Turpin Ted has achieved for the Haworth tourist industry what the Taliban did for winter sun breaks in Afghanistan
It's called the Changegate Car Park in Haworth. But you won't get any change from the £75 you pay for clamp removal if you break their rules even a teeny bit, as we saw in The Yorkshire Clamper (Channel 4).
Leave your car for a couple of minutes to get some coins and you no longer need them. Just the big notes, please. Park across two bays, even if there's not another car in sight, and they'll demand the contents of your handbag. Baroness Betty Boothroyd was done for sticking her ticket in her car window upside down. It would have been cheaper to get her eyes tested at Specsavers.
Not surprisingly, the owner Ted has become a Dick Turpin hate figure. Turpin Ted has achieved for the Haworth tourist industry what the Taliban did for winter sun breaks in Afghanistan.
For Ted it's a matter of principle: "You can't have rules and then bend them," he says. It seems perfectly reasonable when he explains it, though he cheekily flogs Turpin T-shirts, even as the wheel torture screws are being fitted to cars. I call that turpitude.
He recited his four parking expectations as we do our class codes of behaviour. But what about leniency, Sir? Impossible - where would you draw the line? This was tough on crime and the causes of crime all at the same time. If Ted ever wants a job enforcing the wearing of our school uniform, he's my man. We might even get rich together on the fines.
Several rich men celebrated their talent - as well as their upcoming books, TV programmes or films - in the new series of Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (BBC One).
Ross is a hyperactive host but quick quips and a compelling personality make for interesting conversation. For example, national cricket hero, Stuart Broad, told Ross that his fastest ball travelled at 93mph. Wow, that beats the last Virgin train I travelled on.
Ricky Gervais reminded us, as he always does, what a huge superstar he is. I spotted him patiently queuing behind my wife in a London bookshop recently and she hadn't even recognised him. But then he didn't recognise her either.
Jamie Oliver demonstrated how to cook "bullock's bollocks" and chop a cucumber in thin slices in less than seven seconds, a skill learnt when he was 10. I won't be risking that in my school. Now he's testing his kids on the names, smells and tastes of the 24 herbs in his garden.
Jamie would have had something to say about the freshness of food plundered from supermarket bins by "freegans", protesting about waste, in another new series, Tonight: From Bin to Banquet (ITV1). It was Antony Worrall Thompson's turn to do the cooking with free ingredients from skips. He fed hundreds - it was just like the parable of the loaves and fishes. But this really was a miracle because nobody got food poisoning. Just goes to show: what you lose on the clamp, you win from the bin.
Ray Tarleton
Sunday, 20 September 2009
Monday, 14 September 2009
Tune in, switch off - Getting the hump
How do you get 300 camels to travel in convoy when they are freaked by the camera crew? The answer came thanks to Kate Humble on The Frankincense Trail (BBC2).
Our eager explorer, costumed in yellow so bright that she resembled an ice lolly, was covering 2,000 miles over seven nations and delving into 3,000 years of history. Albert, the herdsman, had the answer to the camel problem, deploying mobile phones and a vehicle or two.
Meanwhile, Kate had her own challenges, having to model a full-length abaya, the traditional overgarment worn by women in the Islamic world. She was going to meet a prince, so naturally she had to wear her best frock. But in fact, the suffocating discomfort of the veil reduced her to tears - partly because of the physical strain, but mainly because women are compelled to wear it.
She also collected some resin, which has the power to cure depression, nose bleeds and wrinkles. And we discovered that frankincense used to be worth more than gold. Her 90 kilos at £300 would have been a year's salary for your average Roman. My theory is that they burnt it because they were desperate to conceal the camel pong.
In Yemen, Kate saw camel-jumping, which is used to keep young men at peak fitness. The winner managed a five-camel, two-metre-high leap. I can see us scrapping the long jump and spicing up our sports days with a similar event. Dartmoor pony-jumping, anyone?
Dr Adam Rutherford was also in hunting mode in The Cell (BBC4), trying to discover the secrets of life. His fossilised microbes were 1 billion years old. That makes me feel young, at least. We went into the toxic soup kitchen to watch scientists trying to create living cells from scratch. It looked to me like milkshake in a blender. If they succeed, it's going to be (drum roll) a "second Genesis". Professor George Church, from Harvard, explained the crucial process at the heart of all life - reading DNA code and carrying out its instructions. And I thought the most important job was bringing my wife her morning mug of tea.
