And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (25 page)

Apparently, the mosquito has arrived in Europe in old tyres that have been sent from Asia for recycling, and it is able to survive because of the mild weather. That’s a great double whammy for the mongers of doom, because they’ve managed to blame cars, multinationalism and global warming in one go.

And it gets better because, among the smorgasbord of terror carried in the mozzie’s bomb bay, is dengue fever,
which killed the man who used to rent me jet skis in Barbados, and the West Nile virus, which causes vomiting, headaches, fever, neck stiffness, a rash, stupor, coma, paralysis, disorientation and blindness. If you feel unwell in any way at all, you’ve had it.

Anyone who’s bitten by a mosquito this summer is urged to catch the insect and send it directly to the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, unless of course your fingers are too swollen and you think you’re Ena Sharples. In which case your family are urged to paint a white cross on your front door and sing ‘Ring-a-ring o’ roses’ until the plague cart arrives.

So why, you may be wondering, are we not being buzzed by crop-dusting helicopters spraying the nation with insecticide? Why isn’t Patrick Allen on the radio, advising us all to stay inside when the air-raid warning sounds? Why are people not panic-buying Buzz Off and bottled water?

Well it might have something to do with the fact that the Asian tiger mosquito is a lousy flyer whose habitat never extends more than a few feet from its home base.

So, while it may be in Calais, it would struggle to reach the White Cliffs.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, however, say that it did. Well then, it would have to find a creature over here that had been infected with the West Nile virus. And the creatures most likely to carry it are chipmunks, skunks and birds that live on swamps.

Since there are no swamps or chipmunks or skunks in Britain, it is extremely unlikely that the mozzie could pick up the disease. But again, let’s say that it did. Then what?

Well, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in America, the insect would have to bite you within a day or so, and, even then, only 1 per cent of humans who get infected become seriously ill. Mostly, this will be people with HIV.

In other words, you stand a 99 per cent chance of not becoming ill from a mosquito that can’t pick up infection in Britain, even if it could get here, which it can’t.

That’s the truth of the matter. So the Asian mosquito must line up with cornflakes and red meat as something that poses no threat at all to our health.

If this has ruined your day, don’t worry, because I have a tip. Try being happy and contented instead.

Sunday 19 June 2005

Like most people, you probably remember Johnny Morris, the talking television zoo keeper, as a genial old soul, with his llama noises and his jaunty cap. So you may be surprised to learn that when news of his death was announced on the radio, I whooped with delight, punched the air and shouted, ‘Good.’

This is because when I was four years old I asked him for an autograph and he told me to ‘bugger off’.

The indignity of it. I had made him a celebrity by watching his programmes, so therefore it was his duty to drop everything, including the small orang-utan that he was holding at the time, and do as he was told. And if I had pretended to be part of a television news crew and squirted him in the face with water, that would have been fine, too.

Did you see Tom Cruise last week, hopping up and down on his stumpy little legs, just because some Channel 4 pranksters had emptied a bucket of acid into his eyes?

Doesn’t he realise that it’s the God-given right of ‘ordinary’ members of the public to say, do and squirt whatever takes their fancy into the faces of those on television? I always used to think that. Right up to the moment I appeared on television myself.

I still remember the first time I was asked for an autograph. It was a middle-aged woman, and I sank to my
knees in a mixture of shock, deep pleasure and eternal gratitude. I wanted to bask for ever in the turbulence of her magnificence. ‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,’ I said, clinging on to her ankles with one hand and writing a veritable essay with the other.

As Angela Rippon once said, ‘I love it when people ask for my autograph. It’s when they stop you have to worry.’

Except today I’m not so sure, because every time I turn round, there’s some snotty-nosed kid with a felt pen, half a chewed napkin and an expectant look on his face.

And it’s always his mum who does the talking: ‘He’s ever such a fan of
Newsnight
.’

Even the lavatory fails to provide a safe haven. Only last week I emerged from a stall in the gents at Birmingham airport, to find a couple of kids waiting outside with their dad: ‘They love your lunchtime show on Radio 2.’

