Tales of the Expected

Are You Pulling My Legacy?

2011-11-19T04:44:00.000-08:00

The Olympic Stadium just hours before
the 2012 games begin. Lord Coe
is confident of its punctual completion,
and of Elvis arriving in time to perform
at the opening ceremony.

For those of you that care, London has been awarded the 2017 World Athletics Championships. I say it like that because I expect that not many people do. Not that much anyway. Certainly it pales into sporting insignificance when compared to the glimmering spectacle of the Olympic games to be held here next year, and for many, constitutes a far duller prospect. It’s a bit like being out in a bar: you get chatting to a confident and gorgeous girl/guy, and bask in their glorious presence for a short while as they pay you the attention you’ve worked so hard to receive. Before you know it, he or she leaves and you’re left talking to their awkward, shy and ugly cousin, and despite doing their level best to impress you, you would much rather they just went away forever.

That’s what we’re dealing with here, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because most people don’t see athletics as a sport. Simple. It’s a spectacle: a once-in-four-years reason to care a jot about a bunch of men and women running around a field and throwing things. If I ever tune in to such events, it is because of the outside chance of a javelin missing its target and nestling itself in the shoulder of a middle distance runner. It hasn’t happened yet.

I’m being slightly unfair – some people love running, jumping and throwing. So much so, they do and talk about little else. You know the people I’m referring to, and they’ve almost certainly bumped into you when you’ve been strolling romantically along the South Bank, or jogged absurdly on the spot next to you in yellow leggings while you’re waiting to cross the road. Fitness is important, I grant it, but that’s what gyms are for. Runners and jumpers are thus safely contained and shielded from the army of non runners and jumpers who try really hard on a daily basis to fight the overwhelming urge to trip them up or clothesline them as they bounce annoyingly past.

But I digress. The point is, athletics for most people is a spectacle, and not a sport. We all love the 100 metre final at the Olympics. Thousands of years of Darwinian achievement sandwiched into less than ten glorious seconds worth of explosive muscular contraction. Likewise, we all know Usain Bolt, and Asafa Powell, and, erm, the other ones. Similarly, the 200 metres are popular. And the 400, a little bit. The 800 metres is bearable, but anything longer than that and we’ll generally wait half and hour to rewind the Sky box for the last lap. That’s the sort of dedication the British public has for track and field athletics.

Thus, the World Championships constitute a watered-down version of this already diluted enthusiasm, and I will bet a discus throw of small change that the newly preserved running track around the national stadium will put fewer bums on seats than during its glory days in 2012, with the footfall of Olympic champions still echoing around its capacious, spectral shell. Don ’t believe me? Just look at the Crystal Palace complex during one of the absurdly titled ‘grand prixs’ next time it’s on TV. Ghostly.

But the point of securing the games was to ensure that the stadium didn’t turn into an athletic burial ground like Barcelona’s, right? Well yes, ostensibly. Coe and co will regurgitate the same platitudinous rhetoric of the ‘legacy’ and ‘sustainability’ of track and field athletics in this high-achieving land. But in reality, it’s analogous to a hungover fry-up in a greasy spoon café. Winning the World Championships saved their bacon. Just think, if London had lost out to Doha, then the egg deposited on faces would be runny and plentiful, just like after the failed World Cup bid, except with a half-billion pound stale piece of ovular fried bread as the centre-piece of the oily, tepid platter.

By securing the championships in 2017, the legacy committee has managed to justify retaining the stadium in public ownership; an 11^th hour decision that saw West Ham lose out on its (previously ratified) bid for a new home. Without 2017, the farcical organisation of the stadium’s fate would have stood out like a world-class velodrome in Stratford. Which is another issue, for another time.

Cynical perhaps, but Coe got lucky here. Surely the concept of a legacy is predicated on deciding it beforehand? Otherwise it’s just chaotic bureaucracy buried in a happy accident. The Olympic organising committee has got so much right in the build up to the games that it magnifies the confusion surrounding the stadium ten-fold. The saving grace of it all is that the centrepiece of 2012 will be ready on time, a tremendous feat considering London’s recent efforts at building completion. It’s taken, for instance, nearly ten years to install the new escalators at Bank station, and as we all remember, Wembley was late (an eventuality that won some of its builders considerable sums of money at Ladbrokes).

And so, Qatar defeated, we jog inexorably on to the games next year. Excited? I am actually, and my ticket lottery win for the synchronised swimming will be put to good use. As for 2017, I would tell you here how to get your hands on tickets, but you’re not going to bother, right?

Failure is Golden

2011-09-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

Frank Lampard has dismissed claims
that his relegation to the bench during
a recent Chelsea Pensioners swimming
gala could have knock-on effects for
his England career

Gold, in Athletics, is reserved for the winners. Quite rightly. While it’s true that expectation is unfairly lumped on to runners, vaulters, jumpers and other athletes prior to competition, the determination, guile, strength and tenacity required to triumph on the track or field is rewarded with a solid gold medal, along the equally important recognition of success.

Only in football is it the other way round. Completely unjustifiably, almost a decade ago the media (and therefore the public) crowned a bunch of relatively unproven young men with the title of the ‘Golden Generation’, largely due to England’s 5-1 demolition of Germany in the run up to the 2002 World Cup. This same shining crop crashed out to ten-man Brazil in the quarter-finals of that particular tournament. It was also this gleaming group that disappointed in 2006 in Germany, as well as two years later when Steve Mclaren’s umbrella led the stalwart army of prodigious brilliance all the way to the qualifying stages of Euro 2008, before mercifully sparing them the humiliation of having to actually compete in the tournament.

You know the rest. It’s hardly a revelation that Messrs Gerrard, Lamps, Cole and the rest of the golden boys failed to achieve anything remotely resembling a successful stint during their tenure at the pinnacle of football’s rocky peaks. It’s also no great shock to anyone (except the FA, strangely) that there is a glut of extremely talented young players emerging in this country that should be given their shot at being mildly competitive for England on the world stage. My only gripe is that it’s taken so damn long.

It’s worth dwelling on the ‘Golden’ label that has followed this group through their careers like a heavy application of David Beckham signature aftershave. Was it a hindrance? Did the semiotic significance of ‘Golden’ place an unattainable level of expectation on their young shoulders that proved impossible to live up to? If so, then it was hardly their fault. Anything less than a sustained period of success would have been deemed a failure. As it happens, it has been deemed a failure, and no, they are not entirely to blame for this. The criticism for their lack of success should be viewed mainly in terms of a warped sense of entitlement. In the same bizarre way that Britain still holds the belief that it should remain a world beating military force, each England set-up going into any major tournament is lauded as a genuine contender for the silverware. Is this reasonable? Given the track record of the national team, you’d have to say it isn’t. The almost biblical hype that surrounds the team’s palm-leaf donkey parade into every World Cup renders their actual performance an inevitable failure, with the hearts and minds of supporters existing in a parallel universe where it is either still 1966 or late in the reign of Queen Victoria, the only two times when England really were that dominant (with the latter being more down to imperial exclusivity than actual talent).

It is also the fault of the FA, which I am convinced is also partially responsible for world poverty, international conflict and large scale destructive weather phenomena, such is the ineptitude of its governance. Not since the Conservative party of the 1990s have we seen a group of such misguided, confused old men squabbling and head scratching over the direction of their policies and forward momentum. Just look at England’s recent World Cup bid. It begins with appointing the wrong manager, every time, purely with the belief that success can be bought. In Capello’s case, guaranteed success was secured to the tune of £6m a year. Look where that got us. I’m not opposed to the idea of a foreign manager, not at all, but one that speaks English is a good start.

With the overhyped, big-name manager securely in place, all that is left for him to do is select the same eleven players utilised by the previous, overhyped, big-name incumbent. Cue 2-3 years of confusion, platitudinous interviews and excuses by the bucket load. Next, repeat this process ad infinitum, and ladies and gentlemen, there you have the mastermind organisation that is the English Football Association. Ask any businessman stepping in to rescue an ailing company or brand. What to do when faced with forty years of similar disappointments and hallmark mistakes? Shake it up, change it around, root and branch. This is exactly what the Germans did after that night in Munch (even Heskey scored for goodness sake). Taking a step back, they oversaw a back–to-the-drawing-board approach that led to an experimental, young side that have gelled fantastically, culminating in the last laugh for the vibrant Germans, who destroyed a lack-lustre England set-up at last year’s World Cup in South Africa.

So what now for Capello? Well, with his contract secured until after Euro 2012 (and no longer), anything he likes. Oddly, with this finishing post in sight, only now has he adopted the common-sense view of trialling a comparatively fresh line up. In came Smalling, terrific for Manchester United so far this season, and perhaps vitally, Lampard was dropped to the bench. Happily, you could tell how much that pissed him off, but it is the first real moment of resolve from a manager with an otherwise predictable selection policy.

For me however, Capello didn’t go far enough. With Terry in perhaps his last full season as a first choice centre back (he certainly won’t see the next World Cup), why not now opt for the hugely impressive Phil Jones, recently bought by Alex Ferguson as a long- term first choice replacement for Rio Ferdinand. If one thing is certain in football management, it’s that you should trust the judgement of the most decorated manager in the country’s history. Plus, John Terry is a horrible man as we all know. The same goes for Frank Lampard (although not necessarily the horrible bit). Annoyingly, Capello has rowed back on his apparent statement of intent by sheepishly holding a press conference to iterate Lampard’s continued importance to the national team; presumably this kind of ego-massaging is in his contract.

Though Jack Wilshere would almost certainly have started had he been fit, Tom Cleverly and Jordan Henderson must surely remain contenders in an England midfield that is crying out for youthful exuberance and creative options for the newly thatched and resurgent Wayne Rooney. One thing’s for sure, I wouldn’t like to be in Steven Gerrard’s increasingly rickety boots when he makes his overdue comeback after injury. It may have only been less than a year, but it really does seem like the footballing scenery has totally changed since he began his lay-off. And that can only be a good thing.

Things are looking a little difficult as far as a second striker goes. Bent is Lineker in disguise, but only half as good, and Defoe is so frustratingly inconsistent that I applaud any manager who has worked with him for an entire season without wanting to sacrifice him on a plate to feed up Peter Crouch. Wellbeck is shaping up to be a genuine contender, but a couple of clever back heels in a team surrounded by genuine stars does not a prolific England striker make. Give him a season I say; after all, he did fail to lift a hopeless average England under 21 side this summer.

Whilst Qualification for next year’s Euro tournament has not yet been secured, it seems likely that England will be present, unlike the shambles of two years ago. A good start. But Capello’s strategy at this tournament will be vital to the development of the team in the long run. Hypothetically (and hopefully), off the back of excellent domestic seasons for their respective clubs, the likes of Cleverly, Smalling, Jones and Henderson could really step up on the international stage come the start of Euro 2012. I doubt they’ll win it, but a strong showing at a major tournament would cement them as a regular, cohesive unit, and would supply the much needed experience at the top level to propel them forward to the World Cup two years later, by which time the youngsters will be at the peak of their careers. Far fetched? Perhaps, but as far as I see it, the only way forward.

What then of the Golden Generation? Here’s a suggestion: let the emerging, bright young things embark on a European Championship crusade to eastern Europe, and in the meantime, Fat Frank, Stevey G, Becks and JT can remain at home and apply their gilded boots to the more leisurely path towards Olympic Games glory. You never know, they might even get bronze.

Forget-Me-Net

2011-07-31T14:51:00.000-07:00

After its successes in the world of home computing,
Microsoft's foray into the more unfamiliar
territory of designer drugs has received mixed
reviews from users and critics alike.

The other day, I was recalling with some relish the woeful ITV football programme ‘The Premiership’ – it was terrible, and I’m not just talking about Andy Townsend’s ‘Tactics Truck’ which, last I heard, was teetering on the edge of cliff somewhere in continental Europe, with Townsend insisting that everyone holds on, as he’s ‘got a plan’.

No, I’m talking about the strange and exciting time during which the Internet was taking over our lives. There was a palpable switch, sometime around 2003, where a website address became not just a luxurious but inefficacious addition to media coverage, but an integral part of its output and creative content.

The particular link that sprung to mind involved Des Lynam, a luddite of the highest proportions, attempting to raise viewers’ awareness to ITV’s snazzy new online footballing site. You could see techno-fear in his eyes as his producer barked into his earpiece, instructing him to mention the web stuff. Des, bless him, had no bloody idea what he was talking about and began wildly throwing around w-s, co-s and dots until he went crossed eyed and was led off for a lie down during the break.

Utterly alien to us now, the thought that television presenters, or anyone else for that matter, could be ignorant to the goings-on of the Internet and the accompanying lingo seems absurd. In a short space of time, the web has gone from inconsequential puff to vital resource. It seems quite touching, and delightfully sweet, that in halcyon days of the 80s and 90s, viewer participation in television programmes was conducted via the Royal Mail. Remember that big sack of letters and postcards that was routinely emptied onto the studio floor during Going Live each Saturday morning? I used to love that, although they never read my bloody letter out; thanks Schofield.

For me, it’s been fascinating to watch the way in which the language of the Internet has morphed itself into the very fabric of our day-to-day lives. Even as recently as 5 years ago, advertisements and promotional material quoted website address with a plethora of https and forward slashes, which always looked a little messy and seemed to alienate the technologically challenged. But, as we became more familiar with and reliant upon the Internet as our primary source of information, companies and advertisers dispensed with these superfluous prefixes and even dropped the ‘w’s.

Nowadays though, it is simply not necessary to direct anyone to a website address. We accept that by Googling what we need, we will be effortlessly transported to our desired location. Indeed, most people (myself included) feel inconvenienced by having to even type a full website address into the search bar, and judging by the search suggestions thrown up by Google, are largely unconcerned about the correct spelling either. Interestingly, my Microsoft Office 2007 does not recognise 'Google' in its infinitive or participle form. That said, I'm not sure the OED does either, but it's surely only a matter of time, such is the speed with which the term has become the only real way to succinctly describe the act of searching for something on the Internet.

With advertisers fully aware that the Internet is most people’s first port of call for information, a major shift has taken place in media marketing strategies. Where before, companies would include their website address, they now often dispense with it altogether, fully aware that people will flock, like lemmings, to their site anyway. Other brands feel it necessary to include an instruction to ‘search’ for them online, such as the ‘Search Colgate’ banner emblazoned underneath a tube of the stuff on a billboard near you. Presumably, these sorts of brands must still include the gentle reminder, just in case people forget that they have better things to do with their lives than to Google a brand of toothpaste.

The other great coup of the online branding world is the recent vogue for centralising the online content into the thrust of the ad. Strongbow for instance, have recently launched an absurd marketing drive through their website for thirsty volunteers to collaborate and build their own pub, presumably supplying them with enough Strongbow in the process to ensure the work force is as sozzled as the rest of Britain’s tradesmen, and that the workmanship is to the same, shoddy standard. This is just one of the many weird and wonderful recent ideas to have been dreamed by marketing executives with the considerable new weapon of social media at their disposal. Many brands, simply as a measure of quantifying their market, encourage customers to ‘like’ their latest venture, insisting that once a million people follow suit, they will throw a party or something. What next, two billion re-tweets and Apple Corp will eradicate world poverty? That’d be nice.

I was having a conversation with my brother recently, and I speculatively enquired with him as to whether he thought there might be any tickets remaining for the upcoming England Test Match. ‘Haven’t you googled it?’ was his bemused reply, seemingly baffled that I would have even thought to ask anyone but the multi-coloured search bar. And that’s out problem today, in my opinion. Not just that we consult our phones or laptops before we do people with real opinions and experience, but that having such a bounteous go-to resource is damaging our capability to learn, memorise and recall. Psychologists in a recent study confirmed the startlingly obvious; that heavy use of the Internet for on-demand information has rendered us reliant on it use and affects memory capability. I can’t remember the exact statistics though, but I’m sure there’s a way of finding out…

Or, perhaps it’s a good thing? The playing field has been levelled, information is now a right and not a privilege, and that anyone, anywhere can be self-taught in any intellectual practise they choose. If only that were the case. It would be nice to suggest that with access to the sheer wealth of material online, people would seek and devour knowledge like demented PhD students, but sadly (and predictably) the human race refuses to learn, and instead use it primarily for watching porn and gambling. Hey ho.

On a mildly serious note, it begs the question: with total and utter ubiquity of wireless internet signal, which will surely be realised in the next few years, the requirement to store information in our brains will be unnecessary, nay, perhaps even futile. And that’s a little worrying. If the Internet were taken down (or taken out) tomorrow, we would survive. After all, we’ve been reliant on it for a relatively short space of time, and none but the Facebook-weaned, moronically-brained youth would be irrevocably affected. But a few years down the line? Hard to say, except a catastrophic and apocalyptic scenario is looking ever more likely to be cyber-induced. And let’s not forget that if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, the population of the developed world would cease to speak to one another, and may even be forced to resort to face-to-face contact.

Possibly the most regrettable side effect of the Internet is the awful cyber-slang that inevitably follows. In the most egregious way conceivable, it seems that a number of people (women usually, without partners) insist on suffixing .com onto any number of inane verb participles. It’s horrific, and the next time I see a Facebook update containing the ‘phrase’ ‘pissed.com’, or ‘I’m confused.com’ I may well drown myself in a bath of toasters. Come back Des, all is forgiven.

Excess All Areas

2011-06-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

Like many bands with waning popularity, Queen

embark on a tour of Britain's Universities, where

along with the new line up, Brian May completes

a PhD backstage at each venue as part of his

tour rider.

‘And that’s when he got up on to the table, and in front of the whole pub, snorted a line of drawing pins whilst ingesting a bottle of Jack through his left eye.’ Everyone loves a good rock n roll anecdote, and it is this indulgence that informs the entire genre of retrospective music documentaries. A bloke, usually in a leather jacket and sporting a face resembling a tube map, sits in a pub (now a wine bar) where an infamous piece of rock folklore allegedly took place. I say allegedly, because you never can be too sure. The bloke in question has been telling that one in various pubs since 1976, and jumps at the chance to regurgitate stories of the old days to a television audience who’ll lap it up like Keith Moon on a stag do.

The thing is, everyone wants to believe the rose-bespectacled roadies, producers, biographers and journalists who routinely apotheosise their idols through the medium of the talking head. I’m not saying these things didn’t happen, but the fact is that the people doing the remembering were often as largely drug-addled as everyone else in the 70s. Except Queen. I watched a documentary recently in which Brian May and Roger Taylor laboriously took me through their entire career, from the band’s inception through to Freddie Mercury’s death. Fascinating. Except it wasn’t, not really.

The problem with May is that he’s too damn clever. There’s nothing wrong with a rock star Post-Grad per se, it’s just that he didn’t take enough drugs in his heyday to translate his story successfully to television 30 years later. Good for him, of course, but a little staid for the rest of us. He could even remember which part of the middle eight he wrote on ‘Killer Queen’ which, being a rock star, he has no right to remember. Ozzy Osbourne, for instance, can’t even remember how to sing.

Contrast this with Motorhead, and the quite excellent documentary they produced in the 90s. My favourite anecdote involved drummer Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor who, having taken an alarming quantity of acid, narrowly escaped death after attempting to escape his dressing room by climbing out of the bathroom mirror. Love that guy.

Yes, I concede that this is all very juvenile behaviour, pitiful really, but for me, the hedonistic antics of rock musicians in the 1970s helps to define the era and contribute towards its rightful status as a behemoth of musical history. The argument that Hendrix (60s, I realise), Moon, Bonham, Morrison et al would never have achieved such legendary status had they lived to be fat, old, leather jacketed men is erroneous and academic. The focus should be on the prodigious talents they did display during their blistering, if relatively short, careers. Twice as bright, half as long as they say.

Some do make it out the other side, but not always successfully. Roger Daltrey looks more like a hip old geography teacher these days, and Brian May, well, the hair was bad enough before it greyed.