To show how close we were to this miracle breakthrough, Rutherford took us to San Francisco, where we met scientists who had altered bacteria so that they ate sugar and excreted pure diesel. Looking like the mad inventor in his white coat, he used the liquid to power up his generator, proving the fuel was "ultra-pure". So just wait till this energy drink hits the supermarket shelves. No need to keep that jerrycan of reserve fuel in the boot. If only we could teach camels to do that with their food, even the price of frankincense would drop.
Ray Tarleton
Our eager explorer, costumed in yellow so bright that she resembled an ice lolly, was covering 2,000 miles over seven nations and delving into 3,000 years of history. Albert, the herdsman, had the answer to the camel problem, deploying mobile phones and a vehicle or two.
Meanwhile, Kate had her own challenges, having to model a full-length abaya, the traditional overgarment worn by women in the Islamic world. She was going to meet a prince, so naturally she had to wear her best frock. But in fact, the suffocating discomfort of the veil reduced her to tears - partly because of the physical strain, but mainly because women are compelled to wear it.
She also collected some resin, which has the power to cure depression, nose bleeds and wrinkles. And we discovered that frankincense used to be worth more than gold. Her 90 kilos at £300 would have been a year's salary for your average Roman. My theory is that they burnt it because they were desperate to conceal the camel pong.
In Yemen, Kate saw camel-jumping, which is used to keep young men at peak fitness. The winner managed a five-camel, two-metre-high leap. I can see us scrapping the long jump and spicing up our sports days with a similar event. Dartmoor pony-jumping, anyone?
Dr Adam Rutherford was also in hunting mode in The Cell (BBC4), trying to discover the secrets of life. His fossilised microbes were 1 billion years old. That makes me feel young, at least. We went into the toxic soup kitchen to watch scientists trying to create living cells from scratch. It looked to me like milkshake in a blender. If they succeed, it's going to be (drum roll) a "second Genesis". Professor George Church, from Harvard, explained the crucial process at the heart of all life - reading DNA code and carrying out its instructions. And I thought the most important job was bringing my wife her morning mug of tea.
To show how close we were to this miracle breakthrough, Rutherford took us to San Francisco, where we met scientists who had altered bacteria so that they ate sugar and excreted pure diesel. Looking like the mad inventor in his white coat, he used the liquid to power up his generator, proving the fuel was "ultra-pure". So just wait till this energy drink hits the supermarket shelves. No need to keep that jerrycan of reserve fuel in the boot. If only we could teach camels to do that with their food, even the price of frankincense would drop.
Ray Tarleton
Monday, 7 September 2009
Tune in, switch off - The roast with the most
Desperate Romantics (BBC2) - laudanum-laced, bonking-fuelled and with a little painting on the side - seemed like a six-hour trailer for a drama that only ever tantalised. Still, it could have been a PhD thesis compared with the prancing that passed as history in The Tudors (BBC2).
The strongest drama of the new season so far was ITV1's Gunrush, a topical portrayal of teenagers seduced by guns. Timothy Spall played Doug Becket, a too-good-to-believe husband and father until his daughter was senselessly gunned down after a childish argument in a supermarket. The loss drove a wedge between Doug and his wife ...
There were powerful images: a very realistic death; the young killer curled up on his bed, nursing the murder weapon as if it were his teddy bear; Doug's pain as he tried to scrub his daughter's blood from her sister's cello. And a violent teenage universe that no education system could put right.
Doug was tortured into finding the killer to regain his wife's respect. His only clues were the missing murder weapon and his memory of "a smile", the killer's facial scar, buried deep in his trauma.
Everybody's Everyman, Spall acted to perfection. He once joked that he didn't like his face but wasn't having a head transplant. Well, I say Spall is beautiful.
English food was pronounced beautiful - "the best on the plate in the world" - by Vito Cataffo in Dolce Vito - Dream Restaurant (Channel 4). A successful Italian restaurateur in the UK, Vito is setting up a new place in Benevento, near Naples, to bring English cuisine to his countrymen.
