Don't Stop Me Now (5 page)

Speed, however, is only part of the fruit cocktail. The best thing about the old car, with the old 2.5-litre V6, was its handling. It simply didn’t understand the concept
of understeer, gripping like an American in Hurricane Isabel, and then oh so gently allowing the rear to slide in a glorious bout of power oversteer.

The new one is ever so slightly less good. Because there’s so much more grunt from the extra half a litre, it’s hard to get the throttle position just right. And it only takes your big toenail to grow a little and oomph, the rear wheels light up and you wind up going backwards in what feels like the smoking room at Detroit airport.

There’s another problem, too. The new engine, and the addition of a six-speed gearbox, has pushed the price up to more than
£
50,000, and it’s hard to justify that. Yes, it does appear to be well made and you do get leather trim, but there are no luxuries at all, apart from air-conditioning. You even have to wind your own windows down.

Sure, it’s faster than a Carrera 2, and more fun as well, but it’s not a Porsche, and you can never quite get it out of your head that it was built from plastic in South Africa and assembled on an industrial estate in Leicestershire.

I sort of don’t mind, though, because it is just so very, very fast. And very, very pretty. And who cares if it doesn’t handle quite as well as the old car. Coming second to that would be like coming second to Tom Jones in a singing competition.

The boss of TVR has referred to the Noble as ‘the South African three-wheeler’ ever since its suspension broke in a recent
Autocar
test. But that shows he’s worried about it.

And rightly so. TVR has been doing its thing for
10 years and nobody has thought to help themselves to a slice of the cake. Now Noble has come along and taken the icing and the cherry, leaving only the sponge.

In a world obsessed with image, you can’t beat a Porsche. But in a world obsessed with time, a Porsche is a library. A TVR is the internet. And the Noble is broadband.

Sunday 28 September 2003

Whenever an actor is asked to slip into a toga he sees it as an excuse to go all swivel-eyed and bonkers. When it comes to the Romans, no speech defect is too preposterous, no gait too far-fetched.

We’ve had Derek Jacobi with his club foot and his stutter, and Malcolm McDowell helping himself to every bride, groom and farmyard animal in Rome. Oh, and let’s not forget the one with the funny mouth who stabbed Russell Crowe in
Gladiator
.

If you believed everything you’ve seen about Rome on the silver screen, you’d wonder how on earth they managed to find the lavatory in the morning. Let alone work out how such a thing might be flushed and how the effluent might be carried away in a sewerage system, the like of which wasn’t to be seen in the world again for another 1,800 years.

But it is an unwritten law that all empires, whether the Borg, the British, big business, or even the BBC, are bad. Fuelled by greed and policed with violence, they wreak havoc on the pipsqueaks, raping, pillaging and forcing them to eat genetically modified suppers while watching programmes like
Britain’s Worst Toilet
.

So I wasn’t expecting the Romans to be portrayed in a particularly rosy light in
Boudica
on ITV last Sunday.

And sure enough, in boinged Nero wearing lipstick. We didn’t actually see him gnawing on a panda’s ear and then using a slave’s severed head to wipe away the goo, but the hint was there all right.

Meanwhile, back in plucky old England, Boudica was busy delivering speeches about freedom and democracy. She was the Afghan farmer whose poppies have been devastated by Monsanto. She was Nelson Mandela, William Wallace, Che Guevara and Gandhi all rolled into a one-cal, bite-sized Sunday evening, Charlie Dimmock-style glamourpuss.

Unfortunately, in real life she was none of these things. She was, in a word, British, which is just a whisker away from Brutish. The Romans may have brought peace, along with their baths and their roads, but behind the cloak of civilisation and poetry we were still a nation who loved to get our swords dirty.

When the Romans left, we reverted to type. As Simon Schama says in
A History of Britain
: ‘War was not a sport; it was a system. Its plunder was the glue of loyalty binding noble warriors and their men to the king. It was the land, held in return for military service that fed their bellies, it was the honour that fed their pride and it was the jewels that pandered to their vanity. It was everything.’

