There’s no easy way of saying this, so I’ll just jump straight in. While driving through Colombia last year, I encountered a man who was making love to a donkey. Further investigations revealed that he was not an escaped lunatic and that a lot of the men in his village do the same thing when they’re bored or lonely.
Now I know the programme that I make for Amazon is supposed to be a car show, but I thought the donkey story was interesting. So we broke out the cameras and filmed one of the men making the two-backed beast with Eeyore. And then we spoke to his mates, who were at pains to point out that they only had sex with the female donkeys, because doing it with a boy donkey would be weird, obviously.
The scene was part of a show that was released recently and almost immediately the Pop Idol winner Will Young responded by saying something about how the car I’d been using was gay. Or not gay. Or that it was gay but we shouldn’t have said so. I can’t quite remember. Everyone else, on the other hand, wanted to know why on earth we’d faked the donkey scene.
Yup. Everyone had looked and listened and then decided that because they had never seen a man having sex with a donkey on their way to work at a warehouse in Huddersfield, I couldn’t have seen it either. So it must have been fake.
This accusation of televisual jiggery-pokery baffled me, because let’s just say we’d wanted to film a story that was not true. Why, in the name of all that’s holy, do you think we’d come up with the idea that a man would have sex with an animal? And even if we did, then what? Do we just go up to someone and say, “Hey, mate. I’ll give you a tenner if you’ll do a bit of roadside bestiality”?
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And what do you think the Colombian government would have to say about it? I once put a lavatory in my car in Mumbai, saying that it’d be useful if I got Delhi belly, and now I’m banned from India. Then I said that eastern Turkey felt less safe than Iraq, and now Johnny Turk won’t let me visit any more.
So do you really think I’d want to tell a blatant lie about Colombia? Because those guys probably wouldn’t send me a polite letter asking me never to come again. They’d send a man to cut off my arms with a chainsaw.
I’m afraid, then, the scene wasn’t faked. It was real. The interviews afterwards were real. It was all on television with subtitles. And no one believed it.
I think the problem started with poor old Bear Grylls. Until then everything on the television was true and real because the person doing the talking was Sir Robin Day or John Noakes. A sensible man with sensible clothes and sensible hair. But we learnt that the bear that attacked Bear in one of his camping programmes was actually a member of the production team in a bear suit, and this opened the floodgates.
The BBC was forced to admit that a scene in its epic Human Planet series showing a tribal family in Papua New Guinea living in a tree house had been a setup, and it previously had to concede that footage of a tarantula in a Venezuelan jungle had actually been shot in a studio.
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Oh, and then there was “Wolfgate”, when the Beeb said the wild wolf it had just shown was actually a partly domesticated one. Everyone was very angry, and I can’t see why.
It costs a fortune to send a film crew to a remote location and an even bigger one to house it and feed it while it trudges about looking for its quarry. You want to pay for that? Or would you rather the producers set something up in advance so that they weren’t wasting your licence fee on a scene you aren’t going to believe anyway?
It’s now reached the point where people don’t even bother telling the truth. You had Boris Johnson and his merry bunch of cohorts running round in the run-up to the referendum saying that if we left the EU we’d be able to give the NHS an extra £350m a week. That was a complete fabrication.
Then you had Donald Trump, who’d seen photographs of the crowd that turned out to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and photographs of the measly crowd that turned out to watch his. He knew we’d seen them too, but even so he apparently asked the government photographer to edit the photos to make his crowd seems larger. He’s the most powerful man in the world, and he’s forever lying.
I look now on the internet at all the stuff that’s been written about me in recent times. And a huge amount of it is wrong. So we must assume that a huge amount of the stuff about everyone else on the internet is wrong too. It’s scary.
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Later this year we will show you a Grand Tour programme we made in Mongolia. We will explain that we are in the most sparsely populated country on Earth and that there is not a single shred of evidence in any direction for hundreds of miles that man has existed.
We will drive across this wilderness in a car we have built ourselves, and we will be seen living like animals, for days, in the frozen expanse of nothingness. It is all true and it is all real. And at the end I guarantee someone will write to say that it was faked and that we stayed in hotels.
It’s a shame, really, because when we don’t trust anything we see or hear, we lose our ability to be amazed. You can’t stand back in childlike wonderment at something if you automatically think it’s computer-generated imagery. And how can you form an opinion when you don’t believe anything anyone says or anything you read?
Sometimes it’s healthy to believe that man walked on the moon, that Facebook has some good points and that in Colombia there is a small group of men who shag donkeys.