Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (22 page)

For years, short people have blamed hereditary variations for their tragic disorder, but scientists announced last week that, actually, shortness is caused by missing genes and wonky DNA.

And since we know that, genetically speaking, human beings are extremely close to plants and animals, we can deduce that people such as Tom Hollander, star of the hit show
Rev
, Richard Hammond and Ronnie Corbett aren't actually people.

They may have arms and lungs but in fact they are shrubs.

I should imagine that if they are capable of thought they will be very troubled by this. Short people have enough on their plates without being told that they are subhuman. They can't see the action at football matches, they have a bad temper and they cannot play basketball very well. But, speaking as someone who has more genes than usual, and extremely strong DNA, can I just explain that being tall is even worse?

Tall people may be more civilized and cleverer than average but on a clothes-shopping expedition we get some idea of what life must have been like for a black person in South Africa during the time of apartheid. Especially if we are a bit fat as well.

We pick out a garment that we like and then we go through the piles to see if there is one in our size. And even if by some miracle there is an XL, it's still suitable only for a mouse. And now some makers are labelling their clothes XXXL, which I'm afraid is offensive.

How dare some anorexic Italian with his missing genes and his defective DNA call a fine human specimen such as me extra-extra-extra-large? I'm not.

Yes, I have long arms, but they are not so long that people point at me in the street and make baboon noises. However, despite this, shirtmakers, with the notable exception of Thomas Pink, have it in their heads that every single adult male in the world has arms like a T. Rex's.

It's the same story with shoes. If you are a girl and you have size 9 feet, which is not exactly going to get you a job in the circus, you will face a choice. Either you become a hippie and go about your business in bare feet, or you go to a shop that caters for transvestites.

I appreciate, of course, that people who make clothes need to earn money and they will achieve a higher turnover if they cater only for Mr and Mrs Average. But clothing is an international business, and in Holland – home to the tallest people on earth – I'd be the man in the middle. Whereas, in fact, I'm the man on his way to get a suit made to measure.

As you probably know, I am not a fan of the suit. It is fine for newsreaders, but I do not see why the world thinks you are being respectful just because your trousers match your jacket. It's idiotic. But the world does think this way and from time to time my jeans won't cut the mustard.

I have had a suit for some time but just recently I've noticed it has started to shrink. The trousers will no longer do up properly, and the jacket feels very tight. It must have been a fault in the manufacturing process. But, anyway, I decided a new one was in order.

Like all sensible beings, I wish to get my clothes shopping done as quickly as possible, but this is not allowed when you are having something tailored. First of all, the man in the shop will want to measure every single part of your body and
I'm afraid his tape measure is made by the people who make bathroom scales. I don't care what it says: I do not have a 38in waist. Just as I do not weigh 16 stone.

After you have been humiliated, and fondled, you will sit down with a book full of nothing but material. All of it is exactly the same. The tailor can do his best to tell you that some of the fabric is heavier, or warmer, but frankly you can pick one blindfold and it won't make a jot of difference. It'll be grey and fine.

At this point you will be asked to choose a lining and, while you know it doesn't matter, you will feel tempted to go for something a bit mad. You want to present an outward appearance of sober restraint, but you want to know that behind the façade of sobriety beats the heart of a Californian surfer. Lime green was my selection.

Then I was asked how many buttons I'd like on the front and how many I'd like on the cuffs – none isn't an option, for no reason at all – what sort of pockets I'd like, and where they should go, and how far down the heel of my shoe the strides should reach. It was like doing a test in a subject about which I knew absolutely nothing.

However, with that done, there was a sense I could get out of the shop and back to the bothersome business of making a living. But no. You then have to make an appointment to come back for a fitting, and your head is screaming, ‘Why?'

You can see short people coming into the shop, selecting a suit that fits just fine and getting out again in five minutes flat. You've been there a year, and now a further day is needed for a fitting. Just because you're tall. It's racism. That's what it is.

Eventually I received a call to say that my new suit was ready. And so, having primed my credit card for what would be a eurozone assault on its core, I made yet another trip to London to collect a garment I didn't really like or agree with.

Then, on Monday last week, I was due at a charity event and felt that my new suit could be given its first outing in public. It fitted very well, it was very grey and it made me look very like an accountant. However, I looked very smart right up to the point where someone threw an ice cream at me.

It hit my jacket square on, and yesterday the dry-cleaner said it was ruined.

27 November 2011

This is a tale of two princes. On the one hand we have Harry, a tanned and muscular Adonis who has just returned from two months in the Wild West of America, where he spent a couple of weeks charging about on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle while learning to fly the fearsome Apache helicopter gunship: an airborne dealer of death with the face of a bulldog and the strike of a stingray.

