I drove through the gloom to SPC Motorcycles in Alton on Friday night, to see Charley Boorman talking about Long Way Round; it was a good evening which (given the turnout) made £2200-ish for charities, local and national.

A few bullet-points from the evening:

• His next project appears to involve doing the Dakar rally with Messrs Pavey and Plumb; I wasn’t clear whether it involved Charley competing in it, or just producing a documentary about Simon and Nick, but it sounds interesting. Also there was discussion of a UNICEF-related tour of the length of Africa.

• KTM came in for quite a drubbing through the course of the evening; I’ve test-ridden the KTM 950 in its first release’s incarnation as a long-suspension-travel roadbike, a straight lift from the rally world, and I agree with Charley that it was the only other contender for a modern RTW bike.

  However KTM goofed enormously when they pulled their offer of sponsorship for the tour because although KTM may be Europe’s largest bike manufacturer (which is true, though some people are surprised by this) BMW are going to capitalise enormously from their mistake, and KTM are never going to get another offer like this.

  As ever – speaking from bitter experience – messed-up PR opportunities can cripple an excellent product line, and this is one gonzo example. Missed marketing is bad marketing.

• On the flipside, the guy from BMW said (to paraphrase) [BMW] didn’t realise the publicity potential of this event; we’ve been sponsoring people to go around the world for years now, and thought of this in much the same way – in which case, perhaps their PR department also needs a wake-up call.

  Case in point: I rolled-up at the Shell station on the A44 near the Rollright Stones a few weeks ago; parked up the bike, filled my tank, and went in to pay. The guy behind the till clocked the GS’s beak and cylinders and opened up with the line: “So, are you going the ‘Long Way Round’ then?”[1]

  Now that’s brand recognition.

• All the pro-BMW stuff aside – remember, the gig was hosted at a BMW bike dealership – I suspect Charley is not afraid to thumb his nose at them a bit, so to speak.

• Charley comes across as a really nice guy – he said that he wasn’t very good at giving lectures, and so dropped straight into a hour-long Q&A session; I seemed to be sat behind some of his family members and Pear’s Soap Advert godchildren, which led to a lot of attention being directed at that part of the audience.

• The rudest bit? Someone asked a question about the testicle stew episode, and Charley answered that the worst bit was waiting for them to go pop, and that the incident had left him with a whole new respect for women.

  There was an extended pause while people worked this one out, before the audience just broke into laughter.

• Number one piece of equipment for long-distance bikers? Sterile Baby-Wipes. Now, there’s something I’ve missed before.

• Jedi religion isn’t real. Ewan: These are not the bikes you’re looking for. Move along now. – doesn’t work on Ukranian border guards.

• The food was OK, but went too quickly, leaving only peeled prawns and jammie dodgers; this helped underline the nobody really understanding how popular this event might be thing. This on top of everything else is most cool – anything that makes bikers more acceptable to the general public is good.

Pictures are at http://www.crypticide.com/users/alecm/albums/2004-boorman/; foregoing the autograph thing, I picked up the Book/DVD combo on discount as a memento, and then pootled home via Tesco and M&S.

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[1] “No mate, I’m just going home… but maybe next time.”