Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (16 page)

Next month the space shuttle
Atlantis
will blast off for the final time, and when it returns, that will be that. America will no longer be capable of getting a man into space. So what, then, will become of the International Space Station (ISS)? For now, the crew in their polo shirts and slacks can be ferried back and forth by the Russians while the Europeans – not us, obviously, or the Greeks – can be relied upon to pop up every now and again to empty their bins.

This is done by what the European Space Agency calls its fleet of space freighters. They take washing-up liquid and other vital supplies into space and are then loaded up with all the rubbish for the journey back to earth. The idea is, of course, that they burn up on re-entry but not every part is destroyed. Indeed, only last week, sailors in the South Pacific were advised to stay in their cabins in case they were hit on the head by bits of just such a ship. Called the ATV
Johannes Kepler
, it did mostly burn up but still dumped various components into the ocean in what can only be described as an act of government-sponsored littering.

There are only three Euro space freighters left, and because the governments that fund the programme are now having to give all their spare cash to Stavros and Mr O'Flaherty to keep them in beer and skittles, there won't be any more.

That means the space station will have to be abandoned. And is that any great loss? We're told that many useful experiments are being conducted up there, but what are they exactly? All the crew seems to do is grow mustard and take
pretty pictures of earth. And has anyone thought what will happen to the ISS when the binmen stop coming and the Russians realize they only have a space programme to stop their scientists skipping off to Iran?

Remember Skylab? NASA engineers decided that it could not be kept in orbit forever, so, with their slide rules and their side partings, they decided to bring it down into the sea off South Africa. Unfortunately, they got their sums a bit wrong and most of it crashed into Australia. That time, the American government was hit with a $400 fine for littering. Which it refused to pay.

Boffins, then, may well be reluctant to bring the ISS down in case there is a similar diplomatic incident. But it can't very well be left in space either because of what's called the Kessler syndrome.

At present, there are around 300 million bits of man-made debris orbiting earth at extremely high speed. Some are little flecks of paint or globules of unburnt rocket fuel. But there are also hammers and nuts and bolts. Should one of these things hit the abandoned space station at a closing speed of 35,000mph, there would be many more bits and pieces hurtling around up there, and what an egghead called Donald Kessler worked out is that each time one of these pieces hit another, more smaller bits would result until, eventually, earth would be surrounded by an impenetrable shield of rubbish. Trying to drive a spaceship through it would be like trying to drive a car through a thunderstorm without hitting any of the raindrops.

So here we are, trapped on our own planet by our own mess. We've filled space with junk and littered the oceans with broken-up space freighters and solid rocket boosters and the souls of many dead astronauts. We've spent trillions and all we have to show for it is a bit of useless moon rock
and a profound understanding of how to grow mustard when there's no gravity.

What happened to the spirit of the 1960s when John F. Kennedy made his big speech about why we choose to go to the moon and do the other things – what were the other things, by the way? What happened to our dreams? And why am I, a committed fan of the shuttle and the whole nerdy business of space exploration, starting to feel so jaded?

The problem, I think, is aesthetics. Back in the 1950s, futurists would predict what sort of cars we'd be driving in the twenty-first century. But the cars we actually have are better than those that filled their wildest dreams. It's the same story with computers. They never saw the delicious iPad coming, did they? Or Concorde. Or the Gherkin.

But it was very different with space. The film director Stanley Kubrick dreamt up
Discovery One
, a gloriously slender craft with a ball on the front and six big engines at the back. Then we had
Thunderbird
3. Orange. Jaggedy. Sexy. And the
Eagle
transporter from the television series
Space
1999. It was very cool. And, while there are words you can use to describe the space shuttle, ‘cool' isn't one of them.

Then there's the ISS, which a) is only as far away from earth as Preston is from London and b) looks like a skip full of discarded kitchen appliances.

Mind you, even that's a lot better than the space freighter. In your mind you can probably see a jet-black Mack truck with rockets on the back but I'm afraid in real life it isn't even slightly like that. In fact, it looks like a wheelie bin that's got tangled up in a teenager's crusty bed sheet.

Now, of course, I realize that when you are building a machine for use in space, you don't have to worry about aerodynamics or sleekness. But that's the problem. How many small boys dream of the day when they can go to space
in a wheelie bin? How many people think that the freighter's interior, which looks like a
Blue Peter
project, is a worthwhile way of blowing all those taxpayer billions?

To keep the space programme alive, the boffins, and the accountants that fund them, must understand that we don't want practical, bare-minimum engineering. If you're going to call something a space freighter, make it look like the
Nostromo
; make it look impressive. Give it a bit of wow. Equip it with space guns and, most importantly of all, make sure it has a big red self-destruct button so that when you've finished with it, you can vaporize it before it crashes into the Galapagos Islands.