With the current vogue for band reformations, a nod must go in the direction of the Rolling Stones, who despite trying their level best to kill themselves repeatedly over the years have managed an unrivalled longevity at the top of their respective games without the need for a break, apart from Ronnie Wood’s rehab and Keith Richard’s ‘Palm Tree’ episode. Scorcese’s 2008 film Shine a Light was simply superb, and the physical condition of Mick Jagger at that gig was nothing short of phenomenal. Admittedly, if we didn’t already know him to be particularly svelte, one would either think he was dangerously malnourished or a twelve year old girl, or both, but that’s by the by.

Some rock stars manage to juggle the respectability of unrespectability alongside a clean living lifestyle. Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden not only shunned the long hair, but also now pilots the band’s private jet on world tours. Impressive, considering the band’s reputation. I’d have loved to see Keith Moon try that; it may have been marginally more successful than his attempt to drive a hovercraft through the side of his local pub.

Now I wasn’t born in the 70s, and I realise I may have fallen into the trap of drinking the same anecdotal whisky I derided earlier, but I make no apologies for that, it's more fun that way. It does lead me to think though: what enduring legacies and Winter’s Tales will the current crop of popular musicians leave in their wake? Remember the time that Chris Martin of Coldplay held an all-night smoothie binge? And what about the time when Justin Bieber took four groupies backstage to play Wii? Classic.

Lemmy once expressed his annoyance at seeing bands getting on the tour bus with laptop computers – ‘There’s no place for that in rock and roll’ he said as he sipped his first whisky of the morning. But, unfortunately for Lemmy, that is rock and roll in 2011, and there just isn’t a place for the Rolls-in-the-swimming-pool approach to life on the road anymore. It’s one reason why the 70s is so fondly remembered; a time when men were girly-looking men, groupies hadn’t quite grasped their equal rights and more importantly, when record companies had more money than they knew what to do with and would surround their stars with a comfort blanket of cocaine and sex, just to keep the creative juices flowing. The Rolls Royce thing never happened by the way, which just goes to show the lengths to which people will go to keep the memory of those days alive.

So, we should be content to consign the days of rock ‘n’ roll excess to where they belong; the heyday of the superstar rock band and of globe trotting lunacy. It would be an exercise in futility for today’s wannabe stars to even attempt to live up to the reputations of Zeppelin, The Who or Black Sabbath. Pete Doherty? Oh please, Lemmy would be turning in his grave had he died when medical science dictated he should.

Exclusive: UK shock at Cameron 'In A Relationship' Facebook Status

2011-05-31T06:32:00.000-07:00

'And that's St James's Park over there -
you could use that as the Air Force Base'.

I have a special relationship with my shoes; we’re close, intimately so, and share the good times alongside the bad. It just so happens that the pair in question is the most expensive I own, but it is also the most enduring and they fit like a glove, pardon the mixed metaphor. They protect me from the hard city streets, from the invasion of foreign objects into my fleshy feet and from a multitude of other podiatric concerns.

You might even say it’s an essential relationship. Without them, I’m in some trouble from outside factors. Yes, I have other shoes, but none provide the level of reassuring comfort, protection and longevity. But, it’s a fairly one-way relationship; I need them far more than they need me.

Though not altogether analogous, you understand what I’m getting at in relation to Obama’s state visit to UK (London) shores last week. However, the fact remains: in the same way I lovingly polish my shoes and administer restorative treatment with heart and sole, the British government invariably comes over all gooey-eyed and sycophantic at the self-interested prospect of our ‘Special relationship’ with the US.

You may remember the video to George Michael’s ‘Shoot the Dog’ from a few years ago. You may also, entirely forgivably, have forgotten the song itself. It depicted Tony Blair as George W. Bush’s obsequious lapdog, feverishly panting and drooling over him as he padded obediently by the President’s side and played fetch. Indicative, you might say, of the Blair-Bush years. But what of 2011? What of the new breed of transatlantic leaders and their back-slapping antics? Well, there was plenty of that going on as David Cameron entertained the Obamas at a sickeningly contrived barbecue on the back lawn of Number Ten. It was all smiles and handshakes at the event comprising several heavily perspiring military personnel and starry-eyed members of rent-a-crowd. Cameron even flipped a burger; a practice he is all too familiar with following his days working in McDonalds, trying to make ends meet whilst struggling through his social science degree at a mediocre suburban polytechnic. Right?

Apparently, the rest of the Bullingdon club were disappointed at having not been invited, with one over zealous chap being turned away at the door clutching a croquet set. Shame, Obama really should enjoy the authentic English experience, don’t you think? Also, from the creepily voyeuristic television footage, it was just possible to see Nick Clegg doing the ice run, shortly after peeling the spuds for the potato salad. The lapdog’s lapdog, if you will.

The US president rather interestingly termed Anglo-US relations as a ‘special and essential relationship’ during his state address. Simply by introducing a new adjective into the time-wearied term, he has re-defined and rejuvenated the concept of the partnership as one of a more pragmatic nature, rather than the reassuring, hackneyed lullaby that has eased the British government to sleep at night since World War II. One of action, as well as affection. At any rate, the ‘special’ element of the relationship lost its meaning during Brown’s tenure, when it was not so much a case of the leaders nibbling burgers together, more Brown sulking off on his own to eat all the pies.

Obama is not Ronald Reagan – he is less interested in schmoozing and more intent on taking action to force change; although admittedly at times it seems unclear as to quite what it is he wants to take action to change. Nevertheless, he is content to ride the ingratiating merry-go-round during his stay, if for no other reason than to placate the leg-hugging British neediness whilst securing a place to park his planes in the event of a full scale World War. That and ensuring his soldiers have women to fraternise with once they are parked.

Just who is the relationship ‘essential’ to anyway? In recent years it‘s been a case of ‘You scratch my back, I’ll let you’. But, after all, America is the world’s number one economy and it would be suicidal not to do everything to sustain relations. Which is why every effort has been made to make this state visit as natural as possible and to avoid the try-hard feel that once seemed inevitable following Blair and Bush’s bosom-scraping proximity. It is an attempt to brush those years under the carpet and to re-establish the links forged between the two countries over the generations in a fresh, vivacious way. Who then, took the decision that Messrs Cameron and Obama should form a transatlantic table tennis team on their visit to a South London school? I implore you to watch the footage; it smacks of the try-hard bravado they really should have avoided. The only thing worse than a Cameron-initiated high five is a second one, and by the third, the PM’s gung-ho hand-slapping had engendered just the slightest flinch of discomfort from the leader of the free world.

But he’s like that, Cameron. It was the same during the coalition’s formation, with the much-scrutinised game of back slapping one-up-man-ship with Nick Clegg as they entered Number Ten for the first time. A little like a game of table tennis, and one that Cameron was adamant he didn’t lose.

Talking of Clegg, the poor chap was snubbed by Obama following a request for a private consultation during his visit. No, he was told, you’ll just have to wave a flag and wait in line with the rest. He did, of course, but got a little confused about which side he was on, resulting in a serious flag-brandishing dilemma. When he did get to speak to Mr President sir, he came all over all gushing schoolboy, grinning obscenely at his jokes and furiously nodding his head until he was led off for a lie down.

Obama, to his (speech-writer’s) credit, did attempt to infuse some humour into proceedings and to defuse the formal and imperial overtones to his first state visit. His inaugural joke to the house at Westminster was risky, but was delivered with aplomb. It was also the funniest joke witnessed in Parliament since Charles Kennedy. He brushed aside the potential criticism at having spoken over the national anthem at the Queen’s reception dinner, insisting he believed it to be a soundtrack to his toast. Perhaps Cameron will employ ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in a similar way, possibly as a backdrop to announce government cuts to the Royal family, with Andrew being the first to mandatorily exiled to the US for his daily appearance on Oprah.

Whatever the long term outcome of Obama’s whistle-stop tour of the capital, one thing’s for sure: Cameron will feel mighty pleased with himself; ‘Special’, you might say. Nothing new there, but you get the overwhelming feeling that he now sees himself firmly established on the world stage, with an open invitation to watch the Baseball over at Obama’s place whenever he feels the need for some ‘essential’ transatlantic ego-massaging. Nick Clegg may even get the chance to briefly install himself at Number Ten while he’s away; someone’s got to feed the cat after all.

And so, all is well with the world. America and Great Britain have firmly re-established their age-old political ties and my shoes fit as well ever. The difference is this: I understand that eventually and inexorably, my once imperious footwear will perish, will fall apart and be consigned to the scrap heap. Empires fall, soles fall apart and the once confident stride reduced to a blistered hobble. I wonder if Cameron has thought of that. My shoes were made in China, incidentally.

Back of the Net?

2011-04-14T14:55:00.000-07:00

As he contemplates his greatness,
England number 12 goalkeeper David
James displays a rare momentary lapse
in concentration moments before
Hartlepool's fourth goal.

Who’d be a goalkeeper? Judging by the look on the face of Hiralio Gomes following his moment of darkness against Real Madrid recently, he wished he’d never reached for the gloves. They didn’t used to wear gloves of course, but footballers were just coal miners in disguise back then.

Being ‘in nets’ is not a thankless task, as many an acrobatic No.1 has proved, but on the whole it’s a pretty miserable existence. Strangely though, goalkeepers (with specific notable exceptions) always strike me as the calmest, most intelligent players on the pitch and the ones you’d feel safest leaving your girlfriend with in China White on a Saturday night. They just look so, well, normal. Take Edwin Van De Saar or David Seaman for example: boring looking men who probably have a nice home life and maybe two dogs apiece. No prancing round like a fairy and swan diving over another fairy’s tight-clad leg for them. No, the goalie chooses to spend his days standing on a field watching his friends play football, with all the time in the world to philosophise about world peace or whether he booked his Audi Q7 in for a service. All the while with 5,000 yelping away fans throwing small denominations of change at his head. Or is that just at Millwall?

Surely part of the reason goalkeepers seem a pretty cerebrally collected bunch is down to their ability to put up with inevitable flack from fans, the press and even politicians. Take Seaman (please, not literally) for example; the vitriol that came his way following his world cup clanger against Brazil haunted him for the rest of his career. It was a shocker mind you - meteors take longer to reach Earth than Ronaldinho’s free kick did to sneak in. Thus, as any mistake they make is magnified and almost exclusively leads to a goal, they grow a fairly thick skin. Notable examples of suicidal goalkeepers (in the footballing sense but who knows) include Bruce Grobbelaar, Arsenal’s Flapi-Hand-ki and of course David James, whose blooper reel actually makes up whole shows on BBC3 these days. Incidentally I met Bruce Grobbelaar once at a wedding, and trust me, if I’d offered him a bribe to get me more wine, he’d have taken it.

Like the perennial horse racing question ‘are they jockeys because they’re small or are they small because they’re jockeys?’, it’s strange that nearly all goalkeepers stand well over six feet. We all know that keepers start keeping around the time they can stand (as any of them will, and do, tell you), so it constitutes a pretty fortunate growth spurt statistic. Just in case you were wondering, to keep them small, jockeys are made to sleep in tiny, dark boxes inside stables in Donegal so there’s no mystery there.

There’s no denying that when they do good, they do good, the most famous example being Gordon Banks’s heroics against Pele and co in 1970. I feel a little heathen to say it but for me, with time, ‘that save’ becomes less impressive. Not because of the save itself, but because of the extremely high standard others goalkeepers now attain in the modern game. In the same way you wouldn’t expect Jesse Owens to keep up with Usain Bolt, keepers in the modern game are superior athletes to their predecessors. Maybe not all of them, but the like of Joe Hart are Pepe Reina and are great to watch: fabulously athletic, quick on their feet and often seem to read the game with matrix-like vision. Remember that crazed Colombian with the reverse overhead kick save? Very Keanu.. On top of that, the forwards are stronger than ever too. No disrespect to Gordon, but a solid Ronaldo strike may have rendered him paraplegic.

I can’t write about goalkeepers without mentioning Peter Schmeichel. The absurdly limbed Dane more or less changed the way an entire generation of his successors played the position. The slow motion replays of his flailing arms and legs greeting an attacker at twenty miles an hour were enough to give you nightmares. God knows how his opponents felt. Barring possibly Shilton, ol’ Rudolph must be the finest keeper of the past twenty years, and played a bigger part in Man Utd’s huge 90s success than he is given credit for.

Amongst the invective levelled at them however, there is praise to be had for goalkeepers after a successful penalty shoot-out, kudos for keeping a particularly impressive clean sheet (no more Seaman jokes I promise) and back page action shots for game-saving heroics. The problem is that it goes as badly wrong as often as it goes pleasingly right, as Gomes will tell you once he’s stopped crying. That’s the dilemma for aspiring keepers – to risk a polarised life as a hero and villain or to tick along anonymously as a centre half. No doubt any goalkeeper will tell you he’s happy with his choice, but it’s a bit like having an ugly baby; it’s not how you wanted it but you wouldn’t swap it for the world.

Good for you boys, keep up the good work as you reach for your spit-encrusted Sondicos, sag into the turf all alone on a rainy Tuesday night and pick coins out of your hair. Personally, I was a left-winger; much better, everyone loves a left winger.

The Writing's on the Wall

2011-03-18T08:45:00.000-07:00

Following the large-scale success of
the recent advertising campaign for
Viagra, its manufacturers are
rumoured to be planning an
audacious attempt to turn the
moon into a giant scrotum

General assumptions in life tend to indicate an element of truth, and as far as public conveniences go, the universally held opinion that men’s toilets are dank, filthy and stench-infused places certainly hits the mark, usually as a direct result of the patron’s failure to do so. A fitting environment then, for the darkest, most primal and often disturbing instincts of the male race to pour out. I’m talking, of course, about the universal constant of lavatorial scrawling. Being (relatively) ignorant to the goings on in the world of female toilets, I shall forego speculation into those sweet smelling Arcadias. I have, however, amassed enough reluctant experience of the underworld that is the Gents to pour comment.

Mid urination, lift your eyes for a moment from the foaming, golden Styx and you will invariably see an artistic representation of a Penis. I use the term artistically quite loosely, though the phallic scribblings rendered on tiles up and down the country, and for that matter around the world, do tend to deviate from the strictly anatomic to a startling degree. Sometimes flaccid, sometimes erect; sometimes complete with hair, sometimes incongruously without. Some even opt for ejaculatory actions shots which provide a dynamism hard to capture within a still frame. It is tempting to impute these genital monstrosities simply to the limits of male thought association, yet there does seem to be an almost Darwinian beauty to the parallelism of the capability to simultaneously hold one’s own penis with one hand and create an artistic replica with the other. I suspect (though I don’t know) that women rarely reproduce vaginal scribblings in the same way on the sanctified walls of their latrine, though if they did I suspect they may be more faithfully recreated than their male counterparts, possibly with coloured felt tip shading. Purely speculation of course.

Cave paintings they may not be, but the fascination with inscribing the male member onto the toilet wall of time is as old as the hills. The Saxons after all felt it necessary to suggest for posterity that their virility knew no bounds, as any low flying aircraft over the hills of Dorchester will hardly fail to testify. The magnificent 180 ft tall Cerne Abbas hill figure is really nothing other than a cubicle scribble for people with too much time on their hands. These days, a marker pen on the wall is the only subconscious Freudian manifestation we can readily fit into out busy schedules. Even religious imagery relies heavily on the phallic. Ok, Jesus maybe not, but the Hindu gods make no secret of their virility, and the icons plastered on walls and temples throughout India are as explicit as a public lavatory in Dudley, if a little holier.

Perhaps it’s an ideological thing; the cultural saturation of discourses on masculinity has led to a situation where men do not feel comfortable with open discussion of their bodies and candour as to anatomic size ratios. This then, would suggest that the inscriptions on toilet walls are an attempt at self-justification, an effort to carry out a comparative study to establish if they are, in fact, normal. Either that or the opposite is true, and constitutes a habitual self-aggrandisement. Whatever the case, while penises constitute the most common graffiti item in the Gents, they are joined by a happy throng of offensive messages, abbreviated football team loyalties, the odd swastika and more than a few solicitations to partake in a little fellatio.

Having had the good fortune to study at an arts university, I have been exposed to an entirely different lavatorial experience. The penises are still there, of course, but nestled alongside is some truly hilarious and pseudo-philosophical, how shall I put it, bullshit. This varies from genuine attempts at toilet philosophy to the feverish ramblings of mind-rotted students fresh from a bout of hefty revision on political theory. ‘Foucault fucks freshers’ was a particular favourite of mine before the cleaning staff had the temerity to wipe from posterity that particularly poetic piece of rhetoric.

The act of tagging, the undecipherable signatures that ‘professional’ graffiti artists insist on leaving dotted around in the same manner as a dog pissing on a tree, seems to me the height of stupidity. It’s a little like a serial killer in a Sherlock Holmes story leaving a white glove or sprig of lavender at the scene of each crime. It’s essentially a perpetual act of self incrimination, and dooms the perpetrator to an Dante-esque punishment of spending longer cleaning the stuff off the wall than it took to put up. Perhaps the Penis symbol is the work of a single, particularly prolific ‘artist’. If that were the case, you’d have to applaud the endeavour. Maybe even an MBE for services to street art?

Just when does graffiti become ‘art’ anyway? Admittedly, some of the stuff along any given stretch of rail line is actually pretty good; pointless, but good. Is it art for art’s sake, or simply the manifestation of disaffected youth, bored to the point of being willing to risk life and limb on the railway for the sake of spraying a wall? Or is it for the commuter’s enjoyment? A nice sentiment, but probably not. A few years ago there was a governmental drive to bring graffiti artists into the fold, to lend some legality to their practise by apportioning areas of urban decay for them to work their magic. This, predictably, resulted in vast areas of inner cities plastered with graffiti paint; the very same graffiti paint that contributed to the urban decay in the first place. Suffice to say, apart from nominating the theme, this achieved very little. I might be being a little harsh; after all, it’s not different to what Michelangelo did with the Sistine chapel. His sanctioned fresco is really a renaissance equivalent of a miscreant with a spray can approaching a wall behind Tesco.

Finally, I read recently about a piece of toilet graffiti that is particularly shocking. Various contributors have combined to inscribe the entire first chapter of the first Harry Potter book onto a cubicle wall, to the general praise and approbation of all. Possibly the worst public crime ever recorded, this act of defilement has not only gone unpunished but was actively encouraged. Given that there are an interminable number of tautologous volumes in that particular series, there is a risk that public conveniences up and down the land may be overrun with the infestation of Hermione and co. This would be a huge shame and as a nation, we must not let such ephemeral cultural phenomena run roughshod over countless centuries of graffiti tradition. Give me the penises any day.

Uncommon wealth

2010-09-26T04:50:00.000-07:00

The English ladies Lawn Bowls team
were devastated to discover that they
had been provided with such
sub-standard accommodation

As I write, a team of twelve-year-old girls are feverishly hammering and sawing their little socks off to ensure the 2010 Commonwealth Games can go ahead as planned. The idea of employing fully grown and skilled tradespeople to complete this work seems to have eluded the organisers, who no doubt saw the crowds of youngsters displaced from the many bulldozed villages en-route to the stadium as perfect candidates for earning a little pocket money. And so, with just over a week to go before the curtain is raised on possibly the most pointless competition in the world of sport, the British seize their opportunity for a bit of a moan. Actually, the Kiwis are moaning as well, as is practically everyone involved. It is comforting to know that the mother country has at least bequeathed something to its many usurping offspring.

