, the car is our home for a month, and we have become unusually protective of its individuality.
The ITV crews travel round in three identical Renault Espaces. I say identical, although it hasn’t escaped my notice that some are more identical than others. It appears that the car designated to convey Gary Imlach and Chris Boardman around France has tended, over recent years, to boast leather upholstery, whereas the others don’t. It’s not a complaint, just an observation.
These cars take such a hammering on an annual basis, it’s a wonder anyone will let us rent them at all. In fact, it appears there is only one rental garage in the whole of France that is prepared to entertain such a patently loss-making undertaking.
Every year, the production team has a struggle on their hands with the particular branch of Renault Location who insist that they no longer want our business. Every year, though, some sort of deal is struck. The usual clincher is the publicity card.
ITV producers: ‘But, you must understand. These cars will be driven by ITV’s team of high-profile presenters covering the Tour de France. Money cannot buy such exposure. The marketing impact back in the UK for Renault should not be underestimated. It must run into many, many pounds.’
Renault: ‘Ah, well, of course that changes everything. Please feel free to abuse our brand-new vehicles as much as you wish, and return them in an almost unusable and pretty much unsellable state. Also, don’t worry about the flood of traffic offences that will reach us by post long after you’ve fled back to London with your tails between your legs. It would be our pleasure to settle all your debts with Police Nationale.’
I’m pretty sure that’s how the conversation must run. Only in French obviously.
The worst job on the whole of the Tour, which I have managed to swerve so far, happens on the Monday morning after the final stage in Paris. Someone, normally Matt since no one else volunteers, has to return the car to Renault at their hard-to-find depot somewhere behind the Gare du Nord. This much he has learnt: don’t wait for them to ask questions. Drop off the keys and run.
One time, when reversing the car out of the subterranean car park underneath the Place de la Concorde for its final journey home, Matt got too close to a concrete pillar and completely destroyed the entire left side of the car. It had made it all the way around France with no visible damage, until the very last movement when Matt delivered the coup de grâce.
By some extraordinary coincidence, Mike, our engineer, managed to do the same thing to another car in exactly the same place four years later, only without the same impressive degree of violence. He posed for a picture. For insurance purposes, of course.
On my first Tour Woody tried to back into a frankly non-existent parking space on the top of Alpe d’Huez, and in doing so, tore a ridge four-foot long down the length of the passenger side of the vehicle, ripping off the wing mirror. A couple of days later, Matt drove the same car firmly into the back of a family saloon in the foothills of the Alps. Undeterred by his own obvious guilt, he leapt out of the car, arms flailing wildly and levelled furious accusations at the driver in front, neatly raising the temperature of the encounter to boiling point. Apart from internal bruising and mild concussion to its head gasket the Espace made it back to Paris in one piece. However, I suspect the young family who we shunted into disrepair may still be stuck on the hillside waiting for assistance. If they are reading this: sorry.
On another occasion, we let Liam drive. Years would pass before we ever let him try again. It was his first experience of getting up a mountain on race day, something that takes a lot of practice. On the morning of a big stage with a summit finish the road crawls with cyclists trying to ride the climb for themselves. There is no way of knowing how many there are on any given day. But it is many, many thousands.
They are, it goes without saying, insane. On any other day of the year (provided the mountain hasn’t closed for the winter) they could tackle the ride in relative peace, passed only by the occasional chalet maid in a Renault Clio. They could freely enjoy the uncluttered sights and smells of the mountainside. But on race day, they form part of a vast crowd of cyclists veering all over the road, terrorised in turn by the ghastly clamour of a thousand accredited Tour vehicles. All manner of cars, vans and trucks, steered by drivers on the verge of exhaustion, gasp for air up the mountain as they nose through the crowds, edging people either into sheer rock faces or as close to the abyss as they can go. Into this craziness, and on his first Tour, we pitched Liam.
Now, I am no mechanic, but the Renault Espace has a shocking clutch. After no more than ten minutes of inching up an incline in first gear, you start to notice the smell. The trick is to stay in gear as long as you can, and if you have to stop (which is pretty much always), nip it quickly into neutral and pull on the handbrake. Just never, ever, sit on the clutch.
Unfortunately, Liam hadn’t got the hang of this. Despite our increasingly emphatic advice, he persisted with his clutch foot flat to the floor. The more we implored him to lift it, the less he seemed to listen. No more than a quarter of the way up, he was muttering to himself like a battle-shocked Vietnam veteran drinking alone in a Milwaukee strip joint. He stared fixedly ahead, sweat running in rivulets down his temples, as the car filled with the distinctive acrid smell of smoking clutch plate.
Suddenly, as we rounded a tight, steep corner, from somewhere underneath the bonnet a volcanic cloud of white smoke billowed, large enough to ground temporarily all flights in and out of France. We came to a halt.
Liam remained sitting, a gentle rocking motion had set in, and the shadow of a disturbing smile played across his lips. We had stopped mid-switchback and now sat blocking half the road, as exhausted riders, firing volleys of abuse in our direction, streamed past us. Instantly a bottleneck of Tour traffic started to form behind us.
