For Crying Out Loud!

That said, a state that waits for people who are a bloody nuisance to order dim sum, then silently pokes them in the buttocks with a nuclear-tipped umbrella seems somehow less revolting.

I can think of many people who could and should be removed from the scene in such a way that no one can really explain what happened. George Monbiot. Ken Livingstone. Various hard-line Muslim fanatics. Most human-rights lawyers. Anyone with a rally jacket. People in Babyshambles. People with beards. Anyone with a sign on their desk that says ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here’, anyone in a jungle in Australia, anyone who claps along to the oompah music at the Horse of the Year Show, and everyone at the Ideal Home exhibition.

This Henry II attitude to good governance – ‘who will rid me of this turbulent priest’ – is not premeditated murder. It’s more like a crime of passion, and that’s understandable. You feel sorry for the leader as he sits there thinking: ‘I’m trying to run a country here and how can I do that if I’ve got this infernal priest nicking all my churches and making everything worse? So can someone go out there and stick a sword in his gizzard.

‘And then on the way home can someone please pop into the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show and mess with the Earls Court boilers…’

That’s pretty much the same as a husband trying to run a family and finding that every time he comes home from a hard day at the office his wife is in bed with the paper boy. Eventually, he’s going to snap and shoot them both. And not even the Americans would electrocute him for that.

Of course, once the state gets a taste for the quiet assassination of troublemakers, there’s always a danger that you end up with Uday Hussein feeding hookers to his pet tigers and making old men dance after they’ve had the soles of their feet beaten to a pulp.

That’s bad, obviously. But what you do to solve this is have him quietly killed as well.

There’s a scene in an eighties film called Defence of the Realm where a journalist is blindfolded and dragged to a grand-looking room in Whitehall where three old-school-tie types grill him a bit. And then after he refuses to play ball they attach a small bomb to the record player in his flat and blow him to pieces.

He was going to print a story that would have resulted in the American forces leaving Britain in the middle of the cold war. So what do they do? He couldn’t be arrested and tried because he hadn’t committed a crime. And he couldn’t be allowed to run the story. So he had to explode.

I sort of like the idea that this Ludlum stuff is going on, behind our backs. But I fear it doesn’t any more.

Thatcher, yes. There’s no doubt in my mind that she might not have lost too much sleep if her security services had taken out the odd person threatening national security in a Geneva railway station. But Blair? Hmmm. I doubt he’d have the balls, because he’d be worried about what he could say if Cherie found out.

Then there’s David Cameron. Did you see those pictures of him in Darfur last week? He was wearing cords and a short-sleeved shirt, and I’m sorry, but Boden Man is never, in a million years, going to order the quiet assassination of a turbulent cleric.

If he had a full packet in his underpants he might surely be tempted to lose it with his minions and shout at them to put a dollop of killer lead in Polly Toynbee’s tofu. Instead of which he’s now going to let her shape his party’s stance on social justice.

It won’t work. My Henry II plan will.

Sunday 26 November 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

Making a meal of Sunday lunch

Most nights, like most people, I shovel food into my mouth with one hand while using the other to stab away at the remote control, desperately trying to find something on television that isn’t about penguins and polar bears.

But on Sundays the television is turned off, a big fire is lit in the dining room and the whole family gathers round to gorge on a feast of roast meat, gravy and what country pubs call ‘all the trimmings’.

This is the traditional Sunday lunch, but actually it’s traditional in the same way as going to work in a bowler hat. It’s a perceived cornerstone of the British way of life but in fact few people actually do it.

Recent figures show that only 29 per cent of families eat together more than once a week and that of this minority, 77 per cent do so while watching penguins falling over. A quarter of households in Britain don’t even have a table.

This, I think, should be a new measure of poverty. We in Britain like to think we’re rich because we have aspirin and, for some of the year at least, access to clean drinking water.

We like to think we’re advanced because you can’t join the army at nine, and civilised because people don’t die in the streets of diphtheria.

But, I’m sorry, even the poorest African families have a table. And here, 25 per cent of us don’t.

There’s no real excuse either. On eBay there currently are 3,764 dining tables being sold, with prices starting at just £16 – less than three packets of fags. So buy one, turn the bloody polar bears off and let’s get this family Sunday lunch thing under way.

It all begins at the butcher, and what you need to know is that you will describe whoever you choose as the best butcher in the world. Out here in the Cotswolds it’s the next topic of conversation after schools.

‘We use the “little man” at the bottom of the town. He’s much better than the one at the top.’ ‘What? You don’t use our chap in Chuntsworthy? Everyone does. He’s the best butcher in the world.’

The marvellous thing is that nobody knows what they’re talking about. Beef is not like wine. Yes, those with a sensitive palate could tell the difference between the scarlet plonk-meat sold in supermarkets and the Chateauneuf-du-Pape meat sold by a proper butcher.

But could you really tell the difference between the butcher at the bottom of the town and the chap at the top? Not a hope in hell.

So you buy a joint of meat from whichever butcher has the fewest flies in the window and you put it in the oven and then you try to get your children to set your eBay table.

This will make them very angry because they’re busy watching that man on YouTube who tries to light his fart. And they won’t be jollied along by the thought of the whole family sitting down together because the only people in the world they hate more than their siblings are their parents.

Frankly, they’d much rather be sitting down in a bus shelter with their friends.

Cajoling them to break out the cutlery and put it on the table in something like the right order, without stabbing one another, takes so long that you forget about the broccoli, which is now in need of some culinary Viagra if it’s to become firm again.

