And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (24 page)

And therein lies the problem of striking today. It’s an axe in a digital world, a completely outdated weapon that doesn’t even have an army to wield it any more.

For a walkout to be properly effective, the strikers need to be salt-of-the-earth, horny-handed sons of toil with a simple-to-understand and genuine grievance. But the miners have gone. British Leyland is gone. The steelworkers have gone. And the last time anyone built a ship in Britain, it was called the
Mary Rose
.

Billy Elliot
would never have worked if it had been set against the backdrop of the Great BBC Walkout of 2005. And
Brassed Off
would have been far less successful if it had been set among the drinking fountains of a soon-to-be-closed call centre in Brentford. It simply doesn’t work when everyone on the picket line is standing under a personalised patio heater from Conran, with a cup of Costa coffee and a Dolce & Gabbana donkey jacket.

I could always support someone if they didn’t have an indoor lavatory, and their left lung had been turned into a diseased walnut while digging coal to power my Aga. But Alan Yentob? I don’t think so.

Yes, the BBC still commands respect among right-thinking people everywhere, and if there really were plans to introduce advertisements for panty-liners in the middle of
Newsnight
, and farm all programme-making out to independent production companies, I’d have been on the picket line like a Scargill, bashing policemen over the head with my placard and dropping effigies of Tony Blair into my brazier.

But there aren’t. So I wasn’t.

Sunday 29 May 2005

Isn’t it marvellous to have wizened old Bobby Geldof back on the scene, poking politicians in the eye and peppering the airwaves with his peculiar mix of profanity and passion?

What he’s got planned is huge: the biggest musical event the world has ever seen.

In one day, just four weeks from now, there will be five concerts in five cities on two continents, featuring 100 acts who will play to a million spectators and more than a billion television viewers.

As an added complication, up to 24 bands are being squeezed into 18 slots at the London gig, and all of them have to be finished by 8 p.m., when the ever helpful health and safety mob move in with their noise-measuring equipment.

Choosing who can play has been a nightmare because back in the days of Live Aid, rock’n’roll was a single generational affair, whereas now Geldof has to keep the kids watching while Elton John is wheeled on to the stage, and the parents amused when Baldy is replaced by, oh, I don’t know, that bloke with the nose piercings who ran himself over last week.

Then there’s the bothersome business of political correctness. Already the organisers have been told that the line-up is far too white and that only one African singer is featured, way down the line-up in Paris.

Of course, sorting all this out would be worthwhile if it raises lots of money.

But this time around that’s not the goal.

Twenty years ago, Geldof raised £79,426,252, which was more than enough to buy the poor of Ethiopia lunch. Now, though, he wants to completely refurbish the whole of Africa and he knows the bill for this cannot be met by the Spice Women and A-ha.

So, the plan with the concerts is to focus the world’s attention on the forthcoming G8 conference at Glen-eagles. In other words, Geldof knows he can’t make a difference, but he can bring pressure to bear on those who can.

It’s a brilliant wheeze, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the G8 delegates, because with Bob on the rampage they’ll have to act, and that’s not easy when George Bush, the richest man at the table, almost certainly has no idea what Africa is.

The big problem is, what do they do? If you pour money into a dictatorship, the dictator ends up with some gold bathroom fittings and the kids still have flies in their eyes. A year after Live Aid, I was in Mali and asked some villagers if they’d seen any of the money. ‘No,’ said one, taking me outside and pointing at the soldiers. ‘But they all have new guns.’

Then there’s the business of Third World debt, which the protesters want cancelled. Fine, but who will lend the poorer countries money if there’s no chance of getting that money back? And how does a drug company stay in business if it has to give its medicines away?

It’s all very well saying that Britain could easily afford
to help because it’s the fourth richest country in the world. But how can a government convince a single mum living in a filthy high-rise on the outskirts of Birmingham that she’s well off?

And how do you get the money out there? A recent report suggested that £6 in every £10 of aid is spent on consultants who work out how the money can be spent and on reports, presumably, into how much those consultants cost.

