What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (18 page)

We see many Russians in the big, wide world these days and they appear to be extremely well off. They always have enormous watches, huge cars and embroidered jeans. Many also have football clubs.

So you would imagine that if you were running an airline, you would try to impress these newly moneyed people by lavishing your Moscow service with your latest, newest, shiniest aircraft. Weirdly, British Airways has chosen to do the exact opposite.

In my experience, BA puts its best aeroplanes on the transatlantic routes, and then, when the fittings and fixtures are a bit tired, the aircraft are relieved of their JFK duties and are used to ferry holidaymakers to the Caribbean. When they are too decrepit even for that, they take people to and from Uganda, and I thought that afterwards they were scrapped – or sold to Angola. But no.

It seems they are then given to the fire service, which uses them to train crews on the art of passenger evacuation, and then to the SAS, who run about in the burnt carcasses, shooting at imaginary terrorists. After that, they are used on the Moscow route.

I recently flew with BA to Russia, and to give you an idea of how old the plane was, I will tell you the on-board entertainment system used VHS tapes. And to make the quality even less impressive, my television screen was less than 2 inches across. And it was located on the bulkhead, several feet in front of my face. Also, it was broken. So was the lavatory seat.

I was going to write a letter to the chairman of BA, explaining
that he’s got it all the wrong way round. Using your best aircraft to compete with America’s airlines – which are exclusively staffed by fat, bossy women and serve rubbish food – is like Chelsea fielding their best team to take on Doncaster Rovers.

I was going to point out to him – because plainly he doesn’t know – that the Berlin Wall has gone, and that the Russians are no longer queuing for six years to buy a beetroot and then being shot for saying it’s a bit warty.

I was also going to invite him to take a look around Gum, the department store in Red Square. There was a time when people would come from thousands of miles away because it had just taken delivery of some pencils. Now it makes the Westfield shopping centres in London look like an Ethiopian’s larder. The smallest watch on display is bigger than the TV screen I hadn’t been able to watch on my flight, and the underwear costs more than the ticket.

It’s not just materialism, either. In Russia people are now free to say absolutely anything that comes into their heads. Talk as Russians do in Britain and you’d be hauled over the coals for racism and branded a bigot. You want to suggest the legal age of consent should be lowered to twelve? Go right ahead. People won’t call you a paedo; they’ll be interested to hear why you think that way. They went seventy years without being able to discuss anything. Now they want to discuss everything.

Of course, you are not able to write too disparagingly about Vladimir Putin, unless you want some radioactivity with your bacon and egg, but you can sure as hell say what you like – to whoever you’re with. I found it fantastically liberating.

There are other things, too. In Britain if Sir Philip Green or Lord Sir Sugar were to spend an evening at the Wolseley restaurant in the middle of London playing tonsil hockey with a phalanx of 6-foot hookers, tongues would wag. In Russia that sort of thing appears to be quite normal.

A friend texted while I was there to say, ‘Be careful. Moscow is bad for your soul.’ He’s wrong. It’s not bad for your soul, but
I bet it could be very bad for your marriage, your bank balance and your gentleman’s area.

Moscow buzzes and hums. You should try the bone marrow in Cafe Pushkin and spend a few minutes at the side of the road seeing if you can spot a car that would cost less than £50,000 if you’d bought it in Britain. Then check out the pavements and see if you can find one single girl who’s fat or less than 6 foot tall or not wearing a beautifully cut pair of jeans. I have no idea what Hugh Hefner’s wet dreams are like. But I bet they’d be along these lines.

I went to the Kremlin at one point to discover it’s all been done up and refurbished. Not so it resembles how it might have looked in the past but so that foreign diplomats are blown into the middle of next week by the grandeur. Every room is like being inside the mind of a gold-obsessed four-year-old princess.

And then, just as I’d decided that Russia looked like the love child of Monte Carlo and Kuwait, with a little help from Onyx on Thames, someone leant over and told me the Lada Riva was still in production. And I’m sorry, but that’s like being told that the king of Saudi Arabia does his own washing, with a tub and a mangle.