26 June 2011

In the olden days when we watched movies on video recorders, we could fast-forward through all the legal and commercial claptrap to the start of the actual film.

Not any more.

Now we are forced by electronic trickery to sit through the endless roll call of production companies, disclaimers and suchlike, until eventually we are presented with a reminder that if we copy the film, we are committing an act of piracy and we will be keelhauled.

I have a deal of sympathy with this argument. Foreign television companies pay a fortune for episodes of
Top Gear
and then transmit them with much trumpeting and brouhaha, only to find that most of the audience is elsewhere, having already watched everything on the internet. A couple of years ago
Top Gear
was the most illegally downloaded show in the world.

Things are even worse for the producers of Hollywood blockbusters. They spend £100 million making an all-action spectacular in which cars are driven at high speed into actual helicopters. And absolutely no one pays to watch the finished result.

Just last week various film companies told the High Court that file-sharing sites on the internet are costing them hundreds of millions a year and that firms such as BT and Virgin Media must take action to block them. It's all a total waste of judicial time, partly because if you close down one avenue of access, another will begin immediately somewhere else. But
mainly because most of the people who steal films don't really think what they're doing is wrong.

Some argue that if you copy someone's car, it's not theft because the original is still with its rightful owner. But that's legal doublespeak. Most people – and when I say ‘people', what I mean is ‘teenagers' – have grown up with an internet where everything is free. Phone calls. Facts. Pornography. Nothing costs anything at all.

They go to one site, and a song they want is available for nothing. So why would they go to iTunes and pay 79p? In their silly little heads it makes no sense.

Of course, the idiotic hippie who wrote the song probably thinks it's fair enough, too. But one day, when he's older and wiser and millions of people are stealing his music, he will start to wonder how the concept of theft became so blurred. Perhaps it's always been so.

When I was growing up I would steal rhubarb from the nuns at the local convent. It was their rhubarb. They'd grown it. And they were doubtless looking forward to stewing it and having it for pudding one night with some double cream. I deprived them of that. And yet this was not considered to be burglary. It was called scrumping and, at worst, I could expect a clip round the ear from Constable Plod.

Later, when I was away at school, the council knew that whenever roadworks were necessary in the local village, it could expect to lose pretty well all the cones and most of the flashing amber beacons. Only when we helped ourselves to the temporary traffic lights did it finally come round and make a fuss.

We see similar problems in the workplace. Take a computer home and we all accept that this would be theft. But what about a pen? Nobody's going to mind about that – unless, of course, it's a Montblanc and you took it from the managing director's top pocket.

Hotels are a hotbed of legal fuzziness. I spoke last week to a chap who says his wardrobe at home is stuffed full of dressing gowns he has nicked from various suites around the world. Even though he works in the DVD business, he says that because he has paid many hundreds of pounds for the room he is entitled to take the robe home.

Really? Because on that basis he's also entitled to take the television and the sink. Worse. He can spend £300 on the weekly shop at Waitrose and after settling up he'd be within his rights to swipe half a dozen boxes of Black Magic chocolates.

Shoplifting is an interesting case in point, actually. Obviously, it would be poor form to nick a fridge freezer but a Bounty bar? A gentleman's magazine? I'm a fervent believer that Woolworths went west simply because nobody in the store's history ever actually paid for anything. Every branch was always full of schoolkids with fast hearts, wide eyes and bulging pockets.

And this, I think, is the issue we face with the internet. When a fourteen-year-old downloads the latest collection of noises from JLS it has a known value of 79p. It's a modern-day penny chew, a stalk of rhubarb from the nunnery. It's nothing.

It's the same story with a film. You're nicking something that'll soon be on Sky anyway. And yes, I know, some of you will have read this online, having bypassed the subscription fee. Why not? Rupert Murdoch won't miss a quid.

The trouble is that so long as we continue to believe that theft is only theft if the stolen item is bulky, tangible and expensive, the time will come when Bruce Willis will be forced to hang up his vest and every film made is a tuppence ha'penny slimmed-down version of
The Blair Witch Project
. And the only news you get will be from Twitter. And your
book will have been written by someone who actually admits it's worthless.

And you'll have to wade through hours and hours of unimaginable tripe on the music scene before you find a song written by someone who knows what they're doing. A someone who'll eventually hang up their guitar and have to get a proper job so that they can actually get paid.

I don't think there's a damn thing that can be done to stop theft on the internet. It's uncontrollable. But I do think there is something that can be done to change people's perception of illegal downloads. Stop saying that if you nick a film, you are a thief or a pirate. Pirates are cool. Kids have pirate parties and everyone loves Jack Sparrow. Surely it would be better to say that if you nick a film, you are a mugger.

