The World According to Clarkson (2 page)

These people go on to tell us that mobile phones will cook our children’s ears, that long-haul flights will fill our legs with thrombosis and that meat is murder. They want an end to all deaths – and it doesn’t stop there. They don’t even see why anyone should have to suffer from a spot of light bruising.

Every week, as we filmed my television chat show, food would be spilt on the floor, and every week the recording would have to be stopped so it could be swept away. ‘What would happen,’ said the man from health and safety, ‘if a cameraman were to slip over?’

‘Well,’ I would reply, ‘he’d probably have to stand up again.’

Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed with the wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios must display warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and the other day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use a door. I am not kidding.

So you can imagine the problems I shall encounter this week when, for a television series I’m making, I shall climb into a decompression chamber to find out what life would be like on an airliner at 30,000 feet if one of the windows were to break.

The poor producer has been given a form the size of Luxembourg which asks what hazards I will face. Well, my lungs will explode and the air in the cavities under my fillings will expand ninefold, causing untold agony, but I probably won’t feel this because there is a good chance that the subsequent hypoxia will turn me into a dribbling vegetable.

I consider it a risk worth taking, but my thoughts are irrelevant because these days my life and how I live it are in the hands of the men from health and safety. The same people who said last year I could not fly in a US-Army helicopter because the pilot was not BBC-approved.

Oh, come on. Everyone knows that American forces are not allowed to crash their helicopters. Following the 1993 debacle in Somalia, when they lost sixteen men
who were sent in to rescue two already dead comrades, it has now been decided that no US serviceman will ever be hurt again. Not even in a war.

This has now spread to Britain. You’ve read, I’m sure, about the hearing damage which can be caused by sergeant-majors who shout at privates, but the plague goes deeper than that. On a visit to RAF Henlow last week, I was rather surprised to see that someone from health and safety had pinned a poster to the notice board, warning the fighter pilots that alcohol will make them aggressive and violent. Oh no, that’s the last thing we want – aggressive and violent fighter pilots.

Then we have Britain’s fleet of nuclear-powered hunter killer submarines, which have all been grounded or whatever it is you do with boats, by health and safety because they could be dangerous.

Now attention has been focused on Britain’s stockpile of uranium-depleted missiles, which are by far and away the best method of penetrating the armour on enemy tanks. Great, except health and safety doesn’t like them because it turns out they might kill someone.

Former squaddies are on the news saying that they loosed off a few rounds in Kosovo and now they have caught cancer. Deepest sympathies, but let’s look at some facts. They only way depleted uranium can get through the skin is if someone shoots you with a bullet made out of it. It can get into the body through the lungs, but since it is 40 per cent less radioactive than uranium that occurs naturally in the ground, it does seem unlikely that
it could cause any damage. I have been down a uranium mine in Western Australia and, so far, I have not grown another head.

However, I do find it odd that the Ministry of Defence will test only soldiers who served in Kosovo and not those who were in the Gulf, where 300 tons of depleted uranium were used and the alpha radiation has had longer to do its stuff. But if by some miracle it does find that our boys have been irradiated and that one squaddie died as a result, then we can be assured that depleted uranium will, in future, be used only on NATO, rather than by NATO.

Where will this end? The US Air Force managed to kill seven British soldiers in the Gulf with what it likes to call friendly fire, so would it not be sensible for those of a health and safety persuasion to ban Americans from the battlefield, too?

Some people say global warming and ozone depletion will kill us. But I’m far more worried about the people who have made it their sworn duty to keep us all alive.

Sunday 14 January 2001

Being a man, I am unwilling to pull over and ask someone for directions, because this would imply they are somehow cleverer than me. And obviously they’re not, because I’m toasty warm in a car and they’re mooching around on foot.

Sometimes, though, and usually in a town where the council has let a group of fourteen-year-olds from one of its special schools design a one-way system, I have been known to give up, become a traitor to my gender and ask a passer-by for advice.

