The picture was taken by Angie Hunter who lived in the same house. She later went on to be Tony Blair's right hand woman during his 1st term at number 10. I never got invited to any parties though. :-)

Yes, I used to smoke, shocking to remember. Stopped in '89, started again in 2000! Doh! Stopped in 2003.
The shoes, I made those myself, it's what I used to do. I was at that time a 'shoemaker.' Not a 'cobbler.' A cobbler mends shoes. I made them, a shoemaker is posher okay. 

The jumper was a real Swedish number my then girlfriend gave me, she was half Swedish.

The first was a dirty matt red 110” Defender pick up with a factory installed 3.5 liter V8. It had a chronically noisy gearbox that became truly deafening when I fitted a Fairey Overdrive.

When our son was born, I drove my wife (in labour at the time) 50 miles up the M5 to Worcester hospital flat out, we maybe touched 70 mph twice. The noise was so overwhelming I couldn’t hear my wife swearing in loud Australian as she experienced contractions. We made it okay, oh yes, and the reason we had to drive to Worcester was that was the only hospital near us with a birthing tub. Both my kids were born under water and interestingly they are both amazing swimmers, but that’s another topic.

We fitted a baby seat on the cubby box in the cab and my pre toddler son liked nothing more than to push his little foot on the massive gear stick and kick the car out of gear just when I really needed to be in gear. Oh, the joy they bring.

With the arrival of my daughter, and for reasons that now totally elude me, I traded that old tank in for a 110” Defender station wagon, again a V8 petrol model, it was in exquisite condition and even then, back in 1996, it cost close to £80 to fill the tank.

In 1998 I traded that monster machine in for the 90” Defender SV pictured above. The young man standing in front of the car is my son aged 5, he’s now approaching 20.

This Landy had a 2.5 TDi under the bonnet, I didn’t much like the sound it made, it sounded like a bread van. I missed the burble of the old V8 petrol but the diesel was a tiny bit more economic to run.

This Land Rover became a vital part of the Scrapheap Challenge production crew from 1998 to 2001, it went everywhere we went, never got stuck, due to the rag top it could have camera mounts clamped to it. Lots of shots of weird contraptions hobbling along were filmed from the back of this Landy. It once conveyed 14 people in the back (they were all standing) out of a quarry and up to the catering wagon.

Some of the more rufty tufty members of the Scrapheap crew were critical of my Landy's paint job, it was a light metallic green and they dubbed it ‘Bobby’s Barbie Landy.’ I wasn’t threatened, they were just jealous. 

During it’s hectic life on Scrapheap a lot of young men ‘had a go’ off roading at various locations we filmed at. I drove it into the sea at Pendine Sands in South Wales so we could get a better shot of the scrappy races vehicles arriving for the race, waves were breaking over the bonnet but it never got stuck.

I ‘steam cleaned’ it later that day in order to ‘wash the salt off’ and then two weeks later had to replace all the brake disks as they looked like something pulled up from the hull of the Mary Rose. That was expensive, and embarrassing.

Mechanic at garage: ‘Where’s it been Robert?’

Me: ‘Um, it might have got a bit of sea water near it.’

In later life we used it to pull a horsebox when my daughter rode a pony, we attended numerous ‘Pony Club’ events, me looking like a tramp, all the other parents in their Range Rovers looking like the front cover of Country Life.

My Landy pulled more Range Rovers with road tyres off level, damp grass than I ever want to remember. Also, having learned to drive tractors at an early age, I can reverse trailers. I don’t enjoy doing it, it’s not a task I seek out but I reversed a lot of Range Rovers and horseboxes out of gates all over the South Midlands. Oh the joy.

A few years ago when our village was cut off in the snow and all the schools were closed, all the kids in the village went up to a local hill that seems designed for tobogganing and I tied a long tow rope on the back. 20 kids at a time sat on their toboggans, held onto the rope and got pulled back up the hill. It never got stuck.

Last week I finally sold the Land Rover back to the man I bought it from. It seemed fitting, he’s a Land Rover fanatic and skilled mechanic so I’m sure he’ll look after it a lot better than I did. The heater doesn’t work, nor does the fuel gage, the drivers door doesn’t shut, the bonnet doesn’t open very easily and there are some bits of mysterious metal rubbing together somewhere underneath.

On the last day I owned it I got in and tried to start it. Flat battery, we just don’t use it any more, in fact we’ve done less than 200 miles in it in the last year. As a final indignity to its he-man prowess, I had to jump start it from my Nissan Leaf.

