Born to Be Riled (14 page)

The only way someone can raise enough money to have a garage in London is by becoming a rent boy. Or a stockbroker. Neither of which appeals terribly. Eventually, of course, everyone will see things the same way and the gradual shift to the south-east will be reversed.
Everyone will move back from whence they came and the idiots from Hammersmith and Fulham Council will look down from the top floor of their red-flagged town hall and marvel at what they have done. The buses will have the roads to themselves. But there will be nobody on board.

My seat was in its upright position, the table tray was folded away and all my electronic games were off.

But despite this, the stewardess was coming down the aisle like an Exocet missile. ‘Sir,’ she smiled, ‘you’re going to need to uncross your legs for take off. It’s a federal requirement.’

This was a new one on me but comparatively speaking it’s a pinprick. Earlier in the day, I heard a security guard in a Las Vegas mall tell a group of weary shoppers to put their shoes back on.

Our cameraman had been dumbfounded in an Albuquerque supermarket when, after asking for a pack of Marlboro, he’d been told, ‘This is a family-oriented store sir. We’re not allowed to sell you cigarettes.’

Shall I go on? OK, how about this. A sticker affixed to the side of a huge rubbish skip warned passers-by not to clamber on the refuse collecting device. That bit was odd enough but underneath it said, and I quote, that ‘It is unlawful to tamper with or remove this notice.’

This means that someone has called a meeting and voted to make it illegal to remove warning notices in
the state of Texas. Illegal, you’ll note. Not inadvisable. Il-bloody-legal.

But the best I’ve saved till last. My waitress in Reno said she could not serve me with a second beer until I had finished the first.

Naturally, I asked, despairingly why this should be so and was told, simply, ‘It’s a rule.’

And that’s it. No argument. No truck. You can’t line your beers up. You can’t cross your legs on a plane. You can’t tamper with notices. You can’t buy cigarettes in supermarkets.

And the decent Christian folk of middle America just seem to accept it. Now, these people may be fat and their hairstyles need to be seen to be believed but they did invent the space shuttle so they’re not stupid.

And yet they’re quite happy to put their shoes on when asked to do so by someone in a uniform. Why?

When the French government tried to increase tolls on lorry drivers, they blockaded the autoroutes.

When the Maggon came up with the poll tax, people set fire to Trafalgar Square.

When the Italians are asked to pay VAT they lose all their books, remind the bloke from the tax office that he’s ‘family’ and pop into town for a coffee.

I suspect that inner-city America has become so out of control that the only way you can be marked out as a law-abiding citizen is to obey every rule that comes along no matter how daft or ill conceived.

And if you want the most ill-conceived law of the lot, you need look no further than the new speed limits. This is not some trifling rule about crossing your legs. This is life and death.

An entire generation of Americans has grown up knowing that it’s entirely possible to die while driving and coast to a halt before you hit anything.

Roads that are wider than they are long were subject to a blanket 55mph speed limit, meaning that you could get in the back for a snooze or perform complex operations on your passenger’s adenoids without fear of crashing.

Your car could weave from lane to lane but this was no big deal because the guy behind had all the time in the world to get out his car’s manual, see where the cruise control off button was and take avoiding action.

But now, most states post a 75mph speed limit, meaning that it all happens so much faster.

The drivers still allow their hearts to beat once every fifteen minutes or so, but they don’t realize they’re teetering on the edge of a holocaust.

And the cars don’t help either. In recent years, American automotive design has leapt to a standard only seen before in Italy – the latest Chrysler line-up is staggeringly good-looking – but dynamically, they’re still in the dark ages.

On my recent trip I rented a number of different cars, which ranged from foul to the Buick Le Sabre.

This compact sedan is 22 feet long and 14 feet wide and I don’t doubt was easily capable of handling 55mph, while returning four or even five miles to the gallon.

But now, the dowager is expected to heave itself along at 75 and it just can’t cope. The suspension is way, way softer than marshmallow which means there is no jarring but even the smallest pebble causes the car to rock sickeningly for miles afterwards.

