Free And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson Page A

most proper artists spend weeks thinking about their work and how it should be approached. What you get from the Hell’s Angel is a five-minute consultation, and what you end up with is a doodle. Furthermore, most successful artists learnt their craft by wearing berets and walking along river banks. These tattoo guys, you know, learnt their craft by customising vans.
    The only good thing is that when the subject dies, the tattoo dies too. Except in Japan, of course, where you can buy dead tattooed people to turn into furniture.
    Interesting idea: yakuza scatter cushions.
    I doubt if anyone would believe that a friend of mine’s love for Ferrari was so intense that she had a prancing horse tattooed just above her G-string. Now, whenever she bends over, people say, ‘Er, why has someone drawn a donkey on your back?’
    It’s rubbish, and she is stuck with it for ever. Oh, I know there are all sorts of procedures these days for having tattoos removed, but they cost – and hurt even more than having the damn thing implanted in the first place.
    Do they work? Well, you only have to examine a blotched and botched London Underground train that’s had its graffiti washed off to see the answer is no, not really.
    Sunday 6 June 2004

Life itself is offensive, so stop complaining
    Following two complaints from outraged Muslim leaders, a poster showing four young ladies in nothing but Sloggi G-strings has been removed from sites near mosques.
    It’s jolly easy to get all frothy about this. There will be those who will say that if Muslims don’t want their children to see pictures of girls in their underwear they should have stayed in Uzbekistan. And doubtless those of a
Daily Mail
persuasion will point out that if a British person moves to France and complains about the local café serving horse burgers, he’ll be told where to get off.
    There are other issues, too. Christians claim that they’ve been complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority for years about ‘lewd posters’ to little or no effect. And yet all it takes is a raised eyebrow from a mullah, and Sloggi gets an eviction notice.
    Sloggi, of course, maintains that it’s difficult to advertise underwear without actually showing it. Although it could take a leaf out of Superman’s book and have someone wear their thong on the outside of their trousers.
    My problem with this, however, has nothing to do with race or positive discrimination or even the ASA. No. My problem is with the sanctimonious, mealy-mouthed, holier-than-thou, underemployed twerps who do the complaining.
    Remember that ‘Hello boys’ advertisement for Wonderbra? That got 150 complaints.
    Then there was the ad for Velvet toilet tissue with the slogan ‘Love your bum’; 375 complained about that. Five hundred moaned about FCUK’s logo and 275 worked themselves into a dizzy lather about Club 18–30’s ad: ‘Discover your erogenous zones’.
    What you have to remember here is that all these people had to telephone directory enquiries for the number for the ASA, get the address, write a letter, buy a stamp and walk to a postbox.
    It wouldn’t be so bad if they merely wished to register their disapproval but, having gone to so much effort, they always say they want action and results.
    It’s not just in the world of advertising, either. Only this week the
Points of View
programme on BBC1 brought a dribble of complaints about excessive speed and what-have-you to the producer of
Top Gear
and asked if, in the light of these letters, he would be effecting changes in how the presenters drive and treat speed in future. Happily, he was bold enough to smile and say, ‘No.’
    But let’s just imagine for a moment that he’d said yes. Let’s imagine that we lived in a world where a handful of people could have something altered or banned by saying in a letter: ‘I don’t like this very much and I want it stopped.’
    I could write to the Church Bells Standards Authority and, as a result of