Clarkson on Cars
Authors: Jeremy Clarkson
Tags: #Travel / General, #Automobile driving, #Transportation / Automotive / General, #Television journalists, #Automobiles, #Language Arts & Disciplines / Journalism, #English wit and humor
PENGUIN BOOKS
CLARKSON ON CARS
Jeremy Clarkson made his name presenting a poky motoring programme on BBC2 called
Top Gear
. He left to forge a career in other directions but made a complete hash of everything and ended up back on
Top Gear
again. He lives with his wife, Francie, and three children in Oxfordshire. Despite this, he has a clean driving licence.
J
EREMY CLARKSON
PENGUIN BOOKS
To Jesse Crosse –
who started the ball rolling
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
All articles in Part 1 first appeared in
Performance Car
between 1985 and 1993
All articles in Part 2 first appeared in the
Sunday Times
between 1993 and 1995
This collection first published by Virgin Books 1996
Published in Penguin Books 2004
25
Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 1996
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-01788-4
Would You Buy a Used Alfa from This Man?
I Had That Geezer from
Top Gear
in the Back Once
Acceleration Times are a Bit Nonsensical
So What’s the Big Deal with the Beetle Then?
Just What is It about the BMW?
Hondas are Bought by Old People
Why Do People Drive Differently All Over the UK?
You Can Tell What People Drive by the Shoes They Wear
Why aren’t Car Ads Aimed at Old People?
The New Range Rover Looks Like a Taxi
Princess Diana Drives Audi Sales Up
Routefinder Satellite Technology
Safety Measures – Who Needs Them?
Who Gives a Damn about the Countryside?
The Mondeo V6 is Very Good – Really
Buttons are Not Just for Christmas
Formula One Racing – as Dull as Ever
20 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Jeremy Clarkson
As I have no ambition, I have to be spurred on by others. It was Jesse Crosse, the first editor of
Performance Car
, who said I should write a column, and I shall forever be in his debt. And it is my wife, Francie, who makes sure these days that I’m always in the right place at roughly the right time. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without her.
There are people in the motor industry too who gave me a leg up in those early days: Barry Reynolds at Ford, Chris Willows at BMW, John Evans at Mercedes and Peter Frater at Chrysler are four notable examples.
And then there are friends like Jonathan Gill, Andy Wilman, Anthony ffrench Constant and Tom Stewart whose wit and wisdom I’ve plagiarised shamelessly for years.
Dear Diary
I do not wish to regale you with tales of my movements towards the end of this month, for two reasons. Firstly, you would be unutterably bored; and secondly, I will miss most of the engagements involved anyway.
I will miss them because I have not written them down anywhere. People have rung to invite me for a weekend’s skiing, for a two-day trip to Scandinavia, for dinner, for whatever.
Not being used to such popularity, I have said yes to everything, without really knowing whether anything clashes or, to be honest, when anything is.
It is a minor miracle if I ever manage to get anywhere in the right decade, let alone on the right day.
The reason for this shortfall is that I have never kept a diary. Oh to be sure, I’ve started many a year with every good intention, filling in my blood group in the personal section and entering things that happened a week ago so that if anyone peeps, they’ll be gobsmacked at what appears to be a gay social life.
By February the entries are getting pretty sparse. By March I’ve lost it or Beloved, in a flurry of domesticity, has fed it, along with the odd airline ticket and several cufflinks, to the washing machine. You may be interested to hear that I have the cleanest cheque book in Christendom.
Most of my time on New Year’s Eve was spent dreaming up all sorts of resolutions. This year, in among things like a four-weeks-and-already-broken ban on alcohol, and a fairytale promise to get fitter, I vowed to keep a diary.
The question was, which one? In the run up to Christmas, any number of motor manufacturers sent such things. And, as they say in Scunthorpe, very nice too.
Slimline and quite capable of fitting in a jacket pocket without making me look like an FBI agent, they do however face some stiff competition.