No matter. An hour after the first ingredient is ready, the last will be vaguely edible as well, so it’s time to carve.

This, for reasons I don’t fully understand, is a man’s job. Perhaps it’s because he hasn’t done the cooking or argued with the kids and is therefore in a better frame of mind to deal with the carving knife which, somehow, after a week in a drawer, has become as sharp as Vanessa Feltz’s backside. Last weekend I would have been better off chopping up the pork with a rolling pin.

So after a while and a lot of swearing, I went to look for that electric sharpener thing that every couple are given when they get married.

Unfortunately, while foraging about in the bottom of the bottom drawer, among the juicers and the traditional scales and the £100 brushed screw-pull corkscrews, and all the other stuff we received on that happy day 13 years ago, I came across some old photographs.

And by the time I’d finished being distracted by these, the broccoli was stone cold and the gravy had become so congealed that it could have been used as a football.

My wife was very angry about this, and how the children had laid the table without mats, serving spoons, glasses or indeed anything you might need to actually eat a lunch. And I’d laid the fire with coal that smells of cancer rather than wood, which I think is naff.

Eventually, though, we were under way. The family all together. Eating good, wholesome, traditional nourishing food.

And talking about all sorts of things, such as the need to sit up straight, the need to eat with your mouth closed, the need to ask for seconds rather than just leaning across the table, and how it’s important to eat without your elbows taking on the shape of a Vulcan bomber’s wings.

That afternoon, feeling heavy and lethargic, I curled up in front of a drowned polar bear and thought about those 3,764 dining tables for sale on eBay.

I’m surprised there aren’t more.

Sunday 3 December 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

Nice jet, shame about abroad

Air travel has done more for world peace than any other single entity in the history of mankind. The more countries you visit, the more you understand that people from other cultures and races and places are just like you – except America, obviously – so you’re less likely to want to shoot them.

The reason why there’s been peace in western Europe for more than 60 years has nothing to do with the European Union or NATO and everything to do with Ryanair.

I’d give the chairman the Nobel peace prize, frankly.

But somehow Gordon Brown has got it into his head that aeroplanes are hurting the sky through which they fly and that he must therefore double airport tax. This means the cost of your annual Christmas holiday in Barbados will rise from £9,482 to a staggering £9,487.

Anyway, to mark Mr Brown’s decision to save the world, I decided to go to Budapest. For lunch.

I’ve often said that if I came to power, the first thing I’d do is declare war on Hungary. This is because it’s the only country in western Europe I’ve never visited. And what you don’t know is scary. Hell. Malignant tumours. Strange noises in the house in the middle of the night. Hungary. They’ve always been the same in my book.

So when a friend rang and asked if I’d like to go Budapest, for the day, I said, ‘Er.’ Then he said we’d be going on a private jet so I said, ‘Yes.’

It belonged to a company called Gama Aviation, which charters its fleet out to the likes of Michael and Winner, and it was jolly lovely. But not half as lovely as the airport in Farnborough, Hampshire, where it’s based.

Check-in time is one minute before the scheduled departure. Or one hour afterwards, if you can’t be bothered to get up. It doesn’t really matter because all you have to do is show your passport to a man who, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, was wearing a high-visibility jacket. Perhaps he thought he might be knocked down by a vacuum cleaner.

Whatever, soon we were on board in a big swivelly seat, wondering whether to have our champagne neat or with a swan in it.

After we landed, a woman called Victor introduced us to our driver. He was called Victor too and he only had one word of English, which was ‘moment’. That, in the big scheme of things, was not terribly useful.

For instance, when he parked outside a big hotel in the middle of a rather boring square, and we asked why, he said: ‘Moment.’ Plainly, he was KGB and we were all going to be killed.

But no. After 20 minutes, another Victor arrived and told us to go shopping.

Budapest, it turns out, is the worst shopping city in the whole of the world. Walking down the pedestrianised main street is exactly like walking through the centre of Croydon 40 years ago, except that all the men are sweeping leaves and all the girls are wearing knee-length shorts with turn-ups. This is not a good look at the best of times, but it’s even worse when you have an arse like a championship pumpkin.

We took a trip down memory lane by going into C&A. Other than this, the only shops were Vision Express and Hungarian trinketry emporiums that sold a wide variety of 3-foot-tall motorised gnomes.

Eventually, we came across a market where two burly-looking Victors were hitting lumps of red-hot metal with hammers, and you could buy hats.

They were not like any hats I’d ever seen. Fashioned from what was undoubtedly carpet underlay, they were shaped like tubas and were 3 foot tall.

Obviously, I had to have one, which meant trying to work out how much they cost. I don’t know what currency they use in Hungary – pigs, I think – and nor could I work out how many sucklings you get to the euro. This is because Victor, the hat seller, only had one word of English, which was ‘moment’.

After the shopping trip we had a look round. And here’s what you need to know.

There is a bridge that links Buda with Pest. There are some green statues of people you’ve never heard of, there’s a long thin building and everything is grey. The shops are grey. The river is grey. The cars are grey.

And the sky is as grey as the shorts with turn-ups.

So we went for lunch where a man called Victor brought us pate, and goulash and duck and it only cost four pigs. ‘Do you want Hungarian wine?’ he asked. Not really.

After our feast, we couldn’t think of anything to do so we rekindled the lost art of having a food fight and then went back to the airport, got on our Falcon, and came home.

