“Were you really chased out of town by those American rednecks, or was it made up for the telly?”
That’s apparently the question asked a lot lately of Top Gear host Richard Hammond. It’s all in connection with one recent episode of the hit UK motoring show:
In the programme in question, we wanted to know if it was possible to buy a car and drive across a chunk of the USA for less money than the cost of traditional “fly-drive” schemes offered by holiday companies.
Rather foolishly the boys decided to paint slogans on the sides of their vehicles, rude/crude slogans that upset the Alabama locals enough to reach for their guns as The Times reports in an excerpt from Hammond’s forthcoming book, Or Is That Just Me?.
Back in 1993 I drove round California and Nevada in a beige 1977 Chevy Impala ‘cop car’ with ‘FBI’ marked on the doors with black electricians tape. We got some odd looks for that but no death threats!
If you’ve got kids you’re bound to have heard of Steve Cole, the creator of Astrosaurs, a funny space-meets-dinosaurs series of books. My son (and many of his friends) will read those and Horrid Henry books for fun and have recently started getting into Cole’s other series ‘Cows in Action’.
Cole has combined the intrigue of spying (the ‘CIA’) with the magic qualities of time travel allowing him to set the books in any period of history he fancies. So I have to mention this entry into the series: Cows in Action: The Wild West Moo-nster.
If you’ve seen the movie Timecop featuring the mulleted Jean-Claude Van Damme you’ll understand the perils facing a world living with time travel technology. It’s a million times more dangerous than what’s portrayed in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure!
I’ll leave the Amazon.co.uk reviewer to reveal the full threat in this book, just to assure you it’s child friendly and bound to appeal to 5 to 7 year olds:
Professor McMoo is a very clever cow - so clever, in fact, that he has managed to build himself a time machine from discarded farming machinery. He and his two cow friends, Pat and Bo Vine live on the Barmer farm, in fear of the hideous farmer’s wife, Betty. But they are also star agents of the CIA - Cows in Action, a crack team of cow commandos! In the future, cows live peacefully with humans as equals, not as food. But some cows in the future try to use the technology of time travel to interfere with history - and the Prof has to help stop that!
It’s a goldrush! The CIA have been sent back to 1860s America where a ter-moo-nator and his shifty sidekicks are trying to get their hands on all the unclaimed land in the Wild West. With all the local cattle going missing and a sinister monster on the loose, can McMoo, Pat and Bo stop the FBI and save history as we know it?
Top titles by Steve Cole:
My post about modern day wagons yesterday led me last night to hunt down my copy of a recent book on the great migration west by covered wagon: Wagons West: The Epic Story of America’s Overland Trails
Frank McLynn’s story of the quarter of a million American pioneers who trekked from Missouri to the American West between 1840 and 1849 is simply fantastic to read and makes you realise that modern day adventurers have it easy with their back-up crews, GPS navigation, satellite phones and modern day medical kits!
The story of pioneer life was celebrated in the 1950s and 60s on the classic Western television series ‘Wagon Train‘ which starred Ward Bond and Robert Horton.
It proved so popular - #1 in the Nielsen Ratings for the 1961-1962 television season according to Wikipedia - that it’s said Gene Roddenberry sold his Star Trek TV show to the American networks as “a Wagon Train to the stars.”
I picked up a 1961-issue Daily Mirror kids comic-style album last year in a junk shop that idolises the show. It’s a fab read and I want to share the artwork so am going to post the cartoons for the ‘Wagon Train’ story over the next week or two. The first one is below - the caption reads:
“Gold! Gold for the picking up!” The thrilling message came winging its way out of the West, and the forty-niners, the 25,000 men, women and children who travelled clear across a continent to search for untold wealth in the earth, joined the hundres of thousands of others who had already crossed from east to west by covered wagon drawn by teams of oxen or horses.
If only there was gold in them there hills today, now that the US national debt is running at more than $10 trillion!. If you want to take your mind off the state of the stockmarket you can buy a few episodes of the Wagon Train TV show on Amazon.co.uk