Ask it to handle a corner – even a gentle one on an
interstate – and it just won’t. I’d have more luck getting my two-year-old daughter to speak Greek. Turn the wheel and it adopts a crazy angle but doesn’t really change direction.

After a mile or so, the tyres start to squeal but it’s still going in a straight line. No kidding, I’ve driven hover-crafts which respond more quickly to messages from the helm. This is a hateful car.

The only time I felt even remotely safe in it was outside Arizona’s schools, where lollipop ladies erect temporary width restrictions and impose a 15mph speed limit.

As I gratefully slammed on the anchors and wound the car down to this more sedate pace, I even had time to think that here, at last, was a law that made sense.

I also thought that if you’re going to America soon, do not allow them to rent you a Buick Le Sabre, and that Montana should be avoided at all costs.

You see, in Montana, they’ve done away with the speed limits altogether.

Last week, Michael Aspel jumped out of a cupboard, holding a big red book, and announced that I was to be the subject of
This Is Your Life
.

My mind was in a whirl. I have no friends who work in television, so they can’t wheel any celebrities through the sliding doors. I have no war medals. I do nothing for charity. I’m only 36. I haven’t done anything yet.

I was completely at a loss for words which, as it turned
out, was good practice because three days later Suzuki delivered one of their new X-90s to my house.

Ordinarily, the road test starts to form immediately in my mind. With normal cars, I’m starting to think about who might be tempted by such a machine and what sort of things would interest them. Should I major on performance, or style, or economy or roominess?

And that’s what bothered me with the Suzuki. Exactly who would be tempted by this weird little car? Me? No. My mother? Absolutely not. The woman in Safeway? Michael Jackson? The Ayatollah? My bank manager?

It’s taken a couple of days to work out that in fact no one will be tempted by it for the simple reason that it’s the most stupid-looking piece of machinery of all time.

It is almost as though the designer dreamed up the front to a point half-way down the roof and, to save time, did exactly the same with the back. Were it not for the lights, you could drive this car forwards or backwards and no one would be any the wiser.

In essence, it’s a two-seat, targa-roofed version of the rather nice Suzuki Vitara. They cost about the same, have the same 1600cc engine and are aimed, I guess, at the same sort of people – hairdressers.

But no hair cuttist I know would dream of buying the X-90. And that brings me back full circle.

Now, Suzuki is a large and clever organization so how on earth did this absurd little car ever slip through the net? Simple. They had a meeting.

If I ran a company, meetings would be banned. Meetings are for people who are under-employed. Have a meeting and you’ll end up with the Child Support Agency. Or an ECU. Or Birmingham city centre.

I went to a meeting for the first time in years last week, and was staggered at how little we achieved in five hours.

This was entirely my fault, but then there’s always someone like me in a meeting who has an opinion on everything and wishes to share it.

Trouble is, there’s always someone with an equally large mouth who disagrees, and that’s it. Everyone else is left to do their fingernails while two people call each other names and consider throwing water at one another.

When the bar opened we called a halt, decided we were doing a good job, and no conclusions were needed. Had we been running Suzuki, the X-90 project would have sailed through unscathed.

I remember in my early days as a reporter for the
Rotherham Advertiser
, covering the local parish council meetings. One, in particular, spent 45 minutes wondering whether they should have a glass or a plastic water jug, and ended up deciding to have both.

In the early days of motoring, car firms were run by one man with a vision. Colin Chapman founded Lotus so he could make small, light, agile cars. Sir William Lyons knew exactly what a Jaguar should be. Ferdinand Porsche was a proponent of air-cooled engines slung out at the back. Henry Ford wanted to pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap.

Now look at Japan. With the exception of Honda, all oriental car firms were founded by large corporations whose sole aim is to keep the shareholders happy. Hundreds – if not thousands – of people are involved in every decision, and the management lives in constant fear for its jobs.