Conclusions? Well, as I sat in my apartment block in London that night, trying to get half a ton of paprika out of my hair, I decided that I’m sold on private jets and that I no longer want to declare war on Hungary. It would be like waging war on a mental institution.

But there’s something else I thought of too. My noodle delivery man was French, the girl in the coffee shop downstairs is Polish, the lift is always full of Americans speaking two-stroke and the girl on the till in my local supermarket is proof positive that Mars is definitely capable of spawning life.

So, actually, we don’t need air, or even space, travel any more. Because these days, the best way of meeting other people is to stay at home.

Sunday 10 December 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

It’s English as a foreign language

As you know, it is impossible to speak French because everything over there has a sex. Tables. Ships. Birthday cakes. Throat lozenges, even. Everything is either a boy or a girl and they snigger when you get it wrong.

I’m told, however, that English is even harder to learn because although we recognised many years ago that tables are essentially asexual and invented the word ‘it’, there are several million alternatives for every object, subject or emotion.

This makes life very difficult for those to whom English is a second language.

George Bush, for instance.

When those ‘trrists’ flew their planes into the World Trade Center he went on television and referred to them as ‘folks’. That’s not right. ‘Folks’ are people who line-dance. ‘Folks’ are dim-witted but essentially quite likeable souls, whereas people who use Stanley knives to hijack planes and then fly them into tall buildings are ‘bastards’.

I understand his dilemma. Because ‘men’ can also be called lads, blokes, chaps, geezers, guys and so on. And you try explaining to a foreigner which word to use and when.

I’ve just spent the week in Moscow with a Russian publisher whose English was so perfect he’d started to delve into the furthest reaches of Roget’s Thesaurus. This was a mistake. It meant he kept referring to Russian secret-service agents as ‘lads’.

I wanted to pull him up on it, but you try explaining to a Russian why someone who puts polonium in a chap’s lunch is not a ‘lad’ or even a ‘bloke’. And while he may be a ‘chap’ to his senior officer, to the rest of us, and to his girlfriend, he’s a ‘guy’.

Worse, one of the girls I met over there had a book called Cockney Rhyming Slang.

You cannot even begin to imagine how wonky this made her sound.

Even if English is your first language, it’s easy to get in a bit of a muddle.

I, for instance, think that the word ‘whatever’ as in ‘I heard what you just said and I can’t be bothered to even think of a response’ is one of the greatest additions to the English language since ‘it’.

But I’ve been asked by my 12-year-old daughter to stop using it. Not because she finds it irritating but because she says it sounds wrong coming from a balding, fat, middle-aged man. ‘Whatever’ is a word solely for the pre-teens, and I’m jealous of them because all I had at that age was the almost completely useless ‘groovy’.

It’s not just a question of age, either. It’s also region. Pete Townshend, for example, can say ‘geezer’ and just about get away with it because he’s a sixty-something Londoner. In the same way that a plump postmistress from Derby can call you ‘duck’ and I cannot.

The worst example of getting it wrong, however, comes from Americans who, having lived in Britain for a while, think they can start talking English. Every time Christian Slater calls me ‘mate’ I’m filled with a sudden desire to shave his face off with a cheese knife. Americans cannot say ‘mate’ any more than Germans can say ‘squirrel’.

And it’s even worse when they stop using the word ‘pounds’ and, in a Californian drawl, say ‘quid’. I’m told – and you should be aware of this – that we sound similarly idiotic when, in America, we use ‘bucks’ instead of ‘dollars’.

It must be particularly difficult for foreigners if they are ever exposed to British advertising, because here we find all sorts of words that work well in a commercial break but nowhere else. ‘Tasty’, for example. Or ‘nourishing’. Or my least favourite: ‘refreshing’.

My point this morning is that English is indeed a very hard language to master.

It’s full of nuances and subtleties that take a lifetime to understand. But, and this is important, it does mean that for people who were born and raised here there is never an excuse for getting it wrong. Our wonderful mother tongue is always able to produce the ‘bon mot’.

So why, then, is official Britain so monochromatic? Why do the police close roads because of an ‘incident’? Why is every fight, from a pub brawl to a fully fledged riot, a ‘disturbance’? And why is the shipping forecast so bland? Why instead of ‘stormy’ don’t they say the sea’s ‘a frothing maelstrom of terror and hopelessness’?

And most important of all, why can’t doctors be a bit more elaborate with their choice of words when describing the condition of a patient?

Last week, for instance, we heard about a young chap who had been using his mobile phone on the third storey of an office block when the lift doors opened. Without looking, he stepped through the gap only to find the lift wasn’t actually there.

In the resultant fall he broke his back in two places, punctured a lung and snapped several ribs. But even so, doctors later described his condition as ‘comfortable’.

Now look. Someone lying on a squidgy daybed under the whispery shade of a Caribbean palm tree is ‘comfortable’. Someone lying in an NHS hospital with a broken back and a shattered rib poking through one of his lungs just isn’t.

‘Crumpled’ would have been better. As would ‘miserable’, ‘broken’, or ‘cross’. They could even have said: ‘Well, he won’t be playing on his Wii console for a while.’ Even my Russian friend could have come up with something better than ‘comfortable’.

He’d have said ‘the lad’s a bit bent’. And it would have taken about two years to explain why that’s wrong as well.

Sunday 17 December 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

I didn’t drop the dead donkey

I’m finding it rather difficult to get into the spirit of Christmas this year, because Geoffrey, one of my much-loved donkeys, has just died.