If all goes to plan, in a few weeks I’ll be test-driving the Land Rover Defender electric, one of seven all electric Defenders that Land Rover revealed at the recent Geneva motor show. I’m intrigued.

When I got back to my hotel room last night the telly started working as I walked into the room. I hadn’t touched a button, merely slid my key card into the little slidey thing by the door and kerchung. MTV, ‘worlds sexiest music videos’  appeared in glorious colour. Lovely.

I started channel hopping, something people have been doing for the last 40 years or so. Before that you had to stand up and turn a clunky knob on the telly to change channels. In fact when I was a kid you didn’t even do that, we had a nine inch Bakelite telly that only got the BBC.

‘We’re not having that awful commercial rubbish in this house.’ Said my mum.

The actual screen of the telly in the hotel, the machine itself is amazing, flat screen, incredible definition, top notch sound. That was all good but I was immediately aware of some numpty in some obscure office in London who had pre-decided what I could watch. A scheduler, a person who organises the schedule, a person who’s job it is to tell you what you can see and when.

Suddenly the technology I was using seemed archaic and limited, clunky and crude and above all, out-dated. The menu system is nothing short of tragic, finding out what you can watch is next to impossible, searching for a specific thing you want to watch? Forget it.

It’s crap, it’s a broken model, it doesn’t work and my experience in the hotel room reminded me why I don’t have Sky and why I don’t watch much broadcast telly any more.

Breaking Bad and House of Cards on Netflix is how I want my telly. It’s all available, all the time, I decide my own schedule, I watch it when it fits in with my time table, I’m no longer prepared to operate my life around the vague whim of some self important numpty in NoHo.

I’ll watch the news at a scheduled time and that’s about it. I know some people like to watch men running around with balls on a nice grass lawn and that’s fine too. But for the rest of it, I only have one thing to suggest. ‘Schedulers, sling yer hook.’

These glorious islands we call the United Kingdom house the largest stockpile of civil grade plutonium….. (suitable Clarksonian pause) ….. in the world.

I have just listened to this alarming BBC radio 4 program called ‘Britain’s Plutonium Mountain.’

The cost of dealing with this toxic legacy are too enormous and depressing to recount, listen to the show if you want the figures, however I couldn’t help but speculate for just a bit after I’d heard it.

I admit I’m a dreamer, a barely educated fool and I’m often accused of ‘not living in the real world,’ however I think we can all agree that ‘the real world’ that created this nuclear nightmare is not particularly fiscally prudent or sane one.

So bare with me for a short moment of idiotic fantasy. Just imagine if instead of spending uncountable billions on newer, ever more complex, ever more fragile technologies to use this ‘ultimate fuel’ to generate our electricity, we had back in 1953 followed the hippy dippy route of developing massive, expensive, hard to connect to the grid off shore wind farms and massive, expensive, hard to construct expensive grid level storage. We could have spent say £20 billion of tax payers hard earned money doing this over the last 55 years, that would have been a lot less than we have spent on our nuclear programs, but where would we be now?

Oh yes, I get it, a massive proportion if not the entirety of our electricity would be generated with renewable sources, we wouldn’t have to import dangerous and expensive fissile or hydrocarbon fuels from dodgy and dangerous sources, our economy would be healthier because we’d spent the money for that electricity within our own system, it would employ thousands to construct and maintain the systems, the environment around us would be safer, we wouldn’t have to deal with this insane stockpile of lethal stuff that will just not go away for hundreds of thousands of years.

But that’s just silly, the ‘real world’ solution is to continue to spend billions and billions of pounds shoring up an utterly non-functioning system because we are buggered if we don’t.

No one from the pro nuclear lobby ever mentions Sellafield and the incredibly important work of the very brave men and women who work there dealing with this hideous inheritance. The armed men who guard this deadly stockpile twenty four hours a day at unimaginable cost. This isn’t party political in any way, every shade of government for the last 50 years has been sucked into this mess

Just in case you can’t be bothered to listen to the program, I will précis one bit of our proud nuclear history.

It is theoretically possible to combine plutonium with other mildly less dangerous fissile material to create a ‘mixed oxide’ or MOX fuel. The French do it, not really anyone else.

In 1993 we started building a MOX plant at Sellafield with an initial cost of £265 million, but before building was finished guess what? Yes, it ended up a little bit more expensive, £437 million and with one other teeny weeny problemette. It didn’t work.

Yes, clever men in suits, scientists and politicians managed to spend £437 million of our taxpayers money doing diddly-squit.

