Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (29 page)

Recently a number of people in suits were summoned to appear in front of a panel of other people in suits in a fantastically expensive and time-consuming attempt to find out exactly who listened to Sienna Miller making her hair appointments and precisely what sort of horse David Cameron prefers.

Interestingly, some of the people in suits said one thing while others said quite the opposite. Which means that a panel of politicians has had to try to work out who has been telling porkies. Fine. But then what?

You may imagine that if you tell a bare-faced lie to members of Her Majesty's elected government, your liver will be removed and your head placed on a spike in the Brent Cross shopping centre. There's even been talk of offenders being locked away for the rest of measurable time in a deafening room under Big Ben. But it doesn't quite work that way.

To find out how you are punished, we need to go back to 1957 – the last time a non-politician faced being reprimanded for contempt of parliament. Inevitably it was a journalist, the fearsome John Junor, who had wondered in his newspaper's editorial why extra petrol was being allocated to politicians during rationing. (To feed the generators in their duck houses, probably.)

And what was his punishment for this heinous crime? Was he hanged? Incarcerated? Deported? Or is that what the famed mace is for? Did they use it to stove in his skull?

No, actually. In fact, he was summoned to the bar of the
House of Commons, which is quite literally a white line across the floor, where he was made to say sorry. I'm not kidding. They took one of the most powerful newspaper people of the time and made him stand on the naughty step. And that makes me wonder. Would the use of primary school punishments work today?

At present there is no way of punishing a banker who has been greedy. We know that what he's done is wrong. And, in the wee small hours, he knows what he's done is wrong. But how can he be made to pay for his sin? At best he can be drummed out of the lodge, made to resign from the golf club and stripped of his knighthood. But that's about it.

We see the same problem in broadcasting. If I make a mistake, can Ofcom take away my children? Fine me? Put me in prison? No. Time and again I read in the
Daily Mail
that I've had my ‘knuckles rapped' for ‘sparking' some kind of fury. But the truth is, nothing of the sort ever happens. I don't even get a call from the headmaster.

And, who knows, maybe I might be rather more careful if I really did face having my knuckles rapped with a blackboard rubber. Maybe a banker would be a bit less willing to lend money to someone who couldn't pay him back if he thought that he might be forced to stand in Threadneedle Street wearing a dunce's hat.

And then we must move to Greece, where last weekend many people voted for a party that wants to break out the retsina and party like it's 1999. You may think that, in a country that claims to have invented democracy, that's their right.

But since their blinkered stupidity means the rest of the world has been thrown into a state of economic panic, there's no doubt in my mind that they should all be made to stand outside for a while.

I definitely think this kind of school-room justice would work in football. At the moment the yellow card is the premium economy punishment.

A barely noticeable uplift from a straight free kick but a long way from the club-class red. A yellow card doesn't mean anything. But what if the offender were made to go and stand in a corner while sucking his thumb for ten minutes? There would be far fewer late tackles, I bet.

Then we have weather forecasters. They tell us it will be a lovely day tomorrow and then bounce back the following evening showing not a hint of guilt that the picnic you organized on their recommendation was washed into the River Test by hailstones the size of small Toyotas. Would it not be a good idea, if they've made a mistake, to force them to deliver the next evening's bulletin in their school uniform? Certainly I'd like to see ITV's Becky Mantin do this.

It's in public life, though, that the humiliation would work best. All last week Ed Miliband was being foolish, acting up in front of his friends by saying his party had nothing to do with the country's woes and that the current leaders are interested only in millionaires. It was constant party political sound-bite diarrhoea, and there's only one punishment that would work. He needs to be put on silence. And Ed Balls, the fat-faced henchman who sits next to him in the debating society? Make him hold his hand out, palm upwards, and get the serjeant at arms to hit it with a ruler.

And what of the man – he exists somewhere – who chaired a meeting about Britain's naval requirements for the next fifty years and said: ‘Yes. I agree. Even though we have no planes to put on the deck, we shall spend £10 billion of someone else's money building two new aircraft carriers'?

Why is he not summoned to the office of Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, and made to write out,
1,000 times: ‘I must not order very expensive warships that can't possibly work.'

Other options under my new regime are detention on a Saturday afternoon – I think Theresa May could do with a couple of hours for the Heathrow immigration debacle – and the one thing that used to bring me up short in my school days: the threat of my parents finding out that I'd been smoking while eating in the street, with village boys, in home clothes.

This is what we do with George Osborne. We simply tell him that if he doesn't stop making silly mistakes in class, we shall write to his mum.

13 May 2012

All awards ceremonies are the same. You sit on an uncomfortable chair for seven hours, watching an endless succession of orange people you don't recognize getting gongs for their contribution to God knows what, and then, when it's your turn, you either have to look pleased that someone else has beaten you, or you have to bound on stage and, through gritted teeth, say that you couldn't have won by yourself. When, in your heart of hearts, you know you could. And indeed have.

