Don't Stop Me Now (32 page)

Sunday 19 February 2006

I was bored. I’d eaten everything in the fridge, learned to play the piano and beaten myself at chess. And then someone from Jaguar rang to see if I wanted to go to South Africa for the weekend. Damn right I did. Getting there is very easy – you go on a plane – but working out what to expect when you arrive is rather more tricky. On the one hand you think you’ll spot Peter Gabriel with a bone in his nose, chanting. Or maybe Charlie Dimmock bouncing up and down in Nelson Mandela’s rose beds. But on the other hand you suspect you may be hacked to pieces by a machete-wielding mob.

You certainly don’t go to South Africa for the viniculture. We stayed at a vineyard and on one evening they took us to the cellar, which was full of huge steel vats and pressure gauges. It was like being in a nuclear power station.

And what did the finished product taste like? Well, pretty much like the stuff that comes from the outlet pipe at Sellafield. I doubt the French would put it in their windscreen washer bottles.

So what about ebony and ivory getting along in perfect harmony? Yes, apartheid is over but all the black people seem to have got now is the vote, and a carrier bag each. I’m not kidding. Even if you go far out into the blazing
heat of the hinterland, you will find the roadside littered with people who are just sitting there, with a plastic bag, doing nothing.

Occasionally one will stick out his thumb so you can give him a lift to a new bit of roadside where he can sit with his bag, doing nothing. But the back seats in the Jag were too small so I’m afraid I just cruised on by.

I don’t think I’ve been anywhere where the rich, behind their razor wire and automated sprinkler-fed lawns, live quite so close, and yet quite so far away, from the poor and their plastic bags. I don’t think a
Guardian
reader could cope.

Frankly, though, I had more important things on my mind. For 30 years I’ve toured the globe looking for the same light that we saw in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, when Paul Newman takes Katharine Ross for a spin on his new bicycle. You know what I’m talking about: that dandelion-flecked morning promise of warm summer breezes to come. Well, it’s there, in South Africa.

And Christ almighty, it gives good mountain. It’s a bit like Greece, and Yorkshire and northern California. But of course it’s not, because the clouds are pure Wilbur Smith; they could only be African. And then you have the Lowry trees, with their Lionel Richie hairdos. You don’t find those anywhere else either.

Then you spot where the post-sanctions money was spent. On the roads. They’re amazing.

Now they’ve worked out that tyres go on cars, rather than round one another’s necks, they’ve created one of the best driving countries anywhere on earth.

Eventually I got to Cape Town and oooh, what a place. It’s often said that London, New York and Rome are the world’s three great cities but none has much of a backdrop. That’s why I prefer Hong Kong, Wellington and Reykjavik. You have the restaurants and the shops and the bars. And all the time you can admire God’s axe work in the background.

In many ways Cape Town is like Sydney or Vancouver. It has a Britishness to the architecture and there’s a sort of touristed-up dock area where you can pay too much for stuff you don’t need. But in Cape Town you have Table Mountain just there, right at the end of your nose.

This – and I’ll take no argument, thanks – is one of the world’s great cities. And South Africa, despite the hilarious attempts to make wine, is one of the world’s great countries. I loved it.

Jaguar had made the most of the three-day trip, too, providing helicopters to take us into the mountains and ribs to take us round the coast. They provided choirs every time there was an embarrassing silence and at night they provided telescopes so we could look at Saturn.

They’d also provided 16 chauffeur-driven long-wheelbase XJs to ferry us around when we were drunk. And 45 XKs for when we weren’t. Although by the time I got there 700 journalists from around the world had been through the programme, so there were only 39 left.

So, what’s the XK like? Well, if you go faster than 130 mph I can report that the front end starts to get a bit light. You lose some of the ‘feel’ from the wheel. And
this, in one of the strangest games of consequences ever, is because of the need to provide a decent-sized boot.

Here’s why. EU rules say that the compulsory highlevel centre brake light has to be mounted within a certain distance of the rear window. And because the rear window on the XK convertible is small, so it’ll fit in the boot without taking up too much space, the only place to fit the brake light is on top of a big rear spoiler. And because it’s so big, the front of the car starts to ‘lift’ at speed.

