How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [25]
My talk seemed to go quite well. The tent was full of families who’d paid £15 a ticket, none of which comes to me, incidentally; and so, in return, I tried to give them all a laugh – which they were unlikely to get from the ice cream or the Mexican diplomat’s lecture on his conservation project to save the Latin American monarch butterfly.
But with each answer, I was inadvertently signing my own death warrant. There I was, jokily telling all the small boys in the audience that I’d once done 186 mph through the Limehouse Link in London, and that speed limits are for the weak. And backstage it was all being moulded by the eco-greens into a howling, sack-the-idiot press release.
I probably will be, and it’s my own silly fault. I never saw it coming. I was expecting them to burn a pile of my books; I was ready for George Monbiot to leap on stage and arrest me for having a patio heater. I’d even taken a change of clothing in case a fat woman, full of root vegetables and hate, shoved a custard pie in my face again. It never occurred to me that I’d been invited specifically to shoot myself in the face.
Top Gear is back on your screens in three weeks. It’ll be hosted by Bill Oddie and will feature lots of movement and dance. And how you can make a car out of straw.
Sunday 1 June 2008
It’s just a dumb animal, Mr Oddie
It seems that Bill Oddie’s fluffy Springwatch television programme has been in a spot of bother because it keeps showing pictures of animals and birds doing sex. Well, obviously I’m not especially given to defending the twitching weird beard but, honestly, all that birds and animals do is eat, sleep and mate. If you take the rumpy-pumpy out of the equation, what’s left?
You can’t even show them having lunch these days because a bird wrenching a worm from the ground would have vegetablists putting the producer’s name on an internet hit list. Anyway, the sparrow porn, the rampant carnivorism and the ducky gangbangs are not the problem. No. It’s the awful syrupy way that all nature’s little creatures are judged and measured by human standards.
We are shown some footage of daddy swallow tenderly picking each of his little babies from the nest … and dropping them on to the floor, where they will gasp for a bit, in great pain, and then die. It’s presented as though we are watching Josef Fritzl, but we are not. We are watching an ounce of feathers and bone killing its kids, not because it’s stupid or psychopathic but because it’s a bird. Are we supposed to think that all swallows kill their kids? Isn’t that a bit like saying all human men wander about town centres at night stabbing one another with screwdrivers?
By all means tell me that a swallow can fly all the way from Africa and find the same barn in Norfolk that it left six months earlier. That is amazing. Or find one that can’t. Because that would be hysterical. But do not try to convince me that swallows have some great intelligence that we humans lack. Because they don’t.
It’s much the same story with dolphins. Time and time again, nature presenters portray them as bright. But compared with what – a table lamp? A lobster? The fact is this: my dishwasher, by any measure, has a greater power of reasoning.
And anyway if it’s suggested that a swallow could write a book if only it had hands, or build a box-girder bridge if you gave it a spanner, then when we see it indulging in infanticide, we will feel duty-bound to come round to the Springwatch bird box and wring its cruel and vindictive little neck.
Of course, we can get sentimental about animals. I like my dogs very much. Sometimes I talk to them as though they are my children. I’ve even trained them to fetch sticks and sit down. In other words, I’ve attempted to make them more human. But this is futile because they are not human. I know this because they spend most of their day in the paddocks eating horse shit. When they’ve had their fill, they come into the house and vomit on to every flat surface they can find. This has caused a great many