I have a question: exactly why do we need an athletes’ ‘village’? I’ve always been a bit baffled by the concept of these places, Olympic or otherwise, which for three weeks in a lifetime are inhabited by groups of opposing athletes who would probably much rather not have to bump into their detested arch rivals every time they pop out to the village shop. What exactly makes it a village? Perhaps there’s a little church hall serving tea and cakes and a graffiti-lined bus shelter crammed with steroid-injecting miscreants. Whatever goes on inside these strange little gated communities, I don’t see the point. Yes, competitors need somewhere to sleep, eat and have rampant sex with each other, but why can’t they do those things in a hotel? It’s good enough for footballers after all.

In a defiant move, the English Commonwealth team has sent some of its athletes to do exactly that in the run up to the beginning of the games, whilst the diligent workmen at the village site attempt to shake off the Dengue fever long enough to connect
monsoon-soaked cables to exposed sockets with their teeth. So the hockey team are all comfy in their five-star suites, and would probably rather stay there rather than have an air-conditioning unit fall on their heads. If every athlete (around 8000 in total) were to do the same, wouldn’t that be better all round? I don’t buy the argument about training facilities either. The lawn bowls team were the first to boycott the accommodation, and have more chance of recreating the conditions of a lush surrey bowling green in the function room of a plush hotel than they ever would have of finding a patch of suitable grass in Delhi. Plus, the runners can jog round the block, the weight-lifters can carry people’s cases upstairs and the if the rest have come this far and still need to practise, well quite frankly, that’s their fault.

I may be being a little flippant, but doing things this way would save an awful lot of money. The athletes’ village is to be sold as luxury apartments on completion of the games, and there isn’t a hope in hell that this money will find its way back to even partially reimbursing the government investment, and will instead line the already-jangling pockets of the Dubai-based property company responsible for the shambles. What is the difference then, of sprinkling a lot less money on building a couple more hotels, which takes no time at all (the new Premier Inn in Greenwich for instance, was built overnight) and constructing a smaller, centralised training facility somewhere near the stadium site? That way, the competitors would all be able to stay together with their respective teams, yet not have to share a lift every morning with the person that intends to trample them into the sandpit.

The biggest problem here is the questionable need to hold a Commonwealth Games in the first place. An anachronistic concept at best, there seems to me no conceivable reason to continue with it. The sheer expense alone surely raises questions about the viability of a ‘tradition’ that is as defunct as the empire itself. Things have moved on, thank God, and so should we all. If the enthusiasm is there for an alternative competition to the Olympic Games, why not expand it to include other nations that didn’t have the pleasure of having an British flag plonked on their native turf a few hundred years ago? Obviously you can’t let the Americans in, because they would take over and ruin it, but surely athletes want to compete at the highest level, and not just against the other countries from a Victorian atlas?

Nevertheless, these games will go ahead and everything will probably be fine. Anyone who seriously expected a trouble-free construction effort in Delhi was deluding themselves. The games are costing £1.5 billion, more than ever before, and yet the facilities are sub-standard. As much as it is regrettable to admit, a certain amount of corruption within the system and greed amongst contractors must have led us to this point, and the overriding feeling is that it was inevitable. It seems ludicrous that the condition of the buildings and infrastructure has only just been identified as unsatisfactory, and that the problem wasn’t spotted and rectified sooner. This is, however, partially down to the media’s love of scandal, as a felicitously timed expose can do wonders for the impact of a story (just ask any Premiership footballer).

Personally, I hope the people of Delhi defy the negative speculation surrounding them and put on a bloody good show of hosting these games. After all, if we have to have them, we may as well enjoy them (and try not to lose). But more than anything, I really hope the garden bowls team find a lawn without a pile of rubble on it. Poor things.

Analyse This...

2010-08-26T13:18:00.000-07:00

A spokeswoman for the BBC unveils
Radio Five Live's latest punditry signing,
whilst indicating the number of words
in his hastily assembled vocabulary

Perhaps it’s the bizarre human fascination with watching sport that causes us to treat its discussion and debate in an equally odd way. To some, indeed to many, the mere existence live sporting activity on television is beyond understanding. To these strange people, the very act of remotely witnessing a display of physical exertion from the living room seems a hypocritical display of indolence. If, in fact, sport is an activity that onlookers can derive as equal a pleasure as the participants, then surely the very concept would dictate that the viewer be present at the occasion?

This, as we all know, is nonsense, and is the sort of non-sequiter that is peddled all too frequently by those with no interest in sport whatsoever; a cruel and heartless bunch who take pleasure in seeing the football switched over to Eastenders. Shame on them.

I will concede that there might be a little too much sport on TV these days. If the sum total of any given week’s sporting output were calculated, it would undoubtedly amount to a period of time sufficient to complete every outstanding DIY job in the country, and countless piles of untouched ironing. Sadly (for some), we are where we are, and the fact that Sky TV alone churns out five channels of combative action indicates a stage in human development from which it is impossible to return. We are a nation, nay a civilisation, devoted to watching sport. I don’t intend to ruminate here on the merits or disadvantages of this fact, but instead to simply accept it, and move on. After all (if apocryphally) ‘Ours no to reason why / Ours just to sit and watch’

To the above-mentioned contingent, whose enjoyment lies elsewhere, nothing is more bewildering than the burning need of presenters and pundits to discuss, analyse and cogitate upon the action, whether speculatively or retrospectively. Each televised sport deals with its analytical requirements in different ways. Athletics for instance, has a great deal of time to fill between the periods of ‘action’ (for me this is from the time it starts to when it graciously ends). The presenters then, rely on having an endless reel of races, throws, jogs and sandpit dalliances at their disposal on which to pour comment. With televised athletics, it is necessary that these presenters are former athletes, for it is well known that anyone involved in track and field is either socially inept and incredibly boring (and therefore incapable of a career after competition in any other arena than commenting on athletics), or so strung out on opiates or steroids that they commit themselves to the nearest metaphorical high jump (citation required).

Cricket is always a divisive subject in this respect, and so I will neatly spring over its boundary rope long enough to make a superb catch at deep cover and maintain that no other sport has more successfully found ways of amusing itself between memorable moments than this glorious example. Here, anecdotes reign supreme, and I once heard a ten-minute segment of Test Match Special devoted entirely to the story of a pigeon that had incommodiously plonked itself at Silly mid-on. Magic.

I won’t dwell on Tennis for any longer than is necessary; for I am enraged to tears each time I consider how effortlessly Tim Henman has stepped into the studio to undo half a century of flawless BBC coverage. I firmly believe that his vacuous face and lack of charisma could have gone a long way in athletics.

The truth is that every sport has its pundits making Herculean efforts to speak coherently and sensibly on their respective subject, but none historically fail quite so spectacularly as the most beloved of world sports. It’s a well known fact that football punditry contains little of the coherence mentioned above, and even fewer instances of the sensible. This relies on a key tenet, one that ensures it will remain forever the exclusive domain of the moron and the halfwit; the ex-footballer. Given that the vast majority of pundits have shuffled off the footballing coil, it necessarily means that television studios across the land are filled with suited men of questionable literacy, grasping flailingly at fashion sense and doing their level best to state the obvious in such tangential ways that they hope to convince us of their perspicacity.

It must be noted that there is a vast gulf between punditry and commentary, and few would accuse John Motson and the like of lacking erudition. Commentators, on the whole, tend to be knowledgeable and articulate, chiefly because they have never played the game, choosing instead to spend their childhood at school.

Whether it be the booming ejaculations of Andy Gray, the bleating drawl of David Pleat or the tired groans of Graham Taylor, each channel broadcasting the beautiful game have apparently chosen the best they could find to comment upon it. If this is the case, then God help the likes of Joey Barton upon reaching retirement.
An ex-player has three choices as I see it; one, he can obtain his coaching badges and enter the maelstrom of football management (see Robson/Hughes). Secondly, he can lose all sense of perspective and direction, and become an alcoholic (see Gascoigne/McGrath). Lastly, he can take the comparatively cosier route on to radio and television and become a pundit, which an alarmingly large number are now choosing to do. It is not advisable to attempt all three, but that hasn’t stopped some (see Merson).

I have no problem in the slightest with ex-footballers becoming pundits, indeed it seems a natural progression. What does alarm me however, is the success that some of them enjoy for seemingly no good reason. Take Martin Keown for instance. He is no oil painting, and cannot claim to have achieved success for his scintillating appearance. Yes, he has some grasp of the defensive subtleties of the game, but given that sense of humour to him is as alien as a credit card limit to a Wag, how does he land a regular spot on Match of the Day? At least confine him to the gantry where he can do no more harm than lament zonal marking until they switch off the floodlights and leave him in darkness.

Alan Shearer’s presence on the MOTD sofa is (slightly) more understandable. He is undoubtedly a legend of the game, yet unfortunately this does not necessarily extend to his automatically becoming a legend of punditry. No, Sir Shearer of the Toon is the Duke of Obvious, commanding an army of statements that constantly battle with one another for the title of most pointless. He has improved slightly as time has gone by, yet his hair-tearingly annoying habit of confusing adverbs with adjectives has to stop. I realise it’s not Newsnight, but have BBC standards slipped to a level where even basic grammar is no longer required? As for his sense of humour, it’s there somewhere, but given the way he writhes around uneasily after making a joke, it looks as if he has had it surgically implanted, and that his body is rejecting the new organ with every chuckle.

Not a great deal can be said about Lee Dixon, other than that watching his hairline recede has become a pastime of mine. Nowadays, unfortunately, his forehead appears bigger than the screen itself and is becoming cause for alarm. I am in the process of drafting a strongly worded letter to the BBC demanding its immediate removal, at very least before the watershed for fear of scaring children.

Most alarming of all, and provoking in me a genuine concern for the sanity of the BBC Sports editor, is the recent inclusion of Robbie Savage on the punditry merry-go-round. Not only does he still play, which is cheating a little, but he is also irrevocably dim. Ok, I can forgive his appearance on the 606 football phone-in; his provocative nature and status as a hate figure are beneficial in engendering some liveliness into that all encompassing, excuse-laden term ‘banter’. Plus, it is useful to provide the callers with a presenter on a similar intellectual wavelength to themselves.

I draw the line however at his being permitted to co-commentate on Radio Five Live matches. I admit that Five Live has the tendency to occasionally descend into little more than adolescent, testosterone-filled shouting, but its actual coverage of football matches is second-to-none, and the professionalism of the commentary team should be sacrosanct; at all costs prevented from being undermined by the guffawing clownishness of Savage. To wit, listening to him commentate is like being forced to scrub your face with a cheese grater, only much less grammatically coherent.

I realise my vitriol has been primarily aimed at the BBC (as always seems to be the case), and although it produces a great deal of top quality sporting output (its Formula One coverage for instance is impeccable), the quality of football punditry is at an all time low. At least when Sky Sports customers wince at the fatuous comments of Jamie Redknapp, they only have themselves to blame for paying the premium. Everyone else with a remote interest in the game is forced to pay an unavoidable license fee to hear Savage habitually mispronounce a word, attempt to rectify it, and after realising he is illiterate, laugh at himself and encourage others to laugh with him. We’re laughing at you Robbie.

Put simply, as the self-styled Prince of punditry Alan Hansen would say (to whom nothing of the above applies), it’s simply diabolical…

An Apple a day...

2010-07-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

Reverend Jobs explains why the
light that shines from his
rear end is perpetually shaped
like a half-eaten piece of fruit

The curious thing about a cult is its ability to make you think that what you’re doing is correct and proper. The lengths gone to for it, the devotion shown towards it and the vehement defence given to it when questioned are all hallmarks of a deluded individual having undergone some vicious brainwashing at the hands of a sinister leader.

Cults are rare though, right? They’re reserved for young buck-toothed girls in straw dresses somewhere in the mid-west of America, duped into believing that the ‘Reverend’ has some divine calling that permits, nay demands, late night visits to their bedrooms.

Not so I argue, and elements of cultist activity exist in our everyday lives. It’s no secret that the lucrative world of consumerism has for a long time shown traits of underhand dominance; whether it be the ubiquitous advertising of Coca Cola or the constant and slippery reinvention of McDonalds, it’s well known that huge corporations employ swarms of executives to quietly persuade us to stay loyal and hand over our hard earned cash.

But some things in life are different. Or at least they seem to be. This thought filtered through my hitherto diverted mind a couple of hours after I got back from the O2 store last week. I refuse to admit that I queued for my new iPhone 4; I didn’t. I simply turned up nonchalantly around the time the shop opened and hung around looking inquisitive for a while before a nice chap gave me a number and told me to come back later to pick up my phone. A couple of hours later I breezed back in, gave them my details and went about my day, iPhone 4 in hand. Unfortunately, that isn’t quite how it happened. My nearest store is at the O2 arena, and the only reason anyone would (and did) go there at 9am on the day after the release of the new iPhone is entirely obvious. So much so that on the tube, I spotted at least five other men (for they were almost all men) with white earphones and a twitchy look of nervous expectation on their pillow lined faces. Stepping off the train, each one did their best to appear relaxed, yet began walking at a pace that wasn’t entirely reasonable for the time of day.

Despite what you might imagine, there isn’t a great deal to do at the Dome either. Two cappuccinos later, I was beginning to get a little restless and felt the need to anxiously check my wallet every 5 minutes for the slip of paper that guaranteed my new phone, in much the same way as a paranoid air passenger slides his hand into his jacket pocket repeatedly to check his passport hasn’t inexplicably dropped out and found its way into the hands of an Al-Qaeda terrorist.

After helpfully and perhaps a little smugly advising latecomers that ‘if your name’s not down you ain’t getting in’, I sat in the sunshine watching a swathe of identical looking men in short sleeved shirts and flip flops striding purposefully towards the complex, then seconds later trudging dejectedly back to the station, some frantically checking the online stock report on their (woefully outdated) phones and considering a day trip to High Barnet.

Back inside the store the atmosphere was strange, and looking back, it’s this that prompted the thoughts about the cult of Apple. There we all were, men and women from different walks of life, all unified with a common purpose. We bonded. I promised to make sure the couple with the ticket before my own didn’t get overlooked while they popped out for lunch. The man beside me engaged enthusiastically in a conversation about how silly we probably all were for sitting there like lemons waiting for a piece of plastic (although of course in reality it’s a beautiful, synergetic blend of glass and stainless steel) and for a short while, we became best friends. So there it was, Apple Corp. bringing us all together for worship in the house of Jobs. We had faith, like any subservient cultist, that they would deliver and bring us happiness. There was even a BlackBerry convert that was forgiven, blessed and baptised by the joyful throng.

A quick mention of the phone itself, and one feature in particular that could instigate some interesting situations. I’m talking about Facetime; a preposterous moniker I grant you, but this video calling facility might just alter the face of mobile etiquette as we know it. It may look all roses and smiles on the Apple promotional video, but what happens when the student’s mother 'Facetimes' her little angel, only to faintly discern a naked girl in bed at the corner of the shot, or the coffee table supporting the world’s largest bong? What happens when a wife calls while her husband is ‘working late’? Surely to reject the video call is just as suspicious? I suspect every local boozer up and down the country will reserve a blank whitewashed section of the gents for such occasions, in order that the explanation as to why Darren hasn’t returned home as promised remains partially believable. A quandary for sure, and not one considered by the sickly sweet marketing campaign from Apple HQ.

Back with the sinister goings on at Apple, another trait of the inducted cult member is the compulsion to defend their beliefs with gusto. Almost every iPhone user I’ve met falls into this category. If even a breath of criticism is levelled at their device within earshot, a vehement case is immediately argued. If, say, a Nokia is praised for its superior functions, the Appleist is quick to denounce it as a false prophet. The result is a worldwide community of salespeople in the places that matter, spreading the gospel amongst colleagues, loved ones and sometimes complete strangers. This thesis is beginning to make sense.

If you have accepted iPhone, Mac or iPad as your personal saviour, then Steve Jobs becomes the Creator. The Artichect. The Supreme leader. As every great cult has its enigmatic and somewhat elusive figurehead, Appleist belief starts and ends with the vision of one man. In the 80s, dodgy evangelists would take to the stage, spreading their skewed version of reality to hundreds of people, and thousands more watching on TV. This usually resulted in donations of millions of Dollars towards funding ‘evangelical’ work such as prostitutes and Ferraris. The same is true of Steve Jobs and Apple (though probably without the prostitutes, but who knows?) The keynote speeches, given by Jobs to pour hope and joy into the hearts of dedicated followers, are lapped up by industry professionals and consumers alike. Every word is analysed, every claim gawped at and every sales figure applauded. This man can get a round of applause for simply switching on a telephone. He can do no wrong. To add to his status as The Chosen One, he dresses like a despotic emperor from a 70s Science fiction series. The baggy polo neck jumper appears more ceremonial gown than San-Fran causal.

So there we have it, a cult very much in the ascendancy. Apple has gone from quirky, specialist computer manufacturer to market-leading world giant. Its share value recently surpassed the Church of Microsoft to make it the biggest technology company on earth, and possibly the universe.

Is Mr Jobs the anti-Christ? Does the iPhone carry the mark of the beast? In the future, will Apple wield total control of our online activity? Will its omnipresence ensure that, as the Bible tells us ‘no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name’? (Rev. 13:17) Maybe not, but I did just buy something from the App Store…

How Do You Plead? England in the Dock.

2010-06-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

The new England World Cup kit, which boasts
unrivalled comfort and freedom of movement,
has received mixed reviews from players
and fans alike.

Having just seen a decidedly porky John Barnes re-enacting his infamous rap on an advert for Mars Bars, it seems the World up is truly upon us. In the spirit of fairness, I’ve decided to weigh up the two sides of the equation and approach the difficult question of England’s World Cup chances from both angles. So, step up the 23 defendants.

The Prosecution

Three Lions on our shirt, Capello’s army, Cape of Good Hope; these and many other headlines will inevitably grace the front and back pages of the tabloids over the next couple of weeks. The problem? They are woefully misplaced, hopelessly over expectant and totally unrealistic. Hope overrides logic every four years as an excited nation gears itself up for a World Cup that will be unlike the last one, or the one before that, or even the one before that as the memories of white shirted losers limping pathetically from the field are inexplicably erased.

A leopard doesn’t change its spots, and likewise the lions on the shirts of our nation’s football team in time honoured fashion will almost certainly fail to roar. The countless disappointments provided by England sides over the years are no fluke; we are simply not as creative as the Brazilians, vivacious as the Spanish, or determined as the Germans. No matter how many times we persuade ourselves that this time will be different, the old ghost of failure looms threateningly over the team bus, as swarms of journalists do their level best to eek out positives from lacklustre group stage matches and narrow qualification to the knockout stages. And it is here that things invariably crumble. Some call it back luck, others a curse, but let’s face it; five penalty shoot out defeats in seven major tournaments over twenty years tells its own story. Whether it’s the stamina, mental strength or sheer grit we lack is debatable, but it’s one or the other. It is not simply a case of bad luck. If it were, then someone up there clearly has a grudge. What we should really be questioning is why we don’t make the decisive impact over 90 or 120 minutes instead and remove the need for the dreaded spot kicks.

Nonsense, you might say. This time, under Capello, we’ve got a real shot. No. And here’s why. To kick us off, the captain and key central defensive figure of Rio ‘I don’t wee into cups’ Ferdinand has crippled his knee after losing a tackle with a piece of turf. Bad start. Not that I would have felt completely secure with him at the back anyway, as his medical record is almost as colourful as team-mate Gary Neville’s, and that’s saying something. No, Rio’s bad season, with the unfortunate back injury that saw him start only 13 times for Manchester United, was always a bad omen. Unfortunately for us, the deputies for his position hardly instil confidence. There’s Ledley King, whose excruciating movement on his rickety knees is one part Sol Campbell, one part dry stone wall. Or there’s Jamie ‘crazy horse’ Carragher, who would still appear two yards off the pace in a stroll on Eastbourne pier. To complete the headache, Capello has drafted in Michael Dawson of Spurs. Yes he’s had a great season, but he’s never even worn an England shirt; is a testing opening game against the USA really the place to toss him in to the deep end?