The G8 delegates could try to explain some of these difficulties, but there’s little point because, in a battle for the people’s minds, a man in a suit making a reasoned point is never going to beat Brad Pitt clicking his fingers every three seconds to remind us all how often a child dies in Africa.

Don’t get me wrong. I want Brad Pitt clicking his fingers. I want the concerts. I want a million to march on Scotland. I want those delegates to feel like they’re in a pressure cooker and that, to turn down the heat, they have to stop making empty promises and actually do something. I even have a plan for what that ‘something’ might be.

It’s based on those ‘Adopt an Otter’ schemes you see at zoos. The idea is that you pay £2 a week, and a specific otter, called Fluffy usually, is actually yours.

I’m not suggesting that every single African should be adopted by every single westerner – there aren’t enough to go round, for a kick-off – but it certainly could be done on a town-by-town basis.

At the moment, councillors spend an inordinate amount of time twinning themselves with some agreeable
little hamlet in France or Germany. Why? So they can go on exchange visits? It is hard to conceive of a more useless way of spending public money.

But what if your local council twinned itself with a town in Africa? I had a similar idea after the tsunami, and I really think it would work.

At the moment, we all just think that there are nearly a billion people in the G8 countries and that if we don’t cough up, someone else will. But when your village has been given the responsibility for a specific village in Africa, abdicating your responsibility to keep the people in that village healthy is not an option.

You would make cakes for the bring-and-buy stall.

Without wishing to sound like I’m writing the copy for a banking commercial, poverty is a global problem. But the solution, I suspect, is local.

Sunday 5 June 2005

Every Sunday evening 56 million people in Britain find something better to do than watch
Top Gear
. So, statistically speaking, you almost certainly don’t know we’re currently staging a vote to find the country’s best driving song.

I assumed, because I know that the programme is watched by many children, that the list of nominations would be full of bands I’d never heard of and music that, if it came on my radio, would make me want to get out of the car.

But no. The top 10, as it stands at the moment, features AC/DC, Motorhead, Steppenwolf, Queen, Kenny Loggins, Golden Earring and, rather disturbingly, at number one Meat Loaf’s appallingly pretentious
Bat Out of Hell
. In the whole of the top 20, there are only three acts from the twenty-first century.

This brings me on to Radio 2. We’re told the newfound popularity of Auntie’s Light Programme is because all the presenters are different, but that’s not it at all. It’s because the new music being played on Radio 1 is always irritating and can sometimes be harmful to your well-being. If the nanny puts Radio 1 on in the kitchen when I’m trying to write, I am often overwhelmed with a sudden and sometimes uncontrollable need to hit her over the head with a bag full of snooker balls.

Do you see where I’m going here? There’s much talk, especially as the festival season begins in earnest, about which of the new bands are any good. Even the
Daily Telegraph
devotes half a page to the relative merits of Coldplay. But the fact of the matter is that the pearls, and they are few, are drowned in an ocean of absolute rubbish.

I know I have something of a reputation for being a rock dinosaur but you should see my daughter’s record collection. Of course, it isn’t a record collection as such; it’s an assembly of ones and noughts on her computer; but anyway, being 10, she likes Maroon Five and Avril Somethingorother, but mostly her binary ballads are from Led Zep, which she thinks are so cool, and Bad Company.

This means, of course, she doesn’t mind at all when Mummy and Daddy go out at night to see artists you thought had gone west in a puddle of vomit and chemicals some time in 1976. In the past couple of years we’ve seen Roger Waters, Blondie, Yes, the Who (half of whom have actually gone west in a puddle of vomit and chemicals) and then, last week, Roxy Music.

Bryan Ferry is a remarkable human specimen. He is a man for whom the ageing process has had no meaning. He may now be a hundred and twenty-twelve, but there are no man breasts, no spread and no sign of a hair hole. And you should see him move. Be assured, his rebellious pro-hunting son Otis can never say to a mate: ‘Hey, you dance like my dad.’ Because no one, no matter how athletic they be, is that good.

The man redefines anyone’s concept of cool. He even makes whistling cool, which is technically impossible. And what’s more, it’s rumoured he once ticked off a
younger son for swearing while their hijacked jet was in the process of nose-diving. And this iciness comes through on stage as his band of real, proper, clever and talented musicians run through a set of songs that would leave any modern band open-mouthed in astonishment.

