Alexei Sayle: understanding the Austin Montego In 1984 the Design Centre would award its prestigious label to the only motor vehicle ever thought worthy of this important prize. The car was the Austin Montego, an oddly sized, weird-looking, badly built lump whose only innovative feature was a talking dashboard. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said: "If a lion could speak we could not understand him," and unfortunately the same was true of an Austin Montego dashboard. The Design Centre made me sad because in the Seventies and Eighties I was an oddity amongst my friends in that I was both left-wing and patriotic. I risked exclusion from many salsa-dancing classes in north London for suggesting I might purchase a UK-built car rather than the default Renault 4 or Fiat Uno. Nevertheless, I always tried to buy domestic products, even though the few good car models we made back then still possessed awful flaws. The electrical systems in the Jaguar XJ not only had a mind of their own, but that mind suffered severe mental problems. I owned an Eighties SWB Land Rover which, amongst its faults, wouldn't start whenever it rained, and the springs on the boot lid of my Rover 800 Coupé were so weak that a light breeze would bring it crashing down on your neck. Unlike most other people, though, I never blamed the shop-floor workers at UK car factories for the faults in all my cars, because in the early Seventies I briefly worked at Lucas Ltd making those clinically depressed electrical circuits for Jaguars and Land Rovers, and it's hard to describe how undervalued and disregarded we workers were. When I read about British workers and British designers now producing fantastic cars, all under foreign ownership, it makes me angry. The machinery we worked on was ancient and worn out and the factory itself was old and dirty. In a modern Japanese or European factory there is only one canteen where everybody eats, which fosters a collective sense of ownership and all levels of the workforce are able to exchange views and swap ideas. At Lucas there were something like five different canteens, with ascending levels of food and hygiene going from factory floor to clerical, senior clerical to management and finally upwards to the wood-panelled splendour of senior management. The food in our workers" canteen reminded me of something I'd read about in Dostoevsky and there was no provision made for the many vegetarian Hindu workers, so all they could eat were the watery carrots or mushy boiled brussels sprouts that accompanied our leathery meats. This might go some way to explaining the Montego and its incoherent dashboard: perhaps the people who built it were suffering from scurvy or vitamin deficiency because of the food in their canteen. When you think about it, it's the only possible explanation.