Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (26 page)

Everybody likes Sir Michael Parkinson. Everyone trusts him, too – me most of all. He often pops up in ad breaks to bring news of a life insurance plan that will pay for my funeral with enough left over to provide cash gifts for my family, and even when he's halfway through I'm reaching for the ‘Yes, I'll have that' button.

I reckon that at a push he could get me to sign up for a coach tour of North Wales.

But last week we began to see evidence that age had started to eat away at his marbles. Because he wondered out loud and in print why there were no traditional interview shows on television any more, and why, with Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton, it all had to be played for laughs.

That is easy to answer. In the olden days newspapers reported news. They were filled with earnest stories from around the world and weren't interested in the opinions or photographs of those who earned their crust by being in
Are You Being Served?

So, to keep themselves in the public eye, the people from
Are You Being Served?
had to appear on a chat show. They would beg to appear on
Parkinson
and they would work hard beforehand, thinking up amusing anecdotes and practising their lines. It was important to do this because if people liked them, they would get bigger parts and one day perhaps get a job on
Robin's Nest
. If they were really popular, who knows? They might become David Niven.

If you have been listening to the endless parade of tabloid
newspaper people who have appeared at the Leveson inquiry, you would imagine that this sort of thing still goes on today. And you'd be right. But instead of appearing on chat shows, people who are orange and have no discernible talent employ public relations people to plant pictures in the papers and the glossy magazines of them cuddling African children and giving money to tramps.

That is why, the argument goes, they can hardly complain when they are subsequently photographed fondling an
X Factor
hopeful or vomiting on a homeless person. If you use the press to climb over the parapet and into the public consciousness, then you belong to the press. And it can do what it likes with you.

However, people who are not orange and who rely on their talent to get work, rather than a PR man, are caught in the same net. There is a photographer on every beach, waiting to spot evidence of a bingo wing or orange-peel thighs.

The star takes someone out to dinner and they are snapped. They go home with them afterwards and it's front-page news. They get into a cab and we are told what sort of underwear they've chosen.

I don't know Daniel Craig. Never met him. And yet I know, just from skimming the
Daily Mail
, whom he is married to, where the marriage took place, how many times he had been married before and what he's doing at the moment. It's the same with Brad Pitt. If he'd been around in the Sixties, we'd know what films he'd been in and to whom he was married. But that's it. Today, we know he hasn't seen his granny for years and even what brand of cigarette he smokes. I reckon I know more about Brad – whom I have never met either – than I do about my own children.

So, if I asked him to appear in
Top Gear
's ‘Reasonably Priced Car', he'd think, ‘What's the point? I could sit here, in
my lovely Los Angeles home, smoking Marlboros and drinking a fruity burgundy with my lovely girlfriend, Angelina. Or I could get on a plane, fly to England, drive a drab little car around an airfield and then have a yellow-toothed buffoon ask me a lot of damn fool questions that are pointless. Because everyone knows the answers already. Because they read OK!'

The only way you can get an even vaguely interesting guest on a chat show these days is if they are on a publicity tour, promoting their new book or film or fitness DVD. They are dragged into the studio in chains, poked into the chair by a film company exec with a cattle prod and nailed in place to make sure they don't wander off or fall asleep.

They don't know who the host is, what the show's about or what country they're in. All they know – because off camera there's a woman with three BlackBerrys and an agitated face tapping her watch – is that they've got only five minutes before they have to catch a flight to Germany to go through the whole rigmarole again. And then on Tuesday it's Uruguay.

Of course, the host could sit back and ask about their relationship with their father – a Parky trick – but there isn't the time. And on the part of the interviewee there isn't the inclination either. Plus, the modern audience isn't interested in a man's soul. Just his manhood and where it has been.

That's why I have such huge respect for Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross. I've tried to do what they do and it's bloody difficult. Seriously. You try keeping the viewers happy and entertained while talking to someone who doesn't want to be there, has nothing to say, feels worn out and is deeply aware that tomorrow the
Daily Express
is going to run pictures of him snogging a horse.

And there's no point being rude or refusing to talk about
their ‘important' new project. If you do that, in future the film company will simply book all their big stars on to a rival show. You'll end up with Mr Motivator, Fred West's cleaning lady and Christine Hamilton. If you want the big names, you have to massage their egos, you have to show clips from their new DVD and you have to provide the laughs. Because if you don't, you've had it.

That is what Michael Parkinson has to understand. The talk show is dead. It was killed by OK! and the army of paparazzi who trawl the streets bringing us news of Sienna Miller's underwear.

4 March 2012

Tell someone you suffer from insomnia, and invariably those who do not will reply by saying they never have any trouble getting off to sleep – ‘Head hits the pillow and I'm out like a light.'