In other words, the Brits love a good scrap. And it’s still going on today. While the rest of the world hangs its head in despair over Iraq, Tony Blair comes out from behind the health-food counter and shouts: ‘I’m proud of what we have done.’

Most countries, except perhaps France, will fight to
protect their borders or their way of life. But Britain will fight to protect someone else’s borders and someone else’s way of life. Poland. Kuwait. Korea. Don’t worry, we’ll be there, fists flying.

What’s more, we’re the only nation that likes to fight in its spare time. You’ll see more brawls on a British high street in one night than you will in the whole of Italy in an entire year.

I went out the other night with a bloke who freely admitted that he likes nothing more than to finish off the night with a fight. While chaps elsewhere in the world hone their chat-up lines, hoping to go home with a girl, he has developed a range of provocations so that he can go home with a chair leg sticking out of his arm.

Think about it. If someone in Italy says, ‘Are you looking at me?’, you’re on for some rumpy-pumpy. If someone says it in England, you’re on for a ride in an ambulance. And have you ever heard a Frenchman say, ‘Est-ce que vous upsettez mon vin?’

We are supposed to be a pot-pourri of Saxon, Goth, Roman, Norman, Celt and Viking. But actually we’re just thugs and vandals. When the Romans went home, we pulled down their buildings, ripped up their roads and settled down for 400 years of bloodshed and mayhem known as the Dark Ages. Those were the days, eh?

And they’re still going on. In Birmingham recently I encountered a group of lads pushing one of our television cameras along the street.

‘Where are you going with that?’ I asked.

‘We’re going to push it into the canal,’ they replied, as
though it were the most natural thing in the world to do.

Beauty and love have no place in Britain. Which is why we are responsible for the most brutal and savage car of all: the TVR. An Alfa Romeo will try to woo you with poetry. A TVR will bend you over the Aga, rip off its kilt and give you one, right there and then.

A Volkswagen will make you a lovely shepherd’s pie and light a fire to make your evening warm and cosy. Whereas a TVR will come home and bend you over the Aga again. A TVR would nick the lifeboat charity box on the bar, empty it, then shove it up your jacksie. A TVR would fight for its life, its honour, its family and, most of all, its pint.

Put a TVR on
Desert Island Discs
and it would take a flamethrower and a selection of hits from Wayne County and the Electric Chairs. Then it would bend Sue Lawley over the mixing desk and make animal love until it broke wind.

You don’t get paint on a TVR; it’s woad. And instead of being made from steel or aluminium, it’s wattle and daub. It’s an Iron Age fort with a Bronze Age engine. It’s Boudica, only with less femininity and more rage in its heart.

And look at the names TVRs have had over the years: Griffith, Chimaera, Cerbera – all terrifying mythological creatures with goat heads and seven sets of teeth.

That’s why I’m unnerved by the latest version, the T350C. What kind of a name is that? It makes it sound like an electric toothbrush. And while a toothbrush has a revolving head and bristles, it’s not as scary as, say, a
hammerhead shark. Could this mean, then, that the new car has lost some of its bite?

Two things back this up. First of all, it’s a coupé with a boot and a hatchback, and I’m sorry but I just don’t equate the concept of TVR motoring with all this stuff. It’s like trying to imagine a Saxon despot in a cardigan.

Then there’s the handling. Push any of the other TVRs into a corner too fast, and in an instant, with no warning, you’re in a world of smoke and hate. Getting your entry speed wrong in a TVR is as dangerous as spilling a Glaswegian’s pint. But the toothbrush just understeers, like a Golf or a Focus.

There’s other stuff, too. For all the racing heritage and volume of a straight-six engine, it simply doesn’t sound as terrifying as a V8. And this is the first TVR I’ve driven in ages with a substandard interior. In recent years we’ve become used to all sorts of swoops and oddities, but in this one it just doesn’t work. It feels daft for no reason.

And yet, by some considerable margin, this is the best TVR I’ve ever driven. With its integral roll cage it feels stiffer and more together, like all four corners are working in harmony, rather than in discord. And the brakes are just astonishing.

So’s the power. You may only get 3.6 litres and no forced induction, but you end up with a better power-to-weight ratio than you get from a Lamborghini Murciélago. That means it is seriously, properly, eye-poppingly fast.

