Born to Be Riled (35 page)

OK. Got all that? Well it gets worse because the service, I’m afraid, has to be free. You see, Mr Prescott has said it’s all right for me to have a car but that I must leave it at home more often. Fine, but I’ll have paid for it and road tax is applicable no matter how infrequently I use it. I therefore can’t afford to spend even
more
money on a bus fare.

To address this, the White Paper says that I will have to pay to use motorways and that I will be charged if I drive into a city centre. I see, and how will this be done then?

Will there be toll booths on every single road into London, all 10,000 of them? Or will I be forced to fit my car with an electronic device that can be read by roadside monitors? And if so, who will pay for this device to be fitted?

Sadly, the White Paper fails to explain this, in the same way that Enid Blyton fails to explain how Noddy, a wooden puppet, manages to converse with an elephant.

Undaunted, Mr Prescott goes on to say that by charging tolls to use roads, and taxing car-parking spaces, super-efficient, dream-world local authorities will be able to raise a billion pounds a year. They won’t lose it. They won’t waste it on twinning ceremonies. They’ll spend it on public transport.

Oh dear. I’m afraid that in Mr Prescott’s world, where everyone drinks Ovaltine and Jenny Agutter is 13, a billion pounds is a lot of money. But in fact a new double-decker costs £130,000, and as a result a billion won’t even buy
one
for each town in the country.

The chances therefore, of getting a service from Castor to Chipping Norton 30 times a day are somewhat remote.

But that’s not the end of the world. You see, if car travel were as bad as everyone says, no one would do it. And things are going to get better and better.

Already, we have the same number of cars on the roads as we do people with driving licences. So unless we perfect the art of driving two cars at once, the projected 30 per cent increase in traffic volume just can’t happen. In fact, as people start to work at home more often, it’ll probably decrease slightly.

I do, however, think that Mr Prescott’s White Paper has a place. If it were illustrated with attractive drawings, it might even supersede ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ as my daughter’s favourite night-time story.

It was announced this week that the market for jeans has suffered a dramatic fall, and that I am completely responsible.

Marketing experts at the
Daily Mail
say that because of my fondness for the denim trouser, youngsters now see jeans as old people’s clothing, and as a result, won’t buy them. This has been christened the ‘Jeremy Clarkson Effect’.

Wow. My very own effect. You can forget knighthoods and OBEs. They’re for people. I’m to be talked about with the reverence of a star or a moon. I’m a galactic guiding light and I’m going to be very, very rich.

You see, the British jeans market shrank from £609.5 million in 1996/7 to a paltry £561.2 million in 1997/8. That’s a fall of 14.3 per cent, and I don’t doubt for one minute that the people at Levi’s and Lee are desperate.

Well chaps, I have a solution. Pay me £40 million a year and I’ll stop wearing them.

But what shall I wear instead? I can’t possibly switch to trousers. Trousers are what you needed to wear to get into northern nightclubs, aged 18. Trousers are what you bought at Harry Fenton in the Arndale Centre. My father wore trousers. Jim Callaghan wore trousers.

I wore jeans in 1976 because there was no real choice. Oh sure, Levi’s did a range of corduroys in rebellious, lurid colours and I once sent away to a company that advertised in the back of
New Musical Express
for a pair of velvet loons. But while bulldozing myself into them they burst, and that was that.

You must understand that I was brought up under the ‘David Dundas Effect’. I told my careers master that I didn’t care what I did after leaving school, so long as I didn’t have to wear a suit. And to this day, I still don’t own one.

My father used to sit at the kitchen table in his slacks telling me that by trying to be different I had ended up looking the same as everyone else. As far as he was concerned Led Zep sounded just the same as Rick Wakeman and jeans were jeans.

But jeans, most emphatically, were not
just
jeans. You would not, for instance, be seen dead in a pair of Wranglers. Wranglers were too dark and even after two years they still felt and looked too stiff. I once chucked a girlfriend when she came out at night with a brace of Ws on her backside.

Wranglers were for people who liked country-and-western music, so back then I wore Levi’s with the forward tip of the flare hanging
exactly
a quarter of an inch over the platform sole of my shoe. And then, when I was first introduced to The Clash, I switched to straight-leg C17s from France.

