Born to Be Riled (40 page)

There you are. It’s not actually true, but in this business you learn very quickly that to keep the people of West Sussex happy it is important to remember that all Rovers are superb and that all Toyotas are made for people with vivid jewellery, and Africans.

I know this because I spent a large chunk of last week
driving across Namibia in an Afro-spec Toyota Camry – four wheels, a gigantic stereo and a burglar alarm.

It really was a dreadful drive, from Swakopmund on the Skeleton Coast 400 miles into the wilderness on roads that were part gravel and part dried-up riverbed. You’d be hurtling along at 90mph when there’d be a trough into which the car would crash with the sort of crunch that can loosen hair.

Stones would fly into your windscreen, creating yet more impact scars so that you’d have even less warning of the next elephant pit.

And then there were the corners. When you’ve been driving in a dead straight line for 50 miles you get lulled into a false sense of security so when, over a blind crest, the road suddenly executes a 90 degree left, you’re not ready.

On tarmac the move would be hard enough, but on gravel you need to use the handbrake and some left-foot braking, and it’s a good idea too, to flap your hands around outside the window; anything really, to make the bloody thing turn.

I’m told that 10 per cent of all hire cars in this gigantic desert state are never sold. They’re rolled.

Now my Camry had done 20,000 miles as a hire car in this superheated boulder-strewn landscape and do you know something? There wasn’t a squeak, there wasn’t a rattle. It may be quite the dullest shape ever to have left the lead in a designer’s pencil, but my God, Johnny Jap knows how to weld metal.

He also knows what’s what in the world. With a miserable 2 litre engine and quite the worst automatic gearbox I’ve ever found, the Camry is not a fast car. But
really, on gravel, cars which offer blood and guts performance usually bring out the blood and guts of those inside. A top speed of 90, I promise, is enough.

What you need from a car out there is the robustness of a lunar-rover and the reliability of a military satellite. You can’t break down when the only roadside cafés are staffed by lions, and you’re on the menu.

And then there’s the dust, which is so persistent it could get into a nun’s pants. Certainly, it managed to get through a closed boot lid and from there actually into my suitcase. If you drive an ordinary car through a dust cloud for 400 miles, Clarence will have you for elevenses. But while the Toyota lets dust in, this seems to have no effect on anything vital.

Except your hairstyle. After just 100 miles I appeared to have an anvil on my head.

Now in Britain, of course, we don’t have gravel roads and our dust is converted into mud long before it can invade your bouffant. And while we have troughs in the road, called speed humps, we tend to take them at 5mph, not 70.

So it could be argued the Camry is over-engineered for our tame and temperate environment. We want more than granite door hinges and a front spoiler that’s made from Kevlar.

We want restful orange dials and piped leather upholstery. We want chrome embellishments on the body and a raft of electro-techno wizardry in the dash. We want – no, we demand – traction control and an ability to get from 0 to 60 in complete silence.

Rover, for sure, has met this criterion well with the new 75 and will, as a result, sell a great many cars in West
Sussex. But then Toyota also sells cars in West Sussex,
and
West Africa
and
Western Samoa.

The simple fact of the matter is this. When Rover designs a car, it thinks only of Europe. When Toyota designs a car, it thinks of Tokyo’s traffic jams, the Stelvio Pass and the vast deserts of Namibia.

And that’s why Toyota is the world’s third biggest car company and Rover is a small and tiresome division of BMW, which, in turn, is soon to be a small and tiresome division of General Motors.

Rover, and all the European car makers, need to think not of the European Union, or even the global village. Satellite phones and the RB211 may have made the world feel smaller. But it isn’t you know.

Now that cruise missiles and the environment have gone away, we have something new to worry about. The police, it seems, have become racist and every night hundreds of black people die in the back of their vans.

A report in the
Sunday Times
last week showed that nearly 16 per cent of people entering the legal profession, and 23 per cent of those at medical school, are black. But even here, in society’s stratosphere, they’re not safe from constant police harassment. Plod, apparently, is forever barging into surgeries to look up Dr Ngomo’s bottom.