To the spectators at the side of the road, we became a source of delighted amusement, a useful boredom reliever. Our smoking engine continued to betray our incompetence. A Dutch TV crew, in a non-smoking car, managed to nudge past us, stopping briefly to tell us that the clutch plate was by now probably white-hot, and that if we attempted to move, it would shatter like a plate of glass. Their best advice was to ‘get the lid open and maybe piss on it a bit’. We smiled our thanks, wound up our windows, and sat tight. A little island of Britishness marooned in a crap French car.
Descending is another thing altogether. Queues fifteen miles long routinely form on mountainsides, consisting of a dangerous mix of accredited and non-accredited vehicles. With the right-hand lane chock full of stationary traffic, and the left lane empty of vehicles coming back up the mountain, sooner or later one of the Tour vehicles (usually a champagne-coloured Citroën belonging to France Télévisions) will pull out of the queue and start to hurtle down the wrong side of the road at breakneck speed. Instantly, it will be joined by a dozen others. The trick is not to be the first car in the illegal convoy speeding down the wrong side of the road. It’s best to be in second place. That way, they, not you, take the impact of any head-on collision.
This terrifying practice has been severely curbed over recent years by the police, which is not altogether unreasonable. But some of the irresponsible thrill of touring has gone with it.
If Woody drives most of the time, I tend to sit in the front passenger seat. I normally have a little left-over scripting and thinking to do as we race towards the finish line. With my laptop perched on my knees, I fight a growing urge to vomit. As soon as I have finished whatever it is I have to type, a Pavlovian response to French motorwa
ys kicks in, and within seconds I am asleep, dribbling gently down my collar.
This is when someone, usually Liam, will lean over with their camera phone and film me snoring as my head bobs up and down. I have almost a dozen clips of me on various motorways in France sleeping in this manner down the years. They document a soft decline into narcoleptic middle age.
When he’s not filming me, Liam is either ranting about the uselessness of Glasgow Rangers’ latest signing, sleeping or tuning his ukelele. If he is feeling chipper enough, we will then be treated to a burst of inappropriate music in the style of George Formby. ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ by Bonnie Tyler, for example. It works well sung at high speed in a cod-Wigan accent.
Each stop off for refuelling can be a source of tensions as we mimic the dysfunctional emotional dynamics of a family on holiday with their teenage kids. We take turns to play the Sulking Teen, although I normally favour the part of Strict Dad.
I have a mania for efficiency in these stops, resenting each and every second spent in the queues and aisles of a French motorway service station. So it is that I have taken recently to manning the petrol pump, while Woody, who keeps the float, goes in to pay. In this way, I get to send the other two ahead to sort out/acquire/indulge themselves in whatever way they feel is appropriate. Then, when I have cascaded sixty-odd litres of stinking diesel into the bottomless well of the Renault Espace, I can join them in the shop, safe in the knowledge that they have already had time to peruse the shelves and make up their minds about what it is that they crave.
Woody normally panics. Sensitive to my impatient streak, he has already queued to pay for the fuel, trousered the receipt, and loaded himself up with comfort food. And that’s when the panic sets in. He will always come back with at least one item that betrays a rush of blood at the till. This may take the form of an awful yoghurt-based French drink. Strawberry Yop is often the weakness of choice, or a random confectionery with a vaguely insulting name, like Pimp. Or Plop.
The two of us will be back in the car then, and ready to go, before Liam has come back. Occasionally we will catch a glimpse of him moving from aisle to aisle behind the glass of the shopfront, shimmying between rows of querulous school kids. We know perfectly well that he is looking for coffee. We know, also, since nothing much surprises us any more about each other, that he will return eventually with a brew that in no way matches his exacting standards.
And so, in the end, he will reappear cradling a small plastic cup full of something dark and forbidding, which matches his scowl. That face he pulls, with its distinctive jutting out of the lower lip and sinking of the angle of the head to sixty-five degrees is known as ‘faire la tête’. It takes its name from a chef in a restaurant in a village in the Pyrenees who didn’t want us to sit down for dinner because it was nine o’clock already and he couldn’t be arsed. The waiter implored us to be quick in choosing our meals, because, he said with a flick of his head in the direction of the kitchen, the chef ‘dans la cuisine, il fait la tête.’
It is in this manner that we progress around France, with ninety euros in the glove compartment nestling next to our passports, for presenting to the gendarmes when they inevitably pull us over for something or other. We keep the correct money for the fine so as to save time. It works well.
The motorbike cops in their bright blue and slightly camp jeggings appreciate how quick we are on the draw. Money. Passports. Licence. Sign here. Apologies. Au revoir. Et bon Tour!
Time must be saved at both ends of the day. It slips through your fingers.
It sounds simple enough, but it’s not always that easy beating the race from the Départ to the Arrivée. If we have been filming at the start village, we have to get going five minutes before the race leaves or risk getting stuck behind it. The Tour puts up signs that point to the preferred off-race route. We hunt for these amidst a forest of brightly coloured and often contradictory signs pointing to various car parks, for the teams, for the caravan, for the race officials. The ‘Hors Course’ signs aren’t easy to find in a strange town, which has been almost entirely shut down for the day and features random roadblocks around every corner.
