Driving Us Insane

A year in the fast lane with Jeremy Klaxon, presenter of TV's Bottom Gear

Toby Clements

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781848877245
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857893598
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Automotive Transportation & Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Driving Us Insane reveals the presenter of TV's cult motoring series Bottom Gear as he has never been revealed before. Week by week, car by car, stunt by stunt and challenge by challenge, it describes - in forthright, no-holds-barred detail - the events of a year to remember in the life of a legend of British broadcasting. From his inadvertent running down of Roger Moore in an Aston Martin DBS to his gate-crashing of the set of a gay porn movie in a golf buggy, this is Klaxon laid bare. UTTERLY, TOTALLY, BARE. The cars that inspire him, the friends and colleagues who admire him, the women who desire him, the ramblers, environ-mentalists and lesbian schoolteachers who rile him. If Driving Us Insane was a car, it would be a 7.3-litre, 12-cylinder Pagani Zonda F driving down the M40 Chiltern gap at 150 mph with a JBL GTO-1202D Subwoofer belting out The Who's 'Won't Get Fooled Again' while Myleene Klass swoons naked in the passenger seat. ONLY BETTER. MUCH BETTER.

Contents

FRIDAY 1ST JANUARY

MONDAY 4TH JANUARY

THURSDAY 7TH JANUARY

FRIDAY 22ND JANUARY

WEDNESDAY 3RD FEBRUARY

TUESDAY 9TH FEBRUARY

TUESDAY 16TH FEBRUARY

MONDAY 22ND FEBRUARY

WEDNESDAY 24TH FEBRUARY

WEDNESDAY 3RD MARCH

WEDNESDAY 17TH MARCH

TUESDAY 23RD MARCH

WEDNESDAY 24TH MARCH

FRIDAY 2ND APRIL

SUNDAY 4TH APRIL

TUESDAY 6TH APRIL

MONDAY 12TH APRIL

FRIDAY 23RD APRIL

WEDNESDAY 28TH APRIL

MONDAY 3RD MAY

SUNDAY 9TH MAY

TUESDAY 25TH MAY

WEDNESDAY 2ND JUNE

SUNDAY 6TH JUNE

TUESDAY 8TH JUNE

FRIDAY 18TH JUNE

TUESDAY 29TH JUNE

WEDNESDAY 30TH JUNE

FRIDAY 2ND JULY

MONDAY 5TH JULY

FRIDAY 9TH JULY

SATURDAY 10TH JULY

TUESDAY 13TH JULY

THURSDAY 15TH JULY

FRIDAY 16TH JULY

SUNDAY 18TH JULY

MONDAY 19TH JULY

FRIDAY 23RD JULY

SUNDAY 25TH JULY

THURSDAY 29TH JULY

FRIDAY 30TH JULY

SATURDAY 31ST JULY

MONDAY 2ND AUGUST

TUESDAY 3RD AUGUST

THURSDAY 5TH AUGUST

MONDAY 9TH AUGUST

WEDNESDAY 11TH AUGUST

FRIDAY 20TH AUGUST

SATURDAY 21ST AUGUST

THURSDAY 26TH AUGUST

FRIDAY 27TH AUGUST

SUNDAY 29TH AUGUST

WEDNESDAY 1ST SEPTEMBER

FRIDAY 3RD SEPTEMBER

SATURDAY 4TH SEPTEMBER

SUNDAY 5TH SEPTEMBER

MONDAY 20TH SEPTEMBER

SUNDAY 3RD OCTOBER

WEDNESDAY 6TH OCTOBER

SUNDAY 10TH OCTOBER

TUESDAY 12TH OCTOBER

WEDNESDAY 13TH OCTOBER

FRIDAY 15TH OCTOBER

WEDNESDAY 20TH OCTOBER

SATURDAY 6TH NOVEMBER

THURSDAY 18TH NOVEMBER

MONDAY 22ND NOVEMBER

FRIDAY 26TH NOVEMBER

WEDNESDAY 1ST DECEMBER

MONDAY 6TH DECEMBER

TUESDAY 7TH DECEMBER

THURSDAY 16TH DECEMBER

FRIDAY 17TH DECEMBER

SATURDAY 18TH DECEMBER

THURSDAY 23RD DECEMBER

FRIDAY 1ST JANUARY

Rammond says starting a diary on January the first is like driving a Ford Mondeo Titanium X saloon. Now I don’t know what he means by that but I can tell he means it as a joke, because he laughs, and afterwards says ‘as you do’, as he always does, so I know I have to go one better.

‘No, Rammond,’ I say, ‘it’s like driving a – ’, but then the words escape me. What is it like? What possible relevance to car driving has keeping a diary?

‘It’s like driving a what, Jeremy?’ he asks, and I can imagine his eyes are all goggly and demonic.

But I still don’t know.

‘A Range Rover?’ I try.

‘A Range Rover?’ he scoffs, and then he says he has to go and talk to his agent about doing a voiceover for a television series on squirrel-culling in Kosovo.

