Taking a testosterone detour

Even though I once rear-ended a woman near Watford Gap (the details must remain for another day), I retain great affection for the M1. As I drove down it last week (trying to decide whether the lump I'd just avoided was road kill or a bit of discarded tyre), I suddenly had a Proustian moment when the driver of the red sports car in front pressed his screen washer button, causing two jets of liquid to spurt right over his vehicle and land on my own windscreen.

In addition to the unexpected frisson of a free wash, I was instantly transported back to my childhood, and recalled the delight that all 10-year-old boys take in their ability to urinate over their own head, often achieving a graceful arc that ascends 10 or 15 feet. Sadly, such urethral prowess deserted me long ago, although I'm told that elderly survivors of prostate operations often regain the capacity, an observation that the Bard himself might well have slipped into Jaques' speech in As You Like It, just to make the point about second childishness a little clearer.

The desire of ageing men to regain their lost childhood by ownership of a spurting, red sports car was the unspoken subtext of last night's Highest Bidder (BBC2). Ostensibly about the sale of a 1962 Ferrari Testosterone (sorry, that was a Freudian slip, I mean Testarossa 330), this curiously unfocused documentary actually shed more light on the uniquely male obsession with classic cars, and the sublimated eroticism that fuels this craving.

Until Jeremy Clarkson donates his brain to science (and scientists develop an electron microscope powerful enough to find it), we can only guess at the precise cause of this fixation, but New Orleans stockbroker Jim Spiro freely confessed that he'd paid $6.5 million (£4.14 million) for the car because he'd desired it since childhood, and fellow enthusiast Winston Goodfellow was even more candid. "It's Sophia Loren with four wheels," he purred. "It's the next best thing to sex," and as anyone who's ever paid $6.5 million for sex will doubtless confirm, that means it must be very good indeed.

The documentary began in the Palace Hotel Gstaad, where Bonhamsholds an exclusive auction of old Ferraris each December. "We're all children," declared historic car dealer Adrian Hamilton, "and what's Christmas all about, if not toys?" And as the cameras panned over acres of cosseted chrome and paintwork that would presumably soon be sitting gift-wrapped beneath the Yule trees of the rich, it was clear that this wasn't the kind of second-hand car lot where you kicked the tyres, shrugged and said: "I'll take it off your hands for a fiver if you throw in some fluffy dice."

Personally, I've never understood why anyone would want to own an elderly car, not since I recently drove a 1968 E-Type Jaguar that stank of burned leather, leaked petrol and had fewer specifications than a 1980 Ford, but the chairman of Bonhams was insistent: "We're trying to get the highest possible price we can for our sellers, that's what it's all about." Really? And there was me thinking that putting your left leg in, left leg out, and shaking it was what it was all about.

Sadly, the Bonhams auction had nothing to do with the sale of the Testarossa, and similar cul-de-sac detours into the history of the Le Mans endurance race and the biography of Enzo Ferrari suggested that this was a 10-minute programme unwisely padded out to fill a 40-minute slot. Worse, old-fashioned British snobbery raised its head when it emerged that the sale had actually taken place at a highenergy auction house in Monterey, causing Bonhams' representatives to declare sniffily that: "It's less sophisticated ... how appropriate that it's held in a circus tent."

It's true that the auctioneer could have done with a vasectomy of the vocal chords, but, unsophisticated or not, the frenzied atmosphere generated by RM Auctions duly persuaded the fiftysomething Spiro to part with a fortune for his lost dream of youth (a futile pursuit, because what he really wanted was to be 21 again, yet as rich as he is now). But tragically, he'd made his fortune several decades too late for that to be possible, and there are surely few sights in life more pathetic than a man in advanced middle age driving a stubby red sports car around town and silently screaming out: "Hey girls, look at me!" as he passes by.

To some men, watching a classic car being put through its paces is the vehicular equivalent of soft porn, and to them my complaints about lack of editorial rigour will seem irrelevant. But documentaries should aspire to a higher purpose than the uncritical chronicling of the whims and excesses of the rich, and I came away having learned little, although I was reminded of my own youthful hubris when (many years ago) I bought a cheap opentopped sports car.

One day, I was waiting at the traffic lights, imagining myself to be the new James Dean and revving up so hard that clouds of leaded petrol fumes from my exhaust were wafting into a nearby school playground (thereby knocking 10 points off the collective IQ of class 4B), when a small child walked by with his mother. " Look, Mummy," he shouted, and I preened myself in expectation of a fulsome compliment, only to be put firmly in my place when he added: "It's Noddy with funny hair."