The World According to Clarkson (17 page)

However, best of all, the RSPB can’t object because any birds native to the reservoirs of Staines were long since sucked into the Trent engine of a passing 777 and shredded.

Sunday 1 December 2002

I understand that England recently lost a game of cricket. Good. The more we lose, the more our interest in the game wanes and the less it will dominate our newspapers and television screens.

Cricket – and I will not take any argument – is boring. Any sport which goes on for so long that you might need a ‘comfort break’ is not a sport at all. It is merely a means of passing the time. Like reading.

Of course, we used to have televised reading. It was called
Jackanory
. Now we have
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, which is much better. Things have moved on, but cricket has not.

I’m not sure that it can. Even if Nasser Hussain, who is the captain of England, were to invest in some new hair and marry Council House Spice (aka Claire Sweeney, the ex-
Brookside
actress turned
Big Brother
contestant), it wouldn’t make any difference.

Nobody is quite sure how cricket began, though many people believe it was invented by shepherds who used their crooks to defend the wicket gate to the sheep fold. This would certainly figure because shepherds had many long hours to while away, with nothing much to do.

The first written reference to cricket was in 1300, when Prince Edward played it with his friend Piers
Gaveston. And again, this would figure. Princes, in those days, were not exactly rushed off their feet.

Cricket was spread around the world by British soldiers who found themselves marooned in godforsaken flea-bitten parts of the world and needed something to keep them amused, not just for an hour but for week after interminable week.

Today Australia dominates the game – which furthers my theory. Of course they’re good at it. They have no distractions. And the only way we can ever beat them is to round up the unemployed and the wastrels and give them all bats. Certainly, they’d feel at home in the pavilion. It’s exactly the same as sitting in a bus shelter all day.

Let me put it this way – is there a sound more terrifying on a Sunday afternoon than a child saying: ‘Daddy. Can we play Monopoly?’

Like cricket, Monopoly has no end. The rules explain how you can unmortgage a property and when you should build hotels on Bond Street but they don’t say, and they should, that the winner is the last player left alive. And what about Risk? You make a calculation, based on the law of averages, that you can take the world but you’re always stymied by the law of probability and end up out of steam, throwing an endless succession of twos and ones in Kamchatka. Still, this is preferable to the modern version in which George W. Bush invades Iraq and we all die of smallpox.

Happily, my children are now eight, six and four so they’re way past the age when board games hold any
appeal. Given the choice of mortgaging Old Kent Road or shooting James Bond on a PlayStation, they’ll take the electronic option every time.

Then there are jigsaws, which I once had to explain to a Greek. ‘Yes, you spend a couple of weeks putting all the pieces together so you end up with a picture.’

‘Then what happens?’ he asked.

‘Well, you break it up again and put it back in the box.’

It’s not often I’ve felt empathy with a Greek, but I did then. And it’s much the same story with crosswords. If scientists could harness the brainpower spent every day on trying to find the answer to ‘Russian banana goes backwards in France we hear perhaps’, then maybe mankind might have cured cancer by now.

Crosswords, like jigsaws and cricket, are not really games in themselves. They are simply tools for wasting time. And that’s not something that sits well in the modern world.

We may dream of living the slow life, taking a couple of hours over lunch and eating cheese until dawn, but the reality is that we have a heart attack if the traffic lights stay red for too long or the lift doors fail to close the instant we’re ready to go.

Answering-machine messages are my particular bugbear. I want a name and a number, and that’s it. I don’t have time to sit and listen to where you’ll be at three and who you’ll be seeing and why you need to talk before then. And even if I do pick up the phone personally, I don’t want a chat. I’m a man. I don’t do chatting. Say what you have to say and go away.

British film-makers still haven’t got this. They spend hours with their sepia lighting and their long character-developing speeches and it’s all pointless because we’d much rather watch a muscly American saying: ‘Die, m
**********
r.’