Of course, you wouldn’t expect there to be a similar problem in the coupé, which has a big rear window, but this is Jaguar, a small company that’s been losing money hand over fist in recent years. So thanks to a need to economise, both models get the same spoiler. So both have the same high-speed handling issue.

You see a similar thing going on with the aerial. Most cars these days have one inside the front windscreen, hidden away. But because the Jag has a heated front windscreen, and the heater elements mess with the reception, it comes with exactly the same sort of electric antenna you used to fit as an after-market accessory to your 1976 Ford Cortina.

And to think this car is made in the same factory that used to churn out Second World War Spitfires. Though, of course, back then British ingenuity wasn’t at the mercy of American next-quarter accounting.

Because of these two little things the Jaguar is not a car from which you walk away saying, ‘I have got to have one even if it means cutting out my own tongue.’ It’s not
a car that stirs the soul and breaks your heart. Instead it’s a car you’ll decide to buy after a logical process of elimination.

Yes, a 6-series BMW is faster, but come on. This is not a car that stirs your soul either; just your stomach. It’s hideous. And with that silly iDrive malarkey it’s also far too complicated.

So what about the Mercedes SL? Well, unless you can have the AMG growler, the answer’s no. It’s just a bit too boring.

The Jag, on the other hand, isn’t. It is pant-wettingly pretty and it makes just the most visceral, animal snarl when you boot it. On the move this turns into a muted version of the noise you got from 1970s American muscle cars. You’ll adore it.

You will also adore the simplicity of the undersides. It rides on proper suspension, not some oleohydryopneum-atic nonsense, the controls work brilliantly, and while the back seats aren’t big enough for hitchhikers, or even their carrier bags, the front is spacious and wonderful.

There’s only one small thing. The Aston Martin V8 Vantage. This comes from the same company, Ford, was designed in essence by the same man and has basically the same engine. But it sounds even better and is even prettier to behold. So, would you always think, if you had the Jag, that you’d bought second best? Honest answer? Yes. But there is another way of looking at it. Aston Martin has a properly crap reliability record, whereas the latest figures put Jag ahead of every other car maker in the world except Lexus. So what you have with the XK is a
reliable way of enjoying at least some of the Aston magic.

It’s like Cape Town, then. You have a taste of Africa without the malaria, the flies in your eyes or having your genitals cut off by angry locals. Yes, the wine’s rubbish, but like the aerial and that high-speed lift it’s a small price to pay.

Sunday 5 March 2006

How many actors are there in the world? I’m counting everyone, from the ‘boy’ in an amateur dramatic society’s performance of
The Winslow Boy
, to the Latvian teenager who appears only on webcams, covered in baby oil.

I’m counting people in Bollywood, people in French art house films, people at provincial Brazilian drama colleges. And if you do that, the number must be into the millions. Some of them must be very good. It stands to reason. But they’ll never make it. The hand of fate will continue to deal them low diamonds and mid-range clubs until eventually they wind up teaching Stanislavski to self-harming inmates at Pentonville. Even those who make it to the top struggle to become Tom Cruise. The big-name star. The guarantee of bums on seats.

Take Christopher Walken as a prime example. He’s big, all right. He could get a table at the Ivy any time he wanted. And he’s also fabulously watchable. That gold watch scene in
Pulp Fiction
was, I think, the finest performance from any big screen actor since… well, ever.

But he still couldn’t fill a theatre. I mean, since
Pulp Fiction
he’s appeared in
Kangaroo Jack
,
Engine Trouble
,
The Country Bears
,
Poolhall Junkies
,
The Affair of the Necklace
,
Joe Dirt
,
Jungle Juice
,
The Opportunists
,
Kiss Toledo Goodbye
,
Mousehunt
and countless other movies that I can pretty
much guarantee you haven’t seen. Since
Top Gun
, however, there isn’t a single Tom Cruise film I’ve missed. In fact there isn’t a single Tom Cruise film I don’t own on DVD. Of course, Tom’s a fine actor. His performance alongside Dustin Hoffman’s twitchery in
Rain Man
was especially memorable. But is he better than Walken?

So it goes with all things, especially cars. Last week, after a hard day’s filming, I drove home in a new 3-series BMW. The Tom Cruise of motoring. The machine you would automatically choose if you wanted a well-made, reasonably sporty four-door saloon. And it was fine. But the next day an Alfa Romeo 159 arrived at my house. Now, this is a car you would automatically not choose if you wanted a well-made, reasonably sporty four-door saloon. This is Christopher Walken.