And today, the badge is still important. Today, I see Levi’s as a bit too Toto, a bit too middle-of-the-road American soft rock. I therefore wear British Lee Coopers and I can still spot M & S denim at 1000 paces.

Furthermore, I am not alone. Andy Wilman, my producer and co-presenter on
Top Gear Waterworld,
once trod in some human excrement while walking through an unlit Calcutta backstreet. As we sat over dinner in the Fairlawn Hotel he examined the splashes of faeces exclaiming, ‘Well this is a bird-puller.’

Back at our hotel he deposited them in the laundry and was horrified, when they came back, to discover that the Indians had ironed a crease down the front. And of course, once a crease has been ironed in, that telltale faded line never goes away. So he threw them in the bin.

So, let’s just sum up here. He was prepared to keep them after they’d been bathed in shit, but once they’d been stained with the indelible mark of a man who lives at home and lets his mother do the ironing they had to be binned. I understand that completely.

And I was therefore horrified to be accused in the
Independent
this week of wearing ‘nasty, really nasty, stone-washed jeans’. I have never, and will never, wear stone-washed anything. Thank Christ it was the
Independent
so no one will have read this astonishing and libellous slur.

But the point has been made all week. Jeans are for old men. Ian McShane is 55. Tony Blair is 44 and I’m 38. We wear jeans and we listen to original Doobie Brothers tunes in the car, not the jungle remix versions. And it’s all our fault that denim sales are in freefall. The moon does the tides. The sun does the central heating. And I do for Levi Strauss.

But sadly, this isn’t entirely accurate. The real reason why today’s
poulets de printemps
are not buying jeans is because they have a choice which extends beyond the impractical loon.

Today, you don’t
have
to look like Roger Daltrey. You can, if you wish, decide to model yourself on a 19-year-old negro from the east wing of an American jail. Seriously, they’re not allowed to have belts in Yank clink and, as a result, wear their trousers so low on the hip that their underwear is on plain view.

Upon their release they continue to dress in this fashion, to show they’ve been in jail and thus get some respect. And as a result, everyone now shows off the elastic of their underwear as a means of demonstrating some wayward past.

Last year, in Texas, I met a chap who had the low rider strides but no underpants. You could see the top of his penis, and I must confess I found this rather shocking. But that, I suppose, is the point.

At agreeable dinner parties round these parts, we sit around pompously wondering how on earth our children will shock us with their behaviour. We know all about drugs and we’ve all staggered from sweaty dives at four in the morning with perforated eardrums. I’ve even been in the cells. Twice.

But come on. We never had ecstasy or alcopops. My father used to listen to ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ with his fingers in his ears, telling me over and over that it was just tuneless noise. Which is pretty much how I react when
Top of the Pops
comes on these days. Modern music is supposed to scare the old. Yes it used to scare my Mum in the same way that I’m frightened half to death these days by rap artistes advising their fans to kill a pig.

Then there’s television. We had
Tiswas,
where people threw custard pies at one another and Sally James wore a tank top. Now we’ve got
TFI Friday
and stuff on late at night that I really, really don’t understand.

So of course jeans sales are falling. I bet Rick Wakeman doesn’t shift many CDs either. Times move on.

And in terms of fashion, they’ve moved on to combat trousers. The original supply of army surplus clothing dried up years ago, so today the big names in fashion are
offering a trouser with baggy side pockets and an infantry cut. If Tony Blair really does want to be seen as a man of the people this is what he needs – a pair of Gap cargo pants, as I believe they’re called.

And the jeans people have to stop worrying. They’ve been at the top for nigh on 30 years and now The Verve and Oasis have kicked them into touch. They need to accept that the denim trouser is no longer at the cutting edge of rebellion and is now acceptable in all but the most stuffy clubs and restaurants.

I’m sorry to bring cars into the equation here but the denim industry would be well advised to talk to Honda, whose cars appeal largely to the older, more mature driver. What’s wrong with that? What’s the point of spending a fortune making something fashionable and cool when it just isn’t. And anyway the old outnumber the young. It’s a bigger market with more spending power.

