Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (37 page)

It's very rare that we ever catch a glimpse of a newspaper editor. But last week there they all were, suited and booted and strolling down Downing Street in a scene that in their minds probably looked like a publicity poster from
Reservoir Dogs
.

Unfortunately, in my mind they looked like the sixth form on their way to be beaten by the headmaster. You had the speccy Potter boy from the
Guardian
, the one who looks like a young farmer from
The Times
, the rather suave one from the
Sunday Times
[Ed: Christmas bonus for you, Jeremy] and a diminutive urchin from the
Sun
.

The school bully – the man from the
Daily Mail
– was missing because he had a note from his mum.

Inside No. 10 they were told, more in sorrow than anger, that they must come up with a tough new set of rules for themselves or the headmaster would be forced to introduce even tougher ones himself.

In short, they were informed that they must set up an independent body that could a) hand out fines of up to a million quid and b) force them to write lines on the front page of their homework when they got their facts wrong: ‘I must stop calling people murderers when they are not.'

To Grant and Clegg, the smaller boys in the school, this probably seems a good idea, but in reality there are going to be some serious problems. Because these guys are not sixth-formers. They are the editors of national institutions. And now they face being neutered by one of the biggest scourges of modern society – the pressure group.

Every single thing you can think of is represented by a pressure group. Trees. Haulage contractors. Bats. Shrubs. People with big ears. The Welsh. Great crested grebes. Oil companies. The royal family. I bet you there's even one for women who have supernumerary nipples.

At present an editor is free to place letters from such organizations in the bin. But when they threaten to go to the new independent body, and that body is able to hand out million-quid fines and force him to print humiliating front-page apologies, he is going to have to take them seriously. And that – from my experience at the BBC – is an absolute nightmare.

When I get a complaint letter from an individual, it is fair enough. They are entitled to their opinion and are allowed to express it. But when that individual has some official-looking headed notepaper and a website, he is a pressure group. And he is not expressing an opinion. He is expressing what he sees as a fact.

And he cares. Boy, does he care. He cares so much that once he has his teeth into your ankles, he will not let go until you are sacked and dead. And to make matters worse, he knows what to say in his complaint letters and to whom they must be addressed. He knows – because he is a pressure group and it is therefore his job – how to get any independent body to sit up and pay attention.

This means I have to go through life with a thousand tractor tyres on my back, spending 10 per cent of my day doing my job and 90 per cent dealing with someone from the Incontinent Society who was offended because the previous week on television I said I'd driven so fast I'd wet myself.

Several years ago a pressure group called Transport 2000 contacted the BBC saying that either
Top Gear
had to
be pulled from the schedules or a new pro-bus eco-car show must be commissioned as balance.

Now if you wrote to the editor of the
Daily Mail
ordering him either to stop printing stories about the Duchess of Cambridge's pregnancy or to set up an anti-monarchist newspaper to provide readers with an alternative point of view, you'd either get no reply at all or a two-liner inviting you to go and boil your head.

But because the BBC is governed and monitored by precisely the sort of independent body that Lord Justice Leveson wants, Transport 2000 – despite its out-of-date name and its communistic outlook – had to be taken seriously. Very seriously. So for months, hundreds of man hours were wasted on analysing and studying its stupid suggestions. Before sense finally prevailed and they were rejected.

This is what the editors are going to face. Legally savvy nutcases with time on their hands, using every trick in the book in an attempt to force newspapers to toe a line, no matter how idiotic that line might be.

Yesterday I blew up an eel. No big deal, you might think. It was only going to be eaten by a Cockney, anyway. But next year, when the scene is shown on television, we can be absolutely sure that someone from the Eel Preservation Society will start the complaint ball rolling.

And even if that person is just one madman, living in his mother's loft, it will be considered by all the organizations that have been set up to make sure no one at the BBC ever upsets anyone ever. The editorial-compliance people. Ofcom. The BBC Trust. They'll pore over the complaint. They'll study the explosion in slow motion. They'll contact experts from other pressure groups to see if the creature suffered in any way. (Yes. It died.) And afterwards they'll write
to me to say that I've just issued an ‘unreserved' apology. Because a ‘sincere' apology or a ‘profound' apology won't do.

It's this constant pressure that explains why, with the notable exceptions of Harry & Paul, there are now no edgy comedians on the BBC. I spoke to one last week, who said, ‘It just isn't worth it any more.'

And don't, for heaven's sake, think the committee set up to monitor and fine newspapers will be staffed by people such as you and me; people who'll strive to keep the pressure groups at bay and the fun ball rolling. Because that won't happen.

Instead it'll be run by hopeless do-gooders who in their ridiculous quest for fair play will ensure that there's no play at all. Which means that this time next year, no matter what paper you buy, it will be the
Guardian
.