Other than the fact he had a bit of a long face last Saturday afternoon – which is fairly normal – he seemed to be fine. But then on Sunday morning he was on his side in the bottom paddock, as dead as I don’t know what.

I always assumed that the expression ‘donkey’s years’ meant an unspecified, but very long time. However, it evidently means ‘eight years’. Because that’s all Geoff was when he smothered our Christmas preparations with a big sad blanket and went off to that great nativity scene in the sky.

There was, as you can imagine, a great deal of wailing from the children and, if I’m honest, a lump in my throat too. I liked Geoff. He was, as I said in this column only very recently, a straightforward antidote to the silly media world in which I live. Put simply, he had absolutely nothing in common with Janet Street-Porter. Apart from the teeth, obviously.

Anyway, after an hour or two we’d all dried our eyes and were trying to bring some normality to our shattered Sunday. Except, of course, it wasn’t normal, because right in the middle of the bottom paddock was a dead donkey. And what are you supposed to do about that?

Recently, I told you about the problems I had with a dead seal that washed up on the beach outside our holiday cottage. Getting rid of that took several gallons of petrol, a tractor, a strong stomach and, eventually, quite a lot of explosive. But we weren’t dealing with a seal here. We were dealing with Geoff, and I’m sorry, blowing his body to pieces simply wasn’t an option.

Bury him? ‘Fraid not. You aren’t allowed to bury a donkey because someone has decided that his rotting carcass will poison the water table.

So, the knackers’ yard, then? Well, yes, but this would cost £250 and anyway, when we explained that Geoff would come out on the other side as two tubs of Evo-Stick and a few tins of Kennomeat, the children started crying again.

Happily, I was told by friends that it’s possible these days to have your horse or donkey cremated and, at face value, this seemed to be the best and most dignified course of action.

But despite the solemn promises made by these companies that your pet will be incinerated with respect, and that they’ll light a candle in their chapel of remembrance, and that you’ll get its ashes back in a mahogany sculpture of the animal itself, I’m afraid I was sceptical.

If I ran one of these places I’d tell the bereaved family that their animal had gone through the curtains to the accompaniment of Robbie Williams singing ‘Angels’.

And then after I’d got their cheque I’d give them a box full of whatever I could find in the vacuum-cleaner bag.

I spoke to one girl who’d got half her dead horse back in a box not much smaller than a garden shed. Apparently, the burners hadn’t been able to cremate him properly so they’d thrown half the skeleton away and finished the job with hammers.

I decided that Geoffrey would not be going this way and, anyway, my chief concern as the afternoon wore on was that he’d been murdered. No, really. What if yobs had shot him with an air rifle? I became so obsessed with the notion that by the evening I was making up ‘reward’ posters and cleaning my shotgun.

My wife, more worried that he’d caught some terrible equine disease that he might have passed on to her horses, decided that before I started running round the town shooting anyone in a baseball cap, it’d be best to call the vet and ask for a post-mortem.

Unfortunately, when we explained what that was to the children their crying became what is known among psychiatrists as hysteria. ‘They’re going to chop Geoffrey up in our field,’ they wailed.

Plainly, he had to be towed to a quiet spot, but I know from my experience with the seal that dead animals tend to come apart when they’re being dragged. So we had to borrow a forklift and, afterwards, the vet discovered that he’d had a heart attack.

That was a relief but we still had a dead donkey in the garden. Actually, don’t tell my children, but we had two halves of a dead donkey in the garden.

In the end we told the children that Geoff was going to a taxidermist so he could be stuffed and used in school nativity plays – neat, eh? – and then we called a local underground movement known simply as ‘The Hunt’.

Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the Heythrop.

They arrived in a souped-up black van, we put both of Geoffrey in the back and I gave them a hundred quid to take him away. Today, I suspect, he’s in their hounds, which when no one’s looking will use Geoff’s energy to kill foxes, so that they can’t attack and maim our children.

On that happy note I’d like to wish all of you a very happy Christmas, especially my editor who rang last week to ask if I’d write a column about Christmas shopping. He actually used the line, ‘Can you drop the dead donkey?’ Priceless.

Sunday 24 December 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

Let’s all stay with Lord Manilow

When choosing a holiday destination, Ilisten to friends, examine data from the Met Office and think hard about where the nearest paparazzi photographer might be. What I don’t do is thumb through my record collection, pick out my favourite, and rent the lead singer’s villa. You probably know where I’m going with this: the extraordinary holiday locations chosen by Mr and Mrs Blair.

Recently, it has been Sir Cliff’s sumptuous villa in glittering Barbados and now, thanks to a wonky landing at Miami airport, we know he’s staying at a waterfront mansion owned by Field Marshal Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees.

Of course, I doubt either of these choices came from His Tonyness.

Having been to a public school in the 1970s, I should imagine his preferred choice of holiday location might be the Dutch canalside house of Thijs van Leer of Focus, or maybe the organic bean farm now run by Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson.

Unfortunately, most of the rock stars to whom Tony undoubtedly listened in the 1970s are now tweedy landowners in Wiltshire who like to shoot anything that moves and drive very fast from grouse to grouse in Range Rovers. I can see them in their delightful Tuscan villas discussing the Boden catalogue with Dave and Sam, but I can’t imagine that they have much in common with Tony and Cherie.

