Top Gear, top book

The new series of Top Gear starts this Sunday, and by coincidence I have recently read The Man in the White Suit by Ben Collins. He, you may recall, was the Stig for several years until he outed himself when it became obvious that the papers were going to do it for him, and this is his story. Now I don’t doubt that Ben Collins is a pretty good racing driver (one of many who never made it to the top), but he is in a rather unusual position here in that he is most famous for being an anonymous TV character. The rather obvious parallel, given the status that the Stig assumed on the back of Top Gear’s popularity, is with a dual-identity superhero like Batman – something Collins himself picks up on and does a good job of trying to explain from an insider’s point of view; as the Stig, he became a semi-legendary figure in petrol-head circles but could not use this to further his own career as a racing driver. So what we have is a story about a modern celebrity who remained anonymous.

As you’d expect, much of this book consists of behind-the-scenes views of various memorable Top Gear stunts (car football, bus racing, training celebs to drive the reasonably-priced car, etc) which give the reader a glimpse of the professionalism of those involved in the making of the show – rather like Richard Hammond’s book As You Do. However, the best parts are when Collins leaves the white suit behind and goes back to his day job and various extra-curricular activities. Thus, for me the stand-out chapters are the one about competing at the Le Mans 24 Hours (which bears comparison with the Le Mans chapter in Martin Brundle’s excellent Working the Wheel), the GT crash in Romania and training in the Brecon Beacons with the Territorial Army – who, rather innovatively, sponsored him in the ASCAR series. Blokey stuff, of course, but I liked it. A lot. 

Adventures on the Blue Nile

Africa has featured on the BBC’s schedule a lot recently, most notably David Attenborough’s epic wildlife series and the more tongue-in-cheek special on Top Gear. Their ‘quest’ to find the source of the Nile in a trio of second-hand estate cars has been rather amusing and it brought to mind an episode from my own African adventure, when I got to visit one of the Nile’s sources.

 Ethiopia is an interesting country in many ways and experiencing it for the first time is a complete culture-shock. One of just two African countries not to have been colonised in the nineteenth century, it has its own distinct language and alphabet, and it is widely to be believed to the region from which homo sapiens originated. Its take on time is very different from our own, and to the tourist this is somewhat disorientating. I was there in August 2005 but according to all the local calendars it was in fact November 1997, and as far as telling the time of day is concerned, 12 o’clock happens to be at dawn. Thus, when you are told that a bus is leaving the following day at 11, they mean it’s leaving at 5am.

The buses, which usually leave before dawn, are dilapidated vehicles that, once they get out of the towns, invariably have to cope with unsealed roads. Punctures are frequent. While the buses are in motion, no-one is allowed to open any of the windows (no matter how hot or smelly it becomes) as this brings in evil spirits. This was how I, very often the only faranju (white man) on the bus, travelled around the whole country, trying to communicate with the locals (taking packets of biscuits onto the buses helps to break down the barriers), marveling at the scenery and listening to a lot of the Amharic pop music that all Ethiopian bus-drivers love to play on the PA system.

My African travels had started in Cairo, from where I’d followed the Nile south down to Aswan, then into Sudan via Lake Nasser. At Khartoum, the Nile’s two main tributaries, the White Nile and the Blue Nile, meet. Of these, the White one is the longest but the Blue one, coming as it does from the Ethiopian Highlands, supplies most of the Nile’s water. From Khartoum, my journey took me into northern Ethiopia where I experienced a complete culture-shock as I travelled along the northern circuit, taking in the historic towns of Gondar, Aksum and Lalibela before reaching Bahar Dar, a pleasant city located on the shores of the source of the Blue Nile, Lake Tana.

The hotel I stayed in was right next to the lake and organised boat trips for any guests who wished to visit the island monasteries for which it is famous. The man behind the reception desk put me onto a man who he called the ‘official guide’, who I found by the boats having an argument with a French couple who (also) wanted to visit the island monasteries but were tempted by another guide who was charging a quarter of what this man wanted. He had a ready answer to that: “He has no official licence. He knows nothing. That’s why he’s only charging 5 birr!” Eventually, they, and yours truly, went with the official bloke.

From our boat, Lake Tana seemed like a very peaceful place, and it wasn’t long before we got to see some of the traditional papyrus-reed canoes, which the guide said last for about four months before the papyrus becomes waterlogged and a new canoe has to be built. They have been used by local people to travel on the lake for thousands of years.

We were taken to three monasteries, and although it was great fun arriving at the islands and being greeted by groups of children trying to sell us the usual trinkets before we’d made it off the jetty, I found myself unimpressed by the monasteries themselves. That’s probably more to do with me than it is with them; I’m sure that they are fascinating in their own right, but I had just come from Aksum (where Ethiopians believe the Ark of the Covenant to be located) and Lalibela (home of the famous rock-hewn churches), and as a result I was already overwhelmed by what I had learned about Ethiopian Christianity and was very much ‘churched out’ by this stage of my journey. Back at the hotel, I felt relieved that I had only opted for a half-day boat trip rather than the full-day one.