On an average day I’m asked for an autograph maybe 20 times, usually when I get to the punchline of a story, or when it’s raining, or when I’m carrying something heavy.

Of course, I understand the autograph culture. At a charity auction last week, I sat next to a woman who paid £55,000 for a guitar that had been signed by Bono and Sir Cliff. And that made sense, because I have a guitar signed by Jan Akkerman from the Dutch group Focus.

I also have a 100-yen note signed by Bob Seger, and my most prized possession is Monty Python’s Big Red Book, signed by everyone on the whole team, right down to Carole Cleveland. In fact, come to think of it, the only autograph I don’t have is Johnny Morris’s. The bastard.

Signatures bring us closer to fame, and that’s great; but can I say, from the other side of the fence, that there are rules.

John Cleese said on the radio recently that he was asked for his autograph at his father’s funeral.

And when he said ‘No’, he was subjected to a torrent of abuse.

I know how he feels. I was given both barrels last week by a woman who said my signature was too much of a squiggle. And when I argued, she stomped off, saying, ‘It doesn’t look much like “Beadle” to me.’

Then you get the people, usually those with tyre-fitter haircuts and gormless faces, who just stand there, and when you say, ‘What’s the magic word?’ they have absolutely no idea what you are on about.

One man recently sauntered over and said he really didn’t like me on television, that I’d never made a good programme, that his wife wouldn’t have me on in the house, that he’d cancelled the
Sunday Times
because of me and that I should grow up. ‘Still,’ he concluded, ‘I’d better have your autograph, I suppose.’

And you know what? I’m so fearful of Johnny Morris syndrome that I agreed, knowing full well that the stupid man would sell it for 99p on eBay that very night.

Mind you, even this is better than the request for a quick picture, because the camera that’s produced is invariably a phone.

So you wait while a mate tries to turn it on.

Then you wait while it hooks up to the nearest satellite.

Then you wait a bit more while the mate fumbles around in the menu trying to find a camera setting.

Then you wait while he finds the zoom and the brightness setting, and you think, ‘Honestly, it would have been quicker to set up an easel and break out the oils.’

Soon, of course, thanks to
Big Brother
and other programmes of that ilk, everyone will be famous. And then you might imagine there will be no need for me to stand around in shopping centres gurning into people’s telephones or trying to write my name with one hand while having a pee with the other. This happens a lot.

Strangely, however, even when everyone is famous, I don’t think that much will change.

I was at a do the other day when I bumped into the boy band McFly. ‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘I hope you won’t mind but please can I have your autographs for my son?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ said one. ‘Providing I can have yours for my dad.’

Sunday 26 June 2005

We all know the form at charity auctions. You have a few glasses of wine and then you spend an hour or so trying desperately to not buy trips in hot-air balloons and books that have been signed by TV’s David Dickinson.

I especially know the form, because recently I was the auctioneer at a charity event to raise funds for Chipping Norton’s swimming pool. The evening went brilliantly, mainly because two hands kept shooting out of the crowd, buying just about everything, no matter how high the price.

Annoyingly, the hands turned out to belong to my children, who had got bored and decided to join in. So we went home with, among other things, two bags of dung, a nylon T-shirt and several signed copies of my own book.

With that experience so fresh in my mind, I should have known better than to stick my hand up at a children with cancer do last week. The lot was a week on a 140-foot superyacht in the south of France. It has two speedboats slung over the back, many windsurfers, two jet skis, 12 cabins, a crew of eight (including a bosun) and the usual range of bar stools coated in whale foreskin. Ordinarily, seven days on this ocean-going gin palace would cost £75,000. Bidding started at £25,000. Or, rather, it didn’t. Nobody put their hand up, so, since
I knew the auctioneer, I thought I’d help him out by getting the ball rolling. ‘At last,’ he exclaimed, in an excitable, auctioneery way, ‘a bid of £25,000 from Mr Clarkson. Now. Who’ll give me £26,000?’