Actually, that’s one of my less risible metaphors. Because in its long history of making cars, Alfa only rarely produces a
Deer Hunter
or a gold watch scene in
Pulp Fiction
. The vast majority of its offerings are complicated, silly and badly made. And as a result most go straight to the discount DVD bin at Blockbuster.

The thing is, though, with the exception of the simply appalling Arna, I’ve loved all Alfas. In fact I’ve argued time and again that nobody can be a petrolhead until they’ve owned one. It’s a rite of passage. Think of it as the great sex that leaves you with an embarrassing itch.

Take the old GTV6 as a prime example. I owned one once and it was a nightmare. The worst car I’ve owned. Deeply uncomfortable, spectacularly impractical and blessed with steering so heavy that navigating into a
London parking space was like navigating a donkey into a budgie cage.

Then there was the complete lack of quality. Nothing worked. And when you got one thing fixed something else would break on the way home. Once it tried to murder me. The linkage from the gear lever to the rear-mounted gearbox fell off and jammed the prop shaft, causing a sound not heard on earth since Krakatoa blew up, and the rear wheels to lock.

But behind the oyster-like impregnability of its ergonomics and hidden in the sea of snot were two perfect pearls. The styling. And the howl from its V6 engine. In a tunnel, at 4,000 rpm, it was more sonorous than any music. It was like having your soul licked by angels.

In essence, then, Alfa has always understood what makes driving a thrill. But it has never been able to make a car. Well, not a car that a rational, normal human being might want to buy.

Think of them as underground German art films. Great for serious-minded critics but not quite in the same everyman league as BMWillis on an asteroid.

At first I thought the 159 would be more of the same. The boot release button is in the roof, just where you wouldn’t expect it to be, the electric windows have a mind of their own, and like the Fiat Grande Punto I reviewed last week, it couldn’t find or hold Radio 2. It could pick up pigs squeaking on Io, and Radio Leicester. But not Johnnie Walker.

These, however, are trivial faults. No more annoying in the big scheme of things than the iDrive in a BMW
or the harsh ride you get on an Audi. Unlike Alfas of old you have to look long and hard in a 159 to find something deeply disturbing. But I found it all right.

The greatest sensation of speed afforded to ordinary man is not on a go-kart or a rollercoaster. It comes when you’ve got the cruise control set at 70 mph, the traffic in front is stopping and momentarily you can’t find the button to turn it off. In that hiccup of time it doesn’t feel like you’re doing 70 mph. It feels like you’re doing three times the speed of light.

That’s why, in most cars, the cruise control ‘off’ button is clearly visible and easy to use in a hurry. Not in the Alfa it isn’t. It looks like one of the pieces from a game of Risk and it’s mounted on a stalk just below and slightly behind the indicator.

So when the traffic ground to a halt on the M40 I bet the chap behind me was keen to know why I didn’t slow at all and then, for no obvious reason, suddenly indicated left. This, then, is proper swivel-eyed Alfa lunacy but it is the only thing in the car that’s truly wrong and there’s a simple way round the problem. Ignore it. Pretend it isn’t there.

But do not pretend the 159 isn’t there next time you want a mid-range four-door saloon because that would be a mistake. A bad one. First of all, it is exactly one million times better-looking than a BMW 3-series. And with those triple headlamps, and perfect proportions, at least half a million times better-looking than any rivals from Audi, Mercedes or Jaguar.

Inside, it’s even better. The driving position is spot on,
the dials look like they’ve come from a Swiss watch and the quality of the leather, especially if you have it in red, gives the impression that it costs Rolls-Royce money.

But it doesn’t. A 159 Lusso, which is the luxury version, is
£
22,395. That’s about what BMW charges for a 320i SE, but Alfa gives you far more equipment as standard and lots more power as well. The 2.2-litre engine is a peach that just begs to be taken outside and given a damn good thrashing. Porsche engineered an exhaust rasp into the Boxster at 5,000 rpm to reward the sporty driver. Alfa hasn’t bothered. It just gives you a simple four-cylinder engine that, all on its own, sounds better and better until you’re up at 6,500, when it sounds like a metallic werewolf.