Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (15 page)

Normally, when a couple decide they need a nanny to look after their child, the list of requirements is quite small. Can you cook a sausage without blowing the house to smithereens? Do you have a rudimentary grasp of English? And are you able to walk past our fridge without eating every single thing inside it?

Actually, I'm being a silly. A mother is bothered about these things. A father tends to worry mostly about aesthetics. Well, I did. I wouldn't deliberately choose an ugly sofa or a hideous coffee table, so why would I want to clutter up the house with a nanny who looks like Robbie Coltrane?

Anyway, according to various reports last week, the actress Gwyneth Paltrow and her crooning husband, whose name has temporarily gone from my mind, have advertised for someone to look after their children, aged five and seven. And their list of requirements is enormous.

The successful applicant must be able to teach ancient Greek, Latin, French and either Japanese or Mandarin. He or she will also be proficient in painting, sailing, a martial art, chess and drama. So what they seem to want is a blend of Julie Andrews, Robin Knox-Johnston and Boris Spassky. Maybe Stephen Fry would do – except, perhaps, for the martial art – but I fear the salary of £62,100 plus expenses, and a free flat, might not be quite enough.

The story attracted much tut-tutting on the radio and in the newspapers. But there will be no scoffing from me because,
if the story is true, I think the couple should be applauded for setting such high standards.

In the olden days, cleverness was celebrated. People would flock to exhibitions to see new machines and meet the men who'd invented them. Talks were popular. Authors were the rock 'n' rollers, and poets deities. Not that long ago, you could be an engineer and rich … at the same time. But then along came
Blind Date
and that changed everything. Because here was a show specifically designed for morons. Occasionally, for comedic effect, a clever person who could speak properly was invited into the pink and purple idiot chamber so that the host, Cilla Black, could make mocking ‘oooh' noises on discovering that they had been to university.

Suddenly, it was uncool to be intelligent and well read. Cilla told us every single Saturday night that it was much better to be a hairdresser. And, as a result, the future wasn't bright. It was orange.

Blind Date
was the master and originator of the ‘all right for some' mentality that now pervades every part of our lives. Anyone good-looking, or rich, or lucky is perceived to have committed some kind of crime against the chip-eating masses. Today, this has reached such an absurd level that we are expected to weep at the loss of Jade Goody and are bombarded by the antics of minor-league non-celebrities who have pretty much the same genetic coding as a cauliflower and a bit less intelligence than a dishwasher.

I was told last week by someone who worked on
The Only Way Is Essex
– it's a TV show, apparently – that, when asked to name the prime minister, one of the stars said: ‘What? The prime minister of Essex?' Upon being told that there is no such post, he thought for a while and then said: ‘Gordon Ramsay.' Meanwhile, on the other channel, Andrew Marr was talking about the origins of cities. And no one was watching.

Clever people, today, are scary. Stephen Fry is bright enough to know this. It's why he does knob gags. Stupid people only really like to see other stupid people on the television because it makes them feel good about themselves.

They reckon that if someone with the IQ of a cylinder head gasket can get on the box, there is hope that they can too.

Obviously, if this continues, Britain will be sunk. If our children feel they must be gormless to fit in, we shall soon be a big, dark backwater full of fat people celebrating their idiocy with another bag of oven-ready E numbers. And so, obviously, it's important to turn things round. But how?

Earlier this year, a man with an IQ of 48 was barred by the High Court from having sex. It said that he was too stupid to understand the consequences and health risks. Yes. But what it also seemed to be saying is that he might produce a child that's just as daft as him.

There are those, I know, who think that the judge was correct and that all stupid people should be neutered. But I reckon it's better to undo the teachings of
Blind Date
and humiliate the nation's morons into changing their ways. I believe this is possible. When I worked in Rotherham, I met many people who could barely speak. If you'd asked them to write down every single fact they knew on a piece of paper, they'd have needed only a stamp. And yet, despite having less knowledge about the world than a tree, they could add up a darts score faster than a Cray supercomputer. This means people have the capacity to be bright and useful but that no one has worked out a way to make them realize it. Until now …

Tomorrow morning, I have a meeting scheduled with the controller of BBC1 and I'm going to suggest we make a new TV game show in which contestants are picked at random
from the streets and told that, if they answer a selection of fairly simple questions correctly, they will be given sex with a supermodel, much money and a speedboat. However, if they get one of the questions wrong, the studio audience will be encouraged to howl with laughter at their stupidity. Maybe we could go further and put up signs outside their house saying: ‘The person who lives here thought the capital of France was Southend.'

I think it would be a long-running smash. And I very much look forward to the day when the children of Gwyneth Paltrow appear and sail off into the sunset in a shiny new speedboat with a bag of cash.