Staying with the defence, JT will need to be on top of his game (a sight becoming ever rarer) to command the defence. Admittedly, Ashley Cole is superb, but Terry may have a job on his hands to cement over the cracks caused by Glen Johnson’s frequent brain lapses, during which he forgets he’s a defender entirely.

To add to our woes, for the first time in living memory, we have no first choice goalkeeper. David James let in more goals this season than a blind Derby County keeper, and though he had a weak defence in front of him, picking the ball out of the back of the net comes just a little too easy for him. Green too, has soiled a few clean sheets himself this year, so perhaps it’s down to the relatively unproven Joe Hart to sweep up the mess left by Terry and co.

As usual, faith has been put in the blistering attacking force of Emile Heskey, a player justified in his inclusion simply because he ‘holds the ball up well’. Thank goodness, for a minute I was worried they might pick him for his prolific goal record. No, that responsibility goes to Peter Crouch, who despite an impressive goal tally for the national side, is responsible for some of the ugliest goals in international football (the offside handball against Mexico being a felicitous example).

Rooney is the lynch pin, everyone knows that. I harbour doubts over his fitness for the duration of the tournament, and so if you’re going to use your Sun England prayermat for anything, plead for some stamina from undoubtedly our finest player in years.

Let’s face it, England looked shambolic in almost all areas for the first half against Japan last week, and the two own goals we received may have just spent their quota of good luck for the summer. Just to compound our penalty shoot-out fears, the usual dependability of Lampard has vanished just in time for the World Cup, and two misses in a row will hardly aid his confidence going in to the vital knockout phase.

So, with three lions our shirts, and with Jules Rimet gleaming somewhere in a Brazilian trophy cabinet, we stride into South Africa on a gale force wind of expectation. Unlike most, I can’t forget the pain of 1990, the misery of 1996, the disappointment of 1998 or the heartache of 2002. All the more reason for our luck to change, I hear you argue. Unfortunately, I fear not. It’s not a case of luck, it’s about ability, team spirit and strength, and as history has proved again and again, we just don’t have enough.

The Defence

Three Lions on our shirt, Cappello’s army, Cape of Good Hope; these and all the other inevitable headlines will grace the front and back pages of the tabloids over the next couple of weeks. Admittedly, this wave of nationalist fever has been misplaced in the past, but 2010 sees England’s most realistic chance of World cup glory for a generation.

At the helm, we have Fabio Capello. A master tactician, meticulous and thorough, he has a habit of winning things wherever he goes. After a dismal display of leadership from Steve Mclaren, England cruised through the qualification stages under the Italian, winning nine of their ten games including an impressive 4-1 victory away to Croatia, the team that denied Mclaren’s pathetic side qualification to 2008’s European Championship.

Capello has taken time and considerable thought over choosing his final 23-man squad, correctly omitting Theo Walcott and instead opting for the technically superior Aaron Lennon. Even the latest setback, Rio Ferdinand’s withdrawal from the squad with a knee injury, could prove to be a positive for England. His injury problems this season have left him looking a shadow of his former self, and far better for Capello and England that his injury prone body crumbles now and not during a key stage in the tournament. Ferdinand’s withdrawal has also made way for one of the finest central defender in the Premier League this season, Michael Dawson, to step up and bring some much needed youth and vigour to a beleaguered central defence.

In Glen Johnson and Ashley Cole, the England team have a world-class fullback package. The incision provided by Johnson down the right, coupled with Cole’s ability to tirelessly patrol the left flank provide real options for the attacking flair of Rooney and creativity of our outstanding midfield roster. Gerrard will hopefully be given a little freedom to dart in and around the opposition’s defence, working just behind Rooney in a role that has paid dividends in the past.

Like him or loathe him, Peter Crouch offers more than just height in the centre forward role. His remarkable skill for such a tall man allows for multiple approaches in the final third, ensuring England don’t simply have to rely on balls into the box or surges from Midfield by Gerrard or Lampard.

So, we have the team. Now all we need is the luck. Whilst penalty taking has an element of skill, there is a fair amount of luck involved. As we know only too well, lady luck has for far too long been cavorting on the other side of the fence. The penalty defeats of 1990, 1996 and the rest still occupy a painful place in everyone’s memory, but surely our luck must change this time around. My sincere hope is that penalty luck won’t be required this time around, and that we will finish the job over 90 minutes through the devastating presence of Wayne Rooney.

England may just have been dealt a decent hand for once too. A possible last sixteen encounter with Germany has been made a little more comfortable with the withdrawal of captain Michael Ballack through an injury sustained during the FA cup final, which contains a delicious irony somewhere. Yes, Spain remain a huge threat, but the Italians, Portugese and even the Brazilians do not enter the tournament with the strongest of sides, and the Argentineans remain as inconsistent as you would expect under the leadership of Diego ‘awful training sessions but throws a great party’ Maradona.

Despite a lacklustre performance against Japan last week, the England team have the key ingredients for success; a great manager, a solid player balance of experienced veterans and flighty youngsters, plus an impressive winning streak over the course of the qualification period.

The scene is set, and as England stride into South Africa on a gale of expectation, it truly feels that the same wind could see them glide back to our shores in a month’s time holding aloft the greatest prize in world football. Believe it, because it might just happen.

FA-ntasy Football

2010-05-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

'Here's our bid Mr Blatter, but I heard
some Russian guys earlier saying
there might be a Buy It Now option?'

Right, so it seems England’s 2018 World Cup bid is on its arse already; inevitable, but still disappointing. For what its worth, David Beckham may as well have brought the coffin to the birth and called Sepp Blatter’s wife a whore whilst handing over the absurdly massive document last week. For in true British style (well, English really, but I won’t give the Scots the satisfaction) we have shot ourselves in both left feet and are braced to drag our bleeding bodies towards the finishing line, desperately trying to mop up behind ourselves as we go. I’m not just talking about Triesman here either, not entirely. Yes, showing off to his ‘friend’ about his presumed insider wisdom was foolish, but I suspect he’d already had a Martini or two by that time. Besides, who hasn’t found themselves drawn to the subject of Russian corruption after a slap up meal and a few cocktails? The truth is that Russians are corrupt; it’s not their fault, they just grew up in Russia.

Whether or not there is any truth in the accusation remains to be seen, but please, and this is the point; why must the British press insist on urinating in its own pint glass? It is something inherent in our mentality that drives these ‘public interest’ exposures. The expenses scandal yes, I can understand that (though not its longevity), but this bid saw our most realistic chance of landing football’s premier tournament for a generation. As perceived by Fifa, the main problem with England’s previous World Cup bids was our fans. Every country has its quirk; as the Italians eat pizza, the French refuse to shave their body hair and Irishmen sodomise choirboys, the English have football fans that smash up Piazzas. Hitherto, these model citizens have been thought to be too dangerous on their home turf to allow foreigners in for a pasting. But we’ve come a long way, and English football violence has diminished considerably in recent years. Admittedly we’ve confiscated the passports from the worst offenders during major tournaments, but there is a feeling these days that it might just be safe to open the doors and let the world in to what is without doubt the best country in the world for a major football tournament. Yes, America has bigger stadiums, but it takes ten days to get from one to another. Yes, the Russians have oodles of oil money to plough into facilities, but they also drink vodka from the tap. Yes, Spain has the weather, but it's also about as multicultural as Nick Griffin's spice rack.

The truth is that England has it all. Great grounds, passionate fans, diverse culture, good transport links and what’s more, we invented the bloody game. So why does the Daily Mail feel the need to expose Lord Triesman’s allegations to sell a few copies? Also, I take issue with the word ‘allegations’. They only became so after they were aired to millions. Before that, they were simply comments made to a friend over dinner. Admittedly, he was probably having an affair with her (libellous but worth the punt) but they were nontheless private.

I don’t see the public interest angle as acutely as some, who claim that we have a right to know if the chairman of the bid harbours fears of fraudulent activity, but how do we know he wouldn’t have made an official complaint to Fifa if he had gathered substantial evidence? He could hardly go to them with a hunch, or he would be accused of a far greater crime than he has already been made to stand down for, so what else can he do but discuss his thoughts privately? For all we know, on the same night, several officials in Madrid were chucking about claims concerning our bid. The difference of course, is that the Spanish press would never be so stupid as to scupper the interests of its own country. The actions of the Daily Mail have angered many, most notably Gary Lineker, with ‘Outraged Of Leicester’ taking the ironically Mail reader-esque stand of quitting his position as columnist over the story.

Who knows, maybe this will all blow over and the bid return to its status as a front-runner once the decision draws closer, but one thing’s for sure; if the British press continue their whirlwind of meta-journalism on the subject, it won’t fade from memory as quickly as the FA had hoped when Lord Triesman promptly stepped down as FA chairman. As for a permanent replacement, Lord/Sir/Baron Sugar, who seems to be picking up more titles than he can cope with, was quick to register his interest. I suggested in this very blog a couple of years ago that the FA should sign him up, if nothing else but to put his TV slogan to good use and get rid of the bloody lot of them. Given Sir Alan’s contentious views on association football (he once called all footballers ‘scum’ and that they would all be in prison if it weren’t for the sport) it’s probably not a wise move, and would end up making Lord Triesman look like a shining ambassador for the game.

Poor old Capello must be more confused than he usually looks at the whole saga. He has signalled his intent to remain in the manager’s job until after 2012, but might wish he’d never said that. What he actually said was "I have a contract with the FA and it will finish when they decide to sack me," which is hardly an unequivocal statement of resolve. The Italian cannot be blamed for thinking this country totally insane when it comes to its relationship with football. Like a deranged, controlling father to his son, we pour expectation on the England team every two years to deliver, and it is this unfulfilled wish that drives us to turn on it at every opportunity. True, failure in the national team is not exclusive to England and there are countless other countries that never win anything, but out continual and deluded expectation as creators of the game leads us to self destruction time and time again.

As for this year’s tournament, we can realistically expect a semi-final at best; consider our injury list, the lack of coherency in the recent squad and towering form of the Spanish. Rest ye worried minds however, because at least our cricket team have a World Cup to show for itself following last week’s Twenty20 triumph. And how many times have we been able to say that? So maybe then… Just maybe… You never know…

Ignorance is Bliss

2010-04-30T04:39:00.000-07:00

'No, no, you're right. Your sixty years' experience as
a housewife in a small Lancashire town does qualify
you to make judgements on immigration policy.'

In a scene reminiscent of BBC’s The Thick of it, Gordon Brown slags off a ‘normal’ citizen on the campaign trail after retreating to the relative safety of his Jag. It makes you think, doesn’t it? How does Cameron summarise a grim afternoon kissing ASBO babies in Scunthorpe? Or Clegg after canvassing in a Tory stronghold of Thatcherist perms? We all know what Nick Griffin says when the camera is switched off, precisely because no journalist worth their salt would ever press the off button when he and his cronies are within earshot, be that at a party conference or a post campaign pint down the George and Dragon in Dagenham.

Of course politicians don’t like talking to real people with issues; they almost always fail to fit in neat legislative boxes, instead rather rudely choosing to have jobs, lives and children. Ungrateful sods. It must, however, be incredibly frustrating for the politicians themselves, as seemingly almost every man, woman and child on the streets of Britain seems completely ignorant to the bigger picture. Understandably, people in general care most about the issues that affect their everyday lives, and for the most part couldn’t care a hoot for wider monetary policy or voting reform. It is becoming increasingly clear from the ubiquitous broadcasting coverage this election has received that the majority of people are spectacularly uniformed (or perhaps just plain ignorant) to politics as a whole. In the same way that politicians are forced to generalise demographics into digestible statistics, the public on the whole seem equally as acquiescent in subscribing to the few general ‘truths’ about politics and politicians. You know what I’m talking about; take any of the endless and entirely fatuous segments on TV news as an example:

Nick Robinson on one of his interminable jaunts around the country inevitably stops off in some god-forsaken town to talk to the ‘voters’. There, he receives the same old narrow minded answers he gets from every other god-forsaken town he’s had the misfortune to visit after disembarking the BBC election wagon. Firstly, there’s the old man with no teeth and a flat cap who denies he has any interest in the political sphere, claiming that ‘they’re all the same aren’t they? Robbing bastards.’ Next, a woman with hoop earrings on a market stall selling pink velour sweat pants reveals that she’s voting BNP, due to her suffering business being a direct result of the Asian community’s indifference to buying her pink velour sweat pants. Next up is the lady with a respectable job (who took some finding) pledging her allegiance to Nick Clegg on the back of the last TV debate because ‘he seemed like a nice guy’. By this time, it’s clear that the BBC’s esteemed political editor is of exactly the same mindset as Gordon Brown after his run in with the ‘bigoted woman’; a thinly veiled expression of understanding and journalistic intrigue covering his true contempt for the utterly stupid British public.

It’s partly the fault of TV networks for over saturating the airwaves with election hype. Sky News managed to eek out an entire night of coverage devoted to the second debate, even recruiting body language experts to analyse hand gestures, not to mention the broadcast media’s obsession with ties. The most laughable of these innumerable analyses is ‘the worm’. All the channels have incorporated this piece of totally facile technology into their election coverage. If the worm has escaped your notice, it’s basically a real-time graph charting the reaction of selected members of the public to each televised debate Like a wounded snake, it drags its slow length along as the programme unfolds, with the wiggly red, blue and yellow lines moving up or down according to the audience’s opinion of how each leader is faring. It ranges (unofficially) from ‘nice geezer’ to ‘what a wanker’. It has proved itself routinely pointless however, as the lines tend to worm upwards whenever one of them speaks of ‘fairness’ or ‘tax cuts’, and take a dive should they mutter something about ‘austerity’ or ‘tax rises’, for obvious reasons.

On the issue of ignorance amongst the electorate, it’s clear from the TV debates that all three of the party leaders consider the majority of the audiences at home to be a bit dim at best. Having sat through all three, it became obvious that the same stock phrases were being rolled out again and again: ‘David wants to put the economy at risk’ from Brown, ‘stop the jobs tax’ from Cameron and courtesy of Nick Clegg, the worst of the three by far for pleb-friendly political strap lines, ‘put money back in your pocket’, ‘these two old parties’ and the perennial favourite ‘greedy bankers’. These sound bites are designed simply to dupe your average voter into thinking they have the magic remedy to our drunken economy, as it lies dribbling in a gutter somewhere trying to find its wallet for a taxi home. I’m not saying that Clegg, Cameron or Brown should plunge headlong into the minutiae of political theory, but give us some credit; if I wanted a catchphrase, I’d watch Fawlty Towers.

It was summed up nicely during an interview after the second debate with an audience member. ‘I’ve always voted Conservative’ she said, ‘but last week I was really impressed with Clegg, and so I thought I might vote for him’. She followed this heavyweight political judgement with the revelation that she had met Mr Cameron after the show, and that he seemed really nice and talked with her about the nice weather we’ve been having. That, she revealed, was sufficient to swing her vote back the other way. When asked what areas of Conservative policy she agreed with, a moment’s umming and ahing gave way to ‘all of it really’. I have a suspicion that she might be a little confused come election day when she can’t see David Cameron’s name on her ballot paper anywhere. Bless.

Luckily for me, I’m currently surrounded by students at university (and I never thought I’d say that). It was refreshing during the first debate to see contemplative undergraduates discussing the finer points of monetary policy over snakebite. I am doubtful however, that the same conversations will be replicated in pubs and offices up and down the country, and more’s the pity. In my experience, Eastenders receives a much higher billing in the gossip stakes, and should women’s soap opera chat around the office water cooler be replaced with deep ideological discussion, the TV debates would become unnecessary. It’s the same with men and football. I remember what my Mum said to me when I was collecting football stickers as a child for the Italia ’90 world cup; ‘if you spent half as much time memorising your times tables as you do learning the names of the entire United Arab Emirates squad, you’d be a genius.’ Incidentally, I can still name half of them, but I couldn’t tell you what 8 x 12 is.

A joke to finish, I think:

Q: what do you call a coalition government of porn stars?
A: A well-hung parliament.

You can have that one.

Election Exclusive - Party Leaders Mass-Debate

2010-04-15T15:57:00.000-07:00

Tension began to mount as the three remaining
contestants entered the big money round

Now I’m not usually one for up-to-the-minute reactionary blogging. I prefer to ruminate on a subject for a while until the volcanic dust has settled, and hopefully put some comments across that aren't simply a regurgitation of everything else doing the rounds. At least that’s the intention. Tonight, however, I feel I must say a little something concerning what will undoubtedly be the most blogged political phenomenon this country has ever seen. I’m already too late however, as the News at Ten are already giving me poll results at, what is it, 10.15..

I won’t delve too deeply into nitty-gritty of policy, but a few thoughts became clear as tonight’s election debate gathered steam. Firstly, my goodness! I understand that these debates were only announced relatively recently, but you’d think it was long enough for ITV to construct a set befitting the unprecedented occasion. It looked a little like the studio from the 1986 run of Blockbusters, and the wishy-washy backdrop screen behind the leaders’ heads was reminiscent of a bible belt Evangelical church. The construction work on their faces wasn’t much better. Cameron looked like he was appearing at a drag club. I’m just glad I wasn’t watching on HD.

I’m a little disappointed that the format deviated from the tried and tested Question Time system of the clapo-meter; half the fun is the applause, or more specifically the few that clap fervently at a seemingly well made point only to undergo an ideological 180 once they realise that no one else thought so. Interestingly, the questioners were even given a brief biog, like Sue from Oldham with a pub. Who’d have thought voters had lives and jobs!

As ITV is so promptly informing me, Clegg came out on top. He was always going to, right? Nothing to lose. To be fair to him and the Lib Dems, he is by far the youngest and most sober leader they have had for a while. Unfortunately, this sort of programme attracts the glory viewer; you know the one, claims he loves Rugby but only ever watches the Six Nations, during which he’s an expert. I doubt he’ll be tuning in to BBC Parliament any time soon. Lib Dem policies do make a lot of sense, but they require such an upheaval of the system that it’s unfeasible at best. Clegg, for me, was just a tad too obsequious towards the audience, particularly those who posed the questions. It all became a bit much during his closing speech however, when he name-dropped every one of the questioners and the issues they raised. He’s like the one in a group job interview who writes everyone’s name down as they introduce themselves and repeats them smugly in conversation to their potential boss, whilst everyone else doesn’t really give a shit.

Cameron looked uncharacteristically shifty to start with; this stuff is normally his bread and butter. I’m pretty sure that was due to the extra leg he and Brown had acquired in Clegg, which unsettled his practised role of slagging off the Prime Minister solo during PMQs.

Brown was Brown, simple as that. Heavy on fact, light on personality. But he played to it the best he could, and at least he hasn’t made the egregious mistake of trying to develop a personality all of a sudden. He did attempt one joke through gritted teeth, but that was simply a vehicle for an Ashcroft jibe, and was squeezed in between his ingratiating attempts at aligning himself with Clegg.

So, one down, two to go. One debate doesn’t make an election as they say (they do), and neither will three. Polls for this, that and the other on the back of ninety minutes of television are not persuasive indicators of a general election result, and with the current voting system, will probably do little to swing favour in the majority of constituencies that remain red or blue. It’s not like we have a dearth of election-based broadcasting right now either. The radio 4 schedule is almost entirely devoted to it at present, so much so that election hype has even permeated the sacred space that is Woman’s Hour. Having said that, I’ve probably undermined myself spectacularly by writing a reactionary blog piece on election politics. It’s worth getting it in now, however. After May 6th, we’ll never want to talk about it again..

On a lighter note following tonight’s frolics, I was disturbed to hear that the Royal Navy have lowered its recruitment age so drastically, after Cameron claimed to have met a 40 year old man who had served in the service for 30 years. The inadvertent chortle of the night however, came from the apparently budding doctor Clegg whose dodgy phraseology produced this gem;

‘I was at a Paediatric hospital last week, treating babies’.

