How I Won the Yellow Jumper (12 page)

This terrifying practice has been severely curbed over recent years by the police, which is not altogether unreasonable. But some of the irresponsible thrill of touring has gone with it.

If Woody drives most of the time, I tend to sit in the front passenger seat. I normally have a little left-over scripting and thinking to do as we race towards the finish line. With my laptop perched on my knees, I fight a growing urge to vomit. As soon as I have finished whatever it is I have to type, a Pavlovian response to French motorways kicks in, and within seconds I am asleep, dribbling gently down my collar.

This is when someone, usually Liam, will lean over with their camera phone and film me snoring as my head bobs up and down. I have almost a dozen clips of me on various motorways in France sleeping in this manner down the years. They document a soft decline into narcoleptic middle age.

When he's not filming me, Liam is either ranting about the uselessness of Glasgow Rangers' latest signing, sleeping or tuning his ukelele. If he is feeling chipper enough, we will then be treated to a burst of inappropriate music in the style of George Formby. ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart' by Bonnie Tyler, for example. It works well sung at high speed in a cod-Wigan accent.

Each stop off for refuelling can be a source of tensions as we mimic the dysfunctional emotional dynamics of a family on holiday with their teenage kids. We take turns to play the Sulking Teen, although I normally favour the part of Strict Dad.

I have a mania for efficiency in these stops, resenting each and every second spent in the queues and aisles of a French motorway service station. So it is that I have taken recently to manning the petrol pump, while Woody, who keeps the float, goes in to pay. In this way, I get to send the other two ahead to sort out/acquire/indulge themselves in whatever way they feel is appropriate. Then, when I have cascaded sixty-odd litres of stinking diesel into the bottomless well of the Renault Espace, I can join them in the shop, safe in the knowledge that they have already had time to peruse the shelves and make up their minds about what it is that they crave.

Woody normally panics. Sensitive to my impatient streak, he has already queued to pay for the fuel, trousered the receipt, and loaded himself up with comfort food. And that's when the panic sets in. He will always come back with at least one item that betrays a rush of blood at the till. This may take the form of an awful yoghurt-based French drink. Strawberry Yop is often
the weakness of choice, or a random confectionery with a vaguely insulting name, like Pimp. Or Plop.

The two of us will be back in the car then, and ready to go, before Liam has come back. Occasionally we will catch a glimpse of him moving from aisle to aisle behind the glass of the shopfront, shimmying between rows of querulous school kids. We know perfectly well that he is looking for coffee. We know, also, since nothing much surprises us any more about each other, that he will return eventually with a brew that in no way matches his exacting standards.

And so, in the end, he will reappear cradling a small plastic cup full of something dark and forbidding, which matches his scowl. That face he pulls, with its distinctive jutting out of the lower lip and sinking of the angle of the head to sixty-five degrees is known as ‘
faire la tête
'. It takes its name from a chef in a restaurant in a village in the Pyrenees who didn't want us to sit down for dinner because it was nine o'clock already and he couldn't be arsed. The waiter implored us to be quick in choosing our meals, because, he said with a flick of his head in the direction of the kitchen, the chef ‘
dans la cuisine, il fait la tête
.'

It is in this manner that we progress around France, with ninety euros in the glove compartment nestling next to our passports, for presenting to the gendarmes when they inevitably pull us over for something or other. We keep the correct money for the fine so as to save time. It works well.

The motorbike cops in their bright blue and slightly camp jeggings appreciate how quick we are on the draw. Money. Passports. Licence. Sign here. Apologies.
Au revoir. Et bon Tour!

Time must be saved at both ends of the day. It slips through your fingers.

It sounds simple enough, but it's not always that easy beating the race from the
Départ
to the
Arrivée
. If we have been filming at the start village, we have to get going five minutes before the race leaves or risk getting stuck behind it. The Tour puts up signs that point to the preferred off-race route. We hunt for these amidst a forest of brightly coloured and often contradictory signs pointing to various car parks, for the teams, for the caravan, for the race officials. The ‘Hors Course' signs aren't easy to find in a strange town, which has been almost entirely shut down for the day and features random roadblocks around every corner.

