And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson Read Free Page B

a baseball jacket and a T-shirt?
    Then there’s Vietnam. Not once, according to Hollywood, did the Americans lose a battle. So how they lost the war is a mystery. This, I suspect, is the main reason why Hollywood didn’t make
Cold Mountain
. Who’s the bad guy when both sides are, er… American?
    It’s a good job Britain still had a proper film industry when Second World War films were all the rage. Otherwise we’d have had Captain Chuck Gibson bombing the Mohne Dam with Brad and Tod in tow. And what kind of a name is Barnes Wallace? We’ll call him Clint Thrust.
    Hollywood’s record with the truth is simply abysmal, which isn’t so bad if you treat the cinema as a place of entertainment. But in America the multiplex is just about the only place where anybody learns any history. After
Black Hawk Down
the audience left the theatre with a sense that America had been in Somalia fighting thehumanitarian fight. Not simply trying to depose a warlord who didn’t like the idea of US oil companies stealing all the oil.
    This, surely, should worry the Hollywood film and television workers far more than where a movie was shot. In
Saving Private Ryan
the French beaches were Irish. In
Full Metal Jacket
, Vietnam was the London Docklands, and in boxing Lennox Lewis was British.
    Who cares? I certainly didn’t mind where
Cold Mountain
had been filmed or how much the extras had been paid. I just thought it was one of the longest films I’d ever seen. Good, though.
    Sunday 8 February 2004

Fear of fat can seriously damage your health
    Scientists revealed recently that a child born in 2030 will live five years longer than a child born yesterday. So by the middle of this century there will be more people drawing a pension than people going to work.
    This will have a catastrophic effect on the economy because simple arithmetic shows there won’t be enough money in the kitty to keep all these old people in hips and cat food.
    So what on earth are we going to do? Make people save more so they’re self-sufficient in their old age? Get everyone to have more babies? Or ship in thousands of healthy young immigrants who can run around actually doing some work? A tricky decision.
    But then last week along came a report saying we won’t be living so long after all. Thanks to the efforts of McCain with its oven-ready chips and McDonald’s with its McMeals, we’re all going to explode by the time we’re 62.
    Now you’d have expected the government to greet the news with a sigh of relief.
    But not a bit of it. John Reid, the health secretary, said a big debate was needed to challenge the problem of obesity.
    So what’s going on here? One minute we’re told that we’re all going to live to be 126 and that we’ll have to eat each other to survive. Then we’re told that actually it’d be best if we ate nothing at all.
    At first I suspected this might have something to do with cool Britannia. Tony likes his art galleries and funky bridges and frankly he doesn’t want the place cluttered up with a load of fat ankles and prolapsed stomachs.
    Then I thought it was another bit of me-too-ism with Dubya. ‘Hey, George. We’ve got fat people as well.’
    But then a man in a suit went on the television to say the government really ought to tax oven-ready chips, and suddenly it all became clear. They tax us when we move and tax us when we park. They tax us when we earn money and tax us when we spend it. They tax everything we put in our lungs and now they want to tax everything we put in our stomachs.
    Well, I have some observations. First of all, the American idea of obesity is far removed from our own. They have people who have moved beyond the point where fat is a problem or a joke and into the realms where it becomes revolting. We do not.
    I’ve checked, and in Britain I’d be officially obese if I weighed 18 stone. But 18 stone when you’re 6 foot 5 inches isn’t even on nodding terms with what the sceptics call fat: 18 stone would,