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
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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.
I never said you had to agree with my opinions but I can say that in the last 10 years, I’ve only been on maybe five press launches and I’ve sat through all of them with my fingers in my ears, singing old Who songs at the top of my voice.
Sure there are some things I wish I’d never written. I wish, for instance, that I’d learn to stop predicting the outcome of a Grand Prix championship and I wish I’d never been so rude about horses. But most of all, I wish I wasn’t growing up quite so quickly. Just seven years ago, I had an Escort Cosworth and wanted a minimum speed limit of 130mph on motorways. Babies, I thought, were only any good if served with a baked potato and some horseradish sauce. And here I am now with an automatic Jaguar, three children and a fondness for the new 20mph inner city speed limit.
So, as you read through the book, you might find what you think are contradictions, some evidence perhaps that I told the truth one day and some bull the next.
Not so, I’ve just got a bit older.
I expect soon that I shall start to favour cars that have wipe down seats, denture holders in the dash and a bi-focal windscreen - but don’t worry. Even when my nose has exploded and all my fingers are bent, I still won’t like diesel, or people carriers or Nissans, and I shall still be happy to point out the weirdness of America. 250 million wankers living in a country with no word for wanker.
And be assured that when I’m dead, they’ll find a note at my solicitors’ saying that I want to be driven to my grave at 100mph in a something with a V8.
Jeremy Clarkson, 1999
Norfolk, twinned with Norfolk
In a previous life I spent a couple of years selling Paddington Bears to toy and gift shops all over Britain. Commercial travelling was a career that didn’t really suit – because I had to wear one – but I have ended up with an intimate knowledge of Britain’s highways and byways. I know how to get from Cropredy to Burghwallis and from London Apprentice to Marchington Woodlands. I know where you can park in Basingstoke and that you can’t in Oxford. However, I have absolutely no recollection of Norfolk. I must have been there because I can picture, absolutely, the shops I used to call on in, er, one town in this flat and featureless county.
And there’s another thing, I can’t remember the name of one town. The other day I had to go to a wedding in one little town in Norfolk. It’s not near anywhere you’ve heard of, there are no motorways that go anywhere near it, and God help you if you run out of petrol.
For 30 miles, the Cosworth ran on fumes until I encountered what would have passed for a garage 40 years ago. The man referred to unleaded petrol as ‘that newfangled stuff’ and then, when I presented him with a credit card, looked like I’d given him a piece of myrrh. Nevertheless, he tottered off into his shed and put it in the till, thus proving that no
part of the twentieth century has caught up with Norfolk yet.
This is not surprising because it’s nearly impossible to get there. From London, you have to go through places such as Hornsey and Tottenham before you find the M11, which sets off in the right direction, but then, perhaps sensibly, veers off to Cambridge. And from everywhere else you need a Camel Trophy Land Rover.
Then, when you get there and you’re sitting around in the hotel lobby waiting for the local man to stop being a window cleaner, gynaecologist and town crier and be a receptionist for a while, you pick up a copy of Norfolk Life. It is the world’s smallest magazine.
In the bar that night, when we said we had been to a wedding in Thorndon, everyone stopped talking. A dart hit the ceiling and the man behind the counter dropped a glass. ‘No one,’ he said, ‘has been to Thorndon since it burned down 40 years back.’ Then he went off, muttering about the ‘widow woman’.
Moving about Norfolk, however, can be fun. I am used to having people point as I go by. Most shout, ‘Hey, look, it’s a Cosworth!’ but in Norfolk they shout, ‘Hey, look, it’s a car!’ Everywhere else people want to know how fast it goes, but in Norfolk they asked how good it was at ploughing. The spoiler fascinated them because they reckoned it might be some sort of crop sprayer.
I’m sure witchcraft has something to do with it. The government should stop promoting the Broads as a tourist attraction and they should advise visitors that ‘here be witches’. They spend millions telling us that it is foolish to smoke, but not a penny telling us not to go to Norfolk – unless you like orgies and the ritual slaying of farmyard animals.
The next time some friends get married in Norfolk, I’ll send a telegram. Except it won’t get there because they haven’t heard of the telephone yet. Or paper. Or ink.
GT90 in a flat spin
Earls Court becomes the fashion capital of the western world this week as the London Anorak Show opens its doors to members of the public.
Better known as the Motor Show, families will be donning their finest acrylic fibres and braving the Piccadilly Line so that they may gawp at all that’s new and shiny.
However, if you want to see all that’s really new and shiny, you need to stay on the Piccadilly Line until you arrive at Terminal Four. And then you should catch a plane to Japan.
The trouble is that the London Motor Show clashes with the Tokyo Motor Show, and there’s no surprises for guessing which one is rated most highly by the exhibitors.