Add to that the well-intentioned ignorance of local volunteers stationed at each roadblock, and it makes for a frazzled
exit. They are often as unfamiliar with the layout of the town as we are.

‘Excusez-nous, madame. On cherche l'itinéraire hors cours.'

‘
C'est pas par ici. Alors . . . je sais pas
.'

‘Brilliant. Thanks.'

Suddenly we'll spot the correct sign to ‘Hors Course'. It's generally met with an excited whoop of ‘Whores Cors!', using the same highly amusing pronunciation that means Bagnères-de-Bigorre is rightfully known in our car as Bangers-de-Big Ears. And Pamiers is Pam Ayres. Obviously.

On arrival at the finish line, there's a similar problem, in reverse. In an unfamiliar town, getting as close as you can to the TV compound to cut down on the distance you have to lug the camera equipment requires skill, persistence, instinct and brinkmanship. Things can get fractious. I will be desperate to get parked up and get going, since normally I have to feed a story back to London immediately on my arrival at the TV truck. Liam, however, conscious of the fact that his is all the heavy gear, will look for the closest possible parking space.

Eventually, inevitably, we lose our bottle, dump the car and run. Usually we leave it parked slightly diagonally, half up on a pavement, with one wheel hanging off the kerb outside a fire station or a hospital or some building of minor importance. But in provincial France, Tour accreditation is like having diplomatic immunity. Only once have I ever received a ticket on a bike race in an accredited vehicle. And that was on the 2010 Tour of Britain, in King's Lynn.

And after the day's work, the pressure continues. Released from duty, we throw our kit back in the car and fire up the sat nav. This moment is key. The details of that night's accommodation are entered. We hold our breath as the route is calculated. It could be anything from twenty kilometres to a
hundred.

It might take ten minutes or two hours. It might mean dinner and wine and chat. Or it might mean a sandwich from a petrol station before unloading all our equipment from the car in the dead of night.

Either way, Unloading Must Happen. Buried back in the mists of time, some equipment had been stolen from one of the Channel 4 crew cars parked up overnight, and ever since then, perhaps understandably, the edict has been handed down that the vehicles will be emptied of their contents, which, to be fair to the production company, would probably cost close to £50,000 to replace.

Because of the zero-tolerance policy on left luggage, the only thing to be nicked in my time on the Tour, from the back of an otherwise empty car, has been a crate of tinned mackerel and several bags of raisins belonging to Gary Imlach. For Gary, this spelt dietary disaster, and reserve supplies had to be freighted out from London.

But banging huge, heavy flightcases up narrow, uneven staircases at ten o'clock at night while tired and hungry is not very much fun.

On reaching a hotel, one of our number has to assume the role of designated spokesman, and ask the bewildered
receptionist the same hideously repetitive question in babyish French every single night. Is there a chance, the merest of slim hopes, that there might just possibly be a secure ground-floor storeroom, where we can stow the gear without the need for lugging it all up to the fourth floor? No? I thought not.

Every year before the Tour departs, I make a mental note to look up the word ‘storeroom' before leaving for France. Every year I forget, and, therefore, every year we are reduced to making do with the less-than-adequate ‘
petite chambre
'.

It's always funniest, though, when it's Woody who takes on the asking. Quite unabashed, and a little impatient, he throws in a loose smattering of English words to pad out the bald spots in his sentences, and to give the listener the impression of casual fluency without actually being either casual or fluent.

‘Err. So. Yeah.
Bonsoir
.
Une
question. Um, just wondering
avez vous une
. . . (wait for it, here it comes) . . .
petite chambre pour
you know, um, all that stuff really.
La
.' He would point at one of us grunting past him carrying a tripod, smirking a little.

‘Non. Désolé.'

‘OK.
Merci
.' He'll flash a tiny exasperated continental-style smile. ‘Bugger.'

Cultural immersion, Tour style.

And once the gear is stowed away, once the curtains are drawn, and the day is done, it's time to find a flat surface to do some ironing.