Slow-cooked lamb shanks for supper? Oh for God’s sake, I’ll get a takeaway.

Cricket, then, is from a bygone age when people invested their money in time rather than in things. And now we have so many things to play with and do, it seems odd to waste it watching somebody else playing what’s basically an elaborate game of catch.

Please stop watching – then it will go away.

Sunday 8 December 2002

Over the years I’ve always said no to appearing on
Have I Got News For You
. Actually, that’s not true. I haven’t always said no, because they only asked once. However, had they asked again, I would have said no again.

There didn’t seem to be any upside. I would sit there, dripping like cheese in an old sock, while Ian Hislop, Paul Merton and Angus Deayton skated elegantly around their carefully choreographed and heavily scripted routine.

Like pretty well everyone, I knew how the show was put together. Throughout the week, a room full of the brightest writers in the land would crank out jokes and then on studio day the presenters would hone and perm them to perfection.

The guests? Well they’d be like snotty kids, strapping themselves into a Spitfire and going up there, alone, against an entire battle-hardened German squadron. Yes, they might fire off a few bullets but they’d end up full of holes.

However, when the call came through a couple of weeks ago to sit in the main chair, I needed smelling salts. ‘What, be the quizmaster? Me – the car bloke?’

This was like being asked to run the state opening of
parliament. I’d have the team on my side, making sure the throne was gold enough and that my crown wouldn’t fall off. ‘Yes. Just yes.’

It was a bit disappointing that the evening before I was due to record I had been invited to go out with four jolly attractive women who’d spent the previous few weeks learning how to be strippers and who needed a man to accompany them on a tour of London’s lap-dancing venues.

Normally, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse couldn’t have dragged me from that opportunity. But attempting to fly on
HIGNFY
with a hangover and no sleep was not sensible, so I was in bed at 11 o’clock in my smart pyjamas with the bunny rabbit ears.

In the morning a motorcyclist brought round the finished script on a purple cushion. It was very, very funny. And apparently quite simple, too. I just had to sit there, waiting for Paul and Ian to finish their prepared verbal tennis, then I would read my gags from the autocue, pick up the cheque (with a forklift truck) and go home.

Er, well, it’s not quite like that.

I arrived at the studios at 9.30 in the morning to find that Geoffrey Robinson, the former paymaster-general, had been charged with a selection of motoring offences. Plainly, this was good material. So half the script was thrown away to make room, and then the trouble started.

Obviously the three scriptwriters, headed by snake-hipped Jed, wanted to dwell on the white powder that
had allegedly been found in Robinson’s car,
^*
but the lawyers said it would be better to call it a substance. A substance? That was no good. A substance could be something on the bottom of his shoe. So after an hour or so everyone agreed that it could be called a ‘mystery powder’.

So where were Paul and Ian while this was going on? Well, to be blunt, they were at home, in loose robes. They didn’t breeze in till six. And do you know something? They had not seen a script; they didn’t even know who the guests were.

All they see before the show, and I mean half an hour before the tape-players start to turn, are the photographs to which they are asked to come up with captions and the four people in the odd-one-out round. They had the same amount of preparation as the guests.

Let me tell you something else, too. I had always imagined that after twelve years of being professionally cynical they would be cruel and bitter and combative.

But they were like parents before a school sports day. ‘Don’t worry,’ they kept saying, ‘do your best. It’s not the winning.’ They were so kind that they nearly managed to shut down the hydrants in my armpits.

And God they’re quick. I would ask a question that I know they had never seen or heard before and they’d be off, with a top-of-the-head banter that left me breathless. I wish you could have seen the full hour and
40 minutes that they recorded rather than just the 29 minutes that was transmitted.

I’m sorry to sound so gushing but Paul is properly funny. And crammed into that tiny head, Ian has an encyclopaedia.

I should explain that they really do care about winning. Which is odd because, from where I was sitting, the scores seemed to mount up in an entirely arbitrary fashion. I have no idea why Paul ended up with sixteen and Ian with eleven. So far as I could work out, they both got nought.