Had Suzuki been a dictatorship, the X-90 would never
have happened. Mr Big Cheese would have strolled through his designers’ office, seen the drawings, and fired everyone responsible.

But in committee culture, it’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes. No one dares speak out and the project gains so much momentum it becomes unstoppable.

And if even if someone like me does stick his hand up, the people responsible will fight back. Result: deadlock.

Europe’s car firms are in the same boat today. All the founding figures are dead and committees have taken over. That’s how we got the Scorpio and the Vectra.

Single ruling figures are out of the equation. No one is prepared to trust gut feeling and instinct any more, because in the meeting the guys from the market research department demonstrated that the Scorpio, or the X-90 or whatever, had clinicked well.

Then the designer stands up and explains how the push-me-pull-you look will be in for 1998. Or that the wide-mouth frog face is a happening thing in 1996.

Rubbish. The motor show finishes today and few would disagree that the most
exciting
car there was TVR’s new 7 litre V12 coupé.

It looks and goes like it does because TVR is run by one man who dreams things up on the back of a fag packet and sets fire to anyone who thinks he’s wrong.

Democracy. Pah. Never trust anything invented by the Greeks.

It seems to me that the closed circuit cameras which are sprouting out of every town centre vantage-point these days are pretty much useless.

Everyone I’ve ever seen on a still from a security camera looks like Cyrano de Bergerac. And he always appears to be standing at the counter in a bank, brandishing a banana. This, I’m fairly sure, is not a crime. Either that or the supposed criminal has had the foresight to wear a parka with a hood – so we can only see his preposterous nose. And the fruit.

I mean, if you were out robbing, you would be fairly sure that some kind of video recording was being made, so you’d wear a crash helmet or a trilby or anything which would thwart subsequent police enquiries. And if they did come round to your house with some difficult questions, you’d only need say that you were elsewhere at the time but you had seen Gerard Depardieu in town that afternoon, looking a bit shifty. Sure, there are some cameras, way up high, overlooking the most unlikely spots, but the footage from one of these was played the other day on one of the countless new crime programmes and the thieves looked like small mice with enormous conks.

It was all very dramatic, as they ram-raided their way out of a car park with policemen trying to kick in the windows, but the viewer hadn’t a hope of identifying the baddies. And that makes the cameras pointless.

Now I’m not one of these weird beard lefties who thinks that Sony is a Luciferian code for some kind of Orwellian police state. If you’re just walking along,
picking your nose a bit and scratching your backside, who cares if it’s all caught on Beta?

The cameras are only there to nail people from the sewers – thieves, murderers and blackguards. But they won’t work unless we take a leaf out of Monaco’s book.

This tiny principality, just two miles long by as little as 300 yards wide, is watched over by 160 security cameras, not counting the privately run video monitors in car parks and entrance halls.

Coming out of my hotel every morning, there were two which could watch me all the way to the door of the car park and, once inside, there were cameras on every floor and in each of the three lifts. As A.A. Gill wrote in
Tatler
last month, you don’t need a holiday camera in Monte Carlo; just stop off at the border on your way out and ask for edited highlights of your visit.

But onanists beware! If they go to the trouble of fitting cameras in car park lifts, you can be sure your nocturnal habits are being monitored too.

Now, there is no crime in Monaco. Half the residents may have made their millions through some sort of rule-bending exercise, but there is no petty theft. One lady regularly walks home alone from the casino after nightfall wearing jewellery worth $3 million. And she’s never been touched. People say that this is because of the cameras, but that’s nonsense. And neither is it because there’s one policeman for every 40 residents. Sure, with hardly any crime to solve, they have nothing to do all day except enforce a dress code. Try walking through Monaco with the hood on your parka pulled up and see how far you get. I’ll give you a tenner for every yard you manage before Clouseau interferes. These guys won’t even let you
shuffle along head down, with your collar turned up. They’re like stage managers, making sure you look good for the cameras. And if you refuse to look up, they will escort you politely back to France, where you can convalesce.