Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

There are other things, too. In Britain if Sir Philip Green or Lord Sir Sugar were to spend an evening at the Wolseley restaurant in the middle of London playing tonsil hockey with a phalanx of 6-foot hookers, tongues would wag. In Russia that sort of thing appears to be quite normal.

A friend texted while I was there to say, ‘Be careful. Moscow is bad for your soul.’ He’s wrong. It’s not bad for your soul, but I bet it could be very bad for your marriage, your bank balance and your gentleman’s area.

Moscow buzzes and hums. You should try the bone marrow in Cafe Pushkin and spend a few minutes at the side of the road seeing if you can spot a car that would cost less than £50,000 if you’d bought it in Britain. Then check out the pavements and see if you can find one single girl who’s fat or less than 6 foot tall or not wearing a beautifully cut pair of jeans. I have no idea what Hugh Hefner’s wet dreams are like. But I bet they’d be along these lines.

I went to the Kremlin at one point to discover it’s all been done up and refurbished. Not so it resembles how it might have looked in the past but so that foreign diplomats are blown into the middle of next week by the grandeur. Every room is like being inside the mind of a gold-obsessed four-year-old princess.

And then, just as I’d decided that Russia looked like the love child of Monte Carlo and Kuwait, with a little help from Onyx on Thames, someone leant over and told me the Lada Riva was still in production. And I’m sorry, but that’s like being told that the king of Saudi Arabia does his own washing, with a tub and a mangle.

Why would Lada still be making the Riva? What could anyone I’d seen in my whole visit want with a car as nasty as that? Or has it been improved radically since it was the staple wheeled diet of Mr Arthur Scargill’s disciples? I had to find out. So I did. And it hasn’t. In fact, I think it’s become worse.

The Riva began its life in 1966 in Turin, where it was known as the Fiat 124. Fiat did a deal with the Communists, helping to build a factory in Russia in which the company’s old design would continue to be produced. This became the Lada Riva.

Fans will tell you that much changed over the years, but I can report that actually nothing changed at all. Except that now the Riva is also made in the great car-producing nations of Ukraine and Egypt.

I don’t know where the car I drove was made. Or who made it. But I suspect he was very angry about something because it was horrific. The steering column appeared to have been welded to the dashboard so that it wouldn’t turn. The brakes caused the car to speed up a bit and turn left, violently, at the same time.

The buttons on the dash appeared to have been put in place by Janet Ellis from Blue Peter , and the engine had plainly been lifted from a cement mixer that had spent the past thirty years chewing up rebel soldiers in southern Sudan.

It would get from 0 to 60 mph. But only when it was built by Fiat. Since it became a Lada, it hasn’t really been able to move at all. And, boy, is it badly made.

When I eventually ran it over with a monster truck, it folded in half. And to put that in perspective, let me explain at this point that when the very same monster truck ran over an Indian-made CityRover recently, the car was pretty much OK afterwards.

Why, then, is the Riva still being manufactured? Why are there people in Russia still buying it? Could it be, perhaps, that behind the white-toothed, gold-capped Moscow smile, the rest of the country is – how can I put this – a bit poor?

Maybe, in other words, the chairman of BA knows something I didn’t realize: that those who can afford to fly in Russia have their own planes.

And those who can’t are stuck out in the middle of nowhere boiling swede in the hope that one day they’ll be able to afford a car that’s forty-five years old before it’s left the bloody showroom.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, labour- and time-saving devices were all the rage. The Ronco Buttoneer, for instance, made putting on a button a quick and easy job. Which was just as well because the button you’d just attached often came adrift again in a matter of moments.

The top-loading washing machine had replaced the front step, and then came the remote-control box for the television, which meant we no longer had to sit through Nationwide because we couldn’t be bothered to get off our backsides. We also waved goodbye to the punka wallah with the invention of the Pifco fan. Life was very good.

But at some point in recent years someone decided to put the complication back. So now, instead of adding boiling water to a spoonful of instant coffee, we have machines that require constant attention. Every single morning mine wants more water, or more beans. Then it wants me to empty its trays and clean its pipes and decalcify its innards. Making a simple cup of coffee has become a thirty-minute palaver.

It’s much the same story with my mobile phone. Because it turns out that even when you are not using an application, it’s still open, in the background, chewing the battery. And shutting it down is a complex procedure that usually ends up with you taking a photograph of your own nose.

Televisions are massively complicated now. And gone are the days when you simply loaded a VHS tape and watched a movie. Now, with Blu-ray, the machinery takes ten minutes to warm up and you have to sit through hours and hours of waivers, copyright threats and trailers.

My dishwasher is more complex than Apollo 11, my juicer has a 200-page instruction book and have you tried to use a pay-by-phone parking meter? Of course not, or you’d still be out there, in the street, asking yourself what on earth was wrong with putting a pound coin in a little slot.

Naturally, cars are now very complicated as well. It’s almost certainly true to say that the ignition key for your modern car is more complex than the whole of an Austin A35. Which means, of course, it rarely works. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a car that keeps flashing up a message saying, ‘No key detected,’ when I’m sitting there waving the damn thing in front of its dash, whimpering slightly and wondering out loud what was wrong with the old system.

Then there’s the BMW M5, which can get from 0 to 62 mph in about thirteen minutes. You spend twelve minutes and 55.7 seconds telling the on-board computer what sort of setting you’d like from the gearbox, the chassis and the engine, and then 4.3 seconds going from 0 to 62.

You might imagine that the new Porsche 911 had been spared all this nonsense – 911s, after all, are meant to be pure, clean, unfettered sports cars. And there is no place for complexity in such things.

Well, dream on, because the new 911 is a geek’s fantasy. Every component can be tuned while you’re on the move to deliver something different, and there are now two read-outs on the dash telling you what gear you’re in. Which seems a bit odd in a manual. I know I’m in third. I just moved the lever.

The thing is, though, this being a Porsche, it’s all very instinctive and commonsensical. Amazingly, since there are no buttons on the steering wheel itself, you don’t have to go into submenus or hold knobs down for two seconds to make stuff happen. I hate to admit it, but I thought it was brilliant. But that’s probably because I never bought the whole 911 sports-car thing in the first place.

There was a lot more I liked as well. The styling may be ludicrously similar to that of the previous model. And the one before that. And the one before that as well. But the little things that have changed have given the new model some nice new curves. You could even call it good-looking.