Much more to my liking was the excursion I took to see the Blue Nile Falls, some twenty or so miles south of Bahar Dar.

This started with an hour-long morning bus ride to the village of Tis Abay in a vehicle which looked as though it had been made by welding bits of old minibuses together. It was the only bus I travelled on in Ethiopia where I got to sit next to an open window – although it was only open because it had no glass.

           

I had two options once I got to Tis Abay. I could either take a boat trip across the river (above the falls) or walk the long way round to approach the falls below; having assumed that there would be plenty of walking that day, I had put on my hiking-boots on rather than my sandals or trainers so I went for the latter. My guide, a local man called Joseph, was a friendly and knowledgeable type who spent much of the walk telling me all about the new hydro-electric power-station which had been built a couple of years previously. Water from the Abay river (as the Blue Nile is called in Ethiopia) is diverted by a canal to run through the hydro-electric generators, thus providing electricity for most of the region while reducing the flow of the falls somewhat. This is to the extent that in the dry season there is not much to see at all by way of a waterfall. “I had this German tourist once,” said Joseph. “He said, ‘you haven’t taken me to the waterfall, I want my money back!’ But I had – I had to tell him about the hydro-plant and the dry season. He didn’t believe me and swore that I’d taken him to the wrong place!” Since I was there in August, at the height of the wet season, not getting to see any water at the falls wouldn’t be a problem.        

    

The walk to the falls lasted for about half an hour, including the crossing of the fast-flowing Blue Nile by way of a stone bridge that had been built by Portuguese missionaries – the first Europeans to come to this part of the world – in the seventeenth century. The path then took us up to the viewpoint over the falls themselves, which looked spectacular. They’re over a hundred feet high and stretch a few hundred yards across. A lazily-flowing river above the falls, the Blue Nile seemed to transform into a raging torrent before my eyes. An incredible amount of spray was being thrown up, which makes the local name for the falls, Tis Issat (‘smoking water’) very appropriate.

Walking down from the viewpoint, Joseph took me even closer to the waterfall, a walk which involved having to wade through a fast-flowing tributary en route. For this, I had to take my boots off and roll my trousers up to the knees. A local boy clad in a dirty tee-shirt and wielding a long stick was on hand to carry my boots for me; he lent me his stick so I could keep myself steady, and as I waded through the river I momentarily felt like a character in some old-fashioned exploration adventure.

From there, we walked up to the base of the falls, scrambling down a rocky outcrop and past a small herd of cattle – God knows how they got there – to get to the edge of the pool at the bottom of the waterfall itself, and got absolutely covered in spray. I could barley hear myself think above the sound of the falls.

We then climbed a narrow path up to the top of the falls, where I got Joseph to take my picture before he led me across a boggy field to the next stage – a small boat across the river and back to Tis Abay. By now I was very glad I’d chosen to wear my boots for this trip, as the field was a quagmire. Less lucky than me were a group of Italian students who’d gone on a walk by the top of the falls in their flip-flops, and were now reduced to walking bare-foot and slipping over in the mud at regular intervals as they made their way back to the village, from where we would all get the bus back to Bahar Dar.

The next day, I took a bus to Addis Ababa, the capital. This took two days – two days of closed windows, body odour and Amharic pop music! The highlight was without doubt the Blue Nile Bridge – after the falls, the Blue Nile flows through a gorge as it heads westwards, out of the mountains and then north towards Sudan. The road had to descend down to the bridge itself, and then climb up the other side; being in a window-seat I had a great view of the gorge and the bridge from on high, although sadly the driver didn’t stop to let the only faranju on board take some pictures of what would be my last view of the Nile.

Bond ... James Bond

I have never made much of a secret of the fact that my favourite film series is, by some considerable distance, the James Bond films. Naturally, then, I was excited by the release of the new film, Skyfall, which I went to see in the cinema this week.

Pre-Skyfall preparation – reading the reviews in the papers aside – involved re-watching Daniel Craig’s first appearance as 007 in Casino Royale (inexplicably, the only Bond film I own on DVD – I still haven’t got round to replacing the VHS tapes), a repeat of You Only Live Twice (screenplay by Roald Dahl, I kid you not) and the generally excellent Top Gear special on Bond cars. Top Gear has in my opinion gone off the boil in recent years, becoming (as the Bond films did at some point) very much a parody of itself, but this particular special was definitely worth tuning in for. The very good interviews aside, the story of how an Aston Martin DB5 came to be used in Goldfinger was definitely worth retelling (in an attitude similar to that taken by British Leyland over The Italian Job, Aston Martin initially didn’t want anything to do with it, and the makers only insisted on an Aston because Bond had driven one – a DB Mark III – in the novel). Plus, there was a real treat in store in the form of converting a Lotus Excel for use as an actual submarine, in homage to The Spy Who Loved Me. Only the people at Top Gear could have come up with that.