Add to that the well-intentioned ignorance of local volunteers stationed at each roadblock, and it makes for a frazzled exit. They are often as unfamiliar with the layout of the town as we are.
‘Excusez-nous, madame. On cherche l’itinéraire hors cours.’
‘C’est pas par ici. Alors . . . je sais pas.’
‘Brilliant. Thanks.’
Suddenly we’ll spot the correct sign to ‘Hors Course’. It’s generally met with an excited whoop of ‘Whores Cors!’, using the same highly amusing pronunciation that means Bagnères-de-Bigorre is rightfully known in our car as Bangers-de-Big Ears. And Pamiers is Pam Ayres. Obviously.
On arrival at the finish line, there’s a similar problem, in reverse. In an unfamiliar town, getting as close as you can to the TV compound to cut down on the distance you have to lug the camera equipment requires skill, persistence, instinct and brinkmanship. Things can get fractious. I will be desperate to get parked up and get going, since normally I have to feed a story back to London immediately on my arrival at the TV truck. Liam, however, conscious of the fact that his is all the heavy gear, will look for the closest possible parking space.
Eventually, inevitably, we lose our bottle, dump the car and run. Usually we leave it parked slightly diagonally, half up on a pavement, with one wheel hanging off the kerb outside a fire station or a hospital or some building of minor importance. But in provincial France, Tour accreditation is like having diplomatic immunity. Only once have I ever received a ticket on a bike race in an accredited vehicle. And that was on the 2010 Tour of Britain, in King’s Lynn.
And after the day’s work, the pressure continues. Released from duty, we throw our kit back in the car and fire up the sat nav. This moment is key. The details of that night’s accommodation are entered. We hold our breath as the route is calculated. It could be anything from twenty kilometres to a hundred.
It might take ten minutes or two hours. It might mean dinner and wine and chat. Or it might mean a sandwich from a petrol station before unloading all our equipment from the car in the dead of night.
Either way, Unloading Must Happen. Buried back in the mists of time, some equipment had been stolen from one of the Channel 4 crew cars parked up overnight, and ever since then, perhaps understandably, the edict has been handed down that the vehicles will be emptied of their contents, which, to be fair to the production company, would probably cost close to £50,000 to replace.
Because of the zero-tolerance policy on left luggage, the only thing to be nicked in my time on the Tour, from the back of an otherwise empty car, has been a crate of tinned mackerel and several bags of raisins belonging to Gary Imlach. For Gary, this spelt dietary disaster, and reserve supplies had to be freighted out from London.
But banging huge, heavy flightcases up narrow, uneven staircases at ten o’clock at night while tired and hungry is not very much fun.
On reaching a hotel, one of our number has to assume the role of designated spokesman, and ask the bewildered receptionist the same hideously repetitive question in babyish French every single night. Is there a chance, the merest of slim hopes, that there might just possibly be a secure ground-floor storeroom, where we can stow the gear without the need for lugging it all up to the fourth floor? No? I thought not.
Every year before the Tour departs, I make a mental note to look up the word ‘storeroom’ before leaving for France. Every year I forget, and, therefore, every year we are reduced to making do with the less-than-adequate ‘petite chambre’.
It’s always funniest, though, when it’s Woody who takes on the asking. Quite unabashed, and a little impatient, he throws in a loose smattering of English words to pad out the bald spots in his sentences, and to give the listener the impression of casual fluency without actually being either casual or fluent.
‘Err. So. Yeah. Bonso
ir. Une question. Um, just wondering avez vous une . . . (wait for it, here it comes) . . . petite chambre pour you know, um, all that stuff really. La.’ He would point at one of us grunting past him carrying a tripod, smirking a little.
‘Non. Désolé.’
‘OK. Merci.’ He’ll flash a tiny exasperated continental-style smile. ‘Bugger.’
Cultural immersion, Tour style.
And once the gear is stowed away, once the curtains are drawn, and the day is done, it’s time to find a flat surface to do some ironing.
FRANCE. AND THE FRENCH
Faced with a sunset in Provence, perched on the warm stone of a ruined fort in a rare moment of calm, as the race swooped through the flatlands that divide the two great mountain ranges, a thought articulated itself: this really is quite a lot better than Bedford, isn’t it?
I am not claiming that my Francophilia is even remotely exotic. It simply means that I conform to a determinedly middle-class stereotype. You just need to observe the long lanes of traffic queuing on any given day of the week to get on the ferries at Dover. There you will find the busy-looking couples of middle England, fretting in and around their Volvo. He is trying to affix the GB sticker without creating any air bubbles, she is organising the passports and reservations into a sensible folder. There are the mildly bored kids in their early teens gazing through the rear-seat windows into the quayside drizzle. France is the impassioned, year-on-year, genetically self-fulfilling love affair of the English middle classes. It’s in the script.
‘Have you got the traveller’s cheques?’
