And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson (13 page)

Instead, they’ll come home from their A-levels having done much too much, much too young. This will mean they’ll spend the next 10 years of their lives eating crisps and drinking beer while shooting aliens on the PlayStation.

Sunday 26 September 2004

If someone were to build a passenger-carrying rocket for joyrides into space, would you go? Of course you would, unless you’re a farmyard animal or A. A. Timid Trousers Gill.

So let me put it another way. If Richard Branson were to build a passenger-carrying rocket for joyrides into space, would you go? Hmm.

In the ’90s, barely a week went by when we weren’t treated to the unedifying spectacle of Branson’s rat-like little face being winched, at our expense, from some vast expanse of ocean. His speedboats kept running into lumps of wood, and his balloons were always too heavy for sustained flight. ‘Shave off the face fungus, Beardy. That’d lighten things up,’ I used to shout as his capsule plummeted into the oggin yet again.

Secretly, though, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for His Richardness.

Despite his Virgin Cola, which is an affront to the sensibilities of any twenty-first-century being, I like the way he’s made it in business without a pinstripe suit or an obvious predilection for golf and freemasonry. And despite the often disastrous attempts to go across the Pacific on a small horse, or up Everest in a washing machine, I do like the way he kept on trying.

There are those who say he’s a publicity-hungry
monster but, you know, there are easier ways of getting your phizog in the papers than hurtling across the Atlantic at 50 knots. He could have chosen to sit in a jungle while two goblins from up north pour maggots into his ears, for instance. So let’s give the poor bloke a break and look more carefully at this space programme of his.

He says that within three years he’ll be in a position to offer seats on a spaceship at something like £150,000 a pop. Apparently it’ll be no more risky than early commercial jet flight, which, if you remember the Comet, means it’ll be extremely dangerous and very many rich people will be killed.

But once we’ve buried what’s left of Elton John and Bill Gates, the economies of scale will kick in, and soon poor people will be able to die in the freezing radioactive wasteland of space, too. The idea of putting ordinary punters into space was kick-started by the $10 million Ansari X prize for the first private venture that could put a passenger-carrying craft 62 miles above the Earth, twice, within two weeks.

Because we’ve all grown up with Nasa absorbing more money than the Third World, the notion of any individual doing space travel on the cheap seemed as preposterous as DIY brain surgery. But back in June, a machine called SpaceShipOne, funded in part by one of Microsoft’s founders, managed to break the 100-kilometre boundary.

It was an elegant solution. A conventional plane took off with the spaceship on its back. And then, at 47,000 feet, where the air is already thin and the fuel-consuming part of a journey is already done, the spaceship lifted off
and was blasted by a rocket motor out of the atmosphere. It then glided back to Earth, ready to go up again.

It didn’t, because the pilot reported several anomalies, chief among which was a huge bang midway through the flight. Finding out what it was, and fixing it – which they did by painting one of the panels white to reflect heat – meant the second flight was delayed to this week. Early reports suggest that this went flawlessly, apart from the mother ship going into a perilous spin after separation.

So now we have Branson stepping into the breach, saying that by 2007 Virgin Galactic will be using larger versions of SpaceShipOne to transport paying passengers. I do have some concerns about this, none of which has anything to do with perilous spins, loud bangs or Branson’s previous failures. No, my main worry is that the passengers will conform to Branson’s relaxed style and be allowed to fly in jumpers and corduroys.

If I went, and I would, I’d want the full Michelin Man suit, with an aqualung and a parachute. And I’m not being silly.

Back in August 1960 an American pilot called Joe Kittinger climbed into the open gondola beneath a balloon called Excelsior III and floated up to 102,800 feet. At this point, 20 miles above the Earth in what is technically space, he jumped.

Moments later he became the first man to go through the sound barrier without the benefit of a plane. It was, and still is, the highest parachute jump ever, and it proved you can ‘abandon ship’ even when you’re in space.

I met Kittinger a couple of years ago and he’s adamant
that if the crew of the Challenger had been equipped with chutes, some might well be alive today.

Branson ought to bear this in mind. It’s all very well promoting a relaxed service; but passengers are going to look pretty silly if they’re stuck in space wearing nothing but a nice V-neck and a pair of slacks.

What’s more, a 62-mile parachute jump through the furnace of re-entry would certainly add pizzazz to what otherwise might be a once-in-a-lifetime op…

Sunday 3 October 2004

Another day. Another chart listing the best British films ever made.

The last time I looked, the British Film Institute was busy claiming that something called
The Third Man
was at number one, though I couldn’t for the life of me work out why, since it was about a man who went to see a friend who was dead.

In second place it was
Brief Encounter
in which a man meets a woman in a railway station, and in third we had David Lean’s
Lawrence of Arabia
, which was about a homosexual who rides a camel round the desert. And then crashes his motorbike and dies.

I can’t be doing with David Lean. First of all, his ears were far too big, and secondly all his films feature lots of locals in loincloths and too much dust.

And as for
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. God almighty. Jesus took less time to die than Alec Guinness.

Last week, however,
Total Film
magazine said that the best British film ever is
Get Carter
, in which Michael Caine wears a mac and goes up north.

Other notables in the top 20 are
The Wicker Man
, in which we saw someone pretending to be Britt Ekland banging on a wall,
A Clockwork Orange
, which was mad, and
If
, which I always thought was a scientific experiment to see if you can actually die of boredom.

The only Bond film to make the grade was
From Russia With Love
, which came in at number nine. Why? With the possible exception of
Moonraker
, this early Sean Connery flick was one of the worst 007 adventures.

Of course I know these surveys are supposed to prompt debate down at the pub. I know that listing the top 10 coolest windmills and the top 10 zaniest animals are all meant to be the start of an argument, not the end.

