Last night, at the Camden Odeon, bang in the middle of Bridget Jones’s Diary, I got my old trouble back. I hadn’t had my old trouble for nearly 40 years. I last got it at the Swiss Cottage Odeon, bang in the middle of Dr No. You will say, aha, his old trouble clearly has something to do with Ursula Andress wriggling out of her rubber bikini, that would explain why it came back last night, it was on account of Renée Zellweger wriggling out of her rubber knickers, I rather think we have the measure of Mr Coren’s old trouble, do we not – but you are wrong. While it is true that my old trouble is about cinema distraction, when some minor feature suddenly lurches the mind away from the major feature and strands it in an obsessional limbo while the major feature spools on unnoticed, it has nothing to do with snappy latex, or even snappy women. What it has everything to do with is snappy cars.
Now, quiz most filmgoers about James Bond’s motor and they will begin rabbiting on about the Aston Martin which could deploy greater firepower than Nato while catapulting undesirable hitch-hikers through its roof. That is because they have forgotten 007’s first car. It was a Sunbeam Alpine. I have not forgotten, because I had one, too. I had driven to Dr No in it in 1962, but it was getting on for 1963 by the time I got there, because the Swiss Cottage Odeon was at the top of Belsize Road, a 1 in 45 gradient, and the Alpine was the slowest sports car in the world. Which was why, a scant few minutes into the film, my old trouble came on: when Bond got into his Alpine, I did not see the exemplar of butch chic which product placement wanted me to see. I saw a gullible dork who had recently driven out of his local Rootes showroom leaving cackling salesmen rolling about on the floor. Things grew worse when, a little later, Bond effortlessly eluded the doctor’s thugs in a highspeed car chase: an Alpinist myself, I knew that, had the arch-villain been not Dr No but United Dairies, their milk-float would have caught Bond within 50 yards. This was a bogus film, with a bogus hero, and, for the remainder of it, I could concentrate on nothing else: when Ursula Andress splashed out of the surf, it might as well have been Thora Hird.
I flogged my doddering Alpine soon after that to some Bondabee sucker, and bought an Austin-Healey 3000. A true sports car: had weedy Bond got in and turned the engine on, he would probably have fainted at the thunder. And every film it appeared in got the casting right: it was always driven by a raffish cove with wrists of steel and a bulldog briar. Never a twinge of my old trouble there. Offscreen, I drove mine with joy until 1969, when I sold it with grief, and bought the car which, last night, did bring on the old trouble again. I had to do that because in 1969 Mrs Coren gave birth to a Times columnist, and when I went to collect the pair of them from Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, we could squeeze The Times columnist’s carrycot into the little slot behind the seats only by shoving the seats so far forward that our knees covered our ears. Nor, when it began to rain at Shepherds Bush, could we shut the roof because The Times columnist was in the way, so he got wet. It didn’t bother him, because he knew he would get at least three paragraphs out of it some day, but it bothered us.
The next day I chopped the Healey in for a secondhand Mercedes 220SEb cabriolet. It was not only the biggest convertible in the world, it was the safest: conceived out of postwar nostalgia for the Tiger tank, it was two tons of iron and walnut, with a three-ply reinforced hood able to protect The Times columnist from anything the heavens could chuck at him. For Jerry, it was a snook cocked at the shade of Bomber Harris, but for me it was a rite of passage: I was a family man now, tasked not to boy-race, but to trundle and protect. And that is why, last night, the old trouble came back.
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Hugh Grant plays a cad. We do not know he is a cad, though, until he takes the cuddly eponym off for a lively weekend; and the egregious signifier of his caddishness is his car. An autobuff ’s veteran one-off that gives the finger to the common Ferrari or Porsche, it is patently a Flash Harry’s car; for that is what 30 years have done to the Mercedes 220SEb cabriolet. It irritated me no end; it ruined the film; it left the second half unnoticed. I just sat there thinking: this car was not put on earth so that smirking jerks could pull dippy women, it was given to us so that solid men could poddle invulnerably through the traffic with The Times columnist and his sister the Observer poker correspondent on the back seat, punching one another and shouting: ‘Dad, Dad, are we there yet, Dad?’