The best thing, though, is that the audience was also far cooler than anything you’ll find at a teenage rave. There were no football shirts, no spots, and none of that awful greased-down hair that is so popular with tyre fitters. There were one or two rather strange-looking creatures whose barnet had been styled in 1974 and then left to thin out all by itself. I may have also seen some black T-shirts tucked into jeans, which also dated from the early ’70s. But for the most part it was bright-eyed, middle-aged people for whom time has been kind.

There was no unduly long queue for the lavatory cubicles, nobody was flogging bags of expensive aspirins, and in the ballads, instead of waving cigarette lighters around, everyone held up their mobile phones so their kids could hear the tunes too. Best of all, nobody was beaten up and murdered on the way out. Everyone just piled into their Range Rovers and went for something to eat.

Now, compare this with sharing a tent, in a field, having spent the day listening to a bunch of teenagers in spectacularly baggy trousers banging bits of garden furniture together. It doesn’t even get close.

Rock’n’roll, I’m beginning to suspect, is not a going concern. It’s not, as we have always thought, simply a means by which teenagers can annoy their parents but, rather, a one-off, 30-year moment in the development of music. Like baroque and skiffle and oratorio.

Every attempt to change the original formula, be it hip-hop, garage, techno or rap, certainly grates with those older than 12, but that’s its only purpose. It’s not music to annoy the old. It’s just a noise to annoy the old. Which means that when its fans become old it will not survive.

I can absolutely guarantee that, 30 years from now, nobody will be going all the way to London to see P. Diddly, or whatever he’s called this week. Whereas my wife and I will be availing ourselves of cheap-rate rail fares and heading to Camden, again, to see Bryan Ferry, again. And you know what: he still won’t have any man breasts and he’ll still be dancing like a hard-bodied ballerina.

Sunday 12 June 2005

According to the
Daily Mail
you’re going to die, and because your husband eats red meat he’s going to die as well. This means your orphaned children will be left to die, alone, unless they have already been killed by illegal immigrants, or cornflakes. Or drugs such as cannabis and Ecstasy. Or they may have been boiled alive by global warming.

In our sheltered, cosy, centrally heated lives, we love all this, which is why last week the
Mail
brought us news of a new menace waiting at the French entrance to the Channel tunnel.

This dwarfs all that has gone before. So you’d better sit down because soon, apparently, you will be going to the shops when all of a sudden you will be eaten by a tiger.

This is even better than the swarms of killer bees that were on their way from Mexico a few years ago, or the deadly algae that were on the verge of swamping Venice. But then didn’t. That’s because there’s nothing that scares us more than the concept of being eaten.

Bill Oddie might like to think that nature is a fluffy place, full of doe-eyed badgers and baby birds, and that nothing nasty ever happens there. But it does: 90 per cent of living creatures go to meet their maker via the intestines and stomach of another creature.

This means the fear is in us. Underneath the iPod, and
behind the suit of civilisation, we can think of nothing more painful – or humiliating, frankly – than being devoured by something that has no remorse, no pity and no opposable thumbs.

We can watch a million people being shot, stabbed and quartered, and we won’t turn a hair. But we all remember how Robert Shaw went west in
Jaws
.

This isn’t something that only happens in Hollywood and South Africa, either. The Mediterranean is full of great whites which often eat humans, despite the risk to their health from digesting uncooked red meat. And now, according to the
Daily Mail
, the peril is on our doorsteps. Except for one small thing. The tiger they’re talking about goes ‘nnnnnnnn’ instead of ‘grrrrrrrrrr’, because it’s a mosquito.

Don’t be disappointed. Over time, mosquitoes have killed more people than all wars and all car accidents put together. They are the deadliest creature known to man, and the species lining up to invade Britain carries enough disease and pestilence in its tiny proboscis to lay waste to vast swathes of the population. Hospitals won’t be able to cope. Corpses will be piled high in the streets. And your house could fall in value by as much as 30 per cent.