9 December 2012

Soon the nation's experts will settle down to decide what's been the best of everything in 2012. Best sports personality. Best frock. Best dog. And best moment.

Actually, scrub that. The best moment's easy. It was when those five rings of what appeared to be molten steel were lowered into the Olympic stadium and the whole country, as one, suddenly decided that it wasn't so bad to be British after all.

I've already named my best car; AA Gill will soon be revealing which chef did the best job of disguising the bodily fluids in his food; and you, in the meantime, will be in a frilly dinner shirt at a crappy hotel on Park Lane as a comedian with a vaguely familiar face presents some drunken halfwit with the award for 2012's best new packaging solution.

Rough Guides, meanwhile, has announced the ten best places to visit in all of the world. And No. 1 is Northern Cyprus, apparently.

Of course, this is nonsense. Northern Cyprus is just southern Cyprus, only with more soldiers and cheaper carpets. As a travel destination, it is in no way a match for Hue in Vietnam, or New York, neither of which is in the Rough Guides top-ten list.

Puerto Rico is, but that's madness. Unless you like staying in a hotel where the lifeguard has a sub-machine gun.

I'm not sure that north-eastern Iceland should be there either. Because if what you want is peace and quiet and rugged volcanic splendour, you can find that twenty minutes
from Keflavik airport. Driving six hours to find something even better is like spending a day rummaging around in a box of Lego, looking for a more impressive yellow brick.

And I'm sorry, but Dresden? This is the world's fifth-best place in the same way that Angela Merkel is the world's fifth-best-looking woman. There are some fabulous towns in eastern Germany but Dresden isn't one of them. Yes, you get some beautifully restored cobbles but you also get a lot of bitter old men who hate you very much and wish the communists would come back.

However, the entry on the Rough Guides list that seems to have surprised most people is to be found at No. 7. It's the only place in all of the British Isles to get a mention: Margate.

Even the locals seem to have been taken aback, with one saying the town centre is full of yobs and amusement arcades and boarded-up shops. And there's more too: Margate is in Kent and, frankly, that's the least accessible place on earth. If you live anywhere else in Britain, it's easier to get to Yukon. Not that I'd recommend that either, unless you enjoy being bitten by mosquitoes.

However, I can see the logic of Rough Guides with Margate. Sure, it's not as visually impressive as Sydney or Hong Kong. And I am certain San Francisco has more restaurants. But put yourself in the mind of a visitor coming to Britain.

When we go abroad on holiday, we like to annoy our children by taking them to see the ‘real' country. We like to find the restaurants where the menus aren't also printed in English and we want to drink the local wine. Even though we would get the same taste sensation by sucking on one of the blue tablets at the bottom of the urinals.

It stands to reason, then, that many people coming here would want to see the ‘real' Britain. So where should we send
them? Once, I sent some particularly nasal Americans to Loughborough, telling them they couldn't get more British than that. But what if you were taking it seriously?

A seaside town makes sense. Fish. Chips. Vinegar. Endless afternoons in the Cafe de Formica, rubbing condensation from the windows and kidding yourself that the sky is definitely getting brighter. Walks on the gritty sand in the drizzle. A mug of tea. And then off to an amusement arcade to shoot an alien.

There is simply nowhere else on earth where people do that to get away from it all. So I'd say to any visiting American: once you've done Stratford-upon-Avon and an open-top bus tour of Warwick Castle, and you are fed up with how Britain was, get a taste of how it is now with a trip to the seaside.

Margate would do nicely, for sure, but if you want somewhere that's a bit easier to reach from your overheated, Polish-run central London hotel, I think you can do better. Tenby, for instance. Or north Cornwall. Or East Yorkshire.

All of these places are still dripping with echoes of the past. You have hints of fishing and roll-out-the-barrel revelry. But most now also have hotels run by people who've been to London and know that nylon is no longer an acceptable bedding solution.

Back in the summer I spent a few days in Whitby and it was perfect. Cold. Wet. And mostly shut. I bought fish and chips and I ate them on a bench overlooking a forlorn-looking trawler. It plainly hadn't been out for months, because all you can catch in Whitby these days is chlamydia.

I loved it. I loved the wiggly little streets and the old cottages and the sea air. I loved the sound of the gulls and of the rigging in the sail boats, flapping about in the biting wind. I also loved the hotel I found just north of the town, a little
bit of Knightsbridge wedged between the bleak moors and the rocky shoreline where I spent a couple of idyllic hours looking for sea creatures in slippery ponds.

We've all spent time in a seaside town such as Whitby. It's one of the few bonds that we all share. France has its cheese. America has its proms. Rwanda has days when the whole country goes out on the streets to clear up litter. And we have our seaside. It's our glue.

So, yes, since millions of foreign visitors come here every year wanting to know who we really are, it makes sense that one of the world's ten best places to visit is a town on the British coast. For me, that'd be Whitby.