The gunner, who sits in the front, aims by simply looking at a target and then he chooses how the baddie will go to meet his maker. In the explosion from a tank-busting Hellfire missile, or having been hit between the eyes with a bullet from a 30mm chain gun.

Meanwhile, in the back, we find Prince Harry, who will have learnt how to operate each of his eyes independently. One is used to look at the dashboard while the other is focused on a helmet-mounted monocle that keeps him abreast of combat developments. It's a tricky job, flying at about 150 knots, 50ft from the ground, at night, with each of your eyes doing something different. It's also very glamorous and exciting. Which makes Harry a bit like Robert Shaw in
Battle of Britain
. A skilled and brave killing machine in a white polo neck.

Then we have his brother, William, who is also flying helicopters for a living. But in a very different way. He is sitting on a lump of rock in the Irish Sea, watching his hair fall out and waiting for the fog to lift so he can take to the skies in
a lumbering Sea King – a top-loading washing machine that is about as advanced as a Morris Minor's trafficator.

While Harry is learning in the desert sun how to take out underground bunkers, William is clumping about in the heavy, swirling skies of Wales, rescuing idiotic ramblers who have forgotten their shoes and Filipino container ship captains who have driven into the side of Pembrokeshire.

Last year crews at William's remote base rescued 244 people, and I'm sure every single one of them gives thanks on a daily basis that the pilots had the necessary skills to pluck them from the icy-cold jaws of death. But what about the rest of us?

Every year I am invited to be a judge for the
Sun
newspaper's military awards and every year I'm racked with guilt. Because I'm always given four options in each category. Three are always men and women from Afghanistan who have defused a bomb with their teeth or taken out a battalion of Taliban with nothing but a spoon. Then there's the fourth, and it's almost always a search-and-rescue chappie who has saved a kid who had been blown out to sea on his lilo.

And I'm sorry but, with the best will in the world, it's hard to give my vote to the chopper man. It just isn't glamorous enough, somehow.

Yes, I know they must get airborne in fifteen minutes and they are rarely called upon on balmy June days, but no matter how difficult it is to hover above a stricken sailing boat, near an invisible cliff, in a force eight gale, it's not quite as gallant as charging down an enemy machine-gun nest armed with nothing but a square jawline and a sense of moral outrage.

Or, if we are sticking with helicopters, it's not quite as
Boy's Own
,
Commando-
comic heroic as the men who land their monstrous Chinook choppers in a sandstorm, under enemy fire, to rescue one of their mates who has been shot.

Helicopters are glamorous and the people who fly them do so because they love it.

This is true of the men who ferry oil workers out to rigs in the North Sea and the guys who fly photocopier salesmen into Silverstone. It's true, too, of both Prince William and Prince Harry. But when you are landing a Chinook in the middle of a gunfight and you know that you have just become the biggest, juiciest target of them all – well, you need balls like the moons of Jupiter and a heart of gold to do that.

And, frankly, we need more Chinooks and Merlins for the wars we are fighting now and the wars we will undoubtedly fight in future. That's why I'm not really surprised to hear that the navy and RAF's rescue services will soon come to an end. Politicians say we can't afford them. Military bigwigs say neither service was set up to rescue Janet Street-Porter if she trips up and gets a hurty ankle.

I'm afraid I have an objection, too. I don't mind paying for schools and hospitals because a civilized country must help those who cannot afford to help themselves. But why should I fund the rescue of a rambler? He or she chose to go out there in the mountains. He or she knew the risks. And I'm sorry, but if they fall over and get gangrene, they can't furtle around in my wallet for assistance.

And, anyway, we have ambulances for rescuing people who are in trouble on land, and lifeboats for those whose boat has run out of petrol. Maintaining a fleet of ageing Sea Kings, then, seems a luxury we don't need and can't afford.

However, there's a problem. Because the service is not being scrapped. It's being privatized. And how, if you don't mind my asking, is that supposed to work?

Are the pilots going to winch up a fallen climber's credit card before they send down the stretcher? Are drowning Filipinos going to be expected to remember their PIN codes
before the man in the immersion suit is allowed to help them on board? Or is this just a bit of creative accounting? Paying a private company to do what the government used to do for itself?

Isn't it better to use sponsorship? I should imagine that large companies would love to have their brand plastered all over a search-and-rescue chopper. They could film the heroics and use them in adverts. And have all the rescue crews dressed up in their corporate livery. Let me leave you with a mental image. Prince William in a Ronald McDonald outfit. Or PC World purple. Tell me that isn't a deal worth millions.