Does he mean our Indian, Chinese or French restaurants, I wonder? For a good English restaurant is as rare as raw beef in steak tartare. But after a Devon-drenched summer, watching this was my last hope of a sun tan.
The Italians interviewed defined English cooking as fast food. If only: when the recipe claims it will take 10 minutes to prepare, you can bet it will take me half an hour. And that's just finding the potato peeler.
Roast beef was on the menu, fillet the tastiest cut "because it's the laziest muscle". Searching for the best, Vito shivered in a butcher's cold room where the beef was hung to draw out the juices and sweeten the meat. What happened to the Italian sun?
Vito chose the four-week-hung Dexter cut from Lincolnshire and back in Benevento prepared a beef banquet for friends. He kept slapping something loudly when making his point. Or was he just tenderising those fillets? I could try this to get attention in the next staff meeting.
Sporting a sporran-sprung kilt, Vito dressed for dinner on the big night. Well, he was going for an English. But the fillet was toughened by being over-cooked. So no blood on the plates and his guests left dreaming of pizza.
And while we've only been back in school for a week, I was left dreaming of my next Italian holiday.
Ray Tarleton
The strongest drama of the new season so far was ITV1's Gunrush, a topical portrayal of teenagers seduced by guns. Timothy Spall played Doug Becket, a too-good-to-believe husband and father until his daughter was senselessly gunned down after a childish argument in a supermarket. The loss drove a wedge between Doug and his wife ...
There were powerful images: a very realistic death; the young killer curled up on his bed, nursing the murder weapon as if it were his teddy bear; Doug's pain as he tried to scrub his daughter's blood from her sister's cello. And a violent teenage universe that no education system could put right.
Doug was tortured into finding the killer to regain his wife's respect. His only clues were the missing murder weapon and his memory of "a smile", the killer's facial scar, buried deep in his trauma.
Everybody's Everyman, Spall acted to perfection. He once joked that he didn't like his face but wasn't having a head transplant. Well, I say Spall is beautiful.
English food was pronounced beautiful - "the best on the plate in the world" - by Vito Cataffo in Dolce Vito - Dream Restaurant (Channel 4). A successful Italian restaurateur in the UK, Vito is setting up a new place in Benevento, near Naples, to bring English cuisine to his countrymen.
Does he mean our Indian, Chinese or French restaurants, I wonder? For a good English restaurant is as rare as raw beef in steak tartare. But after a Devon-drenched summer, watching this was my last hope of a sun tan.
The Italians interviewed defined English cooking as fast food. If only: when the recipe claims it will take 10 minutes to prepare, you can bet it will take me half an hour. And that's just finding the potato peeler.
Roast beef was on the menu, fillet the tastiest cut "because it's the laziest muscle". Searching for the best, Vito shivered in a butcher's cold room where the beef was hung to draw out the juices and sweeten the meat. What happened to the Italian sun?
Vito chose the four-week-hung Dexter cut from Lincolnshire and back in Benevento prepared a beef banquet for friends. He kept slapping something loudly when making his point. Or was he just tenderising those fillets? I could try this to get attention in the next staff meeting.
Sporting a sporran-sprung kilt, Vito dressed for dinner on the big night. Well, he was going for an English. But the fillet was toughened by being over-cooked. So no blood on the plates and his guests left dreaming of pizza.
And while we've only been back in school for a week, I was left dreaming of my next Italian holiday.
Ray Tarleton
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Tune in, switch off - Jollity, jam and journeys
Politicians are like supply teachers: the public is the class they have to control," mused Natalie Haynes in The Funny Side of Politics (BBC Two). Clive Anderson offered his class a video of the best political embarrassments - and how we laughed.
John Prescott's punch, as clumsy as his language, would have got him struck off the supply register before you could say "CRB check", but he remained deputy prime minister. So let's see it again shall we? This time in slow motion.
It looked as if John Redwood's rendition of the Welsh national anthem was in slow motion too and I'll bet he felt it was. Not knowing the words, the former Welsh secretary made them up with his eyebrows and lips dancing in time to the rhythm. First rule of supply teaching - look as if you know what you're doing.
Jam and Jerusalem (BBC One), a sort of comedy Archers, also had its embarrassing moments. Rosie (Dawn French) had some of the best lines delivered in the worst Devonian accent I've heard. Well, taxi drivers know everything and my last one, from Oakie (Okehampton) taught me how to pronounce some local words properly. So, for example, the nearby South Zeal is "Sow Zell". Rosie could do with him as a voice coach.