‘I meant a Range Rover Discovery,’ I say into my silent iPhone gizmo, but of course, Rammond’s hung up, ‘as you do’.

Why did I ever give Rammond the job in the first place?

It was all right to begin with because he knew his place, but then he had his crash and now his books are all over Budgens and whenever you turn the telly on, there he is, goofing around like a Korean, with an access-all-areas ticket to Crufts.

And where exactly is Kosovo? Does anyone know?

Exactly. I rest my case. It’s one of those comical made-up countries, isn’t it, where everybody’s called Goran, and come the local saint’s day they ritually catch the tips of their penises in their fly zips while chucking live donkeys from tower block walkways.

Like most of Europe, basically.

But you see, here’s the thing: I can’t fire Rammond from BottomGear. And I can’t fire him from BottomGear because of what happened on that awful night in Germany.

MONDAY 4TH JANUARY

So here we go. 4th January. The first day of the rest of my life. BottomGear’s producer Amil rings after lunch to tell me the ratings are in and even though it’s a repeat from two years ago, our Christmas Special was watched by seven million people, twenty-six of whom rang the BBC to complain about me using the phrase ‘turkey-bark’.

No, I didn’t know what that meant either, but Zafira, my wife-and-manager, has given me a little crib sheet on which she has written a list of words I have to use to stir things up.

Now apparently a turkey-bark is a type of fart.

No, really. But it isn’t just any old fart. No, a turkey-bark turns out to be the Bugatti Veyron (POA) of farts, if you will, because, ladies and gentlemen, just like Santa Claus and James Might, it comes but once a year, and even then only at Christmas.

You see, a turkey-bark is that special fart you let out after you’ve had your Christmas dinner with your in-laws. You’re driving back through country lanes and you’re a bit pissed and you roll onto one buttock and let it out in all its turkey-flavoured glory, don’t you, and for once your wife doesn’t say anything because she’s snoring gently with her head against the heated dashboard.

Anyway, I was talking about the climate control on the new Range Rover and I had to say that one among many of its advantages is that it has special witchcrafty sensors that detect any nutrients in the air, shall we say, extracts them and replaces them with the smell of, I dunno, lavender or fresh coffee. Rammond was scripted to ask if it got rid of all odours, and I had to say, yes, even if you let out a ‘turkey-bark’.

As I said ‘turkey-bark’, Natasha – Amil’s assistant, and a girl whom you most definitely would, if you had a spare half hour and a pack of Lurpak at room temperature – held up a sign to the audience that said LAUGH and no one did, except Rammond, even though he can’t EVEN READ YET.

It’s true that the crowd was a bit uncomfortable because for reasons I don’t claim to understand – something to do with the baggy-breasted raisin-counters who run the BBC, no doubt – we were shooting the Christmas Special in the middle of July, and Amil had made all the bald blokes who pay to watch the show dress up in Christmas jumpers and reindeer hats and so on.

Anyway, under the heat of the lights they began sweating like blond boys in a Turkish barracks. In the end we had to dust their heads with talcum powder to dim the glare, but it only got worse when the bus from HMP Holloway arrived with all the women we hire to make the show look less blokey.

Each of these women from HMP Holloway is butcher than James and Rammond and me put together, and sometimes when we watch the footage afterwards I see them staring at my back and I feel like one of those barrels of pork fat the French navy used to sail with, the ones with holes drilled into the sides, put on the quarter deck to offer the sailors – or ‘matelots’ as we call them – an alternative to sodomizing one another. They all caught venereal disease and died as a result, of course, but what do you expect from the French?

So what with the heat and the Christmas jumpers and reindeer horns, all the bald sweaty blokes and the felonious lesbians had their minds on other things, and none of them was going to be fobbed off with a prescripted laugh-along.

So when no one laughed the first time I said turkey-bark, Amil asked me to do the bit again. This time, though, he asked me to pull ‘my face’ to camera as I said it.

I didn’t understand what he meant.

My face is my face. I don’t know anyone who consciously pulls a face, except me that is, when I am pretending to be a woman having an orgasm.

Though perhaps the less said about that the better.

Amil kept going on about me looking mournful and droopy as I normally do when I make one of these jokes. And then when I still didn’t get it, he said, ‘Oh all right then, just pull your normal monkey-scrotum face.’

And that’s what got the laugh.

Which brings me nicely to my point that whatever day you start a diary it is always the first day of the rest of your life. And as someone with even more time on their hands than a Romanian lorry driver on a cross-Channel ferry once said: keep a diary and it will keep you. Or as Zafira says, it comes in handy if kids stop buying my new Thriller DVD and those BottomGear Top Trumps cards.

THURSDAY 7TH JANUARY

Drive up towards the studio to talk to Amil and Rammond about future stars in our reasonably priced car. I say ‘towards’ the studio because as usual the M40 is completely chockablock with Peugeot drivers driving as if they have their nipples in mousetraps, ready to snap down at the sl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• FOREWORD
• Contents
• PICTURE CREDITS and Copyright page