The marquee, I noted with quiet satisfaction, was stuffed with several hundred extremely blonde women and an equal number of bronzed men who, I figured, would want to show their friends just how rich they’d become in recent years.

This always happens. Only a week earlier, at yet another charity auction, I had gleefully stuck my hand up to buy two weeks’ use of the huge, 96-sheet advertising hoarding that dominates Cromwell Road coming into west London.

I wanted it so I could write something rude about a colleague who commutes down that road every day, but I knew in my heart of hearts it would go to someone much, much richer. And it did. And so would the boat…

A minute passed and still no hands had gone up. The auctioneer was giving it his all, gyrating and twitching as though he’d become attached to the mains, but nothing.

Then the awful truth began to dawn. The women were blonde because they were hairdressers, not jet-set jetsam. And the men were brown because they work all day in the open air, with scaffolding. Nobody was going to top my bid. And they didn’t.

Outwardly I was calm. I’d just given £25,000 to a very worthy charity that seeks to provide a home away from home for the families of children with cancer.

So I acknowledged the applause from the hairdressers and waved cheerily at the auctioneer whose bacon I had so nobly saved.

But inwardly I was in a flat spin. I mean, shit, £25,000 is a colossal amount of money. And I’d just spent it by accident.

Someone next to me tried to argue that £25,000 was cheap. But that rather depends how you look at it. Twenty-five thousand pounds for something that would normally cost £75,000 is indeed a bargain. But, in the same way that I was once offered a fully functional jet fighter for £4.5 million, it’s also completely irrelevant.

I just don’t have this kind of money to hurl around like confetti. Maybe I’d spend £25,000 on a car. But on a whim? Jesus. I felt sick.

Then it got worse, because my wife, whose face had turned the colour of tracing paper, was busy reading some small print in the catalogue about what the price didn’t include.

Fuel, for instance. And on a boat of this type you don’t measure consumption in terms of miles per gallon or even gallons per mile. Oh no. When you are topping up a vessel like this, you have to think of the diesel fuel in terms of tons. And then there are the mooring fees which, in a port like Monte Carlo, will be hundreds and hundreds of pounds a night.

‘So,’ I said to my wife quietly, ‘even if we could afford to get the boat to Monaco, and we can’t, we wouldn’t be able to afford to park it there.’

Yes, and that’s just the start of it, because other things that weren’t included were drinks, food and, crucially, a tip for the crew, which is normally 10 per cent of the charter fee. Great. I was facing a week on a boat, not eating, not drinking and not moving. Just recovering from
the fact that I’d had to walk to the south of France because I couldn’t afford the easyJet bill.

You haven’t heard the really funny part yet. You see, contrary to what the auctioneer said in his warm-up spiel, it turns out the vessel is only available in the week commencing 17 September.

And guess what? Slap bang in the middle of the week commencing 17 September it’s the
Top Gear
charity karting evening. Where I shall be hosting a charity auction to raise money for the parents of children with cancer.

I’ve examined all the options, and I’m afraid the only solution is for me to commit suicide. Still, at least I’ll be going to heaven.

Sunday 3 July 2005

Every week the glossy supermarket magazines bring news of yet another celebrity who’s married a horse, drunk their own urine or thrown a telephone at some hapless hotel receptionist. The message is crystal clear: all famous people are mentalists.

Really? Well, I must say that Steve Coogan has never asked me to share any of his pee, Neil Morrissey has never thrown anything at my wife, and Jonathan Ross is not married to his hair. Quite the reverse in fact.

All the famous people I’ve met are just like everyone else. David Frost has bad breath. After a night out with Johnny Vegas, he was sick in a teapot. And Anne Robinson lets my children play tag in her bedroom.

Yes, Dale Winton is bright orange, but what’s unusual about that? If you were to tour the salons of Alderley Edge, you’d find they were stuffed to overflowing with people who are similarly autumnal.

The people I’ve met, however, are the angel fish, the small, home-grown stars whose fame is limited to Britain. But what about the whale sharks and the tuna? What about those whose names are etched on the consciousness of every living being on the planet? This is where we find the real eccentricity.