But when it comes to British films there is no debate because the best one ever made, without a doubt, is
The Long Good Friday
. A movie that
Total Film
doesn’t even put in the top 25.

They credit Michael Caine with genius in
Get Carter
, but for real simmering violence you just can’t beat Bob Hoskins and the immortal ‘I put money in all your pockets’. As a general rule, I like to watch this film at least once a month.

The second-best British movie was
Local Hero
, starring no one you’ve ever heard of, apart from Burt Lancaster, who was brilliant, and set right up at the top of Scotland.

There have been (a very few) funnier films, but none has been quite so touching.

When I first saw it I left the cinema, turned round and went straight back inside to watch it again.

In third place it’s
The Killing Fields
, which was about… well, just about everything actually. Hate, war, friendship, hope, desperation, evil, incompetence, genocide, journalism and platonic man-love, all crammed into 141 spellbinding minutes.

It took David Lean 141 minutes just to get Peter O’Toole’s camel from one side of a sand dune to the
other. And it took even longer for Alec Guinness to fall on that plunger.

Like many British films,
The Killing Fields
was gently peppered with actors from the small screen. We had Bill Paterson from
Auf Wiedersehen Pet
and Patrick Malahide, who was Detective-Sergeant Chisholm in
Minder
. This would normally be something of a credibility hurdle, but I was so wrapped up in the story I wouldn’t have minded if Amos from
Emmerdale Farm
had wandered into shot.

In fact I could make a fairly watertight case that
The Killing Fields
, along with
Local Hero
and
The Long Good Friday
, are not just the best British films of all time but the best from anywhere in the world.

Obviously there have been many wondrous cinematic events from America but, generally speaking, Hollywood movies are designed for 15-year-old youths from North Dakota who, intellectually speaking, are on equal terms with a British zoo animal.

As a result, US films tend to be rather too full of explosions and everyone’s teeth are too white.

Then you have French cinema, in which a man meets a woman. They spend about two hours looking at one another, in black and white, over a cup of coffee. And then the man goes off with another man to have some graphic sex.

I would never argue that all British films are better than all foreign films. As often as not, our directors and screenwriters got their funding from FilmFour, handed in their notice at the
Guardian
and went off to make what looked like a social services training video.

Of course it always got rave reviews from the frizzy-haired
critics and the compilers of best-film-ever surveys, but in America the audiences were usually not that interested in the fortunes of a Manchester drug addict. They would have preferred it if Manchester had simply exploded, and as a result the film almost always flopped.

Trainspotting
was only rescued because the writer remembered to include a plot.

Trainspotting
, by the way, was the fourth best British film. And you can work out the rest over a pint at lunchtime.

Sunday 10 October 2004

Life used to be so easy. At the age of 65 you retired with a nice carriage clock and went home to spend your pension on potting plants and pipe tobacco. Then, 10 years later, you died.

Now things are very different. You retire at 63 and go home to spend your pension on kickboxing classes and cocaine. You have no plans to die at all.

This, as I’m sure you read last week, is having a dramatic effect on pensions. The country can afford to keep its senior citizens in old shag for 10 years but not coke for 30. Not when the number of retired people exceeds the number working.

As a result, the young people of today have been told to expect some harsh changes. They will have to save 30 per cent of what they earn and hand over 70 per cent to the government. They will be expected to work down the mines until the age of 127 and even then they will be expected to die, in poverty, in a puddle of vomit.

Stern-faced men are saying the country must find an extra £57 billion a year for pensions by 2050 if old people are to enjoy the same standard of living that they have today.

It all sounds very gloomy, but £57 billion is nothing. We learnt last week that the government has spent £30 billion on a computer system for the NHS.

In the past few months I’ve watched Oxford Council spend what must have been £57 billion inserting bollards to make life harder for motorists, then taking them away, then building them again.

Thanks to changes made by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, we’re going to fall short of the pensions bill by only 5 per cent. In France they’ll miss it by 105 per cent. In Germany it’ll be 110 per cent. Then there’s the United States.

I read a book by Niall Ferguson while on holiday this year. It’s called
Colossus
, it’s about the American empire and it argues that already the gap between what America has and what it needs to keep its old people in burgers is $45 trillion.

Now, I don’t know what a trillion is, but I do know that $45 trillion is roughly 10 times more than the total combined wealth of Germany, France, Italy and Britain.

It seems there are three ways this vast deficit can be covered: they can either increase taxes, immediately, by 69 per cent or cut medicare benefits by more than a half, or stop all federal purchases for ever.

I haven’t seen either John Kerry or George W. Bush suggest they’ll be doing any of these things. And that’s bad news, because the situation is becoming more critical.

If nothing has happened by 2008, taxes will have to go up by 74 per cent.

No president, of course, will ever impose any such increase, which means that with the certainty of
Titanic
’s fate once it had hit the iceberg, America will go spectacularly bankrupt. It is, according to the author, an inescapable fact.

Long before that happens, however, the US will renege
on all its foreign debt, which will bankrupt the entire world, causing famine and maybe even some kind of holocaust. So you’ll look a bit of a Charlie if you’ve spent the previous 40 years squirrelling away £30 a week for your old age.

This is the fundamental problem with pensions. You are saving for a future you don’t yet know. You’re taking care of something that might never happen – your old age. You could live a life of thrift and then, the day before your pension matures, you could be trampled to death by a horse. Or win £17 million on the lottery. Or watch America go bust, taking the International Monetary Fund and your pension fund with it.

What’s more, how do you know that the people you entrust with your savings will look after them wisely? How do you know they won’t raid the fund, spend it on a boat and then jump off?

Every night commercial television is littered with multi-million-pound advertisements for pension companies. That’s your money – your nest egg – they are spending, trying to attract more suckers so they can build a taller, shinier office block. From which they can plan more adverts.