Top Gear and its tedious laddishness

(First published in The Dominion Post, March 20.)

THEY’RE a strange lot, the Poms. They eat something called supper. They “take” baths (one a week is the norm, I believe). They drive lorries.

They wear quaintly named garments (mackintoshes and vests, for instance), they get terribly excited about something they call foopball, and they invented the world’s only sport where you can play for five days and not get a result

As if all that weren’t weird enough, the Poms adore Top Gear.

My idea of torture is to be strapped into a chair and forced to watch endless repeats of Top Gear. I would rather be tethered to a pole in front of an Islamic State encampment with an insulting cartoon of the prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) hung around my neck.

It’s not that I’m not interested in cars. I always read the Dom Post’s Saturday motoring pages and can even tell you that Fairfax Media’s motoring editor is 1.88 metres tall. (I know this because he tells us at least once a month, under the guise of illustrating the headroom in the car he’s testing.)

No, it’s the juvenile antics and relentless “laddish” humour of Top Gear that I can’t abide. In fact I abhor the whole British cult of laddishness, which seems contrived to give grown men licence to remain in a state of perpetual adolescence.

Top Gear strikes me as a slightly desperate celebration of Britishness in a world where being British doesn’t quite cut it the way it used to. Its male fans are probably the sort of people who have erotic fantasies involving Kate Bush, or perhaps Nigella Lawson, and who yearn for Pink Floyd to reform. 

I cringe at the sight of James May. He’s one of those shabby, ageing Englishmen who seem to think it cool to still wear his hair long even when it’s grey and straggly. I can’t think of any older man with long hair who wouldn’t look better if it were cut short, but May probably imagines it makes him look like a rock god.

Then there’s the little guy whose name I can never remember – the cute, perky one that women probably feel like mothering. I can’t look at him without thinking of Davy Jones from the Monkees.

But most of all Top Gear is associated with Jeremy Clarkson, whose main function seems to be to get into trouble on a regular basis so as to reinforce the programme’s image of irreverent laddishness (that word again) and devil-may-care disregard for propriety.

This plays well to Top Gear’s gormless fans (you know they’re gormless from the uncritically rapt looks on the faces of the studio audience) and ensures the show is never out of the headlines for long.

Clarkson comes across as a loudmouth – a clever and witty loudmouth, but a loudmouth nonetheless. He’s a big man and I imagine he was probably a bully at school.

He’s casually disparaging toward other cultures, which reinforces the sense that Top Gear represents the old English mindset that the wogs start at Calais and all non-Anglo-Saxon cultures exist to be mocked.

It was no surprise to learn that he’s a Chelsea Football Club supporter. That’s a laddish outfit too, of a deeply unattractive kind, with a history of hooliganism and xenophobia. (The racist yobbos who monstered a black man trying to board a train in Paris recently were Chelsea supporters. No surprises there.)

I can, however, understand why a petition supporting Clarkson would attract lots of signatures. People feel cowed and oppressed by political correctness and get a quiet thrill when someone has the balls to defy it, as Clarkson frequently does. Someone has described him as television’s answer to the Duke of Edinburgh, a man widely admired for the same reasons.

We have yet to learn exactly what triggered the latest Top Gear furore. There was some sort of altercation in a hotel restaurant. One report said Clarkson punched a producer when he found out no hot food was available after a long day’s filming.

I was right, then – he’s a bully. It’s easy to become irritable when you’re tired and your blood sugar levels are low, but most people stop short of throwing punches.

Clarkson has now been suspended by the BBC and the three remaining episodes of the current Top Gear series were cancelled.

The whole pantomime unfolded as if following a script, but it stirred up the tribal Top Gear fans and might breathe enough life into the tired old formula to keep it wheezing along for another series.

Clarkson himself seems unchastened, as well he might be. It would be surprising if the BBC sacked its most precious talent for doing exactly what his fans love him for.

More likely the whole circus will blow over. The besotted fans will keep watching and Clarkson will bank a few more million. As I say, a strange lot.

Footnote: Quite by chance, I caught a glimpse of a promo for Top Gear this week. It was the night before my column was published and I observed that James May appeared to have had a haircut. Clearly he did it purely to embarrass me, but he does look much improved.

 

 

Why I almost feel sorry for Sterling and Clarkson

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, May 21.)

You will have heard of Donald Sterling. He’s the owner – though probably not for much longer – of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team.

Sterling sounds a thoroughly unpleasant man. Last month, sports website TMZ released a leaked recording of a private conversation in which the multimillionaire team owner rebuked a close female friend (I’m being delicate in my terminology here) for associating with black sports stars.

