Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (4 page)

With the next series of
Top Gear
just weeks away, we are in a frantic race against time to finish off all the films. I won't say what they're about here, though, because obviously you already know. This is because every single thing we do is photographed and videoed by passers-by. And then either posted on the internet or sold to the newspapers. Now that everyone has a camera in their pocket all the time, everyone is a paparazzo, and that has changed my life completely. I'm not complaining because, obviously, life will be a lot more worrying when the attention stops. But, that said, could I please make a small request.

When you stop me in the street to ask for a photograph, have some clue about how your phone camera works. That way, when you ask a witless passer-by to take a photograph of us, he won't spend twenty minutes holding it the wrong way round and taking endless shots of his own nose.

There's another annoyance, too. Yesterday I was snapped walking up Holland Park Avenue, going into Tesco, buying eggs, driving up the M40 and relieving myself in Oxford services. I'm not joking. I turned round while I was having a pee to find a lorry driver filming me. Doubtless, this riveting scene is already on YouTube. Unless, of course, the chap wants it for some kind of bizarre private collection.

I feel fairly sure that if I were to catch fire, no one would try to beat out the flames or find an extinguisher. They'd simply record the event on their phones.

You think I'm being silly? Well, you may recall that in the
run-up to the election, the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage decided to tow a banner behind a plane, urging people to, I don't know, stamp on a bratwurst. Unfortunately, the banner got entangled in the plane's tail fin and it crashed.

I'm certain you recall the photographs of him in the wreckage, with blood pouring down his face, and of the pilot, seriously injured in the seat next to him.

Now here's the strange thing. Someone took those photographs. Someone raced to the scene, saw two injured men hanging upside down and thought: ‘I know. I'll get my camera out and take a picture of this.'

Of course, it's possible that the person responsible was a professional photographer, in which case the boundaries are blurred. It is a professional photographer's job to record events, not shape them. But I think this mainly applies during periods of civil unrest and war.

However, it is also possible the person responsible was a bank manager or an accountant. And I don't know about you but I think if I were presented with a badly injured man in the wreckage of a plane – no matter how much I disagreed with his opinions – I'd think about neck braces and mouth-to-mouth and fuel leaks rather than exposures and angles and what some pictures might be worth.

We saw a similar problem recently with the sun-dried baby on the beach. Someone decided that the best way of helping the poor infant, who suffered 40 per cent burns, was to take some pictures of him.

And then you have those people – and for some reason they're almost always German – who think it's a good idea to climb over the security fences at zoos.

Maybe they think the leopard or the tiger looks cute but, of course, as soon as they're actually in there, they quickly realize that it wasn't such a good idea after all. Usually as the
creature is eating their leg. What would you do if you saw someone being eaten in a zoo? Throw things at the animal? Try to find a rope so what's left of the person can climb out?

Yes. I'd do something like that, too. But most people, if the internet is anything to go by, whip out their cameras and make a grisly little film.

It's almost certain these days that if you got into trouble at sea, you would not be rescued.

The police, as we know, are not allowed to help. David Hasselhoff is gone. And onlookers would simply take out their phones. You'll get your fifteen minutes of fame, all right. But it will be the last fifteen minutes you ever have.

What the camera does, of course, is detach the onlooker from the events unfurling in front of them. There's a sense as you operate it that you are watching the scene unravel on television and that, as a result, you are unable to help. In short, cameras dehumanize humanity.

But there is an upside. Because in recent years I've noticed that ‘news' is not what's happened. It's what's happened on camera.

If a herd of tigers runs amok in a remote Indian village, it's not news. If a gang of wide-eyed rebels slaughters the inhabitants of a faraway African village, it's not news. But if it's a bit windy in America, it is news. Because in America everything that happens is recorded.

I find myself wondering if last week's Israeli raid on a Turkish ship in a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza would have had the coverage it did if the battle hadn't been captured on film. And likewise the racing driver who broke a leg after crashing in the Indy 500. It only became a big deal because we could watch the accident from several angles in slow motion.

In recent months this phenomenon has even spread to the natural world. I mean it. When an animal does something
normal, it's not news. But when it is ‘caught on camera' doing something normal, then it's in the
Daily Mail
. These days, if you snap an owl catching a mouse, you are Robert Capa.

In the end, this can only be good for all of us. Figures out recently show that more people in India have access to a mobile phone than a lavatory. Soon, it will be the same story in China and Africa. And then, when all the world's being filmed, all of the time, we can go back to a time when news was something interesting rather than something we can simply see.

That way, I wouldn't have to spend half my morning looking at pictures of Twiggy going shopping. And an eagle eating a fish.

6 June 2010

As we know, the country is in a terrible mess, and as a result, the head of every government department has been told to go away and implement cuts.