"This is Devon: a dinner party can take weeks to prepare," claimed Caroline, Jennifer Saunders' stiffly snooty creation, because "one can't just nip out to the local deli". Well Chagford, close by, has a very fine deli. In fact, I can personally recommend the freshly baked pies and tarts.
Rosie's dinner party slurping of "lemon soup", the finger bowl, was comic. Told the bowl was for prawns, she studiously dipped each one in the water before eating. Playing the game of Define British Values, Rosie topped "tolerance" with "cat food". But there was an affecting moment when watching a video message from Caroline's son in Afghanistan.
The modern world malapropped them by. Rosie "Wikipeed" Charles Dance to discover he's now single; Eileen "Goggled" to find information on her computer; and atheist Katy, the community support officer, asked: "Do you twitter, vicar?"
He had no idea. But he was having conscience trouble. "God's not looking after you is he?" she asked soothingly. So the vicar looked after himself instead, ravishing the unbeliever on the Dartmoor rocks.
There was more rural tranquillity in River Journeys with Griff Rhys Jones (BBC One) where we learnt why "nearly all towns were built on rivers". Geography lesson done, there was history too - particularly the fascinating clash of uses for the waterways, for transport or energy and sometimes both at once.
We were on the River Lea where the best barley in the world is grown. Apparently, it was safer to drink beer than water in the seventeenth century. I think it still is in some parts of the world. Griff took in a factory tour to see the malting process and cried out in delight at the damp barley.
Actually, I thought he rather overdid the delight but perhaps he'd not been risking the water either. If he ever wants a job as a supply teacher though, I'd snap him up.
Ray Tarleton
John Prescott's punch, as clumsy as his language, would have got him struck off the supply register before you could say "CRB check", but he remained deputy prime minister. So let's see it again shall we? This time in slow motion.
It looked as if John Redwood's rendition of the Welsh national anthem was in slow motion too and I'll bet he felt it was. Not knowing the words, the former Welsh secretary made them up with his eyebrows and lips dancing in time to the rhythm. First rule of supply teaching - look as if you know what you're doing.
Jam and Jerusalem (BBC One), a sort of comedy Archers, also had its embarrassing moments. Rosie (Dawn French) had some of the best lines delivered in the worst Devonian accent I've heard. Well, taxi drivers know everything and my last one, from Oakie (Okehampton) taught me how to pronounce some local words properly. So, for example, the nearby South Zeal is "Sow Zell". Rosie could do with him as a voice coach.
"This is Devon: a dinner party can take weeks to prepare," claimed Caroline, Jennifer Saunders' stiffly snooty creation, because "one can't just nip out to the local deli". Well Chagford, close by, has a very fine deli. In fact, I can personally recommend the freshly baked pies and tarts.
Rosie's dinner party slurping of "lemon soup", the finger bowl, was comic. Told the bowl was for prawns, she studiously dipped each one in the water before eating. Playing the game of Define British Values, Rosie topped "tolerance" with "cat food". But there was an affecting moment when watching a video message from Caroline's son in Afghanistan.
The modern world malapropped them by. Rosie "Wikipeed" Charles Dance to discover he's now single; Eileen "Goggled" to find information on her computer; and atheist Katy, the community support officer, asked: "Do you twitter, vicar?"
He had no idea. But he was having conscience trouble. "God's not looking after you is he?" she asked soothingly. So the vicar looked after himself instead, ravishing the unbeliever on the Dartmoor rocks.
There was more rural tranquillity in River Journeys with Griff Rhys Jones (BBC One) where we learnt why "nearly all towns were built on rivers". Geography lesson done, there was history too - particularly the fascinating clash of uses for the waterways, for transport or energy and sometimes both at once.
We were on the River Lea where the best barley in the world is grown. Apparently, it was safer to drink beer than water in the seventeenth century. I think it still is in some parts of the world. Griff took in a factory tour to see the malting process and cried out in delight at the damp barley.
Actually, I thought he rather overdid the delight but perhaps he'd not been risking the water either. If he ever wants a job as a supply teacher though, I'd snap him up.
Ray Tarleton
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