His talents do not stop with public speaking, it seems.

It Just Doesn't Ad Up

2010-03-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

Drugs are illegal, Government sponsored adverts
raising awkward conversations between parents and
children aren't. So blame Frank.

Now, perhaps it’s only me, but I’m really not sure I can take any more government-backed advertising campaigns. Yesterday, I panicked that I had forgotten to put my seatbelt on and nearly ran into a wall, realising just in time that I don’t own a car and was on foot to the bus stop. Phew, close call. I also lost concentration at work the very same day worrying that my gas heater was asphyxiating my cat with carbon monoxide fumes. Luckily I don’t have a cat, and all was well.

I am well aware that public awareness on certain matters is paramount; over 100,000 people die each year in the UK from smoking-related illnesses, and advertising campaigns promoting the available quitting options are essential to combat this dire statistic. That’s one poor sod gone while you’re reading this, and so I’m all for it. Except I’m not. Not entirely. Smoking, and a couple of other problems aside, government advertising on the important issues facing us in daily life has reached a totally disproportionate level.

I don’t intend to make light of any issues discussed, but come on; how many people don’t wear a seatbelt these days? Frankly, if you don’t (and God knows why you wouldn’t), you probably deserve to land on the pavement. 400 a year die from this particular brain-lapse; that’s only about one person per day in 60 million, producing such an obscure percentage on my calculator that I couldn’t even understand it. Do we all need to be subjected to this? All the more reason to highlight the issue you might say, given that one glimpse of Brian (who didn’t want to die, by the way) head butting his windscreen while you’re eating your morning toast is enough to jog the old grey matter next time you get in the car. Unless you get the bus of course, in which case you’re fucked. But that’s just the problem, not the bus, but the fact that you won’t see it just once. Or twice. Or even a few times; you’ll go on being subjected to Brian’s brains splattered over your screen for months to come, at all hours of the day. It’s even worse on HD.

More lamentable than the awful replay value of these things is the cost; in the financial year ending 2009 the government media advertising budget reached nearly half a billion. That could pay for a morning’s borrowing; well, ok, maybe a lunch break’s. There was a time when parents were expected to educate their children, but that day is gone. Good old Tele now provides all the answers to the difficult questions. Plus, Mum and Dad are far too busy these days running down motorcyclists or forgetting to fill in their tax returns to have time.

It’s not like they always get the campaigns right, either. Last month, the Advertising Standards Authority banned two press ads on climate change ostensibly aimed at children, including the Keatsian verse:

“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
There was none, as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought.”

Lovely.

Accusations of scare-mongering followed, along with hundreds of complaints, which were upheld on the grounds that the text ‘involved uncertainties in the magnitude and timing, as well as regional details, of predicted climate change.” Evidently, it could not be proved that Jack and Jill’s hill would be adversely affected. They seemed unconcerned that the adverts, along with the TV campaign in which everyone burns and drowns simultaneously must have scared the shit out of unsuspecting children. The fact that they’ve got to live with the effects of their forebears’ carbon gluttony is bad enough.

Some public service advertising is totally ill-conceived. Let me tell you, nothing is going to encourage the onset of substance-related paranoia more than watching a ‘Talk to Frank’ ad with your parents during the break of The Bill. Furthermore, I wonder how many amorous lovers’ fiery sofa liaisons have been doused by a scantily clad model seductively whispering Gonnoorrrhheeeaa in their ears? Perhaps a good thing; it might save the world from acquiring one more poor little tike in a cerebrally inept generation that will grow up unable to think independently, relying on TV to tell him when to take a piss.

Bully for You

2010-02-23T14:46:00.000-08:00

'Miss the next one and I'll
snap it in two.. Did I
mention I used to play?'

Great. Another ‘gate’. This time, it’s ‘Bullygate’, with one of Gordon Brown’s top civil service aides having taken the age old advice to anyone who feels under pressure and told a teacher. Good for him. Of course, no one would care about any of this had Andrew Rawnsley not decided to serialise his felicitously timed expose of life in the cut and thrust of the Brown administration. Whilst my (albeit unqualified) impression of the Prime Minister isn’t one of a man capable of inducing knee-quivering fear, I’m not sure I’d feel completely secure if ever his lazy eye angrily shot my way. He did play rugby after all, as he seems to be so fond of telling us, and anyone who has spent so much time with ‘Knuckles’ Prescott must have picked up a few tips. Fists, however, do not seem to be his chosen bullying tactic. A Cray-style grabbing of the lapels is more his style, plus an innovative take on cyber-bullying by lobbing a Blackberry across the cabinet table.

I agree that some level of control needs to be placed on workplace safety; no one wants to turn up for work every day fearing they might have a photocopier planted on their face, but seriously, come on; if you enter a life of civil service, working at very summit of politics, you can’t expect it to be all smiles and biscuits round the boardroom table, surely? I’m actually a little relieved to hear that Gordon Brown loses his temper every now and then; it makes him seem (a little) more human. If we carry on like this, every artillery private in the army will take their drill sergeant to a tribunal for asking them to get down and give them twenty (though I’m told in the Navy that means an altogether different thing).

Away from politics, Cheryl Cole has left Ashley. I’m a regular listener to Woman’s Hour and therefore a staunch feminist, and so I allowed myself a whoop and a ‘You go girl’ when I heard the news. The only question remains what to do with the 2 million unsold copies of her album that conspicuously remain with his surname plastered over the front.

The most hilarious news since Derby County announced they were donating 2000 items of kit from their club shop to Haiti, was the report that results from the latest BA strike ballots were delayed due to the Royal Mail van in which they were travelling breaking down. Of course it would have been funnier had they been on strike too, but then I wouldn’t have received today’s pile of junk mail that I live for. It comes as no surprise that the overwhelming majority voted for strike action; you cannot freeze pay for cabin crew when make-up and Brylcreem prices continue to rise above the level of inflation. It’s simple economics.

It was announced this week that at the current rate, a quarter of Scotland’s population will be obese before you can say ‘deep fried pizza’. This piece on BBC news was dispatched with the obligatory ‘on location’ piece from a Scottish high school, where a number of rotund and freckly youths exposed the startling revelation that at lunchtime they prefer to eat ‘chups’ to veg. Hardly news. It now just leaves first minister Alex Salmond (no slimmer of the year himself) to announce in the Scottish Parliament the positive news that over three quarters of Scottish people are of a healthy weight. My advice; order a side salad with your battered Mars bar.

Elsewhere, the government are proposing to cut funding for Homeopathic treatments, meaning that deranged hippies can no longer pick up their sunshine pills via prescription. Apparently, empirical scientific and results-led evidence is required to justify these things nowadays. Supporters of the treatments have denied that any success of these medicines is due to the placebo effect, maintaining that effective results can be delivered from a process that claims to increase the potency of a substance via its heavy dilution. Now I only got a C in Chemistry, but that’s not right, is it? Then again, it’s no more ludicrous than teaching Creationism in schools. Hell with it, let’s trial everything on the NHS. I prescribe Guinness and kebabs…

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

2010-01-31T11:43:00.001-08:00

He does. I'm telling
you, he really does
look like a pterodactyl

Poor old Andy Murray. To add insult to injury, after losing his second successive Grand Slam final, he wept like a small child in front of millions. An uncontrollable overflow of emotion, you might say. Or was it? Seemed to me like Mr Murray has been taking acting lessons, performing with a the lump in the throat and a moist eye the fist-to-mouth, turn-from-the-mic-in-grief-stricken-humility move with decidedly more precision than any one of his many unforced errors this morning, or evening depending on your hemisphere. ‘I can cry like Roger, I just wish I could play like him.’ Oh come on, surely that was scripted, considering the most you normally get from the moody Scot is an eyes-to-the-floor monosyllabic grumble.

I felt most sorry for Sue Barker, who, with a beaming smile at the beginning of the coverage, looked every inch like she had been finally provided with her raison d’etre. Henman seemed pleased to be out of the house too, providing the kind of nuggets of wisdom we have become accustomed to from the most easily caricatured man in tennis. Apart from perhaps Boris Becker who, occupying the same sofa (incidentally in the MOTD studio hastily prepared with different coloured mood lighting) looks more and more like a pimp every time I see him.

I don’t want to take anything away from Federer, he was, is and always will be in a class above Murray. I was surprised to read that going into the match, Murray was ahead in their head to head standings, but when it mattered, Federer was sublime. The perfect sportsman? As good a candidate as I can think of, especially as it’s highly unlikely it will ever emerge that Roger has been knocking off his training partner’s wife, unlike some model sportsmen we could, and now can, name.

That brings me nicely onto the sorry case of JT. There’s a bizarre financial element to all this, to do with his extra-curricular sponsorship deals that plunges the whole affair (excuse the pun) deeper into ignominy. To conduct an affair with the wife of your friend and team mate is one thing, but to insist on its cover up primarily to protect your extra-curricular income, on top of the £150 odd thousand per week from Chelsea, is pretty rotten indeed. Strip him of the England armband? I don’t think so; most of the reprobates lining up to snatch it from him are hardly model citizens themselves. Rooney would rather pay to use other, more elderly armbands, while Ashley Cole would leave his armband at home while he took another one to a hotel for the night. Joe Cole would leave his at the bar whilst he went into the toilet to have a fight, and Gerrard would shove it down the DJ’s throat after his second successive song request had been ignored.

No, I would allow Terry to keep the captaincy and just let them all get on with it. As penance, a televised bare-knuckle cage fight between him and Wayne Bridge might suffice, though with sanctions on the sponsorship. We as a nation should rise above all this nonsense and do what the English are famous for, and what makes us proud of our great nation. At this Summer’s World Cup, we should all get behind him and the team, giving them our unwavering support. We can then quite justifiably lynch him when we crash out to Portugal in the quarter finals.

Managing. Just.

2010-01-18T14:01:00.000-08:00

The Manchester City player in question
knew he was in trouble with the
manager after passing out in the
gutter and allowing the line painter
to run over his pristine new
away shirt

I heard Steve Bruce say a little while ago that no manager is truly safe in his job and is only ever six games away from an ignominious sacking, facing the frightening prospect of being left with only a multi million pound pay off for comfort. A nice little earner actually, and a tactic that Bryan Robson has been using for years.

Yes, the Premier League managerial merry go round does not stop to let anybody off. Gary Megson was the latest to be bundled off leaving him bruised and bloodied, the wary eyes of Rafa Benitez following his crumpled form as he continues to whirl at breakneck speed.

I do feel a little sorry for Megson, though none could defend his woeful season, leaving Bolton dangling precariously over the relegation precipice having failed to keep a clean sheet all season. I feel for him because he just looks so damn depressed all the time, and this push over the edge might just leave him on suicide watch. It’s hard to describe his character satisfactorily, but if he were a colour, he would most certainly be grey.

Robert Mancini on the other hand is certainly not grey. In fact, he is positively blue and white, judging from the scarf he so conspicuously insists on wearing. His tailor must despair. City could use their manager’s sartorial stylings on the pitch; their away shirt is frankly ridiculous and looks like a reject from Roy of the Rovers. Mancini’s blue and white may just carry a slosh of Chianti, having revealed that he takes a fairly liberal attitude to his players dining habits before a game. Pizza and wine; revealing that the Italians are still the easiest nation in the world to stereotype. So much so, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him ride onto the Eastlands pitch on a Vespa when they face United tomorrow night. It will be interesting to observe the erosion of his impeccable appearance that life in Manchester will inevitably cause; hopefully by April he will have switched to a trenchcoat, wear his hair plastered down round his face and develop a Gallagherian swagger.

Rafa Benitez has less of a swagger these days; his is more of a defiant meander. It’s hard to believe that only 12 months ago, Liverpool had one eye on the Premier League title. It was suggested to me, when Gerrard failed to show for the second half of last week’s disastrous FA cup tie with Reading, that he probably joined Torres in the media suite to check lastminute.com for a one way ticket to Madrid. It was a proposal that made me smile considering every fourth advertising billboard flashing around the ground was for visitspain.com.

What is most perplexing about Liverpool is just where all the good players are. Despite Benitez’s 180m odd expenditure in his 5 year history at Liverpool, even a cursory glance at the squad roster reveals that only a handful are much use. It’s far more fun to name the bad ones; so Lucas, El Zhar, Babel, N’Gog and Insua, please stand up. Or just do something, rather than passing the ball to the opposition continually as Liverpool are wont to do of late.

Manchester United have had a blip recently too. The cup exit to Leeds was a shock, and though they fielded a depleted side, not even Rooney and Berbatov could make any difference for home side. Credit to the Leeds players though, who deserve to be playing at a much higher level and can hopefully piece together a decent cup run this year. Alex Ferguson gave an excuse I’m sure, though it seems, from the last press conference I saw, that his famous Scottish droll has finally become totally intelligible.

For me, Arsenal are the dark horses this year. If Fabregas can stay fit, there’s no reason they can’t mount a serious title challenge. As for the fourth spot, if Liverpool can take the gun from their head they may, just may be able to prize the final Champions' League spot if Spurs and Man City fall away towards the end of the season as I suspect they might, and if Villa don’t fold like origami in March like last year.

Elsewhere, Adrian Chiles of MOTD2 is beginning to look like Ray Mears after a week in the woods, though admittedly without any shortage of food. And forget the title race; the receding hair lines between pundits Lee Dixon and Alan Shearer is a far more gripping competition, with only a few follicles separating both as the season passes the halfway mark…

The Final Countdown

2009-09-02T05:43:00.000-07:00

The FA has announced that it will investigate
allegations of hairpulling during the recent
intercontinental five-a-side tournament

The inexorable count down continues, whilst the steely faced correspondent stares sternly back at me. The whirlwind of speculation and conflicting reports whips up frenzied doubt and wide eyed disbelief in the masses across the nation who sit, like me, transfixed by the history unfolding before their eyes. The conveyor belt, heavy and luminous with breaking news flickers across the bottom of the screen as my eyes wildly follow it back and forth, back and forth. It confirms, it denies. The suspense, the contemplation of how our very existences will be shaped by the next few decisive minutes, hangs over me like an anvil ready to fall and obliterate the hopes and dreams of all in its path. And then it happens; the countdown reaches zero. As I close my eyes and hold my breath, it… cuts to a commercial break….

Yes that’s right, the apocalypse. Otherwise known as the transfer deadline day; followed by the second in glorious HD Technicolor by Sky Sports News. In truth, it was one of the least busy or interesting deadline days in recent years, but let’s not allow that to ruin our fun, shall we?

Sky Sports must have a broom cupboard where they keep emergency reporters (who incidentally all look the same) to bring out on such occasions as yesterday. Once dusted off, they stand like idiots outside the gates of every stadium/training ground in the country. Unfortunately for them, Premier League transfers were a little thin on the ground on deadline day, and instead they had to resort to deducing like sleuths the covert signs and meanings in the cars and people that went through the gates. At one point, I’m sure, the entire cleaning workforce at White Hart Lane were minutes from being unveiled as the new all-Polish defensive line up for the 09/10 season.

There were a couple of interesting movements yesterday, however. Harry Redknapp snapped up Kranjcar from Portsmouth, reportedly at a bargain rate, and Everton brought in Heitinga from Atletico Madid for £6m to plug a hole in the rapidly diminishing morale tank at Goodison Park. There were a couple more hardly worth noting, but other than that, it really was down to the chaps at Sky to fabricate the rest.

The excitable man outside Spurs’ training ground revealed that a vehicle had just passed through the gates, which may or may not have borne the initials of Matthew Upson, and that this could well mean the West Ham player would sign for Spurs before the end of the day. No more was heard of this rumour, and for all we knew the vehicle in question turned out to be a UPS van.

David James’s actions were watched closely all day, with zoom lenses picking up his afro every now and then popping up above the walls of Fratton Park. Again, nothing.
There was even wild speculation at one point that David Bentley was about to sign for Man City. I really hoped that there was some truth in that one. Not because of what his signature would do to boost City’s title hopes, but because of the potential hilarity of watching as his Mum gave him a lift to Eastlands following his driving ban last week. Alas, no joy there either.

All this was presided over in a very professional manner by the studio team; the spotlight of speculation was cast effortlessly from one corner of the country to the next by the handsome, stoical bloke and the blonde woman who as much as she tried, could kid herself no longer that she was hired for her sporting knowledge or journalistic skills.

As the deadline loomed, it became far more interesting to watch the gathering crowds of chavs in the background of the reporters’ shots, and in the case of the some of the more far flung pundits, the growing fear in their eyes as they began to be hemmed in by bmx bikes cycling in ever decreasing circles.

And then it happened. The picture was switched to Big Ben for the massively over-egged finale as the countdown reached zero, using the annoying ‘atmospehric’ effect of gradually monochroming everything but the clock tower, one that Sky Sports must have patented, such is its overuse. And then, when it was all over, the transfer anorak, who had for most of the afternoon been waiting patiently in the corner of the shot, informed us that because of paperwork and work permits, most of the confirmed transfers wouldn’t be announced for probably another hour an a half, and the bubble, which BSkyB had been desperately been trying to construct all day, burst with a wet pop.. Roll on January for more drama…

To Win, or Toulouse???

2009-09-01T02:39:00.000-07:00

Bob had visited Calais so often that the
transformation seemed to him very gradual

How does a Frenchman play poker? What exactly is a fox dog? Is my 5 iron cursed? Not fundamentally vital questions to most, but all highly relevant ones during what was a beautifully varied, and more than a little sweltering seven days holiday in Southern France.

Two families, united by marriage and the common goal to seek refuge from Britain’s barbecue summer, boarded the 12.30 flight from Gatwick to Toulouse; “Wait” said the wisest of us all, “maybe that’s the arrival time.” Oh God...

We were all grateful then, that EasyJet ensured the flight was delayed for over two hours. Once En France we headed to our remote cottage in the heart of the Gers region. By remote, I mean that the few houses that huddled together between the Triffid-like armies of sunflower fields, constituted the second largest settlement on our local map.

No shops for miles then, and so immediately my vision of the bicycled, bereted Frenchman lost his baguette and garlic string. Nevertheless, we hastened to the nearest store, and performed a large shop with the mindset that only ever possesses the holidaymaker. Out went the staple goods and fresh veg, and in went the wine, cheese and cooked meats. Our good health ensured then, we proceeded in a purely British fashion to ‘planning’ our relaxing holiday. Slots were allocated, schemes hatched and requests placed for numerous activities that, considering the soaring temperatures, were questionable in their sagacity, as the conspicuously absent locals during mid-day hours proved.

By far the most audacious of these was the golf trip. The men’s day out was planned for an early morning departure to avoid us being labelled mad dogs, or worse, Englishmen, later in the day. This early start was made absolutely impossible however, as the breakfast croissants didn’t arrive until after 10am.

It was almost certainly the hot weather that led to my defeat in the inaugural ‘Chambord Open’. I have tried but failed to fathom any other reason why my swing would desert me on the 4th, and come crawling back, panting, as a mirage on the shimmering horizon of the final hole, by which time my score card read like a cricket innings. Plaudits go to my brother James, who (somehow) kept his game and romped to victory, really pulling it out of the cool bag.

The ladies’ day sounded much less exerting, with a tour of the shady local châteaux wine cellars followed by extended tasting. Why didn’t we think of that?

A large part of the holiday was spent preparing food, and much of the remaining time spent eating it. If barbecuing is an art, then we were treated to the Sistine chapel by what can only be described as brother-in-law Nick’s ‘creative vision’. My donation to the culinary gallery was the ‘Rustic Risotto’, although even the alliteration couldn’t sway the critics from the barbecued masterpiece.