Not only that, it is now going to cost literally billions to decommission the site. Before the MOX plant was finally closed down it had produced just over 1% of what it was supposed to do. It was described in a memo from the American government revealed by Wikileaks as ‘the biggest technological white elephant in British history.’

You have to laugh or you go mad.

Anyway, it’s all boring and it’s been chewed over ad-nauseam , but now there’s a new story to get all frothy about.

Tesla launched the Model S seven seater sedan in 2012, it immediately won plaudits across the motoring press and eulogising from new owners across America. Everyone loves the Model S, including The New York Times reporter John Broder, who wrote an article about driving the car over long distances using Tesla’s supercharging system.

Tesla have installed numerous solar powered charging stations on key routes across the USA with the eventual intention of allowing drivers to cover huge distances.

John Broder managed to run out before he got to the last one, the Model S had to be towed. Yes, another electric car fail. Let me speculate just how long it took for this story to be seized upon by the screaming hoards of the ‘electric cars just don’t work’ brigade. No point, it was instant and deafening.

The New York Times had previously published glowing reviews of the car when driven in California, one journalist covered just over 300 miles on one charge. They loved it, it was ‘spectacular,’ ‘game changing’ and ‘pivotal technology.’

So what happened? It seems Mr Broder claims one thing, and now Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla claims quite another.

The Model S, along with most modern cars, is fitted with a tracking device. New owners have to give specific permission for this to be turned on but after the debacle of the Top Gear test drive, the company now always enables tracking when they loan the cars to the media.

Interestingly when Top Gear’s old men in jeans reviewed the Nissan Leaf the tracking was turned on which revealed the car had been driven in circles for a couple of hours before filming to help drain the batteries so it would ‘run out’ at the required time. Bit embarrassing for the Top Gear team but they don’t mind, it’s just entertainment after all.

Elon Musk claims the tracking data shows that the NYT journalist drove over the speed limit and took detours on his 200+ mile drive from one charging point to the next. When he stopped overnight he didn’t plug the car in to trickle charge it and keep the batteries at optimal temperature as any regular EV driver would have done without a second thought. It seems to be implied that this would a) have been simple and b)

would have made an enormous difference.

The test took place in very cold weather which as any electric vehicle driver will tell you will reduce the car’s range by 10-15%. I just want to point out that when an ‘eco’ diesel with a 60+mpg rating is driven in cold weather, it’ll be realistically getting 40 mpg if you’re lucky.

Anyway, the point is, does a journalist driving an electric car for the first time and ‘running out’ prove anything anyway? The simple fact is that if you can afford to buy a Tesla Model S and you drive it 1,000 miles and only charge it from the Tesla super chargers, for one thing it will cost you not a penny for fuel, and the vehicle will release not 1 micro-gram of CO2 emissions. It’s an incredible achievement, for the regular drivers of these cars who have learned to judge distance, time and energy economy with a little more wisdom, those long journeys are very low stress.

I have never ‘run out of battery’ in driving over 44,000 miles in electric cars, I’ve got fairly close on a few occasions but it’s truly not that hard to work it out. You need to be used to the car and the way it behaves, it’s not the same as a fossil burner, it requires a slightly different mind-set from using an old fashioned car. But the advantages are enormous, the running costs are so low they don’t count, the extra hassle of having to remember to charge is no more arduous that plugging in your phone.

I’m personally not bothered that one journalist managed to run out of electricity on a very long drive, he still covered spectacular distances in a large, comfortable and very safe electric car in mid winter in the North Eastern USA. What is clear from his article is that with a bit more knowledge of the vehicle he could easily have made the entire trip without mishap. So we have to learn how to use a whole new technology? That’s scary, we just want to stick with the one we know, burning fossils and the immense strain that puts on our economy and environment is of course, of no consequence. Drill, baby, drill. 

 We each had a go on the steering wheel, or Capstan, or tiller, I truly don't know the correct nautical term, the thing you steer the boat with. Brilliant fun, tacking, shouting out commands to the crew (Mike's wife and a lovely chap and co-owner of the boat called Ken)

I think I look rather dashing and pirate like, this was hotly disputed by my fellow crewmates. And yes I am wearing a shirt emblazoned with Linux emblems having attended a Linux conference in Canberra the week before, yes, I've been busy.

Then, Danny did some steering

Danny was very cool, he got it in the slot and let that baby glide, cool as a cucumber, and while Danny was steering, Craig and I did some mildly erotic lounging on the port side, I think that's the side we were on..

And then we reached the critical stage of the day when Mike allowed Craig to do some steering. Being a highly responsible adult and father he wanted to set a good example so had a medicinal tot of rum.

