The World According to Clarkson (14 page)

Well, I’ve made some calls and it seems that Gary employs a public relations person – a former editor of the
Sun
no less – to create and mould and manage press coverage. While I don’t.

And this, I think, is the root cause of all the recent aggravation with Naomi Campbell and the
Mirror
, the stories about Les Dennis and Amand a Holden, and whoever it was went off with the captain of Blackburn Rovers. No wait. One of them was a drug addict, weren’t they? I can’t remember.

The point is that pretty well all celebs live behind a PR net curtain and enjoy the diffused light it creates. They’re used to the
OK!
-type feature where they’re seen at home, cutting up a freshly baked nut loaf with some shiny apples on the coffee table. They only need roll a 2p piece into a lifeboat-charity box at a pub and
they’re painted in the papers the next day as a sort of Paul Getty, but better looking and with nicer breasts.

So when a paper catches them with a line of coke up their schnozzers or a dead builder in the swimming pool, it’s like they’ve been thrust through the curtain and are facing the real world for the first time. It’s nasty.

PR is nasty, too, but unfortunately it works. Not only for celebrities but also for politicians. It alone put a completely unprincipled man in No. 10, and even more amazingly it kept him there.

All those useless meddlers on the front bench have been on PR courses to make them more eloquent and better able to deal with the press. Well, all except one, of course, and as a result he’s projected as a fat, pugilistic twerp with two Jags.

Big business uses it, too. Twice now I’ve attacked the Vauxhall Vectra and twice the enormous General Motors PR division has managed to spin the story round so that I emerged as the villain of the piece. Again. And he’s fat, you know.

The thing is though that PR is not desperately expensive. Press inquiries can be handled for maybe £500 a month, whereas for £2,000 you can expect to be given your own personal halo and some wings. So why, I wonder, do we not use it in everyday life?

Night after night, my children go to bed angry with me for one reason or another. Usually because I’ve made them go to bed. So why don’t I get a PR girl to do it for me: ‘Your daddy wants you to stay up all night and eat chocolate, but Mummy says it’s bedtime.’

Then when I inadvertently put all the crockery in the tumble dryer – it happens – my PR person could bury the bad news on a day when one of the kids has fallen off a swing and cut her knee.

Late for a meeting? Ordered 2 million paperclips by mistake? Goosed the boss’s wife at a Christmas party? All of these things can be spun to your advantage if you get yourself your own personal Alastair Campbell.

I’m certainly going to get a PR man when my new baby is born. Because if I try to handle things myself, I’ll end up making a mess of it. I can imagine the story in
Hello!
now: ‘Jeremy Clarkson invites us to his dirty house for the birth of his fourth hideous child.’

Sunday 14 April 2002

This summer the Albert Hall in London will play host to an evening of ‘ultimate fighting’. Described as an extreme test for mind and body, the participants are billed as modern-day Roman gladiators; except of course nobody gets eaten.

Ultimate fighting is an American import, naturally, and the idea is that two men are locked in a metal cage where they knock eight bells out of each other using whatever discipline happens to be handiest at the time – kick boxing, kung fu, wrestling, punching, judo. The only things which are not allowed are eye-gouging, and anything involving the groin or the throat. It does not say anything about teeth, though, so who knows – maybe someone will get eaten.

Predictably, every wishy-washy liberal is up in arms, with Derek Wyatt, the Labour MP, being quoted as saying: ‘We have been campaigning against foxhunting, bearbaiting and cockfighting, and this is the human equivalent.’

Well now, Derek, that’s not strictly true, is it? Ultimate fighters are not sitting at home with Mrs Fox and the babies, Foxy and Woxy, when a bunch of snarling dogs come bursting through the front door. Nobody is forcing them into the cage. And they are not kids from
sink estates either. There are three British fighters; one has a degree in electronics from Kent University.

Even so, a spokesman for the British Medical Association said that it’s a ghastly sport and that the point is to inflict injury on an opponent, which is wrong. No it isn’t. If a man, of his own free will, wishes to get into a ring and spend half an hour being kicked and possibly eaten by another man, then what business is that of yours, mine or Derek Wyatt’s?