16 December 2012

When a televisual quiz show finds its feet and becomes popular, its producers get it into their heads that the audience would be much happier if the ordinary contestants with their terrible shoes and their ghastly jumpers were replaced by ‘celebrities'.

So instead of Brian standing there, sweating slightly as he tries to win enough cash for some new decking or a short cruise, we have a bright orange woman whose name we can't quite remember trying to win money for injured rabbits and various other charities no one's heard of.

Shows to have gone down this route in the past include
Mr & Mrs
,
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
,
Weakest Link
and
University Challenge
. Most recently, we've been treated to a star-studded version of the rather brilliant
Pointless
. Which ended up being called
Pointless Celebrities
. And so it turned out to be.

One team was made up of two extremely enthusiastic young people who may have been in a soap opera, or one of Simon Cowell's singing contests, or perhaps a sex tape. But anyway, it quickly became obvious that they had put a great deal of effort into their appearance but none whatsoever into any sort of research.

Luckily, however, the topic that would take them through to the next round was easy: David Cameron. All they had to do was correctly answer just one of the following questions. Which famous public school did he attend? What's the name of his baby daughter? What's his constituency? What's his
wife called? And for which former chancellor was he a special adviser?

Amid staccato bursts of shallow, forced, embarrassed laughter, they had to admit that, actually, they didn't know any of the answers, but that they were prepared to hazard a guess at the name of the public school he'd attended. ‘Oxford,' they said nervously.

Now if I'd been the host, I'd have fixed them with a steely glare and wondered out loud what on earth had possessed them to appear on a quiz show when neither of them even knew the difference between a school and a university. Perhaps this is why I'm not the host of a quiz show.

But here's the thing. While I knew all the answers to the questions about Mr Cameron, I would make an equally enormous fool of myself if I were in their shoes and I was asked questions about
EastEnders
, which I have never seen, or musicals, which I studiously avoid, or Chaucer, the one man from history whom I'd most like to murder.

In the fairly recent past, it was not hard to be knowledgeable. So long as you had read a couple of Shakespeare's plays and you spent an hour each morning reading
The Times
, you were pretty well placed to hold your head high at even the most sophisticated dinner party.

Not any more. I spoke last night to an extremely bright girl. She was eloquent and fully up to speed with how pigs are farmed in Chile, but when it came to recent problems with the press, she had it in her head that journalists had paid the police to hack Milly Dowler's phone.

I encounter similar problems at work because when I introduce the Stig, I usually include a sideways reference to some report from the papers that day. And afterwards, we have to dub on the laughter because almost no one in the audience gets it. That's why you always hear people laughing
so hard it sounds like their spleens are coming out of their noses. And yet the people in the back of shot look like they've just been told a theory about particle physics, in Latin.

The problem is that in the olden days, news was roughly divided in two. You had news about ragamuffins who had appeared in court. And you had news of natives being brought to heel in some far-flung corner of the empire.

Nowadays there's so much information coming from so many different places, we cannot possibly keep abreast of it. Syria, for example. I was really concentrating hard on the complexities of the civil war and what its effects on the region might be when, all of a sudden,
The X Factor
finished and suddenly I felt compelled to read up on the winner.

But before I even had a chance to discover his or her name, I found myself embroiled in a heated late-night debate on the American constitution and the rights and wrongs of being permitted to bear arms. Hard when your head is full of Alex Reid's sexuality. And Bradley Wiggins's haircut. And whether Aston Martin will do a deal with Mercedes.

Today the news agenda is so vast you don't absorb information. You simply skim along its surface. I read a fair bit about the plight of soldiers in Afghanistan and I was fairly clear on one thing: lots of them were being shot by local soldiers they'd helped to train.

But then at a recent military function I spoke to some chaps who'd actually been there and they assured me that this was complete rubbish. So how do I check this out? In the past you would turn to the BBC or the papers but almost no one does that any more. Which is why we end up with a head full of misconceptions, half-truths and flimflam about Kelly Brook's breasts.

Some have argued that Twitter would be the answer to all our prayers; that it would provide a balance of real-time
information from people who are actually on the spot. You'd have news from the rebels in Syria and news too from President Bashar al-Assad. But the truth is that you can't really condense the complexities of the Middle East into a
Very Hungry Caterpillar-
sized crucible of just 140 characters.

And anyway, these days, if you speak your mind on Twitter or any other social networking site, you will wake at five the next morning to find half a dozen policemen ripping up your floorboards.

But the worst thing about any ether-based news delivery system is that no one's on hand to decide on our behalf what matters and what doesn't. Which is why we have two pointless celebrities going on television to demonstrate that, actually, they don't know anything at all.

And neither do I, if I'm honest. Except that it's Christmas this week. Have a happy time and see you on the flip side.

23 December 2012