It was a week of intense competition, and the crushing disappointment of losing out in the Chambord Open spurred me on to narrowly take the Poker title. Five year old nephew Sebbie swam a personal best to usurp the swimming crown, which although thoroughly deserved, speaks volumes about exertion levels the rest of us were able to produce in the sweltering conditions.

Genetically incapable of failing to seek out a bargain, Lily and Lara managed to find a car boot sale/market in the midst of the arable surroundings, and it must be said that even a Frenchman’s cast offs can seem more stylish than the British High Street at times. This rural rummaging was juxtaposed with myself and Nick roaming the streets of the largest town in the area feverishly searching for a Wi-fi connection. We found one, amazingly, but not without some very confused looks from the locals. What exactly is the French for Wi-Fi?

My thanks and regards go out to each and every member of the vacationing clan. Here’s to next year!!! (Although maybe somewhere with air-con, hey Mum?)

I have hitherto neglected to mention that we were staying near a town called Condom. The very place that modern day contraception was born (or rather, wasn’t). It has been hard to sidestep the gags, and accept the applause that my restraint deserves. Merci, et bon soir…..

5 Things I Hate about London..

2009-07-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Met has rejected plans to introduce a new fleet
of response cars, dismissing the proposed vehicles
as 'too slow' for the demanding needs of the force

Firstly, despite the negative tone of the title, it must be noted that I love London. There is far more to love than to hate in this beautiful city. The day this balance is swung is the day I move away (or when I purchase my rock star estate in Surrey, whichever comes first). Despite this, there are a few people, places and inanimate objects that annoy me to the very core of my being in this our nation’s capital. Here are 5 of my most (or least?) favourite things to hate, in no particular order.

1. Americans

A bit obvious perhaps, and one that could be perfectly justified amongst anyone’s top 5 most annoying things in any context. This particular gripe however, is aimed at the American tourist. Cliché I know, but find me a stereotype that is more true to its name (besides a drunk Irishman) and I will give you ten bucks. I’ll even get it out of my bum bag whilst making sure that my socks are pulled up to my knees, and negotiating my way round a huge stomach. All the while, my baseball cap and t-shirt sporting the name of an obscure national park in Colorado will beautifully accompany my immaculately trimmed moustache. ‘Well Gee Whiz Kathleen, they’re changing that darn guard again’.

My advice; to avoid the disdainful treatment you will inevitably receive, do what any sensible American should when abroad – sew a red Maple leaf to your cap or bag.

2. The London lite

Or the London Paper, or any other of the free rush hour rags, filled exclusively with puerile nonsense. I originally thought that competition between these gutter press rivals would drive them both into the ground, but that seems not to be the case, with some 1.5 Million Londoners' each day feverishly swiping a copy from the first garishly overcoated man to thrust one in their face. Yes, I have read them both on many occasions; often unavoidably, as ‘Swine flu to kill everyone tomorrow’ stares me in the face from every angle on the train. To think that these publications constitute many Londoners sole news intake during an evening, or even all day, is unnerving. If an alien craft took a copy of the ‘Lite’ away as a sample of life in London at the beginning of the 21st century, one of two things would happen. Either they would be appalled at the degeneration of a once proud and literate nation into celebrity spotting, sensation lapping halfwits and obliterate us all, or in many years time we would discover distant planet inhabited by Wags, with Cheryl Cole as its Messiah.

3. Zone 3 and beyond

We've all been there. 'We're having a party, come along, should be great fun!'. And it no doubt will be, except it's in Finchley. Or Earlsfield. Or somewhere else you’ve only ever heard of when staring at the tube map on the train and trying to construct obscene anagrams from station names (maybe just me). In fact, Morden and Cockfosters can officially boast more visitors per year than the London Eye, due to drunken revellers waking with a start at the end of the line, dribbling onto their London Lite.

There's perhaps a touch of snobbery in the roll of the eyes and tutting that follows an arrangement to visit 'the outer limits', but it's not just a matter of reputation. There's the travel to take in to account. For some reason, after a drunken evening, it becomes entirely impossible for a group of friends to agree on the time that the last tube runs. Not wanting to cut the evening short, everyone settles on the most liberal estimate, and then the inevtiable moment comes. Underground closed then, and time to consider the night bus.

It is perfectly possible to spend up to 3 hours on the 'N's and feel just as far from home as when you began. And you might be. There’s a good chance you’ll have to change at Trafalgar square, and as anyone who has suffered the interminable wait on a Saturday night knows, every bus running through there is either at capacity or close to it, with the convergence of hundreds of confused and drunken Londoners continuing their odyssey from the wilderness of zone 3 and beyond. Either that, or you'll fall asleep and find yourself being woken by a youth in Lewisham who will ask you less than politely for your wallet and phone.

'Hey, great party last night, thanks! Next time though, let's meet at London Bridge.'

4. ‘Extreme’ Sports

Now, this is a complicated gripe and will not be popular with the hordes of 'out there' Londoners that love nothing more than either flying, strapping themselves to or otherwise interacting with some contraption, with or without wheels, and who as a result look totally stupid.

The first is rollerblading, the Mecca for which seems to be the stretch of path opposite the Albert Hall on the south side of Hyde Park. Why, I've no idea, perhaps a homage to Victoria’s husband, who famously espoused the adoption of foreign customs into England. Not everything ports as well as Christmas trees though. Not even Prince Albert would countenance the ridiculous behaviour of these Lycra-clad skaters, whirling themselves around in what they see as streamlined, graceful and cutting edge manner, but to everyone else looks like they are suffering an uncontrollable and rather camp fit. It is Torvill and Dean, without the pretty costumes (though often with the 80’s hairstyles). I’m sorry, but this is not LA, and neither are we extras from the OC. Oh, and to the lunatics that choose this method of transport to get to the office; yes, your workmates mock you, and whether you know it or not your boss has put you top of the pile for potential redundancy.

The second instance of ‘extreme behaviour’ I have an aversion to is Kites. Or Kite Boarding, or Extreme Kites. Call it whatever you like if it makes you feel anything other than a little foolish for indulging regularly in a pastime designed for small children. Some men get away with it; their passion for flying kites can be successfully masked by taking their own kids out whenever there is a blustery day. As the epicentre for kite flying tomfoolery seems to be Blackheath, then that is nearly every day. So, what about the men (for it seems to be exclusively men) that do not have little ones to vicariously re-live their dreams? Well, they strap themselves to a big skateboard and go mobile, no doubt up-ending joggers and small fluffy dogs in the process. I have already heard the counter arguments. ‘It’s no child’s play, you should try it, you have to be tough to control these things, they’re pretty hardcore.’ Yes, yes, but still a kite.

5. The Metropolitan Police

Not the whole force, but certainly elements of it. Their cars, for starters. I understand that there are probably more criminals per square mile in London than in Strangeways, but does that necessitate a (huge) fleet of gargantuan BMWs to chase them with? Surely, with the traffic congestion London enjoys, a Smart Car would be a more sensible choice for weaving in and out of the rush hour traffic? Not to mention the £30k price tag. Also, if someone can offer me a reason as to why many of the cars are silver, other than an elitist display, I’d like to hear it. That sums up the Met; bigger and better than any other force in Britain. Or so they would have you think. The flaws begin at the top and seep downwards, with Sir Ian Blair having been embroiled in more dodgy dealing and malpractice than Peter Mandleson, and special ops squads that get everything right apart from shooting the right bloke.

And then there's the PCs. Picture an English Bobby: Helpful, jolly, approachable and almost certainly sporting a moustache. The Met officer is none of these, and instead employs a steely faced, supercilious glare, brandished liberally at anyone who cares to arrest his line of sight. All the while, Metcop has his hands tucked into his Teflon vest in a universally recognised pose of authoritative toughness. How he expects to reach his belt and access the plethora of torture instruments required to violently apprehend a random black youth with his hands in his vest is anyone's guess. It has become less ‘Ello ‘ello ‘ello, and more ‘Armed Police, on your knees’.

I realise that policing in the capital is a far more gritty and dangerous than, say, Norwich, but has the age of the British copper, polite and courteous, really been sentenced to the past? There has certainly been a visible difference in police attitudes since the 7/7 bombings, and perhaps it's necessary for our officers to adopt a tougher stance, but somehow it just doesn't feel very British. Can't we all just be polite and get along in the orderly fashion we are famed for? Ask the G20 protestors and see what they say.

So, I feel liberated having got a few things off my chest. What annoys you about London, or any other town for that matter? Answers on a postcard to 10 Downing Street to provide David Cameron with at least a vague idea of what he's doing when he moves in.

Exclsuive - "Election fever not contagious"

2009-06-09T04:31:00.000-07:00

Many voters are accusing UKIP of
misleading them, after it emerged that the party's
primary mandate is not, as many expected, an
invitation for the electorate to have a little
sleep.

In case you’ve been living in a cave, (or in Switzerland) there has recently been another revolution of the European parliamentary merry go round. Considering the turnout of the electorate, the coverage given by television and the press to last weekend’s elections has been somewhat disproportionate. More people watch Eastenders each week than bothered to get to a polling station on Thursday, but we don’t see David Dimbleby anchoring a fully interactive-digital-via-satellite extravaganza charting the rise and fall of Dot Cotton’s popularity levels, do we? More’s the pity.

Needless to say I watched the coverage on BBC1, and quite a spectacle it was too. No wonder the journalists from television centre have been haranguing the Labour ministers about when a General Election will be called; they just cannot wait to bust out their newest CGI vote analysis experience. Forget John Snow and his ‘Swingometer’ – here we have Jeremy Vine pirouetting around a three-dimensional and interactive computer generated white room with more statistics at his disposal with a waft of his digitised hand than most Government departments could leave on a train in months. If you didn’t catch it, I’m sure the BBC hasn’t made it awfully difficult for you to find it online. In fact, it is so futuristic in a James Bond kind of way, that it might even find you.

And so, the computery bells and whistles confirmed to us what we already knew would happen to the Labour vote. To be fair to Brown and co, despite the drubbing, they kept their end up in London reasonably well, although I am convinced that the omnipresence of Boris Johnson will boost Labour’s vote in anything political (if even subconsciously) as long as the walking blonde disaster exists in city hall. BNP supporters will no doubt tear themselves away from beating immigrants long enough to celebrate Fat Hitler (look at his picture again, and draw a moustache) Nick Griffin’s victory in the North West. He will join party colleague Andrew Brons, who will both presumably sit huddled next to each other in fright inside the European parliament building, suddenly aware that they are surrounded by their worst nightmare; a bunch of angry foreigners. Good luck chaps.

They won’t be alone however. There has been a big swing towards the right this time around, with almost all of the socialist parties in continental Europe losing ground to centre right and beyond. Hungary has even elected a few strange looking military fascists in bodywarmers and Boy Scout neck scarves. How menacing. Aside from Germany, France and Italy, this swing to the right has been against the ruling party. Whether this is a just a ‘vote for somebody else as we’re all broke’ reaction remains to be seen, but a huge recession is never going to favour the party in power at the time (isn’t that right Gordon?).

For all its hot air, the Conservative party achieved a smaller gain than expected. It was Ukip that really stole the show, with a Kilroy Silk-free sheen that attracted much of the protest vote from the expenses scandal to land it second place overall of total votes cast. But the plaudits must surely go to Sweden’s Pirate party, who amazingly won a parliamentary seat lobbying for nothing but the freedom to share music over the Internet. This was in response to the closure of file sharing site piratebay.com and the imprisonment of its creators, and it does beg the question; what exactly does a Swedish computer geek with no real agenda do day in day out at the European Parliament? Will he even turn up? Or will he use his 70,000 Euro salary to actually buy his music and render himself obsolete?

Now all is said and done, it is back to work for the MEP’s. If the wage doesn’t prove enough for them, there is always the 200 Euro daily rate for actually turning up. That should pay for lunch. Back home in Blighty, we will all seek a vaccine to help treat our election fever, and hope that we can become immune for the next strain come the general election. Things might not look so good for him, but Gordon Brown should count himself lucky. At least he’s not stuck in a virtual statistic room until it happens like poor old Jeremy Vine.

Where's there's Blame, there's a Claim....

2009-05-19T13:18:00.001-07:00

The Cabinet Member in question was baffled
as to why his modest second home featured
in his morning Telegraph

I walked through Westminster last week, and the atmosphere felt tense. Even Big Ben seemed to cast a wary eye each way before he moved his hand, as if he would be accused of claiming for the time that elapsed since the whole sorry saga of MP's expenses exploded. On the streets, eyes were cast probingly from suit to suit, before being turned to the pavement, as if hoping for it to obligingly open up. It must have been quite entertaining to observe MPs over the last week or so inside the bowels of the Houses of Parliament, each unsettled by what may transpire in the Daily Telegraph concerning their financial exploits of the last couple of years. No doubt they were aware of each other’s too. Picture the scene in a leafy garden on a summer’s afternoon in Pimlico, with a colleague's hearty backslap greeting a cabinet member’s gloat that the barbecue they are gorging on is courtesy of HM government. That same barbecue now sits conspicuously on the lawn, hanging its coals in shame.

This whole business reminds me of a time during my schooldays when the entire year group were called together to investigate a spate of thefts from the school canteen and tuck shop. The thing is, everyone was at it. The dinnerladies in charge were woefully inattentive, and the smuggling out of a curly wurly here, and an apple there (for the more health conscious thief) had become commonplace. That was the problem; because the abuse of the sweet shop was so widespread, it became acceptable within whole groups of students, and consciences were collectively cleared as a result. It was only when it became clear that so many individuals had been spotted, following a sting operation between a squealing student and a despotic biology teacher that everyone began to get nervous. Guilty glances, not dissimilar to the ones being cast around Westminster, replaced the collective sanctuary of the shared secret.

It is surely this mindset that has set the bar for the expenses that have been claimed in recent years, and with each stage of acceptability, the bar has been raised. It has long been known that Parliament exists in a totally different world to that of you and I; or as the newspapers are so fond of calling it, a gentleman’s club that exists within an insular bubble of security and affluence. That bubble was burst when news of the leak was reported; the fact that there was immediate talk of calling in the police to root out the whistleblower now seems unbelievable, and gives weight to the accusation that the lascivious W1 club was attempting to cover its back. Perhaps it was in an effort to exclude herself from this Westminster trap that Margaret Moran claimed for a second home in Southampton. How very noble. Admittedly there are MPs that exist outside of this circle, politicians such as Norman Baker who have long campaigned to make public the expenses claims, but they seem to be few and far between as the Telegraph continues its relentless charge against Westminster. In fact, so much coverage has been given to this story that regular readers have been outraged; you now need to delve inside the paper as far as page 12 before there is even a mention of cricket!

So what is the next logical step for a horde of marauding money grabbers without so much as a phoney mortgage receipt to hide behind? Why, what any self respecting guilty party (or parties) should do; find a scapegoat. Luckily for them they don’t have to look very far, as the Speaker Michael Martin is asking for it. Not that he doesn’t deserve to go, of course; his reluctance for this whole debacle to see the light of day is well known. His own expenses have come into dispute long before this particular episode, although that is not the main reason for his culpability. If he had his way, the whole scandal would have remained under wraps, and the corrupt ship Westminster would have sailed on undeterred, and as the representative for MPs as a group, that is unforgivable (but somewhat typical).

Whilst I don’t sympathise heavily with MPs over these revelations, I do take issue with all this talk of ‘pigs in troughs’ and ‘we pay for your luxurious lifestyles’. Yes, ‘we’ as taxpayers do ultimately foot the bill, but it is by no means an exclusive invoice that starts and ends in Westminster. The same collective ‘we’ pays for the exorbitant wages and needless management consultants at the BBC, not to mention some of its journalists, whose expenses claims probably remain their most creative work to date. ‘We’ pay for the extortionate pensions claimed by disgraced heads of city Police Forces. ‘We’ pay for the shambolic social services that operate children’s services in London, and for the council tax that haemorrhages from every orifice of inept local councils. The counter argument to this is that MP’s are responsible for making their own rules, but let us not forget that the corrupt expenses system has existed for a long while. Just as I have claimed for spurious mileage on my company car in the past, so hundreds of thousands of workers up and down the country exploit their systems in a time honoured fashion. I’m not saying its right, that’s just life. What’s that you say, as a society we’re not greedy? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the banking system.

It is time now to draw a line through the current system and create a fairer and more level expenses playing field. Increase MP wages if necessary but cut funding for anything other than travel, food and essential basic accommodation costs. Even that is generous; most of us pay for our own food do we not? I expect the Speaker will stand down, and examples will be made of the most erroneous claimants, but eventually the public needs to put its high horse back in the stable and allow the government to tend to the lame donkey of an economy that it shares a stall with.

Lastly, is there a demonstrative collective noun for a group of expense claiming politicians? Any ideas? Might I suggest ‘a Moat of MPs’?

The Lost Highway

2009-05-05T05:03:00.000-07:00

The lost streakers on the Lost Highway
were, unfortunately for them, completely
unaware of the lost Juggernaut.

I'm fairly sure that most people have recently had an irrepressible urge to read about a slightly obscure alternative bluegrass and country rock event on the South Coast. Fortuitous then, that I just happened to have written about one. Quite a coincedence I'm sure you'll agree..

The Lost Highway

When first invited to 'The Lost Highway', I pictured a lone figure sitting under a tree by the side of a deserted road, poignantly plucking his steel guitar, the metallic twang sailing gently across the plains of the Mid West whilst the wind whipped up the melancholy melody like sand over the Dustbowl. To a mildly cold Hove then, for the latest showing of the regular country, folk and roots event at the Brunswick, and not even a Stetson in sight. I opted for a large Bourbon though, just to be sure. The venue’s small but prominent stage and candle lit tables ensured an intimate atmosphere for the busy crowd as the first act stepped up.

At odds with the event’s billing, Chris Simmons seems to have no doubt as to his own destination. His stop on the MySpace highway is certainly a busy one, and his CV reads as a breathless list of achievements (and a fair amount of name dropping). His first line, 'Mine is a written request, a pending SMS' by no means set as awful a tone as the lyric suggests. He has, along with his bandmate and backing vocalist Adam Mellor, an impeccable ear for melody. No wonder Jackson Browne lists himself as a fan. His songs are well crafted, and probably good enough, when he gives 100% (for here I fear he was not) to take him a very long way. The faultless close vocal harmonies lifted the tunes immeasurably, and the upbeat number 'Saturn Returns' sounded like Sting on anti depressants.

Headlining the event was the foot-stomping country rock of The Cedars. A set that started out a little tame soon became, in their words, 'low down and dirty'. The authentic up-tempo bluegrass numbers wouldn’t sound of out of place in a Whiskey-fuelled hoe down along the banks of the Mississippi; it took the sea gulls on lead singer Chantal Hill’s dress to remind me we were still in Brighton. The musicianship was first rate; the vocals shone throughout, especially when sung a cappella. The banjo and bass lines fizzed along nicely and the drummer rattled a surprisingly large sound from the world’s smallest drum kit. One drawback however, was the lack of charisma from the band members, which beyond the red lips of Hill, was notably absent. The audience too, could have reacted more fervently at times; where I half expected to turn and see impromptu do-see-do-ing to the driving rhythms, I was greeted with only mild toe tapping. I suppose this is, after all, the Mild South and not the Wild West!

Part of the reason for The Lost Highway's success is that it enables bands of many styles and disciplines to come together in a single event. Claire Lloyd, promoter with Kong Promotions, says 'The Lost Highway is an important part of the Brighton music scene. What started as an Americana event has branched out to give exposure to great artists from a wide range of genres, most that you would not normally expect to see on mainstream billings, whilst ensuring they don’t become pigeonholed.’

The next junction along The Lost Highway is The Fortune of War, Hove, on 14th May for what promises to be the best event yet. Hey Negrita,
Two Fingers of Firewater and the excellent Sweet Sweet Lies will be performing as part of ‘The Alternative Escape’, continuing the Lost Highway’s tireless journey towards unearthing some of the best, diverse and most entertaining acts in the area.