And because it doesn’t try to bite your head off every time you make a mistake, you can use more of the power for more of the time.

Finally, there’s the question of money. To get this kind of performance, you have to be looking at a Porsche GT3 for
£
72,000, or a Murciélago for
£
163,000. Even the Noble I wrote about last week is over
£
52,000. But the TVR is just
£
38,500. Plus another two if you want lift-out roof panels.

So what we have here is a TVR with all the savagery of the olde worlde coupled with the practicality of a usable boot and a soft ride. It’s an ancient Briton with Roman overtones, and as a result Alan Rickman wouldn’t be able to play it properly in a film. He’d be too mad. Think more in terms of Alan Titchmarsh – a little bit raunchy, but actually a little bit not.

Sunday 5 October 2003

There have been a handful of scientific breakthroughs in the past few weeks that I suspect may have slipped under your radar.

A couple of Dutch boffins, for instance, have developed a new kind of fabric that could be used as a television screen. So pretty soon you’ll be able to watch
Matrix Reloaded
on your tie.

Then we have the British satellite that can spot rainfall and vegetation growth in Algeria. As a result, farmers there will be able to bring some shock and awe to the locust breeding grounds before the insect sex even takes place.

Or what about the vibrating shoes that have been developed in America? Apparently these compensate for a loss of balance in the elderly and will cut the number of falls and broken hips.

Best of all, we have the 2580 service on your mobile. Dial the number, hold the phone against a speaker and within 30 seconds, for just 9p, you’ll be sent a text saying what the song is and who it’s by.

So now you can wave goodbye to the misery of trying to find out what it was you heard on the radio by attempting to sing it to your friends. ‘You must have heard it. It’s brilliant. It goes ner-ner-ner de-dum-dum on the beach.’

Even China is riding the techno wave. We were told this week that the sheer weight of skyscrapers being built in Shanghai is squashing the rock on which the city is founded.

And we mustn’t forget that extraordinary dam that will provide limitless power for everyone until the end of time, or their rocket, which next week will keep the red flag flying in space.

Nearer to home, scientists have developed a heat-resistant plastic which they’re using to make a light that goes on in a handbag every time it’s opened. Wonderful. No more standing around on the doorstep for 15 minutes while our wives rummage for the keys.

And then there’s the world of computers. Seismologists have been able to work out just how big the tidal wave will be when Tenerife splits in half and falls into the sea. Very, seems to be the answer.

They’ve even been able to determine why tortoises on the Galapagos Islands are all mental. It seems there was a genetic bottleneck 100,000 years ago when a volcano went off, and only the biggest, daftest tortoises survived.

It’s astonishing. We can trace a tortoise’s family tree without trawling through parish records and looking at gravestones. We can watch moving pictures on our clothes of locusts ‘dogging’, safe in the knowledge that our mothers have not fallen over while we weren’t looking.

And there’s so much more. We can genetically modify crops, we can measure the smell of cheese, we can track stolen cars from space and teach our television sets to skip the adverts. We can do anything. We are invincible. And
yet we are still being propelled from place to place by a series of small explosions.

It doesn’t matter whether you drive a McLaren or a McDonald’s delivery van, you are still relying on exactly the same technology that was dreamed up more than 100 years ago. In some ways this is a good thing, because when change is slow there’s a chance for engineers to plane away at the rough edges, leaving you with something close to perfection.

If there had been a completely new type of technology invented every 20 years or so, none would have been refined to the same extent as the internal combustion engine we have now.

And the most refined, most planed-away, most astonishing engine I have ever encountered is currently to be found sitting in the middle of Porsche’s new Carrera GT. This is 100 years of human achievement crammed into three cubic feet of titanium, magnesium, aluminium and raw, unadulterated, visceral, screaming power.

You’re told, before you set off, that in no circumstances should you apply any throttle at all while engaging the clutch. The mountain of torque, apparently, would catapult you and your
£
320,000 hypercar into the nearest piece of foliage.

The Porsche engineers talk about the clutch pedal as though it’s the trigger for a nuclear bomb. It may as well be.