The World According to Clarkson (12 page)

The prime minister is a Labour Tory. There’s a mosque at the end of your street and a French restaurant next door. We are neither in nor out of Europe. We are famous for our beer but we drink in wine bars. We are not a colonial power but we still have a commonwealth. We are jealous of the rich but we buy into the
Hello!
celebrity culture. We live in a United Kingdom that’s no longer united. We are muddled.

And this must surely be the only country in the world that sees its national flag as a symbol of oppression. So if you can’t be seen as patriotic for fear of being labelled a racist, you aren’t going to be desperately inclined to build something for the good of the nation. Not that
you know what the nation actually is or means any more.

Our football team may be on its way to the World Cup finals but we don’t even have a national stadium in which it can play home games.

Concorde is back in the air – but not because the great white bird makes us all feel good. It’s back because the accountants at British Airways have turned the white elephant into a dirty great cash cow.

To combat this disease, I would like to see a fund set up that does nothing but pay for great public buildings, follies, laser shows, towers, fountains, airships, aqueducts. Big, expensive stuff designed solely to make us go ‘wow’. I even have a name for this fund. We could call it the lottery.

Sunday 9 September 2001

You may have seen various Ibiza-style compilation music albums advertised in the middle of fairly highbrow television programmes recently. And you may have thought that this was as inappropriate as advertising knickers in the middle of a football match. You are watching a documentary about insects. You are intelligent. The only Ibiza soundtrack that you’re interested in is the cicadas, not the mega-decibel noise coming out of the clubs.

I mean, take an album called
The Chillout Session
which, according to the blurb on the cover, is a laid-back mix of blissful beats and chilled-out house featuring Jakatta, Leftfield, William Orbit, Groove Armada, Underworld and Bent. Dotcom computerised e-music for the e-generation. Or, to put it another way, rubbish.

And rightly so. It has always been the job of modern music to annoy parents. When I used to watch
Top of the Pops
in the early 1970s my father’s face would adopt the look of a man who’d just been stabbed in the back of the neck with a screwdriver. There was bewilderment and some real pain, too, especially during ‘Ballroom Blitz’.

This was a man who spoke the language of pop music with the élan with which I speak French. He used the definite article indiscriminately, talking about the Queen
and the T Rex. He referred to the Rod Stewart as ‘that man who sings while he’s on the lavatory’, and once said of the Billy Idol: ‘You’d have thought if he was going on television, he’d have put a shirt on.’

He honestly and truthfully could not see any difference at all between Rick Wakeman and Rick Derringer. I could never believe it, but to his ears, Mick Fleetwood and Mick Jagger were one and the same.

And yet twenty years down the line, I found myself in the same boat, unable to tell the difference between the house and the garage. Techno, hip-hop, rap. It was all the same to me. A collection of angry-looking young men with their trousers on back to front, urging us to go out and kill a pig.

This is undoubtedly why Radio 2 became the world’s most listened-to station. Thanks to an appealing blend of Terry Wogan and the Doobie Brothers, it was a little haven of peace for the fortysomething music lover who was terrified of the noises being made on Radio 1.

However, if you listen exclusively to Radio 2, you are isolated from the fast-moving world of modern music. You become stuck in a Neil Young Groundhog Day, endlessly buying
After the Gold Rush
on CD and mini disc.

You don’t watch MTV. You don’t read the
NME
. You don’t see
Top of the Pops
any more. So, how do you know when there’s some new music out there that you would like?

The record companies can’t put flyers under the windscreen wipers of every Volvo in the land, so that’s why
these
Ibiza Chillout
records are being advertised in the middle of programmes you like to watch. It’s because they feature the type of music you would like to hear.

You may not have heard of William Orbit but you will know his song well because it’s Barber’s
Adagio for Strings
. And while you may be unfamiliar with Groove Armada, you’ll be able to hum along because you’ve heard their tune on and on in those slow-motion end-of-championship slots on
Grandstand
.