So what’s brought this on? Why have the heroes from an Enid Blyton world of rosy cheeks and apple scrumpers
become a bunch of salivating Nazis, proven guilty of institutionalized racism?

I suspect it’s because they’re bored. For 30 years the police have had a purpose, a goal in life, a reason for being. They were employed, solely, to stamp out drinking and driving.

They didn’t investigate the Stephen Lawrence murder properly because all the available manpower was cruising the streets looking for people who’d had a glass of sherry.

But now, the war on drink driving has been won. Britain is the safest country in Europe in which to drive. Only 14 per cent of fatalities are drink-related. And most of those are drunken pedestrians wandering into the path of perfectly sober drivers.

Now, you don’t need a psychiatrist to explain what happens when all of a sudden your role in life is removed. The issue was addressed in
The Full Monty
. You go a little bit bonkers. Some people take off all their clothes. Others roam the streets at night, beating people black and blue. Well blue, anyway.

I was saddened but not in the least surprised to see that Channel Four newsreader Sheena McDonald was run over by a police van last weekend. The driver probably mistook her for Trevor McDonald.

What the police need is a new target. And now they’ve got one – the mobile telephone. Last year, a government-funded study showed that making a call while on the move is as much of a safety risk as driving while drunk. And now, the latest edition of the Highway Code tells drivers that phoning and driving is a no-no.

In Canada, research has shown that drivers who make a call while at the wheel are four times as likely to have a
crash, and that hands-free sets are just as lethal. Talking on the phone, they say, means you’re not concentrating on your driving.

So what about talking to passengers? Well, according to our Highway Code, that’s fine but you must not argue with them. Even if they say the age of consent should be lowered to four, you must bite your lip or you will wind up in court charged with driving without due care and attention.

The code also says you must not eat or drink either. And it warns that navigation systems, onboard computers and even stereos can prove to be a distraction. Crikey. Who’d have believed it? Listening to Terry Wogan is now illegal.

For the country’s black people, this is fantastic news. It means the police can get back in their powerful patrol cars and do what they do best – harass motorists.

They’ll need expensive directional microphones, of course, and persistent offenders, I imagine, will have their cars bugged. Hidden cameras will be used to catch those using satellite navigation systems or eating a Twix.

And that’s just the start. The new Highway Code also says you should not drive for an hour or more if you’re feeling tired and that a break of 15 minutes every two hours is advised.

So how are they going to enforce this then? ‘Sir, we’ve been following you around all day. You had a breakfast meeting at eight, followed by a conference with the world’s terrorists at 10. At lunch time, you had frantic sex with your secretary and a goat, and in the afternoon you robbed a bank and two post offices. And you’ve been
driving now for 121 minutes without a break. You’re nicked.’

This is ridiculous. When I took my driving test, the Highway Code was full of sensible advice. It told me to indicate before turning and not to cross level crossings when a train was coming. It lived in the real world, but now it can’t even get the braking distances right.

Next thing you know, it’ll be telling us not to drive if we want a pee, and not to even so much as think of getting in the car if we haven’t had sex for a while. I’m not kidding.

New research in Australia has shown that 42 per cent of drivers over there have ‘dangerous sexual fantasies while behind the wheel’.

It goes on. ‘We need to break the belief many drivers hold that they can automatically be safely in charge of a vehicle, irrespective of… what they are thinking about.’

I see, so now I face winding up in court charged with driving while under the influence of Kristin Scott Thomas.

‘Your honour, I couldn’t help it. I was just thinking about
The English Patient
and she popped into my head. I’m sorry. I’ll be sure to have some bromide before I drive next time. Only not too much, in case I need a pee.’

Having been born white, I’ve no idea what it’s like to be victimized for no good reason. But as a motorist in Blair’s Britain, I suspect I’m about to find out.

To a great many people,
Top Gear
presenters have very possibly the best job in the world. Free cars, club class travel, no repercussions when you crash and large dollops of fame, fortune and foie gras.