Why would Lada still be making the Riva? What could anyone I’d seen in my whole visit want with a car as nasty as that? Or has it been improved radically since it was the staple wheeled diet of Mr Arthur Scargill’s disciples? I had to find out. So I did. And it hasn’t. In fact, I think it’s become worse.

The Riva began its life in 1966 in Turin, where it was known as the Fiat 124. Fiat did a deal with the Communists, helping to build a factory in Russia in which the company’s old design would continue to be produced. This became the Lada Riva.

Fans will tell you that much changed over the years, but I can report that actually nothing changed at all. Except that now the Riva is also made in the great car-producing nations of Ukraine and Egypt.

I don’t know where the car I drove was made. Or who made
it. But I suspect he was very angry about something because it was horrific. The steering column appeared to have been welded to the dashboard so that it wouldn’t turn. The brakes caused the car to speed up a bit and turn left, violently, at the same time.

The buttons on the dash appeared to have been put in place by Janet Ellis from
Blue Peter
, and the engine had plainly been lifted from a cement mixer that had spent the past thirty years chewing up rebel soldiers in southern Sudan.

It would get from 0 to 60 mph. But only when it was built by Fiat. Since it became a Lada, it hasn’t really been able to move at all. And, boy, is it badly made.

When I eventually ran it over with a monster truck, it folded in half. And to put that in perspective, let me explain at this point that when the very same monster truck ran over an Indian-made CityRover recently, the car was pretty much OK afterwards.

Why, then, is the Riva still being manufactured? Why are there people in Russia still buying it? Could it be, perhaps, that behind the white-toothed, gold-capped Moscow smile, the rest of the country is – how can I put this – a bit poor?

Maybe, in other words, the chairman of BA knows something I didn’t realize: that those who can afford to fly in Russia have their own planes.

And those who can’t are stuck out in the middle of nowhere boiling swede in the hope that one day they’ll be able to afford a car that’s forty-five years old before it’s left the bloody showroom.

11 March 2012

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, labour- and time-saving devices were all the rage. The Ronco Buttoneer, for instance, made putting on a button a quick and easy job. Which was just as well because the button you’d just attached often came adrift again in a matter of moments.

The top-loading washing machine had replaced the front step, and then came the remote-control box for the television, which meant we no longer had to sit through
Nationwide
because we couldn’t be bothered to get off our backsides. We also waved goodbye to the punka wallah with the invention of the Pifco fan. Life was very good.

But at some point in recent years someone decided to put the complication back. So now, instead of adding boiling water to a spoonful of instant coffee, we have machines that require constant attention. Every single morning mine wants more water, or more beans. Then it wants me to empty its trays and clean its pipes and decalcify its innards. Making a simple cup of coffee has become a thirty-minute palaver.

It’s much the same story with my mobile phone. Because it turns out that even when you are not using an application, it’s still open, in the background, chewing the battery. And shutting it down is a complex procedure that usually ends up with you taking a photograph of your own nose.

Televisions are massively complicated now. And gone are the days when you simply loaded a VHS tape and watched a movie. Now, with Blu-ray, the machinery takes ten minutes to warm up
and you have to sit through hours and hours of waivers, copyright threats and trailers.

My dishwasher is more complex than Apollo 11, my juicer has a 200-page instruction book and have you tried to use a pay-by-phone parking meter? Of course not, or you’d still be out there, in the street, asking yourself what on earth was wrong with putting a pound coin in a little slot.

Naturally, cars are now very complicated as well. It’s almost certainly true to say that the ignition key for your modern car is more complex than the whole of an Austin A35. Which means, of course, it rarely works. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a car that keeps flashing up a message saying, ‘No key detected,’ when I’m sitting there waving the damn thing in front of its dash, whimpering slightly and wondering out loud what was wrong with the old system.

Then there’s the BMW M5, which can get from 0 to 62 mph in about thirteen minutes. You spend twelve minutes and 55.7 seconds telling the on-board computer what sort of setting you’d like from the gearbox, the chassis and the engine, and then 4.3 seconds going from 0 to 62.

