“Calm down,” snaps Duncan unexpectedly. “You’re overstimulated.” He glares harshly at me. “You’re never going to understand what it’s like to be Bond driving through France if you’re this overstimulated.”
“All right, all right,” I say.
Duncan is annoyed with me. I guess we’ve got cabin fever, having been cooped up together in this Aston Martin for hours. Still, his tone shocks me. I feel as if I’ve been slapped in the face.
Ironically, Bond actually was slapped in the face by Tilly, his passenger, after he gave her one master/slave eye flurry too many: “The open palm cracked across his face. Bond put up a hand and rubbed his cheek. If only pretty girls were always angry they would be beautiful.” I don’t agree with Bond about this. I don’t find angry women beautiful. I find them stressful and upsetting.
“Turn off the iPhone!” Duncan snaps. “Turn off your e-mails. Just experience the car and the road. Just experience it!”
“OK, whatever,” I say. I do.
“See how nice it is to get rid of all that stimulation and just experience the car,” Duncan says after a while. “You can go faster. The car only comes into its own when you actually accelerate.”
“So you’re saying that to truly enjoy the car, I have to break the law?” I say. But I understand Duncan’s frustration. I’m an annoyingly cautious driver. The speedometer of this Aston Martin goes up to 220 mph, and I haven’t once exceeded 70 mph.
“OK, I’ll overtake that lorry. But just this once.” I gingerly touch the accelerator. “Oh my God!” I yell.
I’m suddenly going 100 mph and the car is so smooth it feels like 30. I’ve never seen a lorry vanish so quickly in my rearview mirror. I feel like Han Solo in hyperdrive, or Jeremy Clarkson. It feels fantastic. No wonder the rich and boorish love themselves.
We stop to picnic, as Bond did, in the Jura Mountains; Bond “attacked the foothills as if he were competing in the Alpine trails,” and so do I—and we make it to Geneva by nightfall. As I pull up outside the fantastically opulent Hotel des Bergues, a rich-looking guest comes over to admire the car.
“I’ve driven this all the way from London,” I say.
“I can see why you’d want to,” he replies. “My father bought me one of these when I was seventeen, and I bought myself a Porsche at the same time, and I really preferred this to the Porsche.”
“Your father bought you an Aston Martin when you were seventeen?” I shriek, astonished. “You must be unbelievably rich!” He takes a slightly nervous step backward. I’m clearly less of a kindred spirit than he’d initially assumed. “Plus,” I say, “isn’t it irresponsible to give a teenager a really fast car? You might have crashed.”
“I did crash,” he says, impatiently, “but that isn’t the point. The point is that, compared with the Porsche . . .” He pauses. “Anyway, have a nice night.”
“And you!” I say. I think about adding, “I’m really constipated because I’ve been driving and eating too much,” but I decide not to, because that would be too much information with which to burden a stranger. Instead, I head to the toilets, where they’re piping choral music into the cubicles. As everything Bond ate comes flooding out, the piped choral music turns into a choir of heavenly voices, filling the cubicle with their magnificence.
Now that, I think, is a fancy hotel.
And this is where my Bond journey ends. Bond gets captured and tortured in Geneva. I go to my room and flick channels, hoping for the purposes of veracity to find a movie in which people get tortured, Saw or My Little Eye, say. But I can’t. Instead, I fall into a deep and elegant sleep.
I Looked into That Camera. And I Just Said It
In February 2010, the broadcaster Ray Gosling was arrested on suspicion of murder, having confessed on his BBC East Midlands TV show Inside Out to the mercy killing of his lover, Tony, sixteen years earlier. The papers were filled with supportive articles from right-to-die advocates and also from Gosling fans, who’d followed the work of this great pioneering TV journalist over his fifty-year career.
But then, on September 14, Gosling was convicted at Nottingham magistrates’ court of wasting police time. He hadn’t killed anyone. He’d been in France, reporting on a football match, the day Tony died. He was given a ninety-day suspended sentence after the prosecution told the court that his false confession had cost £45,000 and 1,800 hours of police time.
I’ve been a Ray Gosling fan since I was eighteen, when my college lecturer told me to seek him out. There was a place for people like me in the media, my lecturer said, and it was a place that had been carved out by Ray Gosling. By people like me, he meant people from the provinces who were a bit awkward, and had strange vocal inflections, but might be able to see the world in a fresh, non-Oxbridge way.
I watched Two Town Mad, Gosling’s brilliant, influential 1963 paean to everyday life in Leicester and Nottingham. In it, you see the young Ray, with movie-star good looks, enthusing about Leicester’s new drive-in bank and multistory car park over a sound track of swinging jazz. He made regional, working-class ordinariness—things his contemporaries deemed too inconsequential to chronicle—seem exciting and cool and worthy of lyricism.
The day after the verdict, I decide to call him. It was such a mystery. What had made him invent the mercy-killing story? Did he think nobody would bother checking? What was his motive?
I tell him about my college lecturer and my subsequent years of fandom. “Since the conviction, my body has been bruised with people hugging me in the street and holding my hand, people loving me and cuddling me,” he replies. “The main thing they say is, ‘Oh, Ray, you silly bugger.’ And you know what? There’s not been one single word of criticism.”
We arrange to meet in Manchester. At Stoke, I see him get on the train and wander into my carriage. “Ray!” I call. “I’m the person you’re meeting in Manchester! What a coincidence!”
He sits down next to me, smiles. Then the train pulls away and he launches into a captivating commentary about everything we can see from the window: the color of some cows, the City of Manchester Stadium, various follies and statues. “This is the tunnel at Prestbury. It’s the richest village in England. It’s where all the grand footballers and executives live. The vicar died playing golf on the golf course. . . .” And so on.
“The BBC has been the great love affair of my life,” he says as we get off the train at Manchester Piccadilly. “Fifty years. And now they’ve blocked me.” He pauses. “Well, if there’s no more broadcasting, there’s no more broadcasting.”
Then, as we catch the bus to Moston, North Manchester, a flash of anger: “The BBC is run by a load of guys who have never made a program in their lives, never told a story in their lives, never cried in their lives, never told a lie in their lives. . . .”
His point is that all nonfiction broadcasters walk a line. And he has a point. Journalism is storytelling. We wait around for the best bits—the most engaging, extreme, colorful moments—and we stitch them together, ignoring the boring stuff, turning real life into a narrative. Even so, there’s shaping a story and there’s making things up.
On the bus, Ray starts telling me about his early childhood, about how his grandmother used to routinely embroider the truth. He was, he says, born into a working-class backstreet family in Northampton in 1939. “My grandmother, my father’s mother, used to keep a flower shop. When I was on my own, she’d beckon me over. ‘Ray, you must never tell your mother this, but we’re partly Jewish.’ But she forgot the story sometimes, a bit like some of the stories I’ve told in my life and you’ve told in your life too. She would beckon me aside and say, ‘Ray, you must never tell your mother this, but we’re partly Gypsy.’” He laughs. “It wasn’t enough for her to be English from Northampton. She had to always pretend to have that extra little bit!” (A friend of Ray’s tells me later that even this story is a bit of an untruth: He wasn’t born into a working-class backstreet family at all—he was quite middle class. But he empathizes with the working class so powerfully that he’s reinvented himself.)