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Because there’s so much more grunt from the extra half a litre, it’s hard to get the throttle position just right. And it only takes your big toenail to grow a little and oomph, the rear wheels light up and you wind up going backwards in what feels like the smoking room at Detroit airport.
    There’s another problem, too. The new engine, and the addition of a six-speed gearbox, has pushed the price up to more than
£
50,000, and it’s hard to justify that. Yes, it does appear to be well made and you do get leather trim, but there are no luxuries at all, apart from air-conditioning. You even have to wind your own windows down.
    Sure, it’s faster than a Carrera 2, and more fun as well, but it’s not a Porsche, and you can never quite get it out of your head that it was built from plastic in South Africa and assembled on an industrial estate in Leicestershire.
    I sort of don’t mind, though, because it is just so very, very fast. And very, very pretty. And who cares if it doesn’t handle quite as well as the old car. Coming second to that would be like coming second to Tom Jones in a singing competition.
    The boss of TVR has referred to the Noble as ‘the South African three-wheeler’ ever since its suspension broke in a recent
Autocar
test. But that shows he’s worried about it.
    And rightly so. TVR has been doing its thing for10 years and nobody has thought to help themselves to a slice of the cake. Now Noble has come along and taken the icing and the cherry, leaving only the sponge.
    In a world obsessed with image, you can’t beat a Porsche. But in a world obsessed with time, a Porsche is a library. A TVR is the internet. And the Noble is broadband.
    Sunday 28 September 2003

TVR T350C
    Whenever an actor is asked to slip into a toga he sees it as an excuse to go all swivel-eyed and bonkers. When it comes to the Romans, no speech defect is too preposterous, no gait too far-fetched.
    We’ve had Derek Jacobi with his club foot and his stutter, and Malcolm McDowell helping himself to every bride, groom and farmyard animal in Rome. Oh, and let’s not forget the one with the funny mouth who stabbed Russell Crowe in
Gladiator
.
    If you believed everything you’ve seen about Rome on the silver screen, you’d wonder how on earth they managed to find the lavatory in the morning. Let alone work out how such a thing might be flushed and how the effluent might be carried away in a sewerage system, the like of which wasn’t to be seen in the world again for another 1,800 years.
    But it is an unwritten law that all empires, whether the Borg, the British, big business, or even the BBC, are bad. Fuelled by greed and policed with violence, they wreak havoc on the pipsqueaks, raping, pillaging and forcing them to eat genetically modified suppers while watching programmes like
Britain’s Worst Toilet
.
    So I wasn’t expecting the Romans to be portrayed in a particularly rosy light in
Boudica
on ITV last Sunday.
    And sure enough, in boinged Nero wearing lipstick. We didn’t actually see him gnawing on a panda’s ear and then using a slave’s severed head to wipe away the goo, but the hint was there all right.
    Meanwhile, back in plucky old England, Boudica was busy delivering speeches about freedom and democracy. She was the Afghan farmer whose poppies have been devastated by Monsanto. She was Nelson Mandela, William Wallace, Che Guevara and Gandhi all rolled into a one-cal, bite-sized Sunday evening, Charlie Dimmock-style glamourpuss.
    Unfortunately, in real life she was none of these things. She was, in a word, British, which is just a whisker away from Brutish. The Romans may have brought peace, along with their baths and their roads, but behind the cloak of civilisation and poetry we were still a nation who loved to get our swords dirty.
    When the Romans left, we reverted to type. As Simon Schama says in
A History of Britain
: ‘War was not a sport; it was a system. Its plunder was the glue of loyalty binding noble