5 June 2011

I don't want to be unduly rude about Wayne Rooney, but it seems the irritating little brat, who plays annoyingly well for Manchester United and annoyingly badly for England, has had a hair transplant. And I'm sorry, but what on earth is the point of that?

He was a very ugly little troll with sticky-out ears and a bald head, and now he is a very ugly little troll with sticky-out ears. It's an improvement but only in the same way that Dawn French's recent diet is an improvement. The fact is, you'd still want her on your team in a sumo wrestling match.

I wonder about this hair transplant business. Did Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, think that if he emptied the sweep-up bag from the local Hair Port beauty salon on to his bonce, he could burst back on to the world stage looking like George Clooney? He doesn't. He just looks like an oily, perma-tanned buffoon with a hair transplant.

I have a hair-loss problem. It's all fallen out at the back. And I know that for several thousand pounds I could have it fixed. But what would be the point? I'd still look like a telegraph pole that had eaten a space hopper. Fixing my hair hole would be like trying to improve the overall appearance of the Elephant Man by cutting his fingernails.

There's no doubt that for some people cosmetic surgery is important. It can be used to boost self-confidence and it can certainly help if you've been trapped in the cockpit of a burning Hurricane. Plus, in the world of celebrity, where
long lenses can pick out a spot of cellulite from half a mile away, it is handy, too.

My eldest daughter came into the world looking like the lion from
Daktari
. The poor little mite had to spend the first three years of her life staring at nothing but the ends of both her noses. So she had cosmetic surgery, the squint was corrected, and nobody would have denied her that.

For sure, I wouldn't want a doctor to fill my lips with collagen because it's made from the skin of a bison, but there's no doubt that the full Steve Tyler does make a girl prettier. And I'm sure Botox is useful if you need to look impassive at all times; in a game of poker, perhaps, or when you are being tortured.

I've sometimes looked down at the vast stomach that hangs over my trousers and thought: ‘Well, I could get rid of that by skipping, not drinking anything more exciting than Ribena and eating like a mouse for a year.' But wouldn't it be easier to pop into a hospital and have all the fat hoovered out?

We are forever being told that we spend more in Britain on cosmetic surgery than we do on tea, and that this year more men will go into the vanity cabinet than will join the army.

So what? If you have a wart the size of a melon on your face, or a prolapsed bottom, or teeth that grow out of your forehead, then by all means have the problem sorted and feel not one jot of shame or guilt. These are sophisticated times and you should use whatever science has created to make yourself happy.

However, when it comes to hair, it's best to let nature take its course. I'm not talking about women now. Nobody wants to see what looks like half a pound of Old Holborn poking out of your bikini bottoms. And ‘99 Red Balloons' was a one-hit wonder for Nena because nobody wanted to see her back on
Top of the Pops
with what appeared to be two guinea
pigs peeping out from her armpits. No. I'm talking about men, and specifically the head.

Some chaps think when they go bald that it would be a good idea to grow a beard. Why? It just looks like your face is on upside down.

Others go down the Rooney route and have a transplant, but in my, albeit limited, experience this doesn't work either. Because you end up with hair that grows like conifers on a Scottish hillside. In rows.

Worst of all, though, are chaps who believe they can hold off the ageing process with dye. This is a mind-blowing waste of time. We have been able to determine this by examining Paul McCartney.

By all accounts he is a fairly wealthy man, so we can presume he uses the very best hair-colouring products that Boots can provide. And yet he still looks like a man walking around with a dead red kite on his head.

It's much the same story with Mick Jagger. Does he really think as he flounces down the street with that luxuriant auburn barnet quivering slightly in the breeze that passers-by will mistake him for a seventeen-year-old? Crowning that wind-battered old face with that hair is like crowning York Minster with a heap of solar panels.

And, anyway, what's the point? The only reason a man might choose to cover up his greying temples is to make himself more attractive to the opposite sex. But when you are nudging seventy, I really don't see how this works. Because surely your hair will be writing cheques your gentleman sausage can't cash.

I have a general rule in life, which so far has stood me in reasonably good stead. Never do business with a man who cares about his hair. This is even more important than avoiding a man who goes to the gym or who has a Rolex watch.

Any evidence of layering or product suggests that he is vain and therefore not to be trusted. Certainly do not buy a house from someone who spends more than £25 on a haircut because I can pretty much guarantee it will smell of sewage every time it rains and fall down after six months.

Look at it this way. When England recently drew 2–2 with Switzerland in a lacklustre performance at Wembley, there was one notable absentee from the stands. Wayne Rooney. He didn't even bother to turn up and cheer his mates on, or his country, because he was across town, having his hair transplant.