So, we can deduce that they’re actually working their way through Cherie’s record collection. Next year, I imagine, it’ll be Lord Manilow’s penthouse in Vegas and then, perhaps, General James Last’s schloss in the Bavarian Alps.

I’m actually rather surprised by this. I’ve always had Tony clocked as Snowball, and Cherie as Napoleon, a steady hard-a-port hand on the tiller. So I’ve rather imagined that her musical tastes started at Billy Bragg, moved through Kirsty McColl and then sort of ended up with the Pogues.

Plainly, though, I’m wrong. She obviously goes down the middle of the road so firmly that I’m surprised she doesn’t have a bruised arse from running over all the Catseyes.

Anyway, a bit later than planned, I shall now get to the point of this new year missive: that you can learn an awful lot about someone from their choice of holiday destination.

In the past couple of years I’ve been to Corsica, Iceland and Botswana. Next year it’ll be Canada. So you know from this list that we’re not an entirely conventional family and that, as a result, we’d make good dinner-party guests.

Likewise, if you meet someone who’s been to Ibiza you will know straight away that they are drug addicts and nymphomaniacs, and that if they’ve just come back from the Greek islands they are either homosexual or their husband has recently run off with his pneumatically breasted secretary.

Anyone who goes to France votes Conservative. Anyone who goes to Italy votes Labour, and anyone who goes to Spain has, at some point in the recent past, held up a post office. The only person who ever went to Germany for a vacation was Arthur Scargill.

Those who go on long-haul holidays can be split into two neat groups. If they go west they are likely to be shallow, materialistic and fitted with hair that isn’t entirely normal. Those who go east will be interesting, dynamic and have unruly pubes.

Dubai is right out. It’s all very well having an indoor ski slope in the desert and guaranteed sunshine and lots of things to do in the empty quarter, but you cannot drink outside your hotel. And I’m sorry, but anyone who puts quad-biking and wadi-bashing above the need for a glass of something chilled is plainly out of their tiny minds.

So what about taking a holiday at home? Tricky this, because obviously Rock is tremendous if you’re 19 and you’re being propelled through life by a cocktail of testosterone and cannabis. And Norfolk is also wonderful if you have developed a television programme and you want to meet commissioning editors in the local oyster bar.

But the worry I have about people who go on holiday in Britain is that they might be caravanists or, worse, environmentalists. They might think, in other words, that by not going on an aeroplane they have in some way saved the life of a Tasmanian butterfly.

Happily, however, Napoleon and Snowball have rather blown this argument into the middle of next week by going to stay chez Lord Sir Field Marshal Gibb.

We know from the plane crash that they did not go to Florida on an organic sailing boat, and we know from the press coverage that they are being transported to and from the Big Pink restaurant in a big black Cadillac SUV.

His Tonyness has told us again and again that man’s effect on the environment, and in particular on climate change, is large and growing. He’s asked us to reduce our carbon footprints. And so, while we’re all at home eating our low-energy light bulbs, it’s a bit annoying to find that to satisfy his wife’s lust for the Bee Gees he’s straddling the Atlantic with a big carbon stomp.

In the olden days Labour leaders were more careful. Harold Wilson holidayed in the Isles of Scilly, Michael Foot liked Venice and John Smith would go walking in Scotland. Not because he wanted to meet Sheena Easton but because he liked the mountains.

Of course, back then, all the animals were equal. But now, thanks to Napoleon and Snowball, some really are more equal than others.

Sunday 31 December 2006

For Crying Out Loud!

Brought down by bouncing bangers

Last week Britain severed its last tie with the 1950s. The monarchy has modernised itself. Homosexuality is now desirable. And Dave doesn’t wear a tie.

But, until now, we’ve never been able to completely free ourselves from our grimy, black-and-white, music-hall past, thanks to the umbilical cord that is Little Chef.

Little Chef seemed to exist in a world of post-war catering, where the banana was considered exotic and nylon tights were decadent and risque. The coffee was brown, simply because the main ingredient was mud. But now you can rejoice because last week it went into administration. And now it’s been sold.

According to press reports, 20 million people a year visited Little Chef’s chain of restaurants. I bet they did. They’d walk in, think they’d gone through some kind of time portal and that Tommy Trinder might leap out of the next booth, and then they’d not so much walk straight out again as flee.

I know a very great deal about Little Chef and its picture-book menus because its restaurants were always a handy main-road rendezvous point when I had to meet film crews in the back end of beyond. The only thing I ever found to eat in there was the sugar.

Even film crews, who are known throughout the civilised world for their capacity to eat absolutely anything, up to and including wheelie bins and manure, would draw the line at the Little Chef all-day breakfast.

There was a letter in the Sun last week from a woman who plainly shares their views. She ordered an omelette and was told they hadn’t come in that morning. Apparently, they were delivered frozen and then simply heated up.

It’s lucky she didn’t go for a Little Chef sausage or she’d still be in there, wondering what on earth they’d made it from. Mashed-up tennis balls probably, because, and I’ve tried this, the Little Chef sausage is the only sausage in the world which, when thrown to the floor, will bounce.

Then there’s Little Chef’s ‘traditional’ fish’n’chips. No no no no no. You look at it on your plate and you think: ‘Jesus H. Christ, did a cod really give up its life to end up here?’ And then you put it in your mouth and you think: ‘No, it didn’t. I don’t know what this is but it sure as hell isn’t a fish.’

To me, it tasted like a dishcloth.

