Documentary Movies & Series

Social media showoffs are shaming me off my backside

By Jeremy Clarkson (The Sunday Times, May 29)

An extensive study has found that fat people are twice as likely to stay at home and not do any work as thin people. This is costing the country eleven hundred and seventy billion a year and everyone is running around wondering what on earth can be done to stamp out this slobbishness.

The Tories say the answer is to make sickness benefits harder to get, while Labour says it’s going to change the school curriculum so that kids spend less time in the classroom learning about important stuff such as pronouns and diversity, and more time in the playground doing star jumps. And it is going to ban adverts for fast food.

That won’t work, though. When I wake up in the morning with a thick head and a mouth full of what feels like wallpaper paste, I know that a Big Mac will soak up all the sick and sort me out. And if McDonald’s is banned from advertising its products, it’s not as if I’ll suddenly forget.

The main problem I have with this fat-makes-you-lazy theory is that I can think of lots of fat people with a good work ethic. Cyril Smith, for instance. He was very busy. So was Henry VIII. And so, if I’m honest, am I. Yes, I realise that I’m seen by many to be the sexiest man alive, but underneath the muddy tweed coats I am something of a porker. And I haven’t had a day off sick since the 1980s, when I was actually much thinner.

I have more evidence to back this up. When I first went to Vietnam in the early 1990s, the vast majority of the population was as thin as it was industrious. People ate tiny portions of fatless food, so the men looked as if they’d stepped out of a Lowry painting and the women, in their ao dai dresses, were the personification of style and elegance.

Then, in 1997, western food arrived — so if you go to Vietnam today, everyone is as big as they are in Barnsley. Has this slowed them down? Has it hell as like. They may be carrying a few extra pounds, but the Mekong still looks like the Port of London did in the 19th century, and the Vietnamese capacity for building factories makes the Chinese look slovenly.

So I think that the people who conducted this study have got it the wrong way round. Fatness doesn’t make someone lazy. Lazy people become fat. You may start out looking like Willem Dafoe or one of those heroin chic catwalk models, but if you sit in front of the TV all day, watching Homes Under the Hammer and washing the endless frozen pizzas and crisps down with gallons of full-fat Coca-Cola, you will quickly become a human barrage balloon. And soon you will be too enormous to work because you can’t even get out of the front door.

It’s not obesity that needs tackling, then. It’s the root cause: bone idleness. And that brings me on to another study, which suggests that if you sit around all day lazily looking at Instagram and TikTok and X, you will soon become Jabba the Hutt and you will die at the age of 19, from fatness.

There are all kinds of hare-brained theories, from (usually American) professors who want to get their names in the paper, saying that people who use their phones for five hours a day are 43 per cent more likely to develop a fatberg in their colon, and that if you spend half an hour scrolling while on the loo, you will be too vast to stand up again. Unless you have a rectal prolapse, which is another likely outcome.

This is all nonsense, because the truth of the matter is that social media is as motivating as Jordan Belfort. Honestly, I can think of nothing that is more likely to make a fatso get off its couch and go for a lumber round the local park. Nothing.

As I have already explained, I wake sometimes on a Sunday morning in a puddle of self-inflicted misery and when I tune into TikTok to take my mind off the pain, I am assaulted with a never-ending stream of videos featuring people making the most of their weekends. They’re out for a bike ride, or they’re growing asparagus and radishes.

There’s one girl in what I suspect is Milton Keynes who goes into her back garden every day and films herself skipping. I want to throttle her because I know I should be in the garden skipping too, or making a little house for the blue tits, or climbing Snowdon, or whatever the Labour Party has called it these days. These perfect strangers send me on a guilt trip. And surely they must do the same for the lazy people who are watching as well.

It’s even worse on Instagram, because here it’s my friends — hiking in the hills of southern France, or having a family picnic with bread they’ve made themselves, or chopping logs. It’s like I’m living vicariously in one of those Ski yoghurt commercials where everyone somersaulted out of bed and got on a horse. And I’m lying there unable to decide who I want to shoot more: them or me.

Even on the platform of bile and madness, X, things are no better, because here we find people energetically marching to demonstrate how feverishly they want to end oil and plastic and business, and spraying paintings and trying to smash Magna Carta. Not sure what the reasoning was for that one, but at least they were up and about, doing something with their lives.

I’m aware, of course, that social media has its faults, but causing obesity isn’t one of them. You never see fat people on there eating crisps and smoking and getting sloshed. It’s people in store rooms and warehouses and offices having a laugh, and it therefore does a better job of making work look like fun than a boring man with adenoids and Playmobil hair saying he’s going to ban Ronald McDonald from our lives.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

And here's the Sun column: ""

An excerpt: "For the second year on the trot, a poll of 2,000 women has revealed that the sexiest man in the UK is . . . me. I’m sexier even than Idris Elba and Cillian Murphy and King Charles. And a lot sexier than Piers Morgan who limped home in a pathetic 40th place. I think he was even beaten by Joseph Merrick. Obviously, I’m amazed by the result but only because so many people say they’re surprised."

Clarkson's columns are regularly collected as books. You can buy them  or your local bookshop.

An Open Secret mentions that an unnamed person made allegations against Peck. And Drake came out and said the procurers were pressuring him to tell his story then but he wasn’t ready (read it on this thread). How’s the producers find out?

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