And so to the movie itself. Well, almost. The film was billed as starting at 7pm, although this was of course the time that the half-hour of adverts and trailers was due to start, some of the former being obvious Bond tie-ins which included, rather annoyingly, quite a bit of the pre-credits sequence from the film I was about to see.

The film was certainly more dialogue-heavy and character-driven than previous Bond films, and I don’t see that as being a bad thing, especially with a cast like this. Ever since Casino Royale, there’s been a move towards redefining what a Bond film is (as well as being a direct sequel, Quantum of Solace was, to all intents and purposes, a revenge-flick – the Bond franchise had never done the former before, while as far as the latter is concerned the only previous one had been Licence to Kill), and as far as this fan is concerned that’s no bad thing. Skyfall breaks new ground for the Bond films in that it’s the first to explicitly emphasise 007’s back-story – and what’s wrong with revealing a bit more about the main character? In the books, Ian Fleming didn’t really get round to this until rather late in the day, with the story of Bond’s parents being killed when he was a boy not being told until You Only Live Twice, the last Bond novel to be published while Fleming was still alive.

In the book, this was told in the form of an obituary written by M, which duly features in Skyfall after Bond is presumed to have been killed in action in the pre-credits sequence. That he is in fact alive and living on a beach somewhere is also taken from You Only Live Twice (the novel, not the film).

Craig is, I think, an excellent Bond – tough and determined but, unlike most of the others, showing a vulnerable side and literally being seen to bleed (in flat contradiction of Q’s final piece of advice to Bond in The World Is Not Enough). He brings something to the role the others didn’t; he certainly looks like more of a killer than Roger Moore in his prime, and yet the vulnerability (an area previously explored only by the seriously under-rated George Lazenby) adds something to the character, making James Bond appear as something more than a wise-cracking government hit-man. Of the old Bonds, he’s closets to Timothy Dalton, who was himself perhaps too serious coming in after Roger Moore (Pierce Brosnan certainly sent things back the other way by restoring a lot of the gags). It helps, I think, that such a portrayal of Bond came at the same time as a welcome reboot of the franchise, which has helped those responsible for the films in that they no longer feel obliged to stick to a prescribed Bond formula. If you want to know why they had to reboot Bond, simply note that Die Another Day – the most self-parodying of the Bond films as well as one of the most extravagant in terms of special effects – was released in the same year as The Bourne Identity. Suddenly, overblown special effects didn’t look too clever, and as well as establishing a new timeline for Bond, Casino Royale was rather stripped-down compared to what had gone before.

Of the other characters, Judi Dench was on top form as M, and Javier Bardem brought in a performance as the villain that hasn’t been seen in many a year – I would not be surprised to find Raoul Silva spoken of in the same breath as Auric Goldfinger and Francisco Scaramanga in years to come. A renegade MI6 agent as the baddie has been done before, but not like this (and a cyber-terrorist to boot; very modern!). Throw in the likes of Ralph Fiennes and Albert Finney, and it’s obvious that Sam Mendes established a heavyweight cast for this, so much so that I’m struggling to think of a Bond film that was as well-acted as this one.

The relative lack of gadgets aside (these were dismissed by the new Q in a throwaway remark about MI6 not going in for exploding pens any more) was more than compensated for by the appearance of the legendary DB5, complete with the optional extras it had in Goldfinger. Even though we all knew what was coming thanks to the publicity, there was still an audible gasp in the cinema when Bond opened the lock-up to reveal the Aston.

Aside from a couple of times where Bond looks at his watch (yes, it’s an Omega, we get it) and an obvious close-up of his mobile phone, I don’t think that the product placement distracted from my enjoyment of the film. Having read the books, I’ve argued on many occasions that product placement with James Bond is not a recent phenomenon but something that goes back to Ian Fleming himself, who with his journalist’s eye for detail used brand-names as a means of making sure that Bond appeared sophisticated and worldly-wise – the Bond of the books wears certain brands or styles of clothes and smokes a particular (specially-made) brand of cigarette, for example, and when reciting the famous cocktail recipe in Casino Royale he really does specify Gordon’s rather than just gin. I guess the difference is that Fleming wasn’t getting paid to do it (although by all accounts he did receive the odd freebie after publication), whereas (for example) Heineken paid a lot of money to ensure that it’s their beer that Bond is seen to be drinking. Sticking with drinks, I note that Bollinger is now the official Bond champagne, although I seem to recall that in the books Bond liked Pol Roger. Or was it Taittinger?

All in all, I really liked it. After the relative disappointment of Quantum of Solace, Skyfall brings the Bond franchise, and Craig’s Bond for that matter, back to the superlative heights of Casino Royale. Daniel Craig is no longer standing in the shadows of any of his predecessors. He’s a great Bond but he’s not the best there’s ever been – yet. However, give him a couple more, and the original may no longer be the best.