Sometimes, my wife would have the salad which, this being !953, was a bit of lettuce and some tomato. Celery, in the world of Little Chef, was a bit too la-di-da. And eggs in their time zone were, of course, powdered.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine that you could go too far wrong with lettuce and tomatoes.

Oh yes you can. Especially if you select only the oldest lettuces that have been left in the sun for too long, and tomatoes which have that squishy ‘Best before the Boer war’ texture.

What were the management thinking? They must have known that all over Britain people would get up in a morning, have some espresso from their zinc kitchen appliances, then drive out of their towns, past the internet cafes and the Bang & Olufsen centres, while listening to some RnB on their MP3 interfaces.

So what made the bosses think that these cool, funky, twenty-first-century people would get 30 miles down the road and think: ‘Ooh, what I fancy for elevenses is a taste of the 1950s’?

It’s only 15 months since Little Chef last changed hands. It was bought by what was called ‘the People’s Restaurant Group’.

One of the backers was a chap who’d been on the Gumball Rally, sold surfer gear to dudes, and helped fund Cafe Rouge. A modern sort of guy, you might imagine.

But what did they do with Little Chef? The worst thing. They slashed the prices so that customers could enjoy a traditional fishcloth’n’chips, plus a mug of tea, for £4.99.

Do the maths. How much for staff costs, for heating, for rent and rates? How much for the tea, the water, the milk, the sugar, the potatoes, the peas and the batter? Now deduct the profit margins and you’re left with the inescapable conclusion that somehow he was buying each fish for a unit of currency so small that it doesn’t exist. It was ration-book catering for the Jamie Oliver generation.

John Major probably gave them hope. Famously, the former prime minister admitted once that he liked Little Chef. But of course he would, because John wanted to go back to basics.

In his 1993 speech, he urged us all to gather round the Light Programme every night, and have side partings. This was a man who thought that putting Currie in his mouth was dangerous and exciting.

But, as we now know, he was out of step, and the administrators had to be summoned. So what should the new owners do to jazz the place up?

Well, all of us fancy the idea of a proper fry-up, so why not simply take the Little Chef formula and do it like the war is over. Get your eggs from the back of a hen, use bread that doesn’t contain any Crimplene, and serve sausages that are made from dead pigs.

You will also need someone to cook it, rather than heat it up. Get a Bulgarian and don’t worry about the cost. People have come in a car. They can afford it.

In essence, don’t make a trip to Nottingham a trip back in time.

Sunday 7 January 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

TV heaven is an upside-down skier

With the demise of Dibley’s vicar, home-grown comedy continues its downward spiral, and now, to compound the problem, they’ve neutered the funniest programme ever shown on British television: Ski Sunday.

I like skiing very much. And the thing I’ve always liked most of all about it is flopping into an armchair and watching other people do it for me.

Ski Sunday was always the highlight of my viewing week. In the olden days you had David Vine in the commentary booth, talking us through the brilliance of some tanned and muscular young man from Norway.

You’d marvel at how he made it look so easy, his skintight suit revealing every sinewy twitch and, according to my wife, whether he was a cavalier or a roundhead.

But let’s be honest, all of us, really, were waiting for the falls.

Oh sweet Jesus. The falls. They were the best accidents a man can have without actually exploding, and they always went on for hours, a tangle of flesh and ego bouncing down the mountain until it crashed into the crowd in a technicolour explosion of joy, Gore-Tex and snow.

And better still, you knew that after the paramedics had collected all of the limbs and hosed most of the blood off the piste, you were going to get it all over again in super-voyeur slow motion. And it would all be set to David Vine’s completely humourless commentary, which somehow made it funnier still.

We watch the Horse of the Year Show for the same reason. Not because we want to see Sanyo Music Centre score a clean round but because we hope it will brake suddenly, sending Harvey Smith through the fence in an ear-splitting jangle of splintered wood and bone.

Bernie Ecclestone probably thinks we watch Formula One because we want to see Michael Schumacher’s supreme car control. Wrong. If he wants the big viewing figures back he must arrange that in every race some floppy-haired Brazilian playboy disintegrates.

Skiing, however, has always been the best because the contestants are going so fast, and they are protected from the forces of nature by nothing more substantial than a big Durex. We could actually see their arms coming off.

So, a single half-hour of Ski Sunday provided more naked laughs than a million crying babies falling in paddling pools on You’ve Been Framed.

Nowadays, however, the show is presented by two greasy-haired dudes who I suspect may be snowboardists.

Now snowboarding, so far as I’m able to determine, is a sport where you dress up in clothes from the Dawn French Baggy Collection and then ingest as much cannabis as possible. The last man still making sense is the winner. This is not great TV.

Mind you, in last weekend’s episode of Ski Sunday, we were treated to the edifying spectacle of one young chap from America who spent an age plugging an iPod into his ears and selecting the right track before setting off. Much to my intense pleasure, he fell over almost immediately.

Amazingly, the commentary team didn’t seem to realise that any sport where the participants wear iPods doesn’t really cut the mustard. So instead of pointing out that the competitor was an imbecile, we cut straight to a link where one of the presenters was addressing us while skiing backwards through a forest.

I can’t tell you what he was on about because, like absolutely every one of the show’s viewers, I was on my knees, praying to God that he’d slither backwards into a tree. More than a long life full of health and happiness, I wanted to see him try to finish the piece to camera with half a fir tree poking out of his bottom.

