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Authors: Jeremy Clarkson

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Born to Be Riled

BOOK: Born to Be Riled
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Born to be Riled
Book Jacket

PENGUIN BOOKS

Born to be Riled

Jeremy Clarkson began his writing career on the
Rotherham Advertiser
. Since then he has written for the
Sun
, the
Sunday Times
, the
Rochdale Observer
, the
Wolverhampton Express and Star
, all of the Associated Kent Newspapers, and
Lincolnshire Life
. Today he is the tallest person working in British television.

Jeremy Clarkson’s other books are
Clarkson’s Hot 100
,
Clarkson on Cars
,
Motorworld
,
Planet Dagenham
,
The World According to Clarkson
,
I Know You Got Soul
and
And Another Thing: The World According to Clarkson Volume 2

Born to be Riled

The collected writings of

JEREMY CLARKSON

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England
Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

www.penguin.com

First published by BBC Worldwide Limited 1999
Published in Penguin Books 2006
1

Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 1999
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 978–0–141–90134–3

This book is dedicated to –
all those people who have bought it.

Contents

Foreword

Norfolk, twinned with Norfolk

GT90 in a flat spin

Blackpool Rock

Gordon Gekko back in the driving seat

All aboard the veal calf express

Speedy Swede

Drink driving do-gooders are over the limit

Car of the Century

The Sunny sets

Who’s getting their noses in the trough?

Ferrari’s desert storm

Killjoys out culling

Flogging a sawn-off Cosworth

Weather retort

Burning your fingers on hot metal

Speeding towards a pact with the devil

Road rage – you know it makes sense

911 takes on Sega Rally

A laugh a minute with Schumacher in the Mustang

Girlpower

Nissan leads from the rear

Cable TVs and JCBs

Mystic Clarkson’s hopeless F1 predictions

Commercial cobblers

Struck down by a silver bullet in Detroit

You can’t park there – or there

Sermon on Sunday drivers

A riveting book about GM’s quality pussy

Aston Martin V8 – rocket-powered rhino

Caravans – A few liberal thoughts

Blind leading the blind: Clarkson feels the heat in Madras

Norfolk’s finest can’t hit the high notes

Car interiors in desperate need of some Handy Andy work

New MG is a maestro

Darth Blair against the rebel forces

Riviera riff-raff

Objectivity is a fine thing unless the objective is to be first

Kids in cars

Brummie cuisine is not very good

Last bus to Clarksonville

Land of the Brave, Home of the Dim

Only tyrants build good cars

The principality of toilets

Clarkson the rentboy finally picks up a Ferrari

Hate mail and wheeler-dealers

No room for dreamers in the GT40

A rolling Moss gathers up Clarkson

Can’t sleep? Look at a Camry

Big foot down for a ten gallon blat

Car chase in cuckoo-land

Frost-bite and cocktail sausages up the nose

Bursting bladders on Boxing Day

Lies, damn lies and statistics

Radio Ga Ga

Spooked by a Polish spectre

Boxster on the ropes

Concept or reality?

Top Landing Gear – Clarkson in full flight

A fast car is the only life assurance

Rav4 lacks Kiwi polish

Cuddle the cat and battle the Boche

Secret crash testing revealed

Diesel man on the couch

Stuck on the charisma bypass

Travel tips with Jezza Chalmers

Capsized in Capri

Noel’s Le Mans party blows a fuse

The Skyline’s the limit for gameboys on steroids

Henry Ford in stockings and suspenders

NSX – the invisible supercar

Corvette lacks the Right Stuff

Footballers check in to Room 101

Big fun at Top Gun

Traction control loses grip on reality

Driving at the limit

Global Posting systems

Fight for your right to party

Gravy train hits the old buffers

Weird world of Saab Man

Freemasons need coning off

The curse of the Swedish smogasbord

Pin-prick for the Welsh windbag

Showdown at the G6 summit

Spelling out the danger from Brussels

Dog’s dinner from Korea

New Labour, new Jezza

Sad old Surrey

A frightening discovery

Hannibal Hector the Vector

F1 running rings round the viewers

Big cat needs its tummy tickled

Elk test makes monkeys of us

At the core of the Cuore

Last 911 is full of hot air

False economies of scale

Blowing the whistle on Ford and Vauxhall

Hell below decks – Clarkson puts das boot in

Country Life

Beetle mania

Football is an A Class drug

Yank tank flattens Prestbury

Supercar suicide

Bedtime stories with Hans Christian Prescott

Clarkson soils his jeans

Burning rubber with Tara Palmer-Tailslide

Jag sinks its teeth in

Kraut carnage in an Arnage

Absorbing the shock of European Union

Minicabs: the full monty

Supercar crash in Stock Exchange

The school run

Voyage to the bottom of the heap

Van the Man

‘What I actually meant was…’