The hugely prestigious Rose d'Or festival in Switzerland is different, though. Very different. As different as the petal of a cornflower is from the crankshaft of an American monster truck.

I was there because
Top Gear
had been picked for a gong. And the first indication that the evening might be a bit unusual came when I opened the obligatory goody bag. At this year's Oscars the nominees were given tickets to go on safari in Botswana, a watch, beauty products and a testicular check-up. In Switzerland I was given a tube of toothpaste.

I was then ferried in a smallish Vauxhall to the red carpet, which was a teeming mass of guests, none of whom seemed to have understood the dress code. Either that or in Switzerland ‘black tie' means ‘anything you fancy, up to and including army boots and a jockstrap'.

Feeling a trifle overdressed, I was ushered by an enthusiastic PR type with a clipboard to a waiting camera crew. The interviewer, a deliciously pretty Swiss girl, plainly had not the
first clue who I was. But I'd been presented to her so she had to say something. And what she said was: ‘Eeeeerm?'

Since there was no suitable answer to that, I was guided by my elbow to the make-up room, where an enormous German woman pointed to a small pimple on my nose and said to everyone within 500 yards: ‘Wow. That is a big spot.' She set to work with a trowel, and fifteen minutes later I was on my way to the green room.

Here I expected to be surrounded by the greats from international television. Simon Cowell. Jay Leno. Piers Morgan. And that madwoman from
Homeland
. But the only two people I recognized were Larry Hagman and Kim Wilde. As we chatted, I was fitted with an earpiece and a microphone and then I was pushed on stage.

It wasn't what I was expecting. Instead of a lectern from where I could deliver my acceptance speech, there was a sofa, adjacent to a massively breasted woman behind a desk. I took the applause from the very large audience, checked out the position of the cameras and sat down.

Now I don't know why, and with hindsight I see it was extremely arrogant, but I assumed the big-breasted woman would speak to me in English. She did not. To my dismay, she addressed me in one of the many languages I don't speak: German.

Happily, a rough translation of what she was saying started filtering through my earpiece. Unhappily, I couldn't make out any of the actual words. So in my right ear I had the Swiss woman speaking in German, and in the left one I had an unseen translator speaking in inaudible tinny English. Small wonder the United Nations is so useless at getting anything done.

Just as I thought things could not get any more confusing, she produced a pair of blacked-out spectacles, told me to put them on and then played Prince singing ‘Little Red Corvette'.
You may remember that scene in the movie
Lost in Translation
when Bill Murray appears on a Japanese chat show and has no clue what's going on? Well, that's how I felt.

Mercifully, I was soon allowed to remove my glasses, and there in front of me was an Australian girl from the second
Transformers
film carrying my award. There was applause and then a man with a clipboard took me backstage, past Larry Hagman and back to my seat.

It wasn't over. No sooner had I sat down than that man with a clipboard was back. ‘Schnell, schnell!' he said. ‘You must go back on stage.' Once there, I was given a massive bunch of flowers and told to stand at the back for reasons that were unclear.

Then they became clear. The big-breasted woman announced the arrival of a newcomer. The audience went wild. And out tottered an elderly gentleman, who began to make a speech. Well, when I say a speech, it wasn't really. A speech has peaks and troughs. It has pauses and moments of light relief. This had none of those things. It was as if he'd been invited on stage to read out every single entry on Wikipedia. Or to count from one to one billion.

After twenty minutes of standing under the hot lights, with my face planted in a hay-fever factory, and wishing I'd opted for the jockstrap rather than my heavy suit, I started to feel quite dizzy. But still the man was droning on. And I know enough about how autocues work to know he wasn't even a third of the way through.

I tried to focus on something important. At first I wondered why the autocue was being projected in widescreen. Then I worked it out. In German, when ‘Danube steamship company captain' is one word, you can't have a 4:3 screen or nothing will fit. Having solved this riddle, I started to see if it was possible to will yourself to death.

Luckily, before I succeeded, a woman I did not recognize leapt up from the front row of the audience, thanked the man and took an award from the
Transformers
girl, and that was that.

Afterwards, Larry Hagman was confused. He'd flown all the way from Los Angeles and hadn't won anything. I had, though, so I decided to hit the after-show party. Here a slim and well-dressed Dutchman invited me to spend the night with him ‘disco dancing'. I made my excuses and left.

Back in my room I watched Swiss television. It's not like ours in any way. Which is probably why they gave a gong to
Top Gear
.

20 May 2012

You would have thought that after fifty-two years of being absolutely useless at absolutely everything – except perhaps the word game Boggle – I'd have learnt how to be a good loser. And yet I'm deeply ashamed to admit that I haven't.