This is the whole point of skiing. We don’t flog to the Alps every winter simply because we like the mountain views, or because we want to perfect the stem christie. Mainly, we go because we know that snow’s slippery, and that there’s a good chance we’ll see someone fall over.

Why do you think YouTube is so popular? Because of the irony, or the subtle use of hyperbole in a situation that’s both morally uplifting and tragic? No. It’s banana-skin humour: a million billion clips of people falling off bicycles, and as often as not catching fire.

The Office and Alan Partridge were both brilliantly written. My respect for Gervais and Coogan is boundless. But did you ever laugh while watching Dave Brent? I doubt it. Not like you laugh when someone comes a cropper on Deal or No Deal, or trips over a paving stone in the town centre and falls flat on his face.

This is what the Ski Sunday team seem to have forgotten. They showed us how much flare should be in evidence in our skiing pants, and how the glove should be worn in relation to the cuff. And all the time, I kept thinking: ‘Oh for God’s sake. Show me a Norwegian falling over.’

Instead, we got a whole segment on snowboarding, and that won’t do. There’s nothing unusual in a stoned Finn getting all wobbly, because that’s what people do when they’ve had a spliff. And my wife doesn’t like the big clothes because, she says, she can’t see their tackle.

The whole point of Ski Sunday is to take the ludicrous art of skiing and present it in a sensible fashion. It’s the juxtaposition of the sane and the insane that works. Someone falling over is brilliant. Someone falling over and then pretending they meant it to happen: that’s comedy gold.

Sunday 14 January 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

No pain no gain (and no point)

On the surface, the human being appears to be a flawed design. Obviously, our brains are magnificent and our thumbs enable us to use spanners. Something an elephant, for instance, cannot do.

However, there seems to be something wrong with our stomachs. It doesn’t matter how many pints of refreshing beer we cram into them, they always want just one more roast potato. And then, instead of ejecting all the excess fat, they feed it to our hearts and veins, and we end up all dead.

Of course, we can use willpower to counter these demands, but this makes us dull and pointless. You need only look at the number of people in lonely-hearts columns who neither drink nor smoke to know I’m right. If they did, they’d have a husband. It’s that simple.

What I tend to do when it comes to the business of being fit is not bother. I eat lots, and then I sit in a chair. The upside to this is that I have a happy family and many friends. The downside is that I wobble and wheeze extensively while going to the fridge for another chicken drumstick.

Unfortunately, all this now has to stop because in April I’m going on an expedition. I can’t tell you where because it’s a secret but I can tell you that it’s full of many perils, such as being eaten. And that if it all goes wrong, I may have to walk many miles over the most difficult terrain you can imagine.

Last week, then, I was sent to a training camp, where the instructor, a former Royal Marine, simply could not fathom what unholy cocktail of lard and uselessness lay beneath my skin. The upshot was simple.

Unless I did something dramatic about my general level of fitness, I would not be going. So I bought a rowing machine.

It cost a very great deal of money and is bigger than a small van. Modelled, I presume, on something from the KGB’s cellars, you tie your feet to a couple of pedals and then move backwards and forwards until your shoulders are screaming so loudly that they are actually audible.

According to the digital readout – powered by my exertions, I might add – I had covered 35 yards. This was well short of the four kilometres I’d planned, so I had to grit my teeth and plough on.

Eventually, after several hours, I’d made enough electricity to power Glasgow and I’d reached my goal, so I tried to dismount. But it was no good. My magnificent brain was so stunned by what had just happened that it had lost control of my legs. I also felt dizzy and sick. Fondly, I also imagined that I had a tingling in my left arm and chest pains.

Part of the problem is that to go on my expedition, I must be six pounds overweight. This means losing a stone so I have been living on a diet of carrots and Coke Zero, which simply doesn’t provide enough calories to rock back and forth in my conservatory for half a day.

Actually, conservatory is the wrong word. I had produced so much sweat while moving about that, technically, it was a swimming pool.

Now one of the things I should explain at this point is that I am always hugely enthusiastic about new projects, but only for a very short time. If I was to get fit and thin, it needed to be done fast, before I lost interest, so once some feeling had returned to my legs, I went for a walk. And since then time has passed in a muddy blur of cycling, trudging, rowing and discovering that it’s uphill to my local town, and uphill on the way back as well.

This has made me dull, thick and, because there’s no beer or wine in my system at night, an even bigger insomniac. And all the while I have this sneaking suspicion that what I’m doing is biologically unhealthy.

Pain is designed to tell the body something is wrong and that you’d better do something fast to make it go away. So why would you get on a rowing machine and attempt to beat what God himself has put there as a warning? That’s like refusing to slow down when an overhead gantry on the motorway says ‘Fog’.

Today, then, my magnificent brain is questioning the whole philosophy of a fitness regime. If God had meant us to have a six-pack, why did he give us the six pack?

In the olden days, people had to run about to catch deer so they all had boy-band torsos and good teeth.

But now, we Darwin to work in a car. Trying to look like a twelfth-century African is as silly as a seal trying to regrow its legs.

No, really. The thing about evolution is that each step along the way has a point. Cows developed udders so they could be plugged into milking machines. And humans developed the remote-control television so they could spend more time sitting down.

Fitness fanatics should take a lead from nature. Nobody looks at water and suggests it would be more healthy if it spent 20 minutes a day trying to flow uphill and nobody suggests a lion could catch more wildebeest if it spent less of its day lounging around.

Plainly, then, our stomachs are designed to demand food and feed fat to our arteries for a reason. I don’t know what the reason might be but I suspect it may have something to do with global warming. Everything else does.