And me? Well, I spent most of the evening reading from the autocue when I should have been looking at the notes on my desk. I forgot to ask two questions completely, I lost my earpiece so I couldn’t hear the instructions from the gallery and at no point did I ever know who was supposed to be answering what.

Doubtless it will all have looked seamless on television – they even managed to make sense of Boris Johnson. But the simple fact of the matter is that 7 million people will have watched my performance and thought: ‘Nope. He wasn’t as good as Angus Deayton either.’

I agree. And nobody ever will be.

Sunday 22 December 2002

Just last week I left my children, aged eight, six and four, at home alone. I only needed to buy the papers and it was just too much of a faff to find all their shoes and get them in the car when I’d only be gone, at most, for five minutes.

Of course I was in a total panic about it. Sure, I’d asked the neighbour to keep an ear out, I’d written down my mobile phone number and I’d explained where the gun was, and how it could be speed-loaded should someone unsavoury come to the door.

But despite these extensive precautions I still came back expecting to find them either in the fire or in white slavery in Turkmenistan.

So, like everyone else, I was horrified to learn this week that two mothers had left their kids at home while they went off, not for the papers, but for a holiday.

One woman had arrived at Manchester airport where she found her son needed a passport (yeah, right), so she’d put him in a taxi and sent him home. The other had gone skiing. Dreadful. What’s the world coming to? Something must be done.

However, let’s stop and think for a moment. The children left behind were eleven and twelve and, while this may seem young to those of us of a forty-ish
disposition, we have to face the fact that today eleven is the new seventeen.

If I’d been left at home alone when I was eleven, I’d have been dead of hunger or electrocution within the hour. Come to think of it, if I were left at home aged 42 there’d be the same result in the same sort of time frame.

We might like to think of an eleven-year-old as some newborn foal, all slimy and incapable with wobbly legs, but it’s not that long ago that eleven-year-olds were skilled in the arts of mining and pickpocketry. And nothing’s changed.

Today, most eleven-year-olds can make a roach, hotwire a car, outrun the police, fight an entire army of aliens, drink a bottle of vodka without being sick and operate a digital satellite transceiver. So they should have no trouble at all with a microwave and a tin opener.

Certainly, most eleven-year-olds are far better able to fend for themselves than most eighty-year-olds. And the state has no qualms about leaving them all by themselves for week after interminable week with no pension and no reliable means of reaching the lavatory on time.

Can an eighty-year-old program a television or understand packet food? Can an eighty-year-old afford the heating bills? Not usually.

Of course an eleven-year-old cannot afford heating bills either but at least he can hack into the power company’s accounts and adjust his bill to nought.

Furthermore, you should put yourself in the shoes of the eleven-year-old. At home. Alone. Over Christmas.

For an eighty-year-old this is hell on earth, but for an eleven-year-old it’s about as close to heaven as you can get while your heart is still beating.

No hirsute old ladies queuing up to kiss you on the mouth. No Queen’s broadcast to the nation.

No sprouts. No Boxing Day parties with people ‘from the village’, no need to wait until Christmas morning to play with your new Xbox game, and no need to worry that someone might want to watch television instead.

No need to open presents which you know are jumpers. No being dragged off to church on Christmas Eve. Put your feet on the furniture, dig out Mum’s X-rated videos, wonder who Joe Strummer was and set the garage to loud.

And because you can eat what you want, where you want, with your fingers, while slouching, and with your elbows on the table, there will be no family rows and no volcanic explosions as, for the only time in a whole year, a family is forced to coexist in a small space for a long time.

I don’t want to be bah-humbug about this. I love the idea of a Christmas around the tree, watching my children unwrap their presents and settling down after lunch to watch Steve McQueen on his motorcycle. But those days are gone and they won’t be back.

Let’s not forget that today is the past that people in the future will dream about.