The Forgettable Fire...

2009-04-02T08:59:00.000-07:00

'You know most guys would
kill to be in you two', Bono
smiles as he contemplates his
own genius.

I hold a certain amount of antipathy for U2. Actually that is unfair, it’s the singer I hate really. When not indulging in self-righteous platitudes from his multi million pound soapbox, Bono (real name Paul Hewson, one regretful plus on his wikipedia page there) is unbelievably still ‘making music’. Everyone knows that the small amount of talent he once possessed (or possessed him?) deserted him in the early nineties, presumably jumping ship and diving desperately into the Irish channel to escape him. More unbelievable is that U2 are still so popular in a supposed age of reason. Would any self-respecting music fan, in 2009, actually stand up and claim to be a fan? Surely not. Anyone outside Ireland that is. Over there, disparaging the great name of U2 is akin to pissing on a priest or setting fire to a nun. I have even heard that in certain parts of County Cork all of the crucifixes wear sunglasses.

It’s not just for his progressively diminishing musicianship that Bono is known. He is of course a celebrated exponent of charity work, promoting awareness of the plight of the third world throughout the first world. Everyone has heard the old adage ‘Give a man a fish and he can feed his family for a day. Teach him how to fish and his family can each afford a copy of the new U2 album’. That was one of his. This sort of charitable behaviour is all very well and good once you are retired and have been put out to graze on the time-rich expanses of the retired rock star farm (See Geldof), but to juggle it with an alter ego of globe trotting contemporary rock star is frankly ridiculous and hypocritical.

I’m sure his PR agency will tell me that he is offsetting the carbon footprint for his tour and air-dropping crates of rice from his jet as he flies over Africa, but that’s not the point. He and the rest of his band still prance around they own the place with their rock and roll facade, and dress it like it too. It’s hard to take seriously a man in a tatty leather jacket and shades when lobbying for aid in the third world. Especially when juxtaposed with Gordon Brown. Perhaps they should swap outfits?

Quite right then, that Bono and co should prove me wrong with a cracking new record. I have heard it, and it is total drivel. When I saw the video for their come back single ‘Get on your boots’, I really did think they were having a laugh; sort of, ‘It’s like comic relief, but just give us your money instead please’. Its main failing is the absence of melody, which is unfortunate. Their newest single, ‘Magnificent’ is also, sadly, not. The U2 publicity engine however, does not seem as rusty as its creators. There have been various stunts in the media to rev up a little interest in the stalling foursome, the most notable of which has been to address the problem behind their 1987 hit Where the Streets Have No Name, by (temporarily) naming an avenue in New York after the band. Last I heard it was closed for roadworks.

I will mention at this point that U2 used to be rather good, until they started running out of ideas and began to look increasingly self-conscious about appearing current and cool. The Joshua Tree remains a brilliant album; the dark brooding guitars and anthemic melodies still sound great today. That they were once capable of such work makes their current efforts all the more embarrassing. They are also responsible for some of the worst album titles of all time. If you are aware of their work, you will be nodding and rolling your eyes with me here. If not, I'll wait while you google them.

The time must surely approaching for U2 to put their guitars down (carefully, mind the back lads) and walk away content at having been amongst the top selling acts in history. Also, the cynic in me is interested to see how fervently Bono pursues the charity stuff when there are no more records to plug. Except a greatest hits of course, and a DVD collection, and maybe a Bono Live 8 doll which talks, revealing how many children in Africa have died of aids since you last punched it in the face. This wish seems hopeful at best, as the last time I saw them on TV (five times this week and counting) they looked like they weren’t going anywhere, except down in everyone’s estimation.

In the meantime then, we can all cross our fingers and hope that our bespectacled friend doesn’t seriously injure himself falling over The Edge, and into a pit of hungry orphans.

Wool-Worth-It?

2009-01-13T19:26:00.001-08:00

Pray For Them...

I heard yesterday that Findus have begun administration proceedings. I was mortified. Will I never again experience the gastronomic fascination provided by the Crispy Pancake? The breaded mystery, the crumbed enigma that has baffled since its illustrious birth all that have gazed upon its proud golden form. The mystical question. What actually is that creamy substance, that gelatinous interior essence that has the power to indiscriminately scald all in its path, and melt the digestive systems of entire populations of students? Perhaps we will never know, and more is the pity..

And this, after I am only just recovering my composure at the loss of everyone’s favourite high street train wreck, Woolworths. The sad demise of the store was only transcended by the tear-jerking moment when their woefully misplaced and ineffectual TV advertising characters, the sheep and dog combination of Wooly and Worth, were soothingly led to the loading bay, where in a scene reminiscent to the climax of ‘Of Mice and Men’, they were told to look unto the horizon. ‘Can you see it, Worth?’ asked the administrator. ‘Just over there, can you see it? A lush green field beyond yonder rainbow, where bunnies hop, where the grass grows greener than any sheep could ever dream of and where the horrible PR men can never touch you? Look, do you see it?’ And, as they innocently craned their necks to glimpse this divine oasis, their brains were blown out mercifully from behind by his shotgun…

Aah yes, Woolworths. Oh to recount the days when one could peruse the aisles of a single store and approach the checkout, in one visit, clutching a bounty of bargains including an ironing board, a newspaper, several of last century’s chart CDs, a pair of children’s shoes and a selection of over priced chewy sweets. What will we do without it? Whilst it is no laughing matter to the good people who once worked at their stores up and down the country, it is the nature of the Pick’n’Mix beast. The sad fact is that Woolworths were and are irrelevant in today’s Internet led retail climate. Had it embraced the phenomenon and looked to flog cheap CD players and pillowcase sets online, it might, maybe, have escaped its inevitable doom; one that has caused more than a fair share of its high street competitors to slash prices on their on-sale items, which as a result of the ravenous credit crunching monster, were already on sale anyway.

Tough times indeed for the high street. Which begs the question, what next? Will the onset of a recession and the onslaught of online shopping activity render that once lucrative stretch of buildings between the KFC and Mcdonalds (for they will surely survive) completely barren? Will there come a time when the only jobs that exist in the retail market be computer operatives, processing orders in a dingy office block in Slough, and Royal Mail delivery drivers? Not even Orwell predicted that. A few may survive this holocaust, as cockroaches to a Nuclear winter, but I fear not the majority. Our world is changing so rapidly and dramatically towards an Internet revolution that it is a serious possibility only a selection of the most tangible services such as food and drink, will escape being rendered obsolete by the information deluge. You can bet your ever-diminishing Pound that these will be administered by Tesco and its major competitors that currently ride the corporate ocean; an oligarchy that for a long time has been buoying itself with the drowning of others.

Perhaps not. Maybe everything will recover and we will venture once more on to the streets of our cities and towns once this cloud of recession has rained its worst. I am dubious however whether this confluence, once rescinded, will leave with us anything remotely resembling the high street we knew growing up. The world is changing, and just as Facebook is the primary point of contact for most youngsters, so will the Internet be the first port of call when ordering a product or service.

You may laugh, but there may be a time when we speak of Woolworths to our grandchildren. We will reminisce about how in our day we actually used to have to leave our homes to buy our Christmas decorations and lets be honest, just how shit it really was…

Sweet FA

2008-11-16T12:59:00.000-08:00

A nation of overweight children too fat
to play football? Certainly sir, would you
like fries with that?

I was perusing the appointment pages of the Sunday Times last week, and came across a cushy little position at the FA. The job title was ‘Chief Executive’ or something; must be important, because they took out a half page ad, and in colour too. Now I read the blurb, and as far as I can gather, the main goal for the successful applicant is to sort out this failing enterprise, and point it in the right direction so that ultimately, the English can win some football matches. At least that’s what I gleaned from the particularly convoluted language used in the ad. They make it sound easy; anyone can achieve co-ordinated synergy whilst maintaining traction to gain leverage in a competitive and ever changing dynamic sector, right?

I was just about to apply, when my mind was unexpectedly cast back to a balmy summer’s evening in 2006, when having obtained the telephone number for FA’s Soho square offices from directory enquiries, I drunkenly called them to demand an explanation for Mr Eriksson’s choice of formation during the group stages. I left my name on that answer phone message, and so considered my hopes of becoming incumbent in the chief exec’s suite dismal at best.

Whatever the eventual candidate decides to do down there at the nation’s most overpaid and under worked office building will be entirely irrelevant. Yes, he (or she, but we’ll safely assume he for now) might change the stationery or sack some people, but there is not much that can be done about the overriding task that has dogged the organisation for over 42 years now; winning something football related. There is the youth training stuff to deal with, but all that needs to be done there is to say ‘yes’ and part with some cash for the seemingly ill fated national football academy in Burton (which at present is occupied by sheep) and put a stop to the ridiculous (but lucrative) sponsorship deal that sees the FA working in conjunction with McDonalds, of all people, to promote grass roots level coaches and facilities. No, the main task lies beyond the CEO’s control; the management of the national team. To inflict further ignominy on the previous director, that task was given to Steve Mclaren, to whom I am not prepared to give the credit of my precious words to insult. Oh, ok then. Wanker. Anyway, he was sacked and went off to learn to speak English in a Dutch accent, and now we have Fabio Capello, who looks equally as clueless if we’re all honest, but has a glittering managerial career behind him. So far it seems to be going ok, but there is still plenty of time for his players to trip over their own egos and end up in a big heap somewhere at the bottom of the world cup qualifying group. We’ll see.

This week, Capello has expressed his desire to coach the British Olympic team in 2012, describing the opportunity as his ‘dream’. We can only assume with his limited grasp of English that by ‘dream’ he meant ‘waking nightmare’. The whole affair will be a disaster from start to finish. It’s hard enough to get one country to play to a decent standard, let alone four. I am also doubtful if the respective FA’s of England and Scotland will ever actually agree to the terms and conditions that will see the first coming together of the home nations for a competitive tournament. Capello has a significant rival in his bid to coach Team GB; a grimly visaged Scotsman who hangs around Manchester a lot. Alex Ferguson is also in the running, presumably so he can pick 11 Scottish players and stick two fingers up at the English as his swan song before retiring to a yacht in the Caribbean.

Whilst I am on the subject of the Olympics, it seems that staging a multi billion pound event smack bang in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the last one is finally beginning to induce some headaches. It has been confirmed that fewer new homes will be built on the Stratford site than originally planned, and the state of the art Media Centre will now be a not so state of the art ‘temporary’ structure, or portacabin. One can only assume that this downscaling will continue and gather momentum as time passes, although you can bet that the final bill will not drop with it. At this rate, we are potentially looking at staging the athletics on the playing fields at Lewisham College and the diving competition on a plank of wood nailed to Blackfriars Bridge.

Back at the FA, there is no obvious resonance of a recession, with a six-figure salary plus benefits awaiting the successful applicant at Soho Square. A wage befitting of the task at hand I would say. If the new CEO can drag English football out of the doldrums and put in place a mentality that leads all the way to the world cup final and the Olympic gold medal, I’d give him a blank cheque. And a knighthood.

New World Order?

2008-10-28T04:51:00.000-07:00

Karl indicates how many major
banking corporations this week alone
could have benefitted from having a
large grey beard.

I’m so glad that things are finally settling down and becoming normal again. There was, for a time, the pervading feeling of impending doom, that not even the politicians in the highest positions of authority knew how we as a developed world would pull together and see out this tumultuous time. But rest ye worried minds, for all is well. The world’s biggest superpower is due to implement a new regime, and will draft its unbridled genius and vision from either a corpse assisted by a crazed Alaskan armed with a hockey stick used for smashing the brains from polar bears, or a thin man with little experience but a smile that transcends his face, taking his financial advice from an unqualified, tax dodging plumber. Phew, that’s America sorted then.

And fret not either, for another major player, everyone’s favourite vodka swilling racists Russia, remains fronted by a man who is capable, if not liable, as his recent instructional video shows, to judo chop his way through the entire United Nations security council. Meanwhile, back home, British level headedness and calm resolve prevails, with the new head of the British armed forces doing the sensible thing in the current economic downturn, and pledging 30,000 fresh troops to various suicide missions across the globe whilst we devise a new sub zero graph to chart the demise of the FukTSE share index.

It would seem then, if I were to obey the countless posters in London’s subways and on boarded-up shops that the only realistic option left open to us in this current climate of disarray and uncertainness is to grow a beard and become a socialist. Fine, I like beards, and I hear the Marx look is very in right now. There is a problem however; the slight niggling drawback that Socialism could never work here in the UK in 2008.

If we were all at university, then it would work like a dream. It is in some way admirable that students are the only demographic that seem to actually want to change the world. I have regularly been accosted in the street by shabby politics students who, having entreated me to become a socialist and subsequently received my polite declination, have each launched into a tirade of righteous dogma and suggested that my decision is obviously based on my ignorance to their ideals and could not possibly be a result of my own independent thinking.

Their activism is largely due to youth, enthusiasm and a fresh perspective on the world, as well as having too much time on their hands, but the main reason for their relentless mission to alter the course of human civilisation lies in the fact that the majority have never stepped foot into the real world; that crushingly difficult, austere and soul destroying ocean that millions of us share, and in which it takes the maximum of effort just to maintain one’s heads above water. Spend a couple of years getting battered by its waves once the harbour wall of university has been removed, and one can be excused for getting less than feverishly excited about organising a revolution for a new world order.

Ironically, if these same politics student succeeded in their utterly futile mission, then life would probably be more pleasant for a large proportion of the population. Despite my cynicism, I would love to see a switch in western values with the introduction of a government attempting to break down class barriers and oversee the equal distribution of wealth for the people of Britain. Call it pessimism, pragmatism or just weary disbelief, but I can’t see it any anytime soon. Especially with the seemingly inevitable onset of a Conservative government to brighten the lives of everyone but the normal man. Still, stranger things have happened. Derby County won away from home the other week, for instance.

On a totally different note, I would like mention how wonderful I think it is for Guy Ritchie that he no longer has to take orders from the repressive and toothy old monster that has dogged him for the best part of a decade. It is no coincidence that the man has not been able to produce a decent movie since he married the cadaverous troll, as all the while he has had to endure the interminable embarrassment of seeing his elderly wife writhe around in a leotard on television with dancers whom she is old enough to have mothered in her late 30’s. It must also be hard to knuckle down to work when the other half, having ostensibly nipped out to get bread and milk, returns each week with another new child stolen from Africa. Get out Guy, get out, and whilst you deserve at least a few million quid for your troubles, you probably won’t get it, because you’re a man (and your wife is in league the devil).

Axe Factor?

2008-08-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

Simon adopts the default position after
advisors suggest he lowers mobile phone
voting fees for this year's X Factor

I envy Simon Cowell. The majority of Britain and America realise he is a power-crazed evil genius who truly only gives a shit about himself, and yet he still manages to front TV shows that pull in millions of viewers from both sides of the Atlantic on a regular basis. He is the totalitarian dictator of the phone-vote show format, responsible for millions of eyebrow raising telephone bills and despite his programmes being implicated (and eventually acquitted) in the fiasco that was the ITV phone-in scandal, his reputation has escaped relatively unscathed.

Cue the new series of X Factor then, and strap yourself in for a predictable and totally choreographed few months. We all remember last year’s winner, well, um, we all remember the winner from two years ago, one Leona Lewis. In her, Cowell finally found a contestant worthy of exploiting on the other side of the pond, rather than just dumping in it, and so we will probably not see Ms Lewis again for some time until she returns from America an emotional wreck with a cocaine habit. By which time, there will be a new one.

The first episode was the usual affair; the inevitable sob story of a woman who ‘wants this more than anything’, aiming to overcome the adversity of her terribly unfair upbringing in which she chose to have seventeen children. You could almost see the Pound signs in Simon’s eyes as this, lets face it, crack whore was given the opportunity to show how singing a few lines on TV is seen as an acceptable alternative to education and hard work when aiming to succeed in life in 2008. Then, there was the unbridled hilarity of two Welsh half-wits who stumbled their way through a Peter Andre song in the most excruciating way since Peter Andre. Like I said, the usual drivel.

The lucrative presenting role has been reprised by Dermot O’Leary, who, whilst being immeasurably more bearable and far less irritating than Kate Thornton, has some way to go before he masters the false sympathy for contestants and obsequiousness towards the judges that is required for the role. Annoyingly, he also insists on wobbling his head around like he is being controlled by Jim Henson. The other big change sees Cheryl Cole replacing Sharon Osbourne, to which I have no objection. You will not hear complaint from Ashley Cole either, who must presumably be overjoyed that he will not have to book a hotel room to conduct his affairs now the wife is out filming.

Over on the other side, the BBC’s latest attempt seems to be in full swing. If ‘Last Choir Standing’ were not the fourth of fifth incarnation of the Beeb’s ‘perform-vote-perform-for- survival’ reality format then it would surely be laughed off the airwaves. I was not a regular viewer of any of the other shows, and so I cannot fairly compare or contrast this one, but it works a hell of a lot better than it sounds.

Of the two presenters, Nick Knowles looks he longs to be back on a show about knocking down walls, whilst the ever smiling Myleene Klass has evidently just graduated from presenting school. The slightly odd pairing presides over a show in which a series of amateur choirs from around the country battle it out to become, you guessed it, ‘Last Choir Standing’. The name suggests that the disqualified are put to death in a gladiatorial manner, but my suggestion to the BBC that this may be a worthwhile addition to the post watershed results segment in subsequent reality shows has been sadly ignored.

This week, singing for survival were Bath Male Voice Choir and Revelation, a gospel choir from a paradoxically joyous and soulful part of East London. Their choice for the showdown was the gospel classic, ‘Love The One You’re With’; although I’ve leafed through my Bible and I can’t find the books of Crosby, Stills, Nash or Young anywhere. Despite this, it was enough to see off the boys from Bath in the judges’ opinion, although I do believe Russell Watson and the other two adjudicators were acting under duress following the projected costs of keeping the eventual losers in the competition. Not even the BBC can run to dressing 32 ageing tradesmen in new suits time after time, not to mention footing the hotel bills having ferried them up and down the M4 every week.

The BBC’s entertainment programming ideas may vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, but credit must go to their ability to think even a little bit innovatively. I thought the days of reality phone-in shows must have been nearing an end after last year’s tired X Factor format but, like an untreated genital wart, it has come back bigger and bolder than ever. As much as I hate to admit it, this is testament to Cowell’s canny ability to assess when a duck becomes a dead one. He proved this by axing Pop Idol and replacing it at just the right time with X Factor, and will doubtlessly do the same again once he has squeezed every last penny from the show, and when he judges his reputation to be waning. Channel 4 could use his vision, with Big Brother currently limping pathetically home in the ratings race. In fact, if it were a Greyhound, it would have long since been shot and tossed in the Thames.

There may be many (myself included) who are screaming out for a fresh approach to entertainment television, but for now it seems we must resign ourselves to at least another year’s onslaught from Cowell & Co, happily duping millions of overweight women into pausing from their takeaways long enough to pour their money down the telephone lines in voting for the biggest thing since the last big thing. What was last year’s winner called, anyway?

What's The Story (Olympic Glory)?

2008-08-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

The Tibetan Shot Put hopeful
demonstrates his technique ahead
of next week's Olympic event.

And so the Olympics are upon us again. It doesn’t seem like five minutes since the last one, but mankind’s largest cock measuring contest is back. This time, it is the turn of Beijing to spend a fortune for the privilege of housing a million foreigners for a month.

There have been doubts as to this vast industrial city’s suitability to host the games. The kayakers for instance, have been warned not to submerge themselves in the river unless they welcome the idea of glowing radioactive green, and the marathon runners have been preparing for the air quality with a strict regime of 20 Marlboro a day.