Sunday 21 January 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

The end is nigh, see it on YouTube

I have the most horrible feeling that the only possible conclusion to the problem of Muslim extremism – and I’m looking 30 or more years down the line here – is mass deportation and an all-new cold war between Mecca and Rome.

I am also fearful that unless we stop thinking of ways to prevent global warming, and start to address the problems it will cause when it gets here, our children are going to finish their days in an overcrowded, superheated vision of hell.

Where they can’t even get a cold drink, because all the corner shopkeepers have been made to go and live in Pakistan.

Unless, of course, America goes bust in the meantime… which it will. It is a mathematical certainty, unless George W. Bush announces, today, a tax hike for both individuals and companies of 69 per cent or he cuts federal spending to zero. Not just for a month or two. But for ever.

Since George Bush is unlikely to do either, the world’s biggest economy will collapse, which means we can’t rely on Uncle Sam when your neighbourhood mullah beats your daughter with a stick for not going to school in a tablecloth. Because it’s 47°C out there and getting hotter, and Jonathon Porritt won’t let you have air-conditioning.

Strangely, however, my biggest fear for the future of the planet and the well-being of our children is YouTube.

At present it is full, mostly, of young men falling off their bicycles and catching fire. But in addition to this you can log on if you wish to see next week’s episode of 24.

This means the producers of 24 have gone to all the trouble of making a show, and paying the actors, and getting all those phones to go ‘beep beep eeoooh’ and then finding that no television company in the world is all that bothered about screening it, because everyone’s seen it already on the web.

Naturally, the company that makes 24 – and I suppose I should point out that it’s Fox, which is part of News Corporation, the parent company of this newspaper – has started proceedings against YouTube.

Fine, you might think. YouTube will be forced to treat the copyright laws with a bit more respect and that will be that. Except it won’t. Because the internet’s like mercury, so as soon as it becomes impossible to post copyrighted material on YouTube, some other computer nerd in Bangladesh will, for an outlay of 35p, start a new video-sharing site. And you’ll be able to post it there.

This morning there are 921 Jeremy Clarkson clips on YouTube, for which, obviously, I receive not a penny. Of course I could sue them – and now they’re owned by Google I think I might – but then the 921 clips would simply appear on the new sharing site based in Bangladesh. And what’s the point of suing someone whose only assets are a laptop and a loincloth?

The upshot is that films, television shows, magazines, newspapers, songs, anything published or recorded, can be put on the internet. And the person who published it or recorded it doesn’t get any money. So what’s the point of publishing or recording anything?

Obviously, if Jonathon Porritt were to write a book, it would be jolly funny to buy the first copy and put it all online, so he ended up with a royalty cheque for 50p. But it’s not so funny if you are Jonathon Porritt.

At present, everyone is obsessed with the internet. Every large media company in the world is investing millions in their websites and not one, so far as I can tell, has even the remotest idea of how it can possibly generate any money.

A prime example is iTunes. It doesn’t. Apparently, Apple doesn’t make a penny from the music you download to your computer. But if you want to put that onto a portable device you have to buy an iPod, and they make lots of dosh from that.

It’s a brilliant wheeze, but now the Norwegian ombudsman has decided that Apple must make its loss-making music library available to anyone, no matter what sort of hardware they have. France and Germany are thinking of following suit. And if the rest of the world falls into line, that’s pretty much that for Apple.

It’s all a nonsense anyway, because there are countless sites out there in cyberspace where you can download music for nothing and then put it onto whatever sort of MP3 player takes your fancy.

Small wonder that last week Music Zone, a chain of Manchester-based record shops, went belly up. Who would buy a CD these days when with two or three clicks they can have it for nothing? That’s as idiotic as saving up for a BMW motorcycle when you live in Branscombe.

And it’s not just the media that are under threat. Why go to a doctor when there’s NHS Direct? Why have sex when there’s always some bird in Latvia who’s happy to get her knickers off? Why buy an encyclopaedia when there’s Wikipedia (apart from the fact that everything on Wikipedia is wrong)? Why go to Tesco when you can shop online? Estate agents. Property developers. Motorcycle dispatch riders. They’ve all had it.

The only people I can think of who won’t lose their jobs to the internet are those who empty cesspits. And nobody seems to have spotted this.

One day, of course, they will. The world will wake up and realise it’s unemployed; that we’ve all been terminated by machines. And please don’t try to argue that men will always triumph over machinery because we can always turn it off. Because that’s the thing with the internet. You can’t.

Sunday 28 January 2007

For Crying Out Loud!

Robbie and I know about pills

I wish to state from the outset that, mostly, I have no problem with people taking drugs. If you want to shovel a ton of coke up your nose before going to the Brits, that’s fine by me. Just so long as I don’t have to sit next to you.

In fact, I read last week that Robbie Williams has checked into rehab because he’s getting through a handful of happy pills, 36 espressos, 60 cigarettes and 20 Red Bulls every day, and I thought ‘Pussy’. If you substitute the happy pills for Nurofen, that’s my daily diet as well, and I’m fine. ‘Fine, d’you hear.’ Apart from the fainting.

However, I must say at this point that I intensely dislike all drugs that affect my ability to think properly. You see people in the garden at parties, hiding behind trees, claiming loudly that Jesus is out there too, and wants to eat them. And you think, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ And why are you now in the fridge, sprinkling frozen peas onto a sherry trifle?