PROCESO DEL PROYECTO. LA PREFIGURACIÓN

With the audience figures for Radio 1’s Breakfast Show in free fall, bosses have decided to replace the DJ Sara Cox with someone else whose name escapes me. The Queen, probably.

It won’t make the slightest bit of difference. No one tunes in to a music radio station because of the announcer. We tune in because of the music, and the music on Radio 1 is from a never-ending stream of increasingly angry black men who, so far as I can tell, wouldn’t know a piano if one were to land on their heads.

No, I do not sound like my father. He couldn’t tell the difference between Ted Nugent and Karen Carpenter; it was all rubbish to his ears. Whereas today there is simply no difference between 50 Cent, Wyclef Jean and Black Eyed Peas. Except for the number of times each of them has been shot.

I have been paying rather more attention than usual to music recently because Sue Lawley invited me on Desert Island Discs.

The luxury good was easy. I decided I’d take a jet ski, though I was tempted, when I met Sue, to ask her along instead. She’s hugely attractive.

The book was harder. You’re given the Complete Works of Shakespeare – to get your fire going, presumably – and the Bible.

But you’re allowed to take one other. That’s impossible. Not being five, I find all books dull after I’ve read them once.

But the most impossible thing of all was the music. Like everyone else, my list of Top 10 greatest all-time songs features around 250 tracks. Fourteen of which are the best ever.

And to make matters worse, some of the 14 best-ever songs are not the sort of things I would care to share with the nation. Telling the audience that one of your favourite tunes is ‘Clair’, by Gilbert O’Sullivan, is not that far removed from walking into the pub and telling everyone you have genital sores.

For instance, I’ve always had a soft spot for Sad Café. In the wee small hours I can admit that to myself, along with a fondness for Camel and Yes and Supertramp. But not in a studio, at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. Not to Sue Lawley.

It was for this reason I also decided to steer clear of anything classical. Unlike some of the guests on the show, who prove themselves to be interesting and mysterious by choosing pieces in B flat by someone unpronounceable from Transylvania, the only classics I know are from adverts. And I fear I may have looked a bit of a fool if I’d asked for that piece from the Pirelli tyre commercial.

Or worse, that one they all clap along to at the Horse of the Year Show.

So what I ended up with was my best-ever eight songs (that I’ll admit to liking). And you know what? The most recent was Bowie’s

‘Heroes’ from 1977. This makes me a very, very old man, and that means I’m feeling well qualified this week to write about Honda’s new Accord Tourer Type S.

Over the years Honda has tried and tried to give itself a youthful appeal. It has injected its cars with Botox, collagen and

testosterone. It has even slotted 190 bhp engines under the bonnet of a Civic, but this was like fitting a spoiler to a plastic hip. All it did was increase the speed the old lady was going when she hit the tree.

It came up with a funky small car which it called the Jazz. It even

offered it in the same shade of metallic pink as a nine-year-old’s nail varnish. And what happened? My mother bought one.

There were sports cars in the 1960s, and Honda does a wonderful sports car now: the S2000. There have been three prolonged lunges for glory in Grand Prix racing and even a foray into the world of supercars.

But it’s to no avail. I was busy admiring an electric-blue NSX on the A40 last week when, with no warning whatsoever, it veered across my bows and shot up a slip road. And who was driving it? Well, it was Mr Bean himself, Rowan Atkinson.

At first I thought the new Accord Type S might be yet another attempt to woo thrusting young executives out of their BMWs and Audis. It has the requisite black interior and the de rigueur fake carbon-fibre cubbyhole covers, so that inside it looks like a gentleman’s electric razor. In addition it has a huge orange speedometer that goes up to 160 mph, twin exhausts, lights like Butler &

Wilson jewellery and a titanium gear lever that offers a selection of six forward gears.

‘Oh no,’ I thought, as I eased out of the drive. ‘It’s like someone’s father undoing one too many of his shirt buttons and trying to dance.’

But it isn’t. The 2.4-litre i-VTEC engine doesn’t spin quite so readily, or sound quite as fruity, as Honda’s other sporty engines, and nor does it develop quite as much power as I was expecting. That said, it’s a very good engine, which is coupled to a sublime gearbox. But both are overshadowed by the ride.

Not even the new Jaguar, with its air suspension, can cope with bumps as well as this Honda. Even when you’re going quickly, and

bumps as well as this Honda. Even when you’re going quickly, and you won’t be because you grew out of that sort of thing 40 years ago, there are no jars or shudders.

On the road I use to test this sort of thing, I was astonished. You feel the car rise as it crests a bump in the road and you tense, waiting for it to crash back down again. But the crash never comes.

It settles gently, like it’s a burly paramedic and you’re on a stretcher.

Strangely, this doesn’t seem to have affected the handling unduly.

The steering’s beautifully weighted. There’s a good, seat-of-the-pants feel. The brakes are powerful and the seats hold you in place perfectly. This is all very clever. I’ve been saying for ages that I want a car that’s fast and sporty, but not so that it breaks my spine in two every time I run over a badger. And that’s what you get from the Accord Type S. Performance for the Past-It boys.

There’s more, too, in the shape of a low £20,000 price tag and unburstable mechanicals. I found out the other day that in the past 13 years there has never been a single failure of Honda’s VTEC system. Not one. Ever.

People talk about Volkswagens being reliable, and Mercs. But if I may liken reliability to the M1, the German cars are only at Milton Keynes. Toyota is outside Leicester, whereas Honda is already on the A1, going into Scotland.

I hope the tyres are reliable, too, because (as is increasingly becoming the norm these days) no spare wheel is supplied. It saves weight, say the car manufacturers. Yeah, right. And money.

You only get a puncture once every 150,000 miles, they counter.

Sure, but when it happens it’s nice to know you’ll only be held up for 20 minutes, not two weeks while a replacement tyre is shipped from

Yokohama.

And no, we’re not fooled by the sealant and pump that are supplied.

This may work if you discover a drawing pin in the tread when you come out of the house one morning. But they are of limited use if your tyre is in 578 small pieces all over the M20.

The only real upside to this penny-pinching is the extra space in the boot. Not that the Accord estate needs it. The rear end is almost Volvoesque in its vastness.

So, a pretty good effort then, all things considered. Except for one enormous detail. Look at the picture and tell me if you have ever, in all your life, seen anything quite so ugly.

If I may bring the M1 into it again, we have Gérard Depardieu at Bedford and the new British Library at Sheffield South. But this is off the top of the map, up round the North Pole, alongside Ranulph Fiennes’s frostbitten fingers.

Why, for instance, does the rear window taper when the bodywork does not? And why does such a big car come with wheels like Smarties? I’ve seen more balance and cohesion at a stag party and more aesthetic merit in a Prague housing project. Did Sara Cox design it? Or was it drawn in the middle of a yardie shootout? In my Top 10 worst-ever looking cars, a list that currently features 145 different models, this is number one. Along with 38 others.

Sunday 19 October 2003