Jeans, you see, will never go away. On Tuesday night I wore a pair at dinner in some desperately flash German hotel in Baden-Baden and the next day I was scrabbling around in them on an oily conveyor belt at Heathrow. You can’t do both in any other sort of trouser.

If you want to arrive at the Pearly Gates in soggy pants, you don’t need to have died at the hands of a firing squad – just try climbing into a car with Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. I’ve been in an F-15 and I’ve done 0 to 60 in one second on a snowmobile. Next week, I shall land on
an aircraft carrier and a day later, strapped into an F-14, I shall take off again. I know, understand and can cope with fear.

But I lost control completely after half an hour in a car with Tara. The bladder went, and round the back, I was touching cloth. That woman is easily the maddest driver the world has ever seen. I wasn’t scared to start with; it was the tail end of the rush hour, we were in the middle of London and it was raining. So even though she was using a Honda NSX, which we know to be tail-happy and skittish, I felt we’d spend most of the time doing 3mph. But no. On Chelsea Bridge, she put her foot down hard in first gear and I felt the back starting to weave, the power straining the very upper echelons of the traction control’s restraining bolt. Then we were into second, foot still hard down, heading for what was unquestionably a set of red lights. The next time I opened my eyes we were heading up Sloane Street at Mach one… and then we weren’t. There was a squeal accompanied by a full-bore test of the NSX’s anti-lock braking system. ‘Gucci’s got a new window display,’ she wailed.

During the next 26 minutes we’d stop at red lights and, on each occasion, the driver alongside was scrutinized. If he was good-looking, there was some flirting then a race. If he was ugly, she’d skip straight to the race. And she never lost. Throughout London that night a trail of BMWs and Porsches were left dazed and confused at the side of the road, their drivers emerging from the tangled mess asking passers-by, quietly, for hot sweet tea. They looked like they’d been victims of a tornado, and in a sense, they had. They’d been TP-T-ed.

Now earlier in the day, I’d talked to various girls who
have finally realized that there’s no point spending a fortune on clothes and hairstyles if they are going to go out at night in a crappy car. So Katy Hill from
Blue Peter
has a Porsche Boxster. Emma Noble has an MGF (while boyfriend James Major has a corduroy Rover 200). Dani Behr has a BMW 328 convertible and Julia Bradbury, from something called Channel 5, has a Mercedes SLK. I shot the breeze with all of them about how these new sports cars are very definitely for the girlies, and how men today need to spend more if they want something macho. And all of them said that the biggest problem they faced on the roads was blokes trying to take them on. And that struck me as odd. I mean, I’m a bloke and I never, ever, feel the need to race a girl at the lights just because she’s a girl. I phoned all my male friends and they all said the same – we like a fit bird in a nice car. It looks good. I therefore suspect that it is not men who take on women. It is the other way round.

It’s like Kuwait. After the recent unpleasantness people there walk around with their chests puffed out, telling their neighbours in the north that they have all sorts of new hardware and will take them on any day. Iraq, on the other hand, can afford to sit there doing nothing, and it’s still frightening. Iraq is a past aggressor. Iraq is a man. And Iraq won’t ever attack Kuwait again. Men, in recent months, have also been strangled by sanctions.

Turn on the television and you’ll find
Playing the Field,
where a bunch of women bully their husbands, have affairs and play football. And then there’s
Real Women,
where the women are men and the men are hopeless. In both, sex scenes are all-woman affairs.

We’ve now got women jet pilots, women boxers and
women like Madeleine Albright and Mo Mowlam sorting out the world’s trouble spots; and in the charts Take That and Boyzone have been replaced by All Saints and the Spice Girls. I’m all for equality, but it does seem at the moment that the pendulum has swung rather too far in the other direction. So, if TP-T ever comes alongside me at the traffic lights she should be aware that I now have a supercharged V8 under the bonnet, that the Jag in question isn’t mine, and that I will win.

So, what’s been happening this week then? Well I’ve been to St Tropez for a little break, but as I rented a diesel-powered Citroen people-carrier it’s hard to think of a motoring angle.