Vince Lombardi, the famous American football coach, once said, ‘Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.' And that's the trouble. He's right. And I don't want to be a loser. I can't bear it. I can fix something that looks nothing like a smile on my face and I can extend my hand in a show of gracious defeat but, inside, it feels as if I'm on fire.

I lost a close game of table tennis recently to the very tall man in glasses who appears on the television show
Pointless
, and I was gripped in the aftermath by an almost uncontrollable need to stab him in the liver and jump up and down on his bleeding body shouting ‘bastard'.

It was much the same story when I watched England lose to South Africa at the Stade de France in Paris five years ago. The etiquette of rugby provides no place for unsportsmanlike behaviour, so when the game ended I dutifully turned to the enormous Boer behind me and said, ‘Congratulations.' But, like the ‘p' in ‘ptarmigan', there was a silent bit. And it was this: ‘But I hope when you get home they put a burning tyre around your neck, and the necks of the entire team who have beaten us, you big, thick-necked, southern-hemisphere ape.'

Conversely, when Jonny Wilkinson kicked that last-minute drop goal to clinch the 2003 Rugby World Cup for England,
I spent an hour ringing random numbers in the Sydney phone book and laughing fanatically. This means I'm not a good winner, either. I fear this may be a British disease.

Let us examine the case of Colin Welland, the former
Z Cars
actor. When he won an Oscar for his screenplay for the film
Chariots of Fire
, he held it aloft and told the assembled moguls that ‘the British are coming'. Which was inappropriate and, as it turned out, entirely wrong.

Then, later, when he failed to win a Bafta for the same film, he was caught on camera slumping back into his seat and looking as though someone had just launched a surprise sword attack on his scrotum.

When a sporting event finishes, I want close-ups of the losers. I want to enjoy their pain. Sir Ferguson is, we're told, similar to this. Even though he rarely fields the best team in the world, he is a consistent winner, partly because of his capacity for hard work and partly because of his unparalleled experience. Mostly, though, the reason his team win a lot is because the players know that if they lose they will be attacked in the dressing room afterwards. Losing is what defines us. When we think back through our military history, what names leap out of the fog? The American war of independence. The charge of the Light Brigade. Arnhem. In Britain we remember and worship John McEnroe for his tantrums and Paul Gascoigne for his tears. Gore Vidal could have been talking about us when he said, ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.'

The
Daily Mail
's website is a massive hit mainly because that is its mantra. In England success and those it envelops are to be ridiculed. Winning is a bad thing.

Was I alone in thoroughly enjoying the last day of the Premier League season? Because we had almost an hour of unbridled joy watching the anguish on the faces of Manchester
City fans as they thought the title had gone to Manchester United. And then some icing on the cake when the boys in red realized at the last moment it hadn't.

I'm so unpleasant, in fact, that when a sporting event finishes, I never want to see the winners running around looking happy. I want close-ups of the losers. I want to enjoy their pain. And instead of the winning team being paraded around on an open-top bus, it should be the losers. That would make for much better television.

Unless they are German. The best losers … in the world.

It would be easy, and stupid, to suggest that they've had enough practice in recent times but, truth be told, in very recent times they haven't really had any practice at all. Motor racing. Industry. Football. They are alvays ze vinners. They even have the only eurozone economy that's growing.

Last weekend, though, it all went wrong for them. Bayern Munich lost the European footballing crown in a penalty shootout to Chelsea. Which meant that the big German team's fans had to trudge home alongside a joyous army of boys and girls in blue.

I tried – really, I tried – as the game finished, to organize my face into the right shape. It needed to be proud and happy. But not smug or boastful. The effort was wasted, though, because every single German I met was a model of decency und kindness.

Many pointed out the irony of an English team beating a German side at penalties. And how it was quite correct that we should get lucky once in a while. Others shook my hand. Most were quick to say, ‘Well done.' And I could see absolutely no evidence that inside they were dying or on fire. There were no balled fists. They were sad to have lost. But happy for us that we'd won.

This is extremely admirable. It's a state of mind I wish
I could achieve in those white-hot moments of despair when the ball goes out, or I pick up a ‘Q' at the last moment, or I land on Mayfair, or I get shot in the head by a Nazi zombie.

My inner McEnroe wants to be a Roger Federer, something the Germans seem to have achieved. I don't crave their shorts or their jackets or their moustaches. But I do crave their sportsmanship. I crave their decency. I crave their niceness. I want to be a German.

Because then I could take on the columnist Jane Moore at Boggle. This has not been possible in the past because she is reputedly very good at it. And I fear she would win. And then we'd never be able to speak again. Because she'd be dead.

27 May 2012