What a complete waste of time. If they begin by saying ‘er’, then they don’t know and you are going to waste hours while they wonder whether you go left at Sketchley’s or right. So here’s a tip. If someone hesitates when you ask the way, or even if a look of bewilderment befalls their countenance for the briefest moment, drive off.

Of course, some launch immediately into a bunch of militaristic directions, involving clear, concise hand signals and bushy-topped trees at nine o’clock.

But that’s of no help either because you won’t be listening. It is a known medical fact, and it has been so since the dawn of time, that a man will hear the first word and then shut down.

When the Romans invaded England, they went home to celebrate and didn’t come back for 80 years. Why? Because they couldn’t find it and, if they did ask for directions in France, they didn’t listen.

In the late thirteenth century, Edward Longshanks used women to steer his armies around the realm because they could listen to, and absorb, directions, whereas men couldn’t. Actually, I just made that up. But there must be a vestige of truth in it because if he had relied for guidance on his knights, he’d have ended up in Falmouth rather than Falkirk.

Certainly, I didn’t listen last week when, having been unable to find the shop I wanted, I found myself drawn inexorably by the man magnet that is Tottenham Court Road into one of those temples to the pagan world of meaningless beeps and unusual hieroglyphics: Computers ‘R’ Us.

I didn’t listen to the voices in my head telling me to get out and nor did I listen when the man started to explain all about a new type of Sony laptop that has too many vowels in its name to be pronounceable. It begins with a V and then you have to make the sort of noise a cat would emit if you fed it through a mangle.

Now don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a column about how I don’t understand computers, and how I wish I were back on the
Rotherham Advertiser
feeding bits of bog roll into a sit-up-and-beg Remington.

I like computers very much and I know enough about them to send emails, write stories and find some ladyboys in Thailand. Unfortunately, however, I do not know as
much about them as the people who work or hang around in computer shops, which means my mind does that man thing and stops working.

Like, for instance, if you were offered the choice of Windows 2000 or Windows 98, you’d go for the bigger number. But the man in the shop advised me to spend less on the 98 and, when asked why, proceeded for all I know to talk about his Newfoundland terrier. I did not hear a single thing he said.

The one thing I wanted was an ability to send emails via a cellular phone, so I asked: ‘Can I plug this into my mobile?’ And he replied… but frankly, he may as well have been talking about the problems of making decent onion gravy while marooned in a Nepalese hill fort.

So I ended up buying it… and now I think it’s broken. Every time I log off from the internet the machine shuts down, casting whatever I’ve written that day into a silicon no man’s land.

Obviously, I could take the computer back to the shop, but then they’ll find that I’ve been looking at ladyboys and this will be embarrassing. Besides, I can’t remember where the shop was, and I’m damned if I’m going to ask.

I could phone a friend, but it would be a waste of a call because, as a man, I’m just an ego covered in skin and, if he knows how to solve my problem, that’s going to cause some light bruising. So I won’t listen. And if he doesn’t know, then he’s of no help anyway.

At this point, a woman would reach for the instruction book, but this is the single biggest difference between
the sexes. Forget the need to be cuddled after sex. And forget spatial awareness and fuzzy logic, because the most butch woman in the world, even Mrs Thatcher, would lie on her stomach for hours with the manual for a new video recorder, ensuring that when she gets back from dinner that night she will have taped the right channel at the right time.

How dull is that. Me? I stab away at various buttons safe in the knowledge that I could be taping something on the other side, next Tuesday, which might be much better.

This certainly helps when playing board games. Because I’ve never read the rules for Monopoly, I travel around the board in whichever direction seems to be most appropriate, and if anyone says I have to go clockwise, I respond with a strange faraway look.

It always works. I always win.

Sunday 21 January 2001

It’s coming to something when the news is making the news, but that is exactly what happened at the beginning of last week when the papers were full of ITN’s victory over the BBC in the Battle of the Ten ’clock Bongs.