This all sounds very sensible but because I'm a television presenter, I know it won't work.

Here's why. Every Thursday night, the producers of
Top Gear
stitch together the various elements of the show to create a finished product that is around seventy minutes long. Because this is eleven more than the time slot, we have to make cuts.

Or as Clive James used to say when he was making TV shows, we have to throw away our babies.

It's extremely annoying. You've edited a segment to be as good as possible, and now you have to start with the scissors, losing the odd fact here and the odd joke there. It takes an age, it hurts and the same thing always happens when you've finished. The programme is better, tighter and sharper. But it's still six minutes too long.

So it's back to the drawing board. And this time, you must lose links and explanations. You are no longer performing liposuction on fat. You're cutting away at bone and muscle. Important stuff. You are bringing it in on budget but the finished product won't stand up. Think of it, if you like, as a hospital with no electricity. It's still a hospital but it's not much use if the iron lungs don't work.

To prevent this happening on
Top Gear
, we try not to trim
muscle and bone. When we're desperate to cut time, we lose limbs.

You may have seen the Vietnam special we produced a couple of years ago. What you didn't see in that show, however, was a sequence involving the Stig's Vietnamese cousin. This had been tough to make. We'd located a local motorcycle stunt rider, we'd shipped a bike over from Japan, we'd done two recces and written several treatments, and twenty-five people had spent a whole day filming the scene under a sticky sky and watchful gaze of government officials who kept wanting to see the rushes.

The reason you didn't see it is because so many unforeseen things had happened on the trip, the finished programme was miles too long. And when we'd slashed and burned the fat, there was still twelve minutes to go. So instead of slashing and burning at the muscle and bone, we threw away a whole sequence. Better, we thought, to lose an arm than ruin every organ in the body.

And that brings me back to Britain's economy. Yes, the NHS can sack a few managers and the Department for Transport can shelve plans to widen the B3018. Little things such as this will save millions but there will still be millions to go, which is why David Cameron and Cleggy, the tea boy, must think long and hard about losing the Vietnamese Stig. They must think about chopping a whole department. Obviously, I would suggest the Department of Energy and Climate Change because it's silly, when times are tight, to have a whole ministry attempting to manage something over which humankind has no control. It'd be like having a Department of Jupiter.

But the climate change department is relatively small, and cutting that when you are a trillion in debt would be like trying to solve a £50,000 overdraft by not having your hair cut
any more. No, Cameron and the shoeshine boy need to lose something big and I believe I have the answer: Scotland.

Let us examine the benefits of this. In the last election the Scottish National Party, which wants independence from England, took nearly 20 per cent of the vote in Scotland. Add this lot to the non-voters who also want to go their own way and you realize there is significant support north of the border for Hadrian's Wall to be rebuilt.

Economically, the SNP thinks Scotland would be fine. I don't know why, since Scottish public spending is 33 per cent higher per head than it is in the south-east of England.

But on its website, the party says that Ireland is independent and is the ‘fourth most prosperous country in the world' (really?) and that Iceland, another small independent state, is the ‘sixth most prosperous country in the world'. (Apart from being totally bankrupt, obviously.)

Let's not get bogged down, though. The upsides go on and on. Without Scotland on the electoral map, Cameron would have a majority in the House of Commons, so he could lose the Cleggawallah, we'd never again have a Scottish prime minister and Scotland would become abroad – which would make it an exotic holiday location.

I think we could take this further. Why not draw the boundary between England and Scotland at York? This way, the SNP would feel that William Wallace's sacrifice hadn't been in vain and, better still, all the northern English constituencies could be governed by the sort of left-wing, wetland-habitat, save-the-bat and build-a-wind-farm government they seem to like so much.

So what, you might be thinking, is in it for those who remain – the Welsh and those in the south of England? Well, there's no doubt that letting Scotland go would be very
painful, especially after 300 years of friendship. But what are the alternatives? The NHS? The Ministry of Defence?

No. I'm afraid it has to be Scotland. It costs the UK £5 billion a year and saving that, on top of the £6 billion in cuts from the fat elsewhere, would go a long way towards solving our debt crisis.

Oil? Well, obviously the Scottish oil companies such as, er, whatever they're called, will continue to pump the black gold into Aberdeen while the others, such as BP and Shell, could simply divert their pipelines to Kent. That's fair. Oh, and we'd have to move the Trident submarine fleet as well.

I want to make it plain to my Scottish readers that I do not want to throw you on to the cutting-room floor. I shall miss you with your funny skirts and your ginger hair. The SAS will miss you, too, since over the years 75 per cent of its soldiers are said to have been from north of the border. But we simply cannot afford to stay together any more. Goodbye, then, and good luck.

