How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [103]
At present you are allowed to take 100 ml of liquid on to a plane because the authorities believe such a small amount could not possibly bring down an airliner. They are wrong. If I painted just 1 ml of Insanity sauce on the window of a 747, it would melt. And this is stuff you can buy on the internet. Stuff that has been sitting in my kitchen for two years.
So, what’s to be done? As you know, I am not Gordon Brown. I do not think problems can be solved with a ban, even though I really believe that a bottle of Insanity sauce is more deadly than a machinegun. The obvious course of action is to remove warning notices from household goods that are not dangerous – cakes, for instance, and staplers. This way, we would pay more attention when something is supplied with labels advising us of great peril ahead.
Sadly, however, since we are now one of the most litigious countries in the world, this will never happen. Nor can Insanity be uninvented. It exists. A bottle of the damn stuff is sitting on my desk now and I have no idea what I should do with it.
I can’t pour it down the sink because it would get into the water table. I can’t put it in the bin because it would end up as landfill. And that’s no good for something which has a half-life of several thousand years. I can’t even take it – as I would with a grenade I’d found – to the police because they’d be tempted to use it as a legal device for getting information out of criminals. And that wouldn’t work at all. Last night, when the bread had failed and the milk was finished, I would happily have confessed to forty-three counts of homosexual rape. Plus there is a side effect – certain death.
Sunday 4 October 2009
Cleverness is no more. It has ceased to be. This is a dumb Britain
Forty years ago, my dad came into my bedroom and made me get up. I was nine and sleepy. I was snuggly and warm. I wanted to stay under the covers. But he was insistent. ‘There is something on television you need to see,’ he said. And I remember the next bit vividly: ‘It’s going to be important.’ So downstairs I went and there, in black and white, were some men talking, while nearby, various sheep fell out of trees. I laughed so much, my teddy bear’s arm came off. And so it was that, at the age of nine, I became Monty Python’s first and youngest fan.
Aged thirteen, I was taken to the Grand in Leeds to see the Pythons perform in what they called their ‘first farewell tour’, and afterwards we all went out for supper together. John Cleese, whom my father had befriended, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and me. They all signed a copy of my Big Red Book and it remains the one possession I would save should my house choose to explode.
I would spend hours listening to their records, and reliving their television programmes in my head. And eventually – my dad said it would be important – this fanaticism caused me to pass my English O-level. I was sitting there, in my study at school, listening to Snow Goose, with the dreary Merchant of Venice swimming around on the page, none of it making any sense at all. And then I thought: ‘Hang on a minute, if it is possible to learn off by heart Eric Idle’s travel agent sketch, then how hard can it be to memorize this twaddle?’ So that’s what I did. Learnt it.
I knew all the Python sketches off by heart. And the books. And the films. I still do. And I still fly off the handle when someone misquotes. It was Norwegian Jarlsberger, you imbecile. I know it’s really called Jarlsberg but that’s not what Cleese said. How can you not know that??!!? Only last week, I was asked by a keen young reporter to recite my favourite Python sketch into her camera