12 June 2011

Many thousands of people are not reading this today because they're driving around an unfamiliar village ten miles from where they live, desperately looking for a pair of wilting balloons tied to a gatepost. This will indicate that they've found the right house at which to drop their six-year-old for a party.

Afterwards, they'll have to drive at high speed to a railway station in the vague hope that their fifteen-year-old son has actually woken up on time and caught the train he said he'd catch.

Then, after discovering that he hasn't, and isn't answering his phone and is probably dead in a gutter somewhere, it'll be time to pick up a third child from her sleepover and head back to the unfamiliar little village only to find the balloons have vanished along with the house at which the six-year-old was dropped.

A report out last week said that by the time a child is eighteen, parents will have spent a full year of their lives ferrying it about. An endless round of school trips, social events and sporting fixtures means that you will have driven 23,500 miles. Which is about the same as driving round the fattest part of the world. And you know what? I don't believe it.

Taking my youngest child to and from school clocks up seventy-two miles a day. That's 13,824 miles a year. So that's more than 110,000 miles by the time she is thirteen. And that's before we get to the weekend, when my wife and I have to employ a team of women with long sticks in what we call the map room.

It's their job to vector us in on the postcodes of parties, and to work out which of us is nearer to whichever child has finished one thing and needs taking to something else. We have learnt much from watching the
Battle of Britain
. Some days, we need the Big Wing.

Of course, occasionally we are too hungover to provide this vital role, in which case the kids will be expected to use public transport. They're not very good at this. The eldest has developed an incredibly annoying tactic of volunteering to come home on the train but then ringing from far away to say her credit card is maxed out and that she can't. The boy, meanwhile, reckons that there's a bus stationed in our local town waiting for the rare moments when he has to use it. And he can't understand why sometimes it's not there. The youngest isn't exactly sure what a bus is.

And I don't want to sound like an old person, but it was never like this when I was a kid, because back then I didn't choose friends on the basis that I liked them; I chose them on the basis that they lived within cycling distance.

I had a bicycle at home, which I would ride for fun whenever there was nothing on television, which was – let's think now – almost constantly.

And I had a bicycle at school, which I would use for getting to and from the local girls' school. Which was seventeen miles away. My bicycle was my passport to adulthood. My bike was freedom.

Not any more, of course. A bicycle now is seen as a portal to the Pearly Gates. There's a sense that unless you are dressed up in a spinnaker of luminescence and your head is shrouded in what appear to be five cryogenic bananas, you will definitely be killed within seconds of climbing on board. This takes the fun out of riding.

But it's nonsense. Yes, a friend of mine peeled his face off
the other day after falling off, but cycling-related deaths are down by a third since the mid-1990s, and it's probably fair to say there's never been a safer time to go for a ride.

Sadly, though, there's a problem. You see, cycling is seen now not as something that might be exhilarating or even useful but as a frontline propaganda weapon in the war on capitalism, banking, freedom, McDonald's, injustice, Swiss drug companies, rape and progress. Every morning London is chock-full of little individually wrapped Twiglets, their wizened faces contorted with hatred for all that they see. Fat people. Cars. Chain stores. It's all fascism. Fascism, d'you hear?

From what they see as the moral high ground, they sneer at pedestrians, howl at buses, bang on cars, scream at taxi drivers and charge through every convention that defines society with their walnutty bottoms in the air and their stupid legs going nineteen to the dozen.

This sort of thing frightens a child in much the same way that little Norwegian children were frightened when jackbooted Nazis marched through their towns and villages, shouting and generally being scary. Little Olaf, cowering in the cellar, never once thought, ‘Ooh, I'd like to be like them when I grow up.'

To address this, we must wage a war on the militants. First, we must make it an offence, punishable by many years in jail, to ride a bicycle in anything other than what I like to call home clothes. Cycling shops selling gel for your bottom crack and outfits with padded gussets will be raided by the police and the owners prosecuted.

This way, cyclists will be stripped of their uniforms and made to look like human beings. They will also be forced to abandon their crash helmets. Nobody in their right mind believes that a bit of yellow polystyrene could possibly keep
a head intact should it be run over by the rear wheels of an articulated lorry. So get rid of them.

With the Nazi clobber gone, we shall start to insist that cyclists develop some manners. They should take a leaf out of the horse rider's book, thanking other road users for slowing down rather than shaking their fists because they didn't slow down enough. We need them to recognize that Bob the builder and Roary the racing car have just as much of a right to be out and about as they do.

This way, children will grow up to think that cycling is fun. And as a result of that, parents will be freed at weekends to do what they want, safe in the knowledge that their thin, healthy children are getting the social lives they need without being a bloody nuisance in the process.

19 June 2011