The BBC explained afterwards that it had twice as many stories, twice as many live reports and twice as much foreign coverage, but it was stymied by ITV, which ran
Millionaire
two minutes late and went straight to its bulletin without a commercial break.

It even had the gallant knight Sir Trevor McDonald crop up in the middle of Chris Tarrant to say there would be some news soon and not to go away.

This ratings war is getting dirty and deeply annoying. In the past, when programmes largely began on the hour or at half past, you could watch a show on ITV and then, when it had finished, find something else that was just starting on another channel.

But look at the schedules now. Things start at five past and finish at twelve minutes to, so by the time you flick over to the Beeb’s new drama series you’ve missed the explosion and the subsequent car chase and have no idea what’s going on.

I understand why it has to happen, of course. When I worked on
Top Gear
it didn’t matter whether we were
featuring a new Ferrari that ran on water or standing around in a field pretending to be sheep, we always got the same viewing figures. However, if the programme began late, after all the other channels had started their 8.30 p.m. shows, we would drop 1 million or so.

Interestingly, however, this type of ‘schedule shuffling’ does not seem to be happening in the world of radio.

My wife, for instance, listens only to Radio 4. It could run a two-hour shipping forecast and still she would not retune to another station. I know for a fact that, like the rest of the country, she has no clue what Melvyn Bragg is talking about on
In Our Time
, but every Thursday morning the whole house echoes to the unfathomable pontifications of his stupefyingly dull guests.

At 10.25 a.m. every day I point out that over on Radio 2 Ken Bruce has a good quiz about pop music – a subject she enjoys very much – but for some extraordinary reason she prefers to listen to the state of the sea at Dogger Bank.

I am no better. Left to my own devices I start the day with Terry Wogan, who last week got it into his head that all Chinese people smell of Brussels sprouts. Then it’s Ken’s pop quiz followed by Jimmy Old.

Now at this point I should turn over, because Old bombards his listeners with the big-band sound and talks to his guests about the price of fish. Then people call up and read out the editorial from the
Daily Telegraph
and it’s just not me. But no. I sit there saying that it’s only for two hours and then it’ll be time for Steve Wright.

Why do I do this? On television I only need to catch the tiniest glimpse of a spangly jacket, the suggestion of a Birmingham accent or the first bar of the
EastEnders
theme tune, and in one fluid movement I reach for the remote and switch over. Yet, displaying the sort of brand loyalty that would cause Marks & Spencer to pickle me in brine, I will drive for hour after hour while Old drones on about how Mrs Nazi of Esher thinks asylum seekers should all be shot.

There is a choice. Obviously Radio 1 is out, unless you enjoy being serenaded by people banging bits of furniture together, and Radio 3 transmits nothing but the sound of small animals being tortured. What about local radio? In London there is Magic FM which broadcasts the Carpenters all day long. Of course, the Carpenters are fine – especially when you have a headache – but between the tunes men come on and speak.

I should have thought that being a disc jockey wasn’t so bad. I mean, it could be worse. But obviously I’m wrong, because nowhere in the whole of humanity will you find a bunch of people quite so unhappy as the CD spinners on ‘Misery’ FM.

By 8 a.m. on a Monday they are already counting down the hours to Friday night as though all of us treat the working week as something that has to be endured. In their world, we all work for Cruella De Vil. And it’s always raining.

Even if it’s a bright sunny day and we’ve just heard on the news that John Prescott has burst, they would still find something to moan about and then it’s on to
Yesterday Once More
for the fourteenth time since 6 a.m.

There is no point in going elsewhere because quite the reverse applies. Misery FM is largely run by people on their way down the career ladder, but elsewhere in local radio most of the DJs believe themselves to be on the way up – so they sound as if they’re talking to you while someone is pushing Harpic up their nostrils with an electric toothbrush.

‘Who knows?’ they must be thinking. ‘A television producer might be listening, so if I’m really zany and wacky all the time I’ll end up on the box.’