You might imagine that the new Porsche 911 had been spared all this nonsense – 911s, after all, are meant to be pure, clean, unfettered sports cars. And there is no place for complexity in such things.

Well, dream on, because the new 911 is a geek’s fantasy. Every component can be tuned while you’re on the move to deliver something different, and there are now two read-outs on the dash telling you what gear you’re in. Which seems a bit odd in a manual. I know I’m in third. I just moved the lever.

The thing is, though, this being a Porsche, it’s all very instinctive and commonsensical. Amazingly, since there are no buttons on the steering wheel itself, you don’t have to go into submenus or hold knobs down for two seconds to make stuff happen. I
hate to admit it, but I thought it was brilliant. But that’s probably because I never bought the whole 911 sports-car thing in the first place.

There was a lot more I liked as well. The styling may be ludicrously similar to that of the previous model. And the one before that. And the one before that as well. But the little things that have changed have given the new model some nice new curves. You could even call it good-looking.

The big debate about this car is its electric steering. Because of European Union rules on emissions, manufacturers are under pressure to introduce systems that use less energy, whether or not they are better at the job. So the conventional hydraulic power-steering setup has been ditched in favour of one that works off the battery.

In the same way as Neil Young keeps banging on about the awfulness of digital sound compared with vinyl, various 911 purists say that the classic ‘feel’ of a 911 is now gone. And I’d agree with that. But since I’m not a 911 purist, I must say I think the new system is better. For sure, you are getting an artificial sense of how the tyres are interacting with the road and, yes, on a track you can spot this. But for everyday driving, the electric system is meaty and tremendous.

Emissions regulations have had other effects as well. The engine now shuts down at the lights and Porsche has had to fit a seven-speed gearbox. In theory this is fine. You lope up the motorway at tickover, sipping fuel like a vicar sips sherry. But when you’re in seventh, doing 60 mph, you don’t get the twitching and fizzing you expect from a car of this type. It feels a bit puddingy.

Of course, when you get off the motorway and realize you’re running late and you need to make up some time, it’s not puddingy at all. It’s just delightful. That said, I would opt for the bigger-engined S model. The standard car I drove, while lovely, sometimes didn’t feel as fast as I’d been expecting.

Now normally when I’ve reviewed 911s in the past, I’d get to this point and say that while the car is jolly clever, it’s not for me. The rear-engined Porsche is like Greece and marzipan and Piers Morgan. Simply not my cup of tea.

But this one is different. Over the years, the engine has crept forward in the chassis so that it’s no longer slung behind the rear axle waiting to become a giant pendulum. It’s water-cooled, too, these days, which means the Volkswagen air-cooled clatter is gone.

Inside, the silly buttons that looked like half-sucked boiled sweets and felt about as cheap as an Albanian’s suit have been replaced with good, high-quality items. The driving position is better, the seats are wonderful and though the car is now bigger than ever, it’s still small compared with all its rivals. That’s a good thing.

Drawbacks? Two, as I see it. The boot’s at the front, which means you get dirty fingers every time you open it; and Porsche has never shaken off the City boy braces-and-Bollinger image it earned in the Eighties. Which means you are never, ever, let out of side turnings.

OK. Two and a half. The engine isn’t quite gutsy enough. But go for the S and that’s resolved. In spades. Just avoid the convertibles. Unless you enjoy looking a plonker.

I’m sure there is much that will disappoint the diehard 911 fan in the new effort. But there is so much to delight those of us who have never liked 911s. I could even see myself buying one. It’s a fab car. Really, really fab. And, all things considered, good value as well.

PS: Since finishing this piece, I’ve realized the Porsche actually gets no stars at all because it’s useless. Last Sunday the tyre went flat. There is no spare. And no depot carried anything that would fit.

Recently a friend of mind had a flat tyre in his 911 and it took
Porsche two weeks to find a replacement. Unless the manufacturer can address this, there is simply no point buying its cars. Because one day you will need, say, to take your mum to hospital and you will have to phone and cancel.

18 March 2012