I must say, at this juncture, that I don’t like fighting. I prefer passive resistance and, if that doesn’t work, active fleeing. Once a friend and I donned boxing gloves ‘for a bit of a laugh’ and pranced round each other making snarly faces. Then he hit me in the ear and I simply could not believe how much it hurt. ‘Ow,’ I said, in a rather unmanly way.

Then there was the time in Greece when a swarthy fisherman punched me in the face. So why didn’t I hit him back? Well, this is hard to do when you are lying on your back in a dead faint.

Of course, the argument goes that war–war is the preserve of the intellectually stunted whereas the intellectually lofty prefer jaw–jaw. But consider this: I could have jawed with Stavros for hours and he still would have hit me.

Only last night, in the pub, I found myself in the middle of a huge argument. I was suggesting that the Israelis really had gone mad this time and that those shots of the tanks in Jenin were no different from the shots of German tanks in Warsaw. My opponent, on the other
hand, was sympathetic to Ariel Sharon and felt his actions were justified in the face of endless Palestinian terrorism.

Neither of us was going to back down and so on we surged. The whole evening was swallowed by a tangle of twisted statistics, spurious historical fact and eventually, of course, that inevitable descent into a spume-filled barrel of finger-poking personal abuse.

That’s the trouble with jaw–jaw. There can be no winner. You are forced to go on and on for ever. Or are you? Surely, if you want to make an adversary see things your way – and that’s the whole point – then why not simply punch him?

Speaking with the benefit of experience, I assure you that if it were a choice of backing down from a firmly held conviction or being punched in the face again, I would back down and whimper like a dog.

I look sometimes at the politicians on
Question Time
, endlessly trotting out statistics and five-year plans in a desperate bid to make the adversary look like a fool. But why waste time? Let your opponent have his say, then hit him.

Certainly this would make the programme more interesting. Imagine it. Oliver Letwin delivers his piece on rising crime and how the Tories will get more bobbies on the beat. Then Stephen Byers leaps over his desk and kicks him. You would watch that, wouldn’t you? I would.

I would especially like to see Edward Heath biting Denis Healey.

John Prescott has had a stab at it, literally, and his left
jab was widely regarded as the most interesting feature of the last general election campaign.

Every week, at the moment, David Dimbleby winds up
Question Time
by inviting people to get in touch if they want to be in the audience, but if we thought there was a chance of watching Ann Widdecombe pulling Glenda Jackson’s hair, the producers would be beating willing spectators back with a stick.

There is something else, too. In the coming weeks Sharon and Yasser Arafat may meet around a table and talk about what can be done. They will conclude, after weeks and weeks, that there is no common ground and that in 50 years the Palestinians and the Israelis will still be blowing one another to pieces.

So here’s a thought. Ariel and Yasser, one on one, in a cage at the Albert Hall. The winner gets Jerusalem.

Sunday 21 April 2002

Bob Geldof, perhaps the second most famous single dad in Britain, said last week that courts need to understand that not all men are brutal, indifferent boors who are incapable of raising children.

An interesting point, especially as it came on the same day as the result of an unusual custody battle in the Court of Appeal. Two parents, one a high-flying City executive on £300,000 a year, the other a full-time parent who gave up work in the early days of the marriage to look after the kids.

So who won? The one who gave up work? The one who’s looked after them night and day for the past six years? Er, no. Even though it’s the mother who works, it’s the mother who won. The mother always wins.

Well not always, according to the lone parent group Gingerbread. It says that one in ten single parents is a man and that, clearly, courts do sometimes award residency orders to fathers. I’m sure they do, if the wife is a drooling vegetable, but I’ve never heard of it.

Indeed, the only two single fathers I know had the job thrust upon them because their wives died.

The fact of the matter is this. You, as a man, can put on your best suit and promise to read the children Harry Potter stories until dawn but you’ll still lose. Even if your
wife is sitting on the other side of the court wearing an ‘I love Myra Hindley’ T-shirt.