Mrs Clarkson runs off with a German

Un-cool Britannia

Move over Maureen

Toyota gets its just deserts

Kristin Scott Thomas in bed with the Highway Code

Time to change Gear

Even soya implants can’t make a great car

Lock up your Jags, the Germans are coming

Well carved up by the kindergarten coupé

Fruit or poison?

Left speechless by the car that cuddled me

One car the god of design wants to forget

Can a people carrier be a real car? Can it hell

Hell is the overtaking lane in a 1-litre

Forty motors and buttock fans

Audi’s finest motor just can’t make up its mind

Keep the sports car, drive the price tag

Out of the snake pit, a car with real venom

The Swiss army motor with blunted blades

Perfection is no match for Brian and his shed

Waging war with the motoring rule book

Evo’s a vulgar girl, but I love her little sister

At last, a car even I can’t put in a ditch

Trendy cars? They’re not really my bag

Why life on the open road is a real stinker

Cotswold villages and baby seals

Shopping for a car? Just ask Rod Stewart

Gruesome revenge of the beast I tried to kill

Out of control on the political motorway

Old sex machine still beats young fatboy

Whatever happened to the lame ducks?

Bikers are going right round the bend – slowly

Freedom is the right to live fast and die young

A shooting star that takes you to heaven

Congratulations to the Cliff Richard of cars

David Beckham? More like Dave from Peckham

A prancing horse with a double chin

£54,000 for a Honda? That’s out of this world

It’s Mika Hakkinen in a Marks & Spencer suit

Like classic literature, it’s slow and dreary

Prescott’s preposterous bus fixation

Take your filthy, dirty hands off that Alfa

Yes, you can cringe in comfort in a Rover 75

Don’t you hate it when everything works?

The kind of pressure we can do without

Three points and prime time TV

Every small boy needs to dream of hot stuff

Footless and fancy-free? Then buy a Fiat Punto

Now my career has really started to slide

The best £100,000 you’ll ever waste

Styled by Morphy Richards

The terrifying thrill of driving with dinosaurs

Perfect camouflage for Birmingham by night

Another good reason to keep out of London

My favourite cars

Need a winter sun break? Buy a Bora

Driving fast on borrowed time

I’ve seen the future and it looks a mess

Nice motor; shame it can’t turn corners

Stop! All this racket is doing my head in

Looks don’t matter; it’s winning that counts

It’s a simple choice: get a life, or get a diesel

Insecure server?

Ahoy, shipmates, that’s a cheap car ahead

So modern it’s been left behind already

Something to shout about

Appendix

Foreword

As a motoring journalist, you spend much of your life on exotic car launches, feeding from the bottomless pit of automotive corporate hospitality. And then you come home to tailor a story that perfectly meets the needs of the public relations department that funded it. For sure, you dislike the new ‘xyz’ but what the hell. Say it’s fabulous and you’re sure to be invited on the next exotic press launch. And so what if some poor sucker reads what you say and buys this hateful car? You’re never going to meet him because by then, you’ll be on another press launch, in Africa maybe, trying out the ‘zxy’.

I used to live like this, and it was great. But sadly, when I climbed into
Top Gear
, I had to climb off the gravy train. This is because, all of a sudden, people in petrol station forecourts and in supermarket checkout queues started to recognise me. These people had bought a car because I’d said they’d like it. And they didn’t like it because it kept breaking down. So now, they were going to fill my trousers with four star. And set me alight.

I learned, therefore, pretty quickly that the single most important feature of motoring journalism - or any kind of journalism for that matter - is speaking your mind. You mustn’t become Orville with a PR man’s hand up your bottom. I know that over the years, these columns from the
Sunday Times
and
Top Gear
magazine have caused PR men to choke on their canteen coffee, and that makes me happy. I have been banned from driving Toyotas, I’ve had death threats, and my postman once had to deliver letters from what seemed like the entire population of
Luton. But at least I can sit back now and know that every single opinion on these pages was mine. I just borrowed a car, and told you what I thought. No sauce. No PR garnish.

BOOK: Born to Be Riled
7.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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