Niggles aside, China has really pushed the boat out for this year’s games, spending more than is conceivable on a stadium that is supposed to resemble a bird’s nest, and which unfortunately for them, has turned out to look just like a bird’s nest.

Much has been said in the run up to the games regarding China’s woeful human rights record, at home and abroad, and many politicians spoke hopefully after Beijing was awarded the games that we may see changes in the communist nation, with the softening of some of their policies and ideals now the world was looking on.

This was wishful thinking of the highest order, and as Amnesty international’s 2008 report shows, has done nothing to alter the behaviour from the ultra restrictive communist government towards freedom of speech and forced labour. No doubt on the surface it will be all smiles in Beijing during the course of the games, and it is doubtful whether despite the inevitable protesting, the Chinese silencing committee will be seen or heard with the world’s eyes fixed on the country; it would after all be a PR nightmare. As for the potential for unrest, one needs to look no further than the farcical torch rally to see the weight of opinion against Chinese human rights policy, and not even with their huge resources can the government replace the entire city with secret service men as seen alongside the flame procession.

As for the sports themselves, China will be hoping to do rather well. Like any communist state, the Chinese government holds its own country in massively high regard, and likes nothing more than revelling in the achievements of China on the world stage. And what achievements they are. Twenty years ago in Seoul, they took home just 29 medals, falling way short of the podium. By 2000, they were third with 59, and last time around in Athens, were pipped to the post only by the ever-omnipotent USA, who took home only 4 more golds than the Chinese. This year, they will be certainly hoping to keep the Americans on their chubby little toes.

Part of the reason for their success is obvious. If the world were a school playground, the Chinese team captain would have far more kids lined against the fence to pick for his team. To put this metaphor into some kind perspective, by comparison Britain would be left with the fat kid and the nerdy one with glasses.

However, sheer population does not automatically denote success. What you need is a system, and that’s one thing the Chinese are rather good at. You see there isn’t many sports that China has great tradition in. Given that re-educating Tibetans is not yet officially recognised as an event at the games, they are left with only a couple of historical specialities. Martial arts are the main one, for which the rest of the world turn up every four years for a total pasting, and the other for some bizarre reason is table tennis. So instead of the British approach; training up anyone who shows promise in their chosen discipline, the Chinese do it the other way round and find sports, however alien, and make people good at them. This explains the production line of freakishly talented (if in many ways totally abused) young gymnasts we have seen over the past few decades.

I read a news piece recently concerning the Chinese rowing team. The government were looking for a sport that had the maximum number of categories, (i.e potential medals) and decided that rowing was it. They set aside a pile of cash, hired one of Europe’s best coaches, picked out 10,000 men and women and put them in a camp for a year and hey presto, a world beating rowing team is born. A little soulless yes, but a winning formula nonetheless. This strategy has enraged the rowing world and put more than one nose out of joint in Henley-On-Thames. In fact, in a television interview recently Steve Redgrave, the sort of Olympic hero whose life you just know is an empty void since his retirement, said that it just wasn’t on that the Chinese rowing team had come from nowhere, and what’s more, they must probably all be on drugs anyway. Nothing like embracing new competition eh Steve?

As for team GB's chances, Redgrave will be happy to know that rowing is amongst our top sports, with experts predicting a gold medal or two despite the challenge from the potentially chemically enhanced Chinese robots he seems so concerned about. We also have a small boy hoping for diving success, which angers me somewhat, because when I was young the swimming pool staff never let me on the high board. He must have his own pool.

Elsewhere, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot by disqualifying our best sprinter, tennis’s Andy Murray will be hoping nobody good shows up so he can bag a medal and the badminton mixed doubles pair who claim they aren’t a couple, but everyone knows are at it, are aiming to go one better than the silver of four years ago. Sadly, there is no GB football team, and the absence of such a squad entering the games looks set to continue after the Scottish FA refused to participate, claiming their independence would suffer as a result. Hmm, I really think they have missed the point.

There is little doubt that Beijing will be a success, from a logistical point of view anyway. The IOC will be hoping for a peaceful few weeks, with sporting prowess taking the headlines, but the games may be remembered from a far more political standpoint. ‘One World, One Dream’ is the maxim under which the 2008 Olympics are being played. Quite whose world, and what dream are unclear, but one thing is for sure, if you are anywhere near Tibet or Darfur, it certainly isn’t yours.

Shiver Me Timbers...

2008-07-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

Jack felt he had been discriminated
against after his broadband provider
accused him of piracy.

When I think of pirates, my mind is transported to some far away ocean, in which sails a ship full of drunken men with eye patches, wooden legs and questionable attitudes towards women. Quite how, given their crews’ sensory and mobility impairments, these ships struck fear into other sea-going vessels is a mystery. Who knows, perhaps the parrots bore the brunt of the labour. What is not in doubt however, is the enduring legacy of such ships and their law-shy inhabitants. Piracy therefore, unlike most crimes, has been granted a legendary status, and its memory somehow seems to absolve its perpetrators of all wrong doing; namely the murder, rape and theft they were so fond of.

Why then, in today’s society, do we reserve the term of piracy with all its swashbuckling imagery, to describe some Japansese student copying music and movies, which he then sells down the local boozer? As far as I am concerned, this is a tame employment of the word. Yes, piracy is a serious issue, and as we are constantly reminded, is more or less destroying the entertainment industry with its impact growing exponentially each year. Despite this, I prefer to think of it as changing it, as opposed to destroying.

Of course, as everyone knows, the Internet has facilitated an alarming amount of piracy, and the illegal downloading of music and films is no longer the exclusive domain of hi-tech nerds operating empires from their parent’s loft. Within today’s Internet savvy youth culture, programs like LimeWire are commonplace, and most think nothing of downloading albums for free with the click of a mouse; I am guilty myself. Part of the problem, other than the ease of doing so, is that obtaining content in this way is not perceived by the majority as wrong. This is despite relentless attempts to convince us of the fact. Take cinema advertising for example, that likens the downloading or purchasing of pirate material to stealing a car or a handbag. ‘It’s not though, is it?’ is most people’s response.

This is partially due to the perception of those we are ‘stealing’ from. People do forget that the entertainment industry extends way beyond the artists or actors themselves, and some can see no further than the overpaid stars, believing their money can be more ethically spent. It is this Robin Hood mentality makes it much easier to justify the ‘theft’ of a movie or album. I spoke to a woman once who honestly thought she was helping Robbie Williams by choosing to illegally download his album rather than buy it. As a die-hard fan she was, in her twisted logic, cutting his profits in a bid to prevent him coming to a grizzly, Elvis-like end whilst eating cheeseburgers on a solid gold toilet in his LA mansion. For fear of her reaction, I stopped short of telling her that it is much, much too late to avert that particular inevitability.

Let us not forget though, that piracy has existed in some form for decades. Much of my childhood was spent happily sellotaping over the tabs on cassettes in order to copy my friend’s NOW 17, or recording songs directly to tape from the radio. Admittedly, before that vinyl was difficult to pirate, but that period saw the birth of illegal broadcasting with Radio Caroline taking to the seas in 1964. Much later, after CD’s has consigned the cassette tape (and annoyingly, most car stereos) to the dustbin, it became apparent that they could be copied cheaply and easily on any half decent PC, giving rise to the explosion in library attendance amongst the student population, raping and pillaging their CD collections in a manner faintly reminiscent of the original pirates, albeit with more government assistance and less work ethic.

The late nineties saw the beginning of the Internet generation, and piracy made a jump into the mainstream. Napster was the pioneer, enabling its members to ‘share’ files between themselves, and boasted 26 million users before it was shut down after a court injunction in 2001. Since that time, countless other sites have sprung up. Record companies have been accused of burying their heads in the sand when it comes to lost revenue through illegal downloads, and seem to be no closer to a resolution. Last week, Virgin announced that it was clamping down on file sharers, threatening to disconnect users from their Virgin Media service unless their illegal activities ceased. This worried precisely nobody, given that according to Virgin, no prosecutions will be made on the back of the investigation. Ironically, Virgin Media are currently introducing a new fibre optic broadband service which will mean increased download limits, and ensure that the very same pirates can access their loot much more quickly and easily than before.

With regards to music, the increase in pirate activity is forcing a change of tack within the industry. In certain cases, they are aiming to beat the pirates at their own game by offering free downloads, as seen with the recent cases of Coldplay and Radiohead, two of the biggest bands on the planet. Increased live performances and more frequent tours are becoming the norm as a result of the changing face of the music scene, and is becoming more and more important. For instance, there are more festivals this summer than ever before, as bands and artists look to claw back the lost profits from recordings to keep them in the lifestyles they have become accustomed. I often wonder whether if placed in today’s climate, the Beatles would have ceased touring as early in their career as they did.

The entertainment industry is resilient though, and whether it be through live shows, merchandise or public appearance, they will no doubt find other avenues in which to make their exorbitant sums of money. So do not fret; the age of the spoilt, overpaid pop star is far from over, and whether we like it or not, with today’s ubiquitous mass media, the likes of Winehouse and Spears will continue to haunt us whether we are stealing their albums or not...

Anyone For Tennis?

2008-06-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

Britain's new national tennis centre has
received a mixed response from players
and coaches alike

I ate a bowl of strawberries and cream this evening, which can only mean that Wimbledon has started. Or that Sainsbury’s had them on special offer. Either way, they were ok, but as is the case with all British fruit, they were just not as sweet or inviting as the continental stuff. The same is true of most of our tennis players; not that they are bitter (although I’m sure a lot of them are), but rather that they are just a little disappointing. I do not wish to write another article centred totally on the failings of British athletes, so I will pick on the ex-athletes. Like Tim Henman. The Prince of over-hype and under-achievement decided last year that he had perhaps put the British public through too much pain and chucked in the towel. It is exclusively within the domain of British tennis that any half decent player can hang up his boots, or plimsoles, and sit back, relax and to wait for the inevitable call from the BBC. There are so few successful pros that tennis on television simply must contain every single one of them. Or at least, that is the only way they can hope to justify the inclusion of ‘Tiger Tim’ on this year’s Wimbledon coverage. You could ring out more charm from a used sweat towel than from Henman and his strange, gormless smile. He promised before the tournament that he would prove to the nation that he possesses a sense of humour, although his insistence on entering Wimbledon each year with the hope of winning revealed this years ago.

My hope is that they will break him in gently by plonking him on some outside court to commentate on ball girl vs tennis ball machine on the ill-conceived ‘BBC interactive’ service, where it is poossible to simultaneously watch pictures of nine tennis courts with their rain covers on. When there is play, being given a choice in this way can be counter-intuitive; I remember last year being completely unable to choose between two live matches, flicking feverishly from one to the other until I had lost the plot of both and said bollocks to the whole thing, returning instinctively to the comforting default position on the sky box that shows non-stop Top Gear.

The great news this year is that they have finally shelled out for a new scoreboard on the centre court. It was long overdue, and must be a relief to its sponsors Rolex, who have been lucky to stay in business by associating with the local railway station standard of the previous one. I think the new colour display even has the facility to play back pictures of Cliff Richard singing in the rain, which bizzarely the BBC seem to find infinitely fascinating.

As for the sport itself, in recent years the men’s draw has been dominated by the world’s only famous Swiss man, with Roger Federer taking the honours in five consecutive tournaments. The final has been contested for the last two by the oxymoronically floppy haired yet ferocious Spaniard, Rafael Nadal, who has only relatively recently learnt how to play on grass, on account of his lack of practise due to the rain falling mainly on the plain in his native Spain. The women’s game on the other hand is harder to call, mainly because of the frightening quantity of super talented blonde girls with an ‘ic’ at the end of their names that are emerging from behind Europe’s old iron curtain.

And so to British hopes. Or hope. The ever petulant Andy Murray will be hoping to avoid injuring his nostril hair, little toe nail or whatever it was that kept him out of contention in the last tournament so he can be free to shout, swear and generally disgust his opponent into submission. Good luck to him I say. ‘Tiger Tim’ could have done with a bit of Murray’s Scottish beligerance in his playing career. The only emotion we got from him was the now famous clench fist motion he performed after a particularly crucial point, which always looked more like he was very constipated. The thing is, Andy Murray is actually quite good, and is only 21 so has some time before his career reaches its peak. This is in stark contrast to Henman, who didn’t so much peak as continue on a semi competent plateau, and was arguably prevented from climbing to the top of the metaphorical mountain by the constant gale force wind of public expectation that blew him back down again. Hopefully, unlike deluded football fans, tennis enthusiasts will have learnt not to pin such unrealistic hopes on our current number 1, and just let him get on with it.

Incidentally, Murray’s brother Jamie is rather good too, and actually won the Wimbledon mixed doubles title last year, although in my eyes doubles tennis doesn’t actually count. It’s tennis’s ‘special’ younger brother, with learning difficulties but a ‘real zest for life’.

The figures reveal for themselves how far behind the British lie in terms of competitive tennis players. France and Germany, two comparable countries in terms of affluence, population and climate, have 15 and 12 players respectively featuring in this year’s men’s draw, and Britain a measly 4. The same goes for the women, with only 5 due to turn up for a battering. Interestingly enough, I cannot name a single female British tennis player. Come back Sue Barker, all is forgiven.

The only conclusion that can be drawn is the lack of available coaching at grass roots level. Tennis has long been the domain of the upper middle classes, with club snobbery ensuring that cash, rather than talent, be the deciding factor in membership. It means simply that there is no talent without coaching, and no coaching without cash. As for tennis in schools, everyone knows that the courts only exist to provide a place to conduct fire drills, and from memory, rarely even have nets.

Funding is a real problem too. Every time I see British athletes fail at something, my mind is cast back to a wonderful segment of a documentary that was aired just before the last Olympic games. It charted the progress of two similar athletes, both swimmers. One was from the UK and the other from Australia, and in a similar situation to Rocky IV, the Australian had wires protruding from him and was plugged into about five beeping machines whilst he trained in a specially climate controlled glass box. Whilst his every movement was being charted by a computer to highlight any minute areas for improvement that might shave a thousandth off his personal best, our guy was in a public pool in Luton with his trainer pulling along what looked like a fishing lure on some wire through the water for him to chase. This, the Olympic hopeful revealed, was the full extent of government funding for the swimming team.

Given that we are hosting the games in the not too distant future, should we not throw some cash behind finding and training the very best athletes? Not necessarily becuase we want to win everything like the Americans, but instead because it is almost guaranteed that in 2012, London’s infrastructure, transport system, crime levels and cost of living will be embarrassment enough, without our athletes showing us up further...

And now for the Sport...

2008-06-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

During the 70's, Des managed to juggle
his work as both sports presenter and
porn star quite respectably.

Imagine yourself in B&Q looking for paint. If you didn’t see the colour you wanted, you would go and see the man in the apron behind the paint desk. He would know more than is healthy on the subject, and you would leave satisfied with your choice of elaborately named colour. Suppose that the man behind the paint counter was not in fact a paint expert, but had been drafted in from the gardening section and couldn’t tell his Cumulo-Nimbus White from his Sratus grey. You would probably feel a little inconvenienced. Now suppose you learnt that potted plant man was not simply covering for his friend whilst he attended a paint-related emergency, but was a permanent fixture behind that counter and would not be replaced. In that instance, you may want to tell him where to stick his paintbrush and go to Homebase instead. I know I would.

This is exactly how I feel with BBC sport coverage. A perfect case in point occurred a couple of weeks ago, when BBC2’s live coverage of the PGA golf championship was anchored by none other than everyone’s favourite crisp-eating goal poacher, Gary Lineker. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Lineker, he is a fine presenter and professional to boot. MOTD is just not the same when he is absent, though admittedly that could have something to do with his stand-in Ray Stubbs, who would be more at home presenting the World Darts championship with a beer in his hand every week. But surely Lineker is the football guy right? Wrong. For some reason, the Beeb consider Leicester’s silver fox to have reached a plateau in his career, where he now transcends football and can be used generically. This as may be, but it did not stop my mother, with whom I watched the golf coverage, uttering his name most incredulously as the program was introduced. The Lineker rule also applies to Sue Barker, who has risen to a level that (thankfully for Sue) seeks to erase the memory of her many years spent in tennis-playing mediocrity.

The BBC has a particular penchant for these sport-hopping impostors, and some are frankly ridiculous. For instance, I laughed out loud when I saw a red-faced John Parrot jogging over Tower Bridge during the London Marathon, struggling to keep up with the man dressed as a giant vegetable that he was interviewing. I am dubious as to whether he has run 26 miles in his life, never mind an afternoon. Similarly incongruous is the sight of half the 1992 British Olympic team wandering around for the BBC with microphones at any given sporting event and interviewing anything that moves. What next, the woman from the racing show presenting Crufts? Oh no, wait…

Specialist, ex-professional sports star presenters are all very well and good, but they must be confined to their respective field of play. The problem is that the BBC lacks a pool of quality, multi purpose presenters. You could draft them in from other genres, but it wouldn’t work. Richard Hammond cannot present everything on television after all, and I wouldn’t trust Graham Norton anywhere near a program involving the word balls. Titchmarsh would make things difficult by turning the six yard line or fairway into a herbacious border, and Adrian Chiles is problematic too; not even the most serious and tactical sports are beyond his relentless, sarcastic dismantling.

Oh, how they miss Steve Ryder with his beautiful mane of greying blond and a manner slicker than James Bond, who can now be seen weekly on ITV delivering his smooth, calm and English-gentleman approach to the Formula 1 championship. I have fond memories of his days on Grandstand, holding links together like the exquisitely groomed glue that he is. It is no wonder Grandstand was canned not long after his desertion to ‘the other side’.

My suggestion is for the BBC to run a major reality show in a similar style to ‘I’d Do anything’, dedicated to finding the next great sports presenter. It would be named after and adjudicated by the godfather of British sporting broadcast himself, with Des taking Lloyd Webber’s seat as the Beeb take contestants and begin to ‘Lynam Up’. You saw it here first…….

Exclusive: 'USA fined for Martian littering '

2008-05-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

Detailed plans of Britain's next voyage

into space as revealed yesterday. It is hoped

that the 'chihuahua' will transport Britons

to Mars by the year 2020.

Hooray! We’ve landed on Mars! When I say we, I mean the Americans. And when I say landed, I mean guided an unmanned and heavily laden tea tray with legs on to the surface. The first pictures from the Phoenix scout craft were beamed back on Monday, showing in crystal clarity the terrain of our closest neighbour to be just as rocky, dusty and dull as many expected. This did not curtail the jubilant scenes from Arizona, with the mission’s staff clearly relieved that they still had a job after the craft was given a 50/50 chance of surviving the landing. ‘Welcome to Mars’ said NASA’s Mars chief Fuk Li, who is presumably overjoyed that this successful phase will ensure he is remembered for something other than his hilarious name.

All this is in stark contrast to the events of 2003, when Britain’s own version of the Phoenix, the pathetically named ‘Beagle’, was destroyed entering the Martian atmosphere, leading to misery inside the broom cupboard in the basement of a University building that doubled as mission control. Given that funding for the British Space Program is less than for the Eurovision song contest (at which we are equally as hopeless), I am dubious that it got that far, and am sure that even if our three-legged Beagle did make it out of the Earth’s atmosphere as claimed, it would have probably hit the Moon by accident.

Space travel just isn’t our thing. Whilst the other world superpowers were getting busy with the space race and putting men on the Moon, we were working on mop-top beat pop and winning the World Cup. Far more worthwhile, as the Beatles sold more records than NASA could ever hope to, and there is still a chance Paul or Ringo might get into orbit. Space exploration in Britain is treated as a bit of a joke; a few mad scientists with vain hopes of floating around in zero gravity. Its place in the media is reserved for the ‘and finally’ segments on the local news, where wannabe astronauts are seen launching rockets ‘into space’ from a quiet spot on Clapham Common. Britain should gracefully