The “friend”, V Stiviano, had posted a picture of herself with basketball legend Magic Johnson on the social media site Instagram. Sterling told her it bothered him that she wanted to broadcast the fact that she was associating with black people.

“You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want,” Sterling said. “The little I ask you is ... not to bring them to my games.”

The subsequent uproar reached as far as the White House. Within three days, Adam Silver, the commissar who runs the National Basketball Association (his official title is commissioner, but I think commissar is more appropriate in this context), announced he had banned Sterling from the sport for life, fined him $2.5 million and ordered him to sell the team.

Silver seems to be a man with unlimited powers. I’m surprised Sterling escaped the death penalty, given that it still applies in California.

Okay, you might say; the man is a grotesque old racist. No argument about that. Then why do I feel he’s been wronged?

The reason is that we have crossed an alarming new threshold.

Freedom of speech is already under sustained attack throughout the Western world. In many countries, governments and judges are on a mission to outlaw something called hate speech, which can broadly be defined as the expression of opinions that somebody – usually a member of a supposedly oppressed minority – finds objectionable and wants prohibited.

But to the best of my knowledge, the proponents of hate speech laws have limited their attention – so far, anyway – to statements made or opinions expressed in public. What’s different about the Sterling case is that it concerns something said in private, and to someone he presumably trusted not to repeat it.

This takes things to a new level. There is probably not a person on earth who would want to be held publicly accountable for statements that have been made in private, in the reasonable expectation that their privacy will be respected. But this is what happened to Sterling.

Where will this lead? Does it mean, I wonder, that any high-profile figure is now fair game? Is there no escape from the speech and thought police? Will all prominent people now fret that their private reflections will be surreptitiously recorded on a smartphone and released to the media? Whatever happened to notions of privacy?

As it happens, Sterling’s private beliefs are of little consequence. If he were a politician or public servant with influence over public policy, they might be a matter of legitimate concern. But they are simply the private mutterings of a bigoted old man. To put it bluntly, they are none of the public’s business. 

Seen in this light, the furore was grotesquely disproportionate.

The Sterling affair raises other important questions. What about Stiviano’s role, for example? Assuming it was she who leaked the recording, she committed a flagrant breach of trust and privacy.

On the face of it, her moral compass is every bit as defective as Sterling’s. Yet Stiviano has largely escaped public scrutiny. Presumably an octogenarian real estate tycoon presented a much more satisfying target.

Consider this, too. Even the most loathsome criminals – mass murderers, serial rapists, terrorists – are entitled to a defence. But not Sterling. Commissar Silver effectively tried and sentenced him ex parte, to use a legal term – in other words, without Sterling being given a chance to speak for himself.

That Silver was able unilaterally to fine Sterling $2.5 million, ban him from the sport for life and force him to sell his team, all without any hearing or opportunity for Sterling to speak for himself, is a shocking denial of natural justice.

I’m astonished there wasn’t an outcry. If I were an American, this abuse of power would bother me far more than Sterling’s private thoughts about whether it was right for Stiviano to be photographed with black men.

There are parallels here with the confected outrage that erupted over Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson’s alleged use of the forbidden N-word in the old “eeny, meeny, miney, moe” children’s rhyme.

Like Sterling, Clarkson is not an easy man to feel sorry for. He’s a blowhard who uses humour - admittedly with some skill - to mock and denigrate.  But the uproar over his supposed verbal indiscretion was grossly inflated by tabloid media that love nothing more than to bring down a celebrity.

The alleged offending word was so mumbled as to be indistinct. Clarkson himself denied using it. In any case the footage was never broadcast, which should have been the end of the story. Nonetheless, the tape was leaked – by whom, and for what reason, isn’t clear – and in the ensuing firestorm, Clarkson was condemned as a racist.

Even if he did use the word, does that make him racist? Insensitive, perhaps, and possibly mischievous, given Clarkson’s fondness for juvenile naughty-boy antics – but racist? We all used that rhyme innocently as children. It didn’t make racists out of us.

Clarkson may be a loudmouth, but racism is a far darker thing. As with the Sterling affair, all sense of proportion was lost. We are all too busy taking offence.  

And then there’s Teuila Blakely – another victim of instant moral outrage, although one more deserving of our sympathy than either of the aforementioned men.

A video showing the Shortland Street actress engaging in a sex act with rugby league player Konrad Hurrell was leaked, apparently without Blakeley’s knowledge, on social media.

