Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson Page A

miles from our hotel but that, according to our board, would take three hours. And it was bang-on right.
    It even knew about the roadworks. Now, if there is one aspect of Japanese life that should be brought to Britain – and there is only one – it’s their ability to fix a road.
    You can forget all about miles of cones which have been erected to protect an upturned wheelbarrow. Over there, an army, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Iwo Jima, descends on the area and stands in serried ranks while the chief reads out instructions.
    They are then dispatched and what we saw next defied belief. In five minutes, the afflicted section of road was cordoned off by a line of cones and a bank of lights that would have shamed Pink Floyd.
    Men in reflective vests waved batons around to direct motorists, but these were no ordinary batons because you could write messages in the night sky with them. They were astonishing.
    I was mesmerised for at least five minutes, by which time the army had done the road work and was taking the cones and the lights down. Ten minutes later, there was no evidence that they’d ever been there, that they’d staged a full-scale reconstruction of the closing scene from
Close Encounters
.
    We talked about that all the way back to our hotel, where we arrived at a cool 10.00 p.m.
    Ordinarily, we like to shoot four usable minutes of film in a day but in Japan, we’d managed about 30 seconds – half a minute of television for eight hours in a jam.
    Another secret about
Motorworld
. The crew gets on well. We go out a lot in the evening and drink. We eat well. We have a good time. But in Japan, night after night, we finished work, went back to our rooms and went to sleep. I even had notches on my bed counting down to the day when we could leave.
    We couldn’t be bothered to go out because it was too much effort in a country that offers no rewards.
    The car is finished there but that’s only one of a hundred reasons why I shall never go back.

Switzerland
    Your dinner party is a bit lacklustre and you’ve noticed the guests have started to glance at their watches, so simply lean forwards and ask this question: if you had to shoot just one person, who would it be? The next thing you know, they’ll have drunk all your best port and, outside, the birds will be singing. And the debate will still be raging.
    Mark Thatcher is always up there as a hot favourite but Jeffrey Archer is never far behind. More earnest people go for obscure Serbian leaders or Third World dictators and Tony Blair usually gets a mention too, from people on both sides of the political spectrum. I always go for Colin Welland, but can rarely find support on that one.
    The game has become so prolonged that we’ve now introduced a new twist. Given a nuclear device, where would you set it off?
    This isn’t quite so successful because after just an hour, everyone is usually in full agreement. Japan always starts out as the obvious choice but they’ve had two already so it hardly seems fair to give them a third. Essex always provides some healthy debate too, as do France and Sydney, but it never takes long for someone to sit bolt upright and say ‘Switzerland’.
    That’s followed by a pause as everyone weighs up the pros and cons and then, usually, everyone starts to nod.Yes, Switzerland, and not only because this is the only country on earth where everyone has a fallout shelter under their stairs.
    It’s strange, this, because on paper, Switzerland has so much in its favour: breathtaking scenery, proper skiing, clean food, nice clocks and, to cap it all, we’ve never had a war with them. Well, they’ve never had a war with anyone, actually.
    I think the big problem is jealousy. I mean, here we have a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world, a country with negligible unemployment and a country that’s had the good sense thus far to stay out of the EC and which, as a result, has made its inhabitants rich