Television

Am I jealous?

James Delmgpole

When I was christened — not during the actual ceremony, obviously, but at the reception afterwards — my father forced a swig of champagne down my throat and declared before the assembled guests, `Anything you want, my son, you shall have. A Ferrari . . . Anything . . .'

My father was rich and racy in those days, you see. And so were all his friends and relatives, Granpy Ken had a Porsche. Auntie Sheila drove a Ferrari Dino and flew Tiger Moths. Uncle Steve and Uncle David had done the Monte Carlo. And uncle 'Harold Pig' raced offshore power- boats emblazoned with the logo of the company — Delson (as in Delingpole and Son) — which would one day be mine.

So what the hell am I doing, 32 years on, slumming it in the East End of London, scraping a measly existence as a journalist and driving round in a leaky, ten-year-old Peugeot 205? And where, more to the point, is that bloody Ferrari?

The answer, I suspect, is that around the time the old man went bust there was a huge celestial cock-up which meant that all the riches and good fortune originally des- tined for me were accidentally diverted to a chunky bloke with bog-brush hair and a terrifying penchant for stone-washed denim. His name is Jeremy Clarkson; he owns two huge houses; he drives a red Fer- rari 355GTS; and he can currently be seen enjoying some of the plummest assign- ments in television history on Jeremy Clark- son's Extreme Machines (BBC 2, Thursday).

Each week, our Jezza gets to test-drive a selection of boys' toys so trouser-expand- ingly enormous, so arse-clenchingly swift, so scrotum-shrinkingly lethal that they make the average £200,000 1,000 bhp Ital- ian sports car he reviews on Top Gear look like a third-hand Sinclair C5 . . . with a flat battery. That last paragraph, by the way, was a feeble attempt to emulate Clarkson's ludi- crously mannered delivery: build up your statement in a crescendo of macho statis- tics and testosteronal superlatives. Pause for effect. Then sock 'em with the punch- line . . . in a deep, stupid voice.

It's a verbal trick which is enormous fun to imitate and hugely addictive. In fact, my brother and I have been practising it down the phone to one another . . . the whole bloody week. The problem is that no matter how absurd you try to sound, no matter how hammy your timing or preposterous your verbal flights of fancy, you're never going to carry it off quite so pant-wettingly hilariously, so Beyond the Fringe (times ten) parodically, so Boys-Own heroically or so Leonardo-da-Vinci brilliantly as the great- est Jeremy-Clarkson-impersonator of them all ... Jeremy Clarkson.

I'm sorry but I might as well come clean right now. He may be a total prat with appalling taste in clothes and music; he may well be a sexist Neanderthal; and — to judge by his obsession with motorised phal- luses — he almost certainly has a smaller willy than me. But I still can't help worship- ping the ground the man drives on. In fact, I'm tempted to suggest that he might even be the greatest television presenter of his generation. Bar none.

Of course, there are dozens of cleverer, funnier, prettier or more refined presen- ters. But not one has a personality so per- fectly matched to his or her milieu, as loud, puerile, subtle-as-a-road-accident Clark- son's is to the world of super-fast cars, boats and aircraft.

In last week's opening episode of Extreme Machines, Clarkson hung out with the nutters who fly 'the maddest, baddest, most dangerous planes on earth: The Unlimited Warbirds'. These are converted second world war P45 Mustangs which take one minute to race round a nine-mile cir- cuit. Flying them, claimed one pilot, is akin to 'riding a hand-grenade with the pin pulled out'. Needless to say, Clarkson had to have a go.

Now, under these circumstances, the last thing you want is a presenter who's going to try to intellectualise the experience. You want somebody who's going to tell you like it is. Which Clarkson does. In spades. 'Oh, wow! Wow! Wow! Oh, my word!' he went

`It could be used as a launch site for round the world balloon flights.'

as the plane skimmed a few inches above the desert. `Oh, oh, oh, fuck! Oh, God Almighty!' he continued as the plane looped the loop. Way to go Jeremy! Is it any wonder the nation so eagerly awaits the forthcoming episode where he takes a back seat in an RAF Tornado and spews his guts out. Twice?

This is the true genius of Jeremy Clark- son. He asks precisely the questions we'd ask in the same situation: 'How big is it? How fast? How dangerous? Can I have a go?' And he responds in the way we'd respond. First he gets excited. Then he gets scared. Then he throws up. And then he goes in search of something even bigger, faster and more terrifying. A powerboat that can do 150 mph. A jet-engined boat that can do 200 mph. Or, for variety's sake, a space shuttle or the world's biggest oil- tanker.

I suppose, after what I said at the begin- ning, the obvious conclusion would be to admit how jealous I am of Jeremy Clark- son. Unfortunately, the kill-joy in charge of BBC programming went and ruined it for me by scheduling a nasty documentary about car crashes later the same evening. I don't want a Ferrari any more. I want a Volvo.