I think I know why. Last weekend I was entrusted with the task of being a single father for two days, and frankly I’d have been better off doing underwater knitting. I made a complete hash of it. When my wife arrived home on Sunday evening, way past the kids’ bedtime, one child was bleeding profusely, one had left home and the other was stuck up a tree.

Things started to go wrong just after lunch on Saturday. They might have gone wrong before that but since I was locked in the office, writing, with
Led Zep II
on the stereo, it’s hard to be sure.

Anyway, they went wrong after lunch because the dishwasher was full and I’m sorry, but I simply do not know how they work.

Oh, I can phase a DVD player so that six individual speakers can be made to come on and go off in whichever room I choose, but where do you put the salt in a dishwasher? And will any form of powder do? Well, not Coffee-mate, it turns out.

So what about washing machines? Nope. I can’t work those either, and I’ve never seen the point of a deep freeze since I only ever buy what I want now. Send me into a supermarket and I will emerge ten minutes later with a packet of Smarties and a copy of
GQ
. The notion of buying a pizza for the children’s supper on Thursday simply wouldn’t enter my head. So the need for a deep freeze would never arise.

Am I alone with this white-goods phobia? I don’t
think so. And I know for sure that I’m not the only man in the world who cannot cope.

It isn’t that I won’t. I can’t. In the same way that I can’t turn back time, or make a dishwasher wash dishes. I therefore had to get the six-year-old to wipe the three-year-old’s bottom while I hid in a bush at the bottom of the garden.

Saturday night, I made a mistake. I knew that I’d have to get up at dawn, so did I get an early night? Was I grown up and womanly about things? No. What I did, in a manly way, was stay up half the night watching a television programme in which a group of twentysomething people, who were marooned on a desert island, stood on a log.

And then it was Sunday and everyone was clamouring for Sunday lunch, just like Mum makes. Impossible. Mums know, you see, what potato does what. Jersey Royal. Placenta previa. Maris piper. Lactate. These are Mum words.

I, on the other hand, had no clue that ‘baking potatoes’ – well that’s what it said on the label – could also be used for roasting. So we had cauliflower instead and this, according to the seven-year-old, wasn’t quite the same.

Clearing up wasn’t quite the same either, because we didn’t bother. Partly because the dishwasher was still unemptied and partly because I had some fairly big plans to build a den that afternoon. And this, I think, is the fundamental difference between men and women parents.

Had it been me coming home on a Sunday evening
after a weekend away, I’d have been greeted by three children in their pyjamas, washed, scrubbed, deloused and with their homework done. The pots would have been cleaned and the playroom would have gleamed like a pathology lab.

But I’d sort of glossed over the boring bits, or made a mess of them, and concentrated on teaching my six-year-old how to drive round the paddock on my new off-road go-kart, which is strictly not to be used by undersixteens. We’d built a tree house, done joy rides on the old tractor, fallen over a lot, had a water fight and all fallen out.

To fathers, kids are fun. To mothers, they’re a responsibility. That’s why it’s so important to have both. And it’s also why, if there’s no option, courts have to side with the mums.

Sunday 28 April 2002

He was in a band famous for singing the line ‘Hope I die before I get old’. And now he has. John Entwistle may have been the quiet one, standing at the back while Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend made merry up front, but anyone who knows The Who knows he was probably the only bassist in the world who could have kept up with the manic Keith Moon, a man who rightly called himself ‘the best Keith Moon-style drummer in the world’.

More than that, if you listen to ‘The Real Me’ on
Quadrophenia
, Entwistle uses the bass to create a melody. And he wrote ‘My Wife’, which is one of the best tracks on one of the best albums from probably the best band the world has ever seen.

The Who were about to embark on a tour of America. It would have been a sell-out. That’s because they were old, they’d been round the block and they knew what they were doing.

Every week Steve Wright hosts a round-table discussion on Radio 2 where people as famous as Peter Stringfellow come in to talk about the week’s new releases. Usually they’re absolute rubbish, an endless succession of teenagers reedily singing along to the
background accompaniment of what sounds like a mobile-phone ring tone.