Listening to this music is like having a length of ermine pulled through your head. If honey could make a noise, this is what it would sound like. It becomes the perfect soundtrack for your spag bol and Chianti supper party.

Of course, you’re not going to listen to it in the same way that you listened to Steve Miller’s
Fly Like an Eagle
in 1976. Back then, listening to an album was a job in itself whereas this e-music is acoustic wallpaper, something you have on while you do something else. In our language, it’s Jean-Michel Jarre meets Mike Oldfield, without the joss sticks and the vinyl crackle.

Moby is particularly good. Buy
I Like to Score
tomorrow morning and you’ll never listen to Supertramp again. You’ll retune your car stereo to Radio 1 and you’ll put up with five hours of pig killing for five minutes of the whale song.

And you’ll start to hear other bands that you like. Radiohead. Toploader. Coldplay. Dido. David Gray. Stereophonics. You may have heard the names over the past few years and you may have assumed, as I did, that they banged garden furniture into computers and
recorded road drills for the benefit of your children, but no. You’ll hear melodies that will cause you to hum along. And none of them will encourage you to stab a policeman.

I’ve taken to buying their albums and it’s wonderful not having to stand at the counter in a record shop being called ‘man’ by the spiky salesman because I want
The Yes Album
on CD.

But if middle-aged people are able to discuss the latest mega-mix from Ibiza and the vocal range of Joe Washbourne from Toploader then our children will have nowhere to go. We’ll be in Ibiza giving it large and, to rebel, they’ll be on a Hoseasons canal boat singing songs from
The Sound of Music
.

Sunday 16 September 2001

Left to its own devices, an elephant would never die. It has no natural enemies. It is not prone to riding a motorcycle. It has the metabolic rate of granite. So, to ensure that the world was not eventually overrun by herds of immortal two-tonners, nature put a time bomb in its mouth: weak teeth. They are replaced with new ones every ten years, but when the sixth set has worn out, that’s it. Game over for Nellie.

Human beings are different. The enamel that coats our teeth is not only the hardest substance in our bodies but also one of the toughest and most resilient concoctions found anywhere on planet Earth.

Think about it. The oldest evidence of humanoid existence was found three years ago just outside Johannesburg. Named Little Foot, nothing much remains. It’s just a sort of fossil, except for the teeth which loom out of the rock as fresh and as shiny as they were when the poor creature lived, 3.6 million years ago.

We see this all the time. Archaeologists are forever pulling dead priests out of fields in Lincolnshire and declaring that they died during the Reformation after being boiled in acid, burnt, hung, drawn, quartered, crushed and then quartered again for good measure.
Every bone is always smashed and rotten and yet the teeth still gleam.

So why, then, has the government recently announced that it will be allocating £35 million to help eradicate tooth decay? Why did it say that poor children can now get free toothbrushes on the National Health Service? Well, it’s because the health minister who dreamt up these schemes is called Hazel Blears. This would make her a woman. And that would make her completely obsessed with other people’s teeth.

When I was a single man I went to the dentist only once, when I had toothache. He said all my teeth would have to be filled except two, which would need root canals. Then, after he had filled my face with needles and Novocaine, he asked whether I would like the work done privately or on the NHS.

‘Oor’s huh diffence?’ I tried to say.

‘Well,’ he replied with a sneer, ‘if you have it done privately, the fillings will match your teeth. And if you have it done on Mrs Thatcher, they won’t.’

I had seen Mrs T’s teeth so, poor as I was, I went private.

For the next fifteen years I didn’t go to the dentist at all and it made not the slightest bit of difference. I was not visited by the Itosis family and their troublesome son, Hal. On the rare occasions when I managed to get girls back to my flat, they did not keel over and die when I moved in for the first kiss. Some didn’t faint.

Then along came my wife, who spends 60 per cent of the family’s GDP on electric toothbrushes and 40 per
cent of her morning sawing away with floss. Also, she sends me off for a dental check-up every six months.