13 June 2010

Oh, dear. I think I've been a bit naive again. Because I sort of assumed that in the run-up to the general election, all three political leaders had made it pretty clear that cuts would be necessary, and that as a result, all of us had reconciled ourselves to a few years of eating less and buying fewer electrical gadgets.

I figured also that after we'd finished laughing uproariously at the plight of the Greeks, we'd realized that we, too, would be in for a similar period of austerity. But I was wrong, because so far as I can see, no one is prepared to change their lifestyle one iota.

Let us examine the case of Nottinghamshire. The Tory-controlled county council and the Labour-run Nottingham council propose to shave a total of about £100 million from their spending and lose 2,000 jobs in the process. Have those affected reacted with a shrug of inevitability? Not a bit of it. They're all working to rule, and their union is making Churchillian noises about going to war.

It's not just council staff, either. You've also got a lot of middle-aged ladies jumping up and down on village greens protesting about plans to close their local library and not listening when anyone tries to explain it's all on the internet anyway.

Elsewhere, tax workers were outside the Treasury because their office-opening hours have been cut and students in Glasgow were to be found waving banners over plans to lose eighteen staff from the university's biomedical and life sciences department.

Doubtless, the druids will be similarly angry after Danny Alexander told the Commons that a £25-million visitor centre at Stonehenge will not now be built. I don't know how druids express anger but if Alexander turns up for work with a lot of warts on his face, I guess we'll know.

Whatever, the point is that no one seems to recognize the need for cuts in spending, and if they do, they don't think they should be involved. So what's to be done?

One chap called the
Jeremy Vine
radio show last week to discuss the problem with David Cameron. In a thick Birmingham accent, he pointed out that if you took all the money from the richest 100 people in Britain, all of our problems would be addressed and the other sixty million people could carry on as before.

Amazingly, Cameron didn't think this was a very good idea, so the man from Birmingham came up with another one. The prime minister should work for nothing. And therein lies the problem. It's impossible, really, to get people to accept the cuts when so many of them are bonkers.

And because they're bonkers, there can be no doubt that when the cuts do start to bite, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, along with a selection of petrol bombs and much police brutality. We are, it seems, on our way back to 1979.

Last week I suggested a way of averting this would be to cut off Scotland. But no one in power seems to be taking that idea seriously. So I have come up with another rather brilliant wheeze: register Britain as a charity.

The last time I looked, British people were giving more than £10 billion every year to help those less fortunate than themselves. That works out at more than £200 for everyone over the age of sixteen.

We put money in the slot to cure cancer, buy swimming
pools for wounded soldiers, build orphanages in Romania, help keep drug addicts off smack, improve living conditions in Gaza: the list is endless. We give so much to charities for the blind that there are now more guide dogs than there are people for them to guide.

In recent months, I've bought pictures to provide music lessons for kids with learning difficulties, signed several rugby balls, supplied a boot full of dung to help keep my local town's lido open and then I spent a night with Louis Walsh to raise cash for Palestine. I even bought the chef Richard Corrigan at one party and I'm damned if I can remember why.

Then there's
The Big Issue
. I don't like it. I think it's boring. But it is the only magazine that I get every week. Sometimes I buy the same issue three times. Why? When I read
Private Eye
, which I enjoy hugely, I don't think, ‘Ooh. That was brilliant. I'm going to buy it again.'

The reason is simple. We enjoy giving our money away. It makes us feel all warm and gooey. Which is why we almost always give whenever we are asked. No, really. I reckon that if I knocked on your door this afternoon, explaining that I was doing a sponsored drive to London, in a comfortable car, to raise money for the Amazonian tree warbler, you'd give me a tenner.

And think about what you're doing when you roll a 10p-piece into the lifeboat on the bar of your local pub. You are paying to rescue some drunken idiot from Surrey who's had too many gin and tonics and fallen off his yacht in the Solent, that's what. But it doesn't stop you giving, does it?

Of course, when you are really passionate about a charity's aims, we are no longer talking about the odd 10p. People are prepared to move mountains, or at the very least climb them, to raise thousands. Tens of thousands, even. And that's
where my scheme comes in, because we are all passionate about the state of our nation.

I'm proposing, then, that your local MP comes round to your house every week with a collecting tin and that instead of organizing strikes and what have you, unions organize sponsored bike rides to Germany. We can all get behind this, eating as many pork pies in a minute and jumping out of aeroplanes, and then we can appear in our local newspapers, in fancy dress, handing over massively outsized cheques for huge amounts to the exchequer.

Other charities may react in horror to this but they shouldn't, because when the cuts come, they will suffer just like everyone else. If we adopt my scheme, the cuts won't come at all.

20 June 2010