How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [83]
In all forms of artistic endeavour, we see similar issues. Surely I am not the only person to have noticed that Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon is identical in every way to Rocky. Or that every modern bespoke, architect-designed house is the same as all the other modern bespoke, architect-designed houses. Or that every painting for sale on the walls of my local pub is identical to all the paintings for sale in your local pub. There are very few ways of painting a cow in a meadow. And they’ve all been done already.
It’s rather depressing to think that, no matter what you do or where you go, you will always be Scott of the Antarctic, the plucky chap who came in second. Or that you can spend years writing an epic, only to have some artistic dunderhead think: ‘You’ve stolen that from a ballet.’
However, there is one area in which every one of us breaks new ground every single day. We do it every time we speak.
Recently, while filming an episode for the new series of Top Gear, which starts again next Sunday, incidentally, I turned to Richard Hammond and said: ‘Oh no. I’ve just shoved this anarchy flag through my water lilo.’ And I can be absolutely sure that no one has ever said such a thing before. ‘My elephant has just exploded.’ No one ever said that either. Or: ‘My word, Gordon Brown’s doing a good job.’ Or: ‘Caroline Flint. Mmm. Tasty.’
Last week we learnt that there were now exactly 999,999 words in the English language. Actually, a spokesman for the Global Language Monitor claims there are a million, but since the millionth entry is ‘Web 2.0’, it must be discounted on the basis it is an existing word with a number tagged on to the end.
Then you have the Oxford English Dictionary, which claims there are in fact 616,000 ‘word forms’ but only 171,000 that could be called current.
Whatever the true figure, I calculated recently that the BBC alone transmits around 87m words a day, all of which manage to offend the Daily Mail, and while I accept that most people only ever use a few hundred types of word in the course of a lifetime – unless they are estate agents, in which case it’s about a billion, none of which makes any sense – we cannot ignore the fact that there are 400m people in the world for whom English is the first language.
That’s 400m people saying, on average, 1,500 words a day. Week in, week out. You’d imagine, then, that every single combination would have been used up years ago, and yet we can be certain no one has ever said: ‘I name this ship HMS Vulnerable.’ Or: ‘The thing I love most about my husband is his herpes.’ Or: ‘Look at that maniac in that Saab.’
We can also be certain that making a whole newspaper column out of the similarities between Ondine and Emerson, Lake and Palmer has never been done before. Definitely not by anyone who could be £10 better off as a result. But then, I need the money because, according to the Daily Mail, all BBC presenter salaries are to be slashed. Interestingly, though, no one had ever said that either.
Sunday 14 June 2009
No, I won’t wear a tiara, if it’s all the same to you
Back in the 1980s, I seemed to spend half my life traipsing to Covent Garden to hire a dinner jacket and the other half mournfully explaining to the man on the returns desk that it was covered in sick when I rented it. And that, no, despite the strong smell of chlorine and the fact it was only 6 in long, it had most definitely not been in a swimming pool. What’s more, every wedding, and there was one every weekend from what I remember, required the idiotic combination of a stovepipe hat and a morning suit. Which would then be ruined because I’d have to leave the reception