Why do I need to have a man poke about in my mouth with a sharpened screwdriver when I know that my teeth will last about 50,000 years longer than the rest of me?

Nobody dies of tooth decay. It’s always some other part of the body that gives up, but despite this we don’t go to the doctor twice a year demanding a full service. Come on, doc, there’s nothing obviously wrong but I want you to examine every single bit of me minutely. I want X-rays and then I want to see your hygienist, who will spray jets of ice-cold grit up my backside.

No, we go to the doctor only when something is wrong and that’s how it should be at the dentist.

Vanity is the problem. Nobody will be able to see if your spleen has a growth on it the size of a cabbage, but when your molars go brown and gingivitis takes your gums, that’s a woman’s idea of hell on earth.

There are four different types of teeth. There are canines which are used for tearing off lumps of meat. There are incisors which are used for cutting it. There are premolars for crushing it. And there are American teeth which are used for appearing in
Hello!
magazine.

You do not achieve American teeth with toothpaste and regular flossing. Nor will you have the full Victoria Beckham after a course of bleaching at the dentist. No, to achieve teeth which are way better than anything nature ever intended, what you need is millions of pounds.

Small wonder that in a football wall these days, the vain and effeminate players put their hands over their mouths rather than their testicles.

There are other drawbacks, too. I’m told that you will emerge from the operation not only looking different but sounding like a different person as well. And there’s no way of knowing before the dentist starts work with his chisel whether you’ll emerge from the ordeal as Stephen Hawking or Sue Ellen.

All we do know is that people with American gnashers all look exactly the same. If you are horribly injured in an accident, they won’t be able to identify you from your teeth because they will have come from the same box in Beverly Hills as everyone else’s. Think about the consequences: you may spend the rest of time lying beneath a gravestone which tells passers-by that you were Victoria Beckham.

Sunday 23 September 2001

I’ve often thought as I’ve watched the police prise yet another frightened little brown man with a moustache from the underside of a Eurostar train: ‘How bad must life have been at home for that to have been better?’

According to the union that represents the immigration service, the ISU, there are now 1.2 million illegal immigrants living in Britain, and we know full well, of course, how they got here. They were ushered into the tunnel and into the backs of trucks by the French police.

However, what I’ve always wanted to know is: how the hell are they getting into Europe in the first place? Where’s the leak?

Well, last week, I found it. Every month, thousands of immigrants are being brought by the Albanian mafia in fast boats across the 50-mile-wide Strait of Otranto from Albania into southern Italy.

And what are the Italian police doing to stop them? Well, I had a good look round and, so far as I can tell, the most important thing they have done so far is buy themselves some really cool sunglasses. It’s like a Cutler and Gross convention.

And you should see their patrol boats. Forget superyacht alley in Antibes. Forget the Class One racers. The fastest, sleekest machines I’ve ever seen are backed up to
the harbour wall in Otranto, rocking as the mighty diesels are revved.

So, the police look good and they can go really fast. But unfortunately they can’t go fast enough.

You see, the profits from smuggling people are simply mind-boggling. The going rate for the one-way trip is $800 (£540) per person, and with 40 people to a boat, that works out at $32,000 (about £21,600) a go. And a few $32,000 trips buys you an awful lot of horsepower.

To combat this, the police are now allowed to keep the boats they catch and use them against the smugglers. Which means the mafia have to build, or steal, faster boats to stay ahead.

Welcome, then, to the biggest aquatic race track the world has ever seen. A race track where the victors win the chance to spend the rest of their days above a chip shop in Bradford, and the losers end up dead.

Here’s the problem. As soon as a mafia boat sets off from Albania it is picked up by Italian radar stations, which direct police boats towards the target. But even if they can go fast enough to catch up, then what?

You can’t simply ask the driver to pull over, because he won’t. He’s going hell for leather and won’t stop even when he reaches the beach. You might be able to block him but then – and this happens a lot – he’ll lob the cargo of Kurds over the side, and once they’ve drowned turn and run for the lawlessness of home.