Is It Really Too Much to Ask? by Jeremy Clarkson Read Free Book Online Page B

most of the audience was either hopelessly drunk, extremely chatty or at home in bed.
    So it was a tough crowd, even for a seasoned campaigner. For a bag-of-nerves newbie, hoping to get noticed, it must have been a nightmare.
    And for one particular girl, on a night when I was there, it must have been even worse. She came on to the stage, picked up the microphone and delivered what we had to assume was her best line. You always deliver your best line first. That way, you have the audience on your side from the get-go. So she delivered her best line and she was greeted with absolute silence.
    It was a fairly funny line but – as one – a couple of hundred people in varying degrees of inebriation decided not to make a sound. If someone had heckled, then she’d at least have had a well-rehearsed put-down to fire off. A heckle could have saved her. But none came. You could have heard a pin drop; well, you could have done were it not for the deafening sound of a poor girl dying from the inside out.
    I’ve always been fascinated by that moment. Because how did all those people suddenly decide, without communicating, to behave in exactly the same way?
    Clive James, the veteran broadcaster, wit and raconteur, always maintained that you will get a bad audience if you have a bad script. And that, conversely, if you are good, the crowd will be good, too. But I’ve now proved this to be incorrect. Two weeks ago, while recording the
Top Gear
show, James May, Richard Hammond and I talked for a few minutes about the new Nissan Micra, and there was the sort of quietness normally associated with church services. As a result, the whole scene was edited out of the programme.
    However, as a test, we did exactly the same story again last week. The same people saying the same words on the same day of the week in the same place. And the audience laughed until their buttocks fell off. I found that very, very strange, so I did some research.
    Back in the early 1970s, an American woman called Martha McClintock, from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, asked 135 college girls living in dorms to record their period start dates. To her amazement she found that, as the academic year wore on, the dates became closer and closer together. The girls were getting in sync.
    How was this possible? Well, it seems that plants and insects – even cows – communicate with one another using pheromones. And some scientists believe that humans emit pheromones, too, through their armpits. Could it be that back at the Comedy Store in the 1980s we could smell the comedian’s fear radiating out from her pits, and responded to it?
    Is that possible? Could it be that the stock market goes haywire from time to time, not because there is anything fundamentally wrong with the system but because of hidden
messages in someone’s body odour? If so, we should all be a little bit terrified. Because what if reason tells us to do one thing but we are then compelled by our noses to do something else?
    I do not want to buy Peter Mandelson’s new book. I don’t see why he should have any more of my money. But I’m frightened to death that I may soon be standing next to someone in a bookshop and, as a result of their whiffy pits, feel compelled to buy it. Likewise, reason dictates that if I see Mandelson crossing the road in front of me, I should press the accelerator as hard as I can and try to run him down. But what if, at the last moment, I get a hint of Mando juice and decide to hit the brake pedal instead?
    It gets worse. Right now, all of us are in agreement that the country is broke. The human part of our brains is telling us we have more debt in relation to gross domestic product than almost any other country in the world and that savage cuts, along with tax rises, are the only answer. Of course, there are murmurings about the abandonment of free swimming lessons for the elderly, and arty people were running around last week moaning about a proposed Arts Council budget