4 December 2011

Have you ever had one of those nightmares where you can neither see nor feel the monster that's attacking you? But you know it's there all right, and unless you can get away, it's going to gobble you up, burn your house down and sell your children for medical experiments.

Well, let me tell you, such a creature exists in real life. It's called the
Daily Mail
.

Like a Terminator, it doesn't know right from wrong. You can't reason with it.

It has no sense of remorse or humility. It's fuelled by hatred. It hates people who are successful. It hates people who are not. It hates people who are fat just as much as it hates people who are thin. It hates everybody. But for some reason it seems especially to hate me.

So, with hindsight, I should have been a bit more wary when the presenters of
The One Show
asked me a few weeks ago what I thought of the public sector workers who had gone on strike. Knowing that a show such as this, with its skateboarding ducks and neat haircuts, isn't really a platform for serious debate, I gave a wishy-washy
Guardian
answer, saying the walkout had made me all gooey and homesick for the Seventies.

And then I said that because I was on the BBC, I ought to be balanced, so I launched into a right-wing tirade, saying they should all be executed in front of their families. We then moved on to a funny-shaped carrot, and that was that.

But, as you may have noticed, it wasn't. Because someone
took the rabid second part of my answer and put it on YouTube. Someone tweeted it. Someone Facebooked it. And then someone asked one of the trade unions behind the strike what it thought about the madman who had suggested on a fluffy-wuffy early-evening show that teachers and nurses should be shot as their children looked on.

Understandably, it thought I should be sacked. Then it had a rethink and suggested it might call in the police. Yes, it wanted me in jail. And so, out of nowhere, a story was born.

The following morning even the prime minister was asked for his views. Happily, he had gone to the trouble of finding out what I'd actually said and suggested I was just being ‘silly'. Downing Street even made a joke, saying: ‘Execution is not government policy and we have no plans to make it government policy.'

Sadly, his opposite number from the Labour party – a man called Ed Miliband – hadn't bothered to research the issue so, when he was asked for an opinion, he resorted to the reptilian response of every political nearly-man and said my remarks were ‘disgraceful and disgusting'. The story was really burning now.

By this stage almost 5,000 people had complained, so the BBC and I decided we really ought to say sorry.

Sadly, this was like pouring petrol on the flames. Ha-ha. So he really did believe that Florence Nightingale should be tied to a post and machine-gunned in front of her mum. The hysteria became worse.

My house was surrounded by photographers. I was doorstepped by an ITN film crew in Beijing. I was papped constantly in Australia. And in Singapore airport on the way home I was patted on the back by the sort of idiotic right-wing lunatic I'd been mimicking on
The One Show
. I'd
become a poster boy for the British National Party. I was Adolf Hitler in Levi's.

And it was all ridiculous. During Wimbledon one year I seem to recall that Terry Wogan said he'd like to take a machine gun to all the people on Henman Hill. No one took him seriously, but me, the two-bit presenter of a poky motoring show on BBC2? Somehow an opinion that wasn't even mine had become the nation's No. 1 topic of conversation.

Apparently I had top billing on that week's
Question Time
. I was front-page news for days. Even Bill Oddie was dragged away from his beavers and asked for an opinion. The worst, though, came from the
Mail
. It said that I was a mental, that my mother had been extremely right wing and that my parents had had little empathy with those less fortunate than themselves. Quite what my poor old mum had done to deserve this after years of unpaid public service, I'm not entirely sure.

But that's the trouble with the
Mail
. There are many creatures on this earth that behave in an unusual way. We can't explain how pigeons find their houses from thousands of miles away or how salmon can find the very spot where they were born. But nothing in the kingdom of nature is quite so unfathomable as a
Mail
reporter.

They look human. They have opposable thumbs and are capable of catching buses. But they don't have the capacity for reason. You can tell them what happened. You can prove it. But it will make no difference.

Here's an example. Last week Mark Thompson, the BBC's director general, was asked by an MP if I was a luxury the corporation could not afford. In the
Daily Mail
this became a statement: ‘Jeremy Clarkson is a luxury the BBC cannot afford.' Somehow it had turned a question into a fact. I really
do believe that in the whole furore over press standards the wrong newspaper has been closed down.

Anyway, I suppose that while I'm here and there's a little bit of space left, I ought really to set the record straight. So here goes. I absolutely do not think that the public service workers who went on strike should be shot or punished in any way.

But, that said, in these times of great economic uncertainty, when everyone is faced with a need to tighten their belt, it's probably reasonable to take the trade union leaders who organized the strike deep into the Blue John Cavern in Derbyshire and leave them there for a little while.

Clarkson calls for trade union leaders to be buried alive. Read it this week, exclusively, in the
Daily Mail
.

18 December 2011