3 July 2011

And in other news last week, Chris Patten, who is chairman of the BBC Trust, said the corporation is too centred on Notting Hill, too bothered about chilli and lemon grass, too Peter Mandelson and completely out of touch with most licence-fee payers, who simply want pies with a splash of chlamydia. Doubtless this tub-thumping rallying call is all part of the BBC's strategy to move various shows and departments from London to a small town called Salford. Which I believe is the stupidest media decision since someone on a tabloid newspaper said: ‘Hey, guys. I can listen to Prince William's voicemails.'

A lot of the arguments against the BBC's move have been centred on the expense, but I believe there's a more important problem than money. In short, Salford is up north.

I do not speak now as a trendy southern poof who misses Tony Blair and has angst about sending my kids to private school. A television show found that since 1740 every single person in my family tree was born, married and died within twelve miles of one Yorkshire village. I am therefore a pure-blood northerner, a man who makes Michael Parkinson look like Brian Sewell. Cut me in half and you'd find I run on coal and whippets.

But here's the thing. While I was being raised in the north, my parents would occasionally risk the highwaymen and take me to London on trips. There are photographs that show a six-year-old me looking at an elephant in London Zoo and pointing at a black man on Bayswater Road. I remember
trying to make a soldier in a busby blink and gazing in open-mouthed wonderment at the sheer size of the Palace of Westminster. It all seemed so much more exciting somehow than anything I'd ever encountered oop north.

And now, thirty years after I escaped from Yorkshire, that still holds true. I still get a tinkle fizz when the motorway ends and I'm plunged into the labyrinth. I still get a kick out of the BT tower and from hailing a black cab. I absolutely love London. And I'm sorry, but if the BBC now said I had to move back up north, I'd resign in a heartbeat. Many others faced with the same problem have done exactly that.

We are told that too many BBC shows are made by Londoners in London, but that simply is not true.
Top Gear
, the show on which I work, is based in the capital but, so far as I know, every single one of the production team is originally from somewhere else. The producer is from Glossop, in Derbyshire. One of the researchers is from Loughborough, in Leicestershire. Until recently we even employed a Scot. Richard Hammond is from Birmingham. James May is from one of the moons of Jupiter. We are therefore as ‘London' as the Chelsea football team … when John Terry is ill.

London is full of the cream. The bright. The sharp. The ambitious. People who had the gumption at some point to up sticks and leave the two-bit town in which they were raised and do a Dick Whittington.

You see it as you drive about: cafes rammed full of people reading big newspapers and talking about big things and drinking coffee that people in Salford have never heard of. It's where the shows are. It's where films premiere. It's the nation's Oxbridge. It's the best of the best of the best.

Salford? It's just Salford. A small suburb with a Starbucks and a canal with ducks on it. It's a box that has been ticked. A gentle tousle of the politicians' mop. According to Wikipedia,
its only real claim to fame is that a man there was run over by Stephenson's
Rocket
. Oh, and someone once found a head in a bog.

This does not qualify it as a great place to make television shows. Indeed, it's a very bad place. Every week we have to try to entice a guest to our studios, which are in Guildford. Sometimes it's tricky. But it's nowhere near as tricky as it would be if we had to get them up to Manchester. Or as expensive. Every week I'd have to say: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome … Stuart Hall. Again.' That might become wearing.

And how could a news programme run from Salford? It's nowhere near any court that matters and nowhere near a single politician.

Furthermore, if we ran the show from Salford, we'd be employing people from Salford. People who were born there and thought, ‘Yes. I like this. I see no reason to go anywhere else.' And in the world of television that could be a genuine handicap. Every year we'd end up making a Christmas special from the Dog and Duck or the nearest Arndale centre. A television show needs to be run by worldly people. Not people who are frightened to death of the next town.

And what would be the upside? Who cares where a show is made? Who cares whether the
Blue Peter
garden is in London or not? Who cares whether Simon Mayo is speaking to you from Portland Place or a glass-fronted tower up north? It makes not a jot of difference. At the end of a show now it often says BBC Wales or BBC Scotland. If at the end of
Top Gear
we put up an ident saying BBC England there'd be hell to pay internally. But why? Nobody who'd paid for the joke would give a damn.

The big problem here is that politicians – and they're behind this shift, be in no doubt about that – have got it into
their heads that Britain is a big place. But it isn't, really. It's titchy. Moving half the BBC from London to Salford is the same as a parish council moving the table around which it meets from the village hall to the community centre.

Britain is a small place with a whopping great world-class city in its bottom right-hand corner. It therefore makes sense to me that every head office, every government department, every newspaper and, most of all, every television and radio show is based there.

10 July 2011