This is spectacularly cruel because, as Ben Elton once observed, when someone in a wheelchair says they can't walk, you don't reply by saying: ‘Crikey. I can. I can also hop and skip and jump.

‘And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to dance with that pretty girl over there. And maybe later we shall have sex, which I bet you can't do either.'

What we
do
do when we meet someone in a wheelchair is steel ourselves to make absolutely certain that we treat them exactly the same as anyone else. We outstretch an arm in greeting, even though there's a distinct possibility no such gesture will be reciprocated. We ask them how they are, even though it's plain to see they are not well at all, and can't reply anyway because they have tubes coming out of their nose.

We spend ages yabbering away to desperately ill children in vegetative states, assured by their parents that it's all going in, even though there is not one iota of evidence to suggest that's the case. We may not give up our seat to a pregnant woman any more, but we will move heaven and earth to help disabled people go about their business.

We design buses that kneel down. We install ramps outside public buildings. Taxis have bright yellow grab handles so they can be located more easily by those who are hard of
seeing. We even host a separate Olympic Games for disabled people. And you know what? A lot of us think it'll be better and more uplifting and more brilliant than the real thing.

But despite all this, despite our big hearts, there are still some disabilities that don't rock our compassion genes at all. Insomnia is just one. Gout is another. So is erectile dysfunction. And people with haemorrhoids? When we watch them walking around like cowboys and wincing when they sit down, we actually find it funny. Well, I do.

We don't laugh when someone has a hideous growth on their face. Not when they're looking, anyway. But when friends say they have piles, I'm gone. Lost in a sea of mirth, and inviting them to play a game of musical chairs.

Then there's deafness. We don't find this funny at all. There'd be no point because the poor soul with the wonky ears wouldn't be able to hear our taunts. Instead – and don't argue with this – we find it annoying.

The voice-activated devices in cars make my point especially well. You ask the electronic woman to set the satellite navigation system for home and she tunes the radio to a hip-hop station. Or says ‘Pardon' over and over again. Soon you are seething.

And it's the same story with people. You say something to someone who's hard of hearing and it's deeply exasperating to have to say it again. ‘Why? You have ears. I can see them. And maybe if you bothered to remove some of the hair in there, they'd work a bit better, you old bat.'

So we say what we've said again, as if we are Brian Blessed addressing people at the back of the Albert Hall.

Which is the same as picking up someone's wheelchair, with them in it, and hurling it down a flight of stairs because we have been momentarily inconvenienced.

I bring all this up because I've been aware for some time
that my hearing is not quite as good as it was. And how much sympathy do I get from the family? Absolutely none at all. My wife huffs a lot, claiming that I can't hear orders to feed the dogs or do the recycling but can hear someone saying, ‘Would you like a glass of wine?' from three miles away. At least that's what I think she's saying. I can't be sure because, as I said, I'm a bit mutton.

Then you have the kids, who speak at 5,000mph, say the television is too loud and turn it down to a point where, to me, every show is basically
The Artist
. Richard Hammond is worse. When I don't hear what he's said – and it's hard sometimes because his mouth is very far below my ears – he just calls me a ‘deaf old t***' and moves on to the next story I can't hear either.

And then last month I got a hole in my eardrum, which made everything worse. Well, not everything. Because at least I now can't hear what Vince Cable is on about. But it also means I just have to guess what people sitting to my right are saying. This is slightly awkward when you are at a dinner party, but very tricky indeed when you are hosting the chat-show segment of a TV programme and your guest is Slash, the guitarist formerly of Guns N' Roses.

Despite making loud music, he is very softly spoken, which in my world means he makes about as much noise as a mouse in lambswool slippers tiptoeing across a shag-pile rug. I'd ask him a question and I could see his lips moving but I had literally no idea what he was saying. Occasionally I'd pull a serious face, hoping he wasn't talking about the hilarious occasion when he set Axl Rose's trousers on fire. And sometimes I'd politely titter, praying to God he wasn't chatting away about his mother's funeral. Since he didn't try to punch me, I think I got away with it, but I won't know for sure until I see the interview air this evening.

The worst part of being deaf, though, is you lose your ability to find things funny. You can just about hear the first part of a story – the setup – but, for comic effect, the amusing ending is usually delivered quickly and quietly, which means you don't hear it at all. ‘A Pakistani, a Liverpudlian and a Scot walked into a bar. And the Scot said …' That's as far as you ever get.

And let me tell you something. Losing your legs or your sight or your ability to sleep is terrible. But losing your ability to laugh? That's the worst thing of all.