First, there’s the Peugeot 405 Fil-o-fax-u-like. Now, these things are of enormous benefit to the likes of Beloved, who has simply millions of absolutely lovely friends and needs to remind herself when my Visa card needs a wash. But to unpopular people like my good self, they’re rather less use than a trawlerman in Warwick.
With just five friends and, on average, two party invites a year, there’s no real justification for me to be strolling around the place with something the size of a house brick under my arm.
Besides, it has a section for goals, which I presume refers to ambition rather than football. I have several ambitions but writing them down won’t get me any nearer to achieving them. I want to be king, for instance, and being able to see tomorrow’s racing results today would be pretty useful too.
Then there’s my Psion Organiser. It’s advertised on television as a sort of portable computer that fits neatly in a briefcase and acts out the role of diary, alarm clock, address book and calculator all rolled into one.
As far as I’m concerned, though, it is of no use whatsoever, because I can’t be bothered to learn how it works. The instruction booklet is bigger and even more boring than the
Iliad
and anyway I think I’ve broken it by getting into edit mode and telling it to bugger off.
Casio do the Data Bank which is disguised as a calculator. It can even be used as one but beware, those who even think about entering an address or an appointment will screw up the innards good and proper. Well I did anyway.
These electronic gizmos are all very well but I want to know what is wrong with a good old pencil and a piece of paper?
I mean, if someone rings up (chance’d be a fine thing) and asks me to a party next week, I could have it written down in what; two, three seconds? I would need a team of advisers and a fortnight’s free time even to turn the Psion on.
The advantage is that it does have an ability to remind me audibly when I’m supposed to be going somewhere. This is where Pepys’s little tool falls fait on its face.
It’s all very well remembering to write something down but this is about as much good as cleaning your shoes with manure if you don’t look at the diary on the day in question.
Even so, I’m a man of my word and, consequently, I’m keeping a diary like a good little boy.
Choosing which book to use was not easy. I have the sex maniac’s diary, which tells me where in the world I can have safe sex, how to apply a condom and on what day of the week I can indulge in what they call the Strathclyde muff dive.
I also have the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Who’s Who diary but it is full to bursting with bad photographs of people in brown suits.
The International Motors’ diary – they’re the people who import Subarus, Isuzus and High and Dries – is a convenient size and has all the usual Letts schoolboy stuff in it about temperature and time zones and Intercity services.
But I do not urgently need to know when the main Jewish festivals are. Nor, frankly, am I terribly bothered about when Ramadan begins.
Toyota’s diary begins with a lovely shot of their Carina car in front of the Pont du Gard in the Ardèche, skips blissfully over the Letts schoolboy behaviour and gets straight on to page after page of slots for the parties.
But far and away the most tasteful offering for 1989 comes from those Italian chappies at Fiat. Largely, the editorial section at the front of their book is taken up with a list of decent restaurants.
It doesn’t
say
they’re decent though, which should make for some fireworks when a trainee Fiat mechanic from a dealer in Bolton comes to the capital on an Awayday and gets presented with a £60 bill at Poons.
You can tell Fiat have aimed their diary at men near the top. But this one is no good to me either, because the allergies section on the personal page is far too small. I am allergic to cats, penicillin, pollen, house dust, nylon, trade union leaders and that man with the Tefal forehead who masquerades as Labour’s health spokesman.
Ford’s gives no space at all to allergies and is full of all sorts of stuff I never knew I didn’t need to know – but this is the one I’ve selected. Instead of giving each week a page of its own, Ford have crammed an entire month on one double-page spread.
This means I can do my shoelaces up on 4 April and feed the hamster on 16 May, and those who peek into the book will think I’m as busy as hell.
At this rate, the weightlifting gold at the 1992 Olympics will be won by a paperboy from Basildon. And apart from having arms like the hind legs of a rhino, he will believe the world is full of cars that can go faster than 300 mph.