What Blakely and Hurrell did was a private act by consenting adults. No offence was committed and no one was harmed. But that didn’t prevent a wave of vicious abuse directed at Blakeley, including death threats and exhortations to kill herself. You can always rely on social media to bring out the lynch mob.

Even more bizarrely, a $5000 fine was imposed on Hurrell by his rugby league club for supposedly bringing the game into disrepute.

You’ve got to laugh at that last bit. Driving an opposing player into the ground head first and breaking his neck – now that’s what I call bringing rugby league into disrepute. But the player who did that recently got off with a seven-week ban. It’s good to know the rugby league authorities have got their priorities right.

More on that emotionally manipulative doco

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, November 6.)

TV3’s RECENT prime-time documentary on child poverty in New Zealand had exactly the intended effect. Viewers were aghast at the evidence of sub-standard housing and preventable illnesses such as scabies and school sores. Anguished writers of letters to the editor wondered how this state of affairs could have arisen in a country once considered the best in the world for raising children.

In one respect, the viewer reaction was encouraging. It was a reminder that we are still a decent, compassionate society.

The problem is, the programme represented a very one-sided view. Its message was that the welfare state has failed our poor – and so it has, but not in the way that documentary maker Bryan Bruce wanted us to think.

The welfare state is now part of the problem. Originally designed to tide people over hard times, it has created a culture of long-term dependency, helplessness and entitlement.

There is ample evidence that dependence on benefits, more than any other factor, causes the poverty trap that Bruce professes to despise. Yet the solution he proposes is more welfare spending.

The documentary ignored the risk that more spending on benefits and state housing would serve to make a welfare-based lifestyle look more attractive and end trapping up even more people.

Neither did Bruce concern himself with the inconvenient fact that more welfare spending increases the burden on the diminishing productive sector of an already weak economy.

Socialists never bother to ask where the money comes from; they are interested only in spending it. But consider this: New Zealand in 1972 had 26 working people for every beneficiary. Today that ratio is down to 7 to 1 (in fact 3 to 1, if you include superannuitants).

This was a disgracefully simplistic, emotionally manipulative programme, but fortunately not everyone was fooled. This newspaper published letters from people who had grown up in state houses and pointed out that the mould Bruce was so appalled by in some of the homes he visited could be avoided simply by proper ventilation – in other words, opening windows – and wiping away condensation. But of course it’s far more dramatic to present state house tenants as the helpless victims of Dickensian indifference and heartless, right-wing politicians.

I agree with Bruce on one thing: child poverty is deplorable. But the problem is far more complex than this slanted programme would have us believe. As I wrote on my blog, a film maker could just as easily produce a documentary proving the exact reverse of Bruce’s thesis – namely, that the welfare state and the culture of dependency it encourages are the cause of, rather than the solution to, the poverty and deprivation that Bruce finds so intolerable.

* * *

I KNOW NOTHING about cricket beyond what I read in the sports pages. I managed to navigate my way through childhood without ever playing the game and it remains a mystery to me.

However I was intrigued by a recent article in Britain’s Spectator magazine, prompted by the death of English cricketer-turned-journalist Peter Roebuck, which examined the abnormal suicide rate among former cricketers and asked: “How is that cricket drives so many players out of their minds?”

The best answer it could give was that top players devoted themselves wholly to the game and were left feeling lost and bereft when their careers ended. With no team at the centre of their lives, many didn’t know what to do with themselves and succumbed to drink and depression.

It certainly seems true that cricket, being a game that lasts days rather than hours, requires players to spend a disproportionate amount of their life with other young men in pavilions and hotel rooms. I wonder whether this results in some being emotionally stunted – trapped in an eternal adolescence of high-fives and howzats – and thus less able to cope with the rigours of ordinary life. Certainly some first-class cricketers give the impression of being unusually self-absorbed and perhaps even mentally fragile.

Spending a large part of your life in the company of other blokes, especially at a time when you’re biologically programmed to search for a long-term female partner, just seems downright unnatural.

Of course I didn’t grasp any of this when I decided never to play cricket, but I’m pleased that I made the right choice.

* * *

ANOTHER outbreak of Acute Sensitivity Disorder has made headlines, this time in Britain. Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson said on TV that striking public sector workers should be shot – taken out and executed, preferably in front of their families.

It was a typical Clarkson line, clearly intended as a provocative joke. But even the Poms have lost their sense of humour.

The BBC, intimidated by unionists’ howls of outrage, apologised. Worse still, so did Clarkson.

When political correctness stifles humour and free speech in the country that once gave us such outrageously irreverent and wickedly funny programmes as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, we should all be very afraid.