11 March 2012

I predict that thirty years from now there will be just one wind turbine in Britain. It'll have been kept as a reminder of the time when mankind temporarily took leave of its senses and decided wind, waves and lashings of tofu could somehow generate enough electricity for the whole planet.

Schoolchildren will be taken to see it by newly enlightened teachers – in the way that today's children are invited to smirk at the Sinclair C5 – and then afterwards they will be shown a clip from last weekend's episode of the usually brilliant
Countryfile
programme to demonstrate just how silly the human race had become.

The normally trustworthy John Craven said with not a hint of doubt that climate change was fuelled by our love of cars, power, milk and lamb chops. Yup. He told us that cows and sheep produce methane, which is twenty-five times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and must be fitted with a breathalyser as a result. Well, James May produces a lot of methane. I know because he's sitting next to me right now. Should we fit him with a breathalyser?

Craven also told us not to buy British tomatoes, which are somehow bad for the environment, and to eat instead South American bananas, which somehow are okay. It's all very confusing.

At the moment, you may be ambivalent about wind power. There are probably no plans to erect turbines near your house so you don't care, as long as your kettle works. You may have even heard from a Liberal Democrat energy
minister who announced last week that living next to a bird-mincing, noisy monolith was good for you. Though what he meant to say was, ‘I like seeing my name in the papers.' Fine, here it is. He's called Ed Idiot. I may have got the spelling a bit wrong but it's something like that.

The fact is that despite what Mr Idiot says, you will soon care very much about wind farms because the government is about to introduce a scheme in which big companies will be charged for emitting carbon dioxide. The idea is to encourage power companies to produce more energy from renewable sources. Of course, the cost of paying to emit all that CO
₂
will be passed on to you. The result: your fuel bill is about to sky-rocket. Only last week the executive director of Which? took the unusual step of telling the government it was ‘writing a blank cheque' with householders' money. How much money? Oh, about £1.4 billion by 2015–16.

And why? Simply to keep a few lunatics happy. And they really are lunatics. Over in California green enthusiasts are planning to carpet the Mojave desert with solar farms that turn heat into power to feed Wilbur and Myrtle's La-Z-Boy swivel recliner.

Sound good? Well, yes, but now some Native American lunatics have popped up to say, ‘How can we make some cash out of this?' Sorry. I don't know why I said that. I'm muddling them up, perhaps, with Australia's Aboriginals, who always announce after every great mineral find that the land has deep religious, spiritual and ecological significance.

Anyway, Hiawatha reckons the solar farms will not only destroy the natural habitat of the desert tortoise and the horny toad but also irritate the gods. He says he wants to use the sun for power but not if it disturbs ‘sacred sites, pristine desert, the turtles or the toad'. He then adds that he was placed on earth to be a guardian of ‘harmonious equilibrium',
and because of that, one green energy company has been forced to spend $22 million (£14 million) – of Wilbur and Myrtle's money – to ensure harmonious equilibrium prevails and the toad can continue to be horny in peace. Of course, this is normal. It is one of the things I enjoy most about members of the loony left. The reason they never get anything done is that they spend most of their lives arguing among themselves. It is hysterically funny and there was a prime example on
Newsnight
recently.

An angry man from the People's Front of Judea argued that climate change was the biggest problem in the world ever, and that we had to embrace nuclear energy if we wished to live beyond next Thursday. Then up popped an even more angry woman from the Judean People's Front, who said that to combat climate change we had to plunge into nature's bountiful larder.

She said at one point that we couldn't use nuclear power because it required too many state subsidies. Forgetting, perhaps, that wind power needs even more. And that uranium is just as ‘natural' as wind.

What am I saying? She wasn't forgetting it at all. She wants us to use wind power even if it doesn't work. And perhaps that's what people like her are really after. A world with no electricity. ‘What has electricity ever done for us? Apart from light, heat, warmth, better toothbrushes, iron lungs and Mildred's vibrator?'

As far as the Judean People's Front is concerned, a world without electricity will drastically reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. And it may have a point, because in the sixteenth century, before Michael Faraday ruined everything, Henry VIII had a broadly similar lifestyle to the people who mucked out his horses.

The problem with wind power is demonstrated well in
Denmark, which embraced the technology years ago. And as a result not a single conventional power station has been shut down. They're needed for the days when the wind doesn't blow, or blows too strongly. Worse, ramping them up and down all the time uses more energy than keeping them working constantly. So the Danes have paid a fortune to build wind farms that don't work, and, in return, their normal power stations are producing even more CO
₂
than they did in the past.

And that's all I've got to say on the subject because I've just remembered I'm doing some shows in Copenhagen later this month and I don't want to be showered in Danish phlegm. It'd be disgusting because, of course, they don't have enough power to charge their electric toothbrushes.

18 March 2012