So I’m sure a few readers may be a little perplexed to hear that I have resigned. Here’s why. Now that I’ve gone, I don’t need to drive a razor around my face every single morning. I don’t need to buy new shoes every time the old pair start to look scruffy and, best of all, I have no need, ever, to set foot again in the armpit that masquerades as Britain’s second city. Much as I liked Pebble Mill, I really did grow to hate, with unbridled passion, the city that surrounds it. Until you have driven through King’s Heath on a wet Wednesday in February you have not experienced true horror.

You may have seen footage of the Colombian towns devastated by the recent earthquake. Well, King’s Heath is like that, only worse. In seven days, God created heaven and earth and then, just to keep his oppo amused, he let Beelzebub do Birmingham. I pity James May, the man being touted as my replacement. He has been lured by the promise of untold riches, of motor industry obsequiousness on a biblical scale and of bathing in an intoxicating mix of public adulation and Dom Perignon. But he has not considered that his drive from England to Pebble Mill will mean getting through King’s Heath.

There are, of course, other reasons why I needed to go. There was, for instance, surprise when I described the Corolla as dull, yes, even shock when I was seen to fall
asleep while driving it. And again, there was surprise when I savaged the Vectra, refusing for seven minutes of televisual time to say anything good about it. By the time I got round to the Cadillac Seville STS, the Clarkson attacks were only mildly noteworthy. You had grown to expect them. The shock tactics had become predictable, and so weren’t shocking any more.

And it was the same with the metaphors. The first time you heard me liken some car to the best bits of Cameron Diaz, you probably sniggered about it at school all the next day. But now, it’s tedious. I never tired of trying to think up new ways to describe a car, and could regularly be found at four in the morning scribbling new lines on a piece of paper by the side of the bed. I thought of one only last night. ‘It’s like being left outside the pub as a child with a crisp drink and a bag of coke.’ Great, but now I’ve nowhere to put it.

I will, of course, carry on writing for this magazine, and there’s always Mr Murdoch to stand bravely between my front door and the wolf, but already I’m starting to miss
Top Gear
. I miss the banter with Quentin and Tiff, as we sniggered about Steve Berry and what he’d crashed that week. I miss Vicky’s eyes and her ability to bring sex into absolutely everything. I miss climbing into a new car and thinking, ‘Right. What have we got here then?’ You may think that the best bit was the endless succession of new cars. But it wasn’t. The best bit was sitting down at the computer with an expectant, winking cursor and then, four days later, handing over seven minutes of video tape to the producer.

The actual driving was always a drag. You sat in some Godforsaken hedge on a blind bend, waiting for the
walkie-talkie to say the road was clear. And then you set off, only to find it wasn’t or that the cameraman had lost focus and that you’d have to do it all over again, and again and again. I promise you this. It really isn’t much fun driving a Ferrari when you are accompanied by a cameraman, a ton of equipment and a bloody great blinding light on the bonnet. I’m often asked what qualifications you need to work on
Top Gear,
and I’ve always given the same advice. Like cars by all means, but love writing. Love it so much that you do it to relax. See the new Alfa or whatever as nothing more than a tool on which your prose can be based. Don’t worry about how quickly it gets from 0 to 60. Worry only about how you will explain this meaningless figure to your viewers or readers.

So what am I going to do to fill the void left by
Top Gear
? Simple. I’m going to write and write and write until the smiles come back.

What a week. Gordon Brown decided to be all generous, only increasing the tax burden on home owners who have a car. Which means you and me, and everyone we’ve ever met. And all the extra revenue will be used by local councils to build stiles and footpaths in your garden so that ramblers can roam around your lawn and trample all over your geraniums.

Then we had the news that soya bean breast implants may leak and that no one really knows what this may do to the body. Oh, really? I’ve known for years.

Ingesting soya beans makes you grow a beard, don red socks and wander about in other people’s gardens in a Day-Glo cagoule. My advice is simple: if you want boobs like Yorkshire puddings, put a couple of steaks in there.