"A tot Craig, ... a tot, don't swig it from the neck... you got no class guy!" was the quote from Dan

This was extraordinary rum, over 100 years old, very nice, Craig only took a little slug, I sipped a thimble full and started slurring and telling everyone I loved them. 

We had a great day, Danny and I are now in New Zealand and Craig is on the way back to blighty.

From experience what this figure really means is at some time, probably 80,000 people have made a conscious decision to follow @bobbyllew on Twitter. The other 20,000 are probably some kind of spam bot wibbly-wobbly code error sub-ether phenomenon only understood by a species with access to technology far in advance of our own.

So, out of that 80,000 I would say maybe 20,000 might be regular twitter users, of that 20,000, more like 10,000 have ever directly communicated with me, and of that 10,000, maybe 5 or 600 are regular commenters on my waffle.

I will admit there have been times when far more tweeters have got in touch, obviously after the first transmission of Red Dwarf X in 2012, I remember I received over 8,000 tweets in the first few minutes after the show. That makes it rather hard to keep up, be polite and respond individually.

It’s also important to remember that I joined Twitter back in 2007, fairly early in the history of the Twitterverse.

In many ways this slow but steady increase in numbers is representative of my life/career experience. I have never been fashionable which means very simply that I have also never been post-fashionable.  I’ve always been a bit unfashionable even when I’ve made an effort.

I have seen some of my comedy contemporaries join Twitter many years after I did, I chatted with them at the time about how Twitter really works when you have a few thousand followers, to notice a couple of months later that they had 1.2 million followers or, in the case of the venerable Mr S. Fry, 5,274,113. Yes, I just checked.

However, I’m very pleased, flattered and charmed that I’ve nearly got 100,000 followers, I think it’s wonderful and I am going to try and give a prize to the 100,000^th follower. Yes, a prize. I know, it’s tragic and revealing of an inner hollowness but it makes me happy.

I have just activated the e-mail setting informing me when I get a new follower, (I had to uncheck that a few years back) so hopefully I will get it right.

The prize? No big surprises, an autographed picture of Kryten 2X4B 523P, a signed copy of ‘News from Gardenia’ and a signed copy of the newly updated, soon to be released ‘The Man in the Rubber Mask’ paperback, with 43.17% more smeg.

Yesterday, seeing the images from Newtown of the children, their parents and the police in such a calm, suburban environment was beyond description.
I knew I shouldn't but I was so upset I tweeted some randomly picked statistics about the horrific level of gun deaths in the USA. 
"Last year Handguns Killed: 48 in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 58 in Israel, 21 in Sweden, 10,728 in the United States.
I was criticised for reaction too soon and that now isn't the time for such discussion but surely,

If not now, America, when?

I was criticised and accused of making up the figures, continually asked for the source by the ever-aggressive pro-gun lobby. All figures are nonsense.

There are dozens of contradictory figures from all manner of sources, but they all add up to the same thing no matter where they are from. Every table points out a massive discrepancy, the number of gun related deaths in America is off the scale. It is an epidemic, nowhere else on earth, including Mexico are as many people killed year after year by handguns.
I also shouldn't have done it because all such rational, fact based, bloody obvious arguments are immediately picked up by gun nuts. The yawn inducing 'more people are killed by drunk drivers' or 'what about the man who stabbed children in China' or the mind numbingly stupid and intellectually illiterate 'guns don't kill people, people....' oh, I can't even be bothered to write it.
I've lived in the UK for 56 years, I've known criminals, drug dealers, crazy bikers, angry husbands, charming vicars, hippy gardeners, extreme cyclists and civil servants. I have never met anyone who owns a handgun other than Craig Charles, but his are replica guns he used to use on stage. No one I know owns a handgun, some of my rural neighbours own shot guns, kept in locked cabinets and incredibly tightly controlled. I have never owned, wanted to own or for one brief moment considered owning a handgun. 
A handgun is a weapon; it’s no good for anything else, it’s manufactured to shoot people at close range. I have fired handguns in gun clubs in America. You need to be very close to your target, they would be useless for 'hunting,' they have absolutely no other purpose than to shoot people. 
The perverse twisting of the intention of the founding fathers to defend their country against my moronic, colonialist forefathers has gone beyond anything they could have imagined. As many people have said, it’s the mind-set of many American people who have been taught; in fact the idea has been hammered into them from childhood. It is your basic human right to carry a firearm, some blokes said so back in the 1700’s so it must be true.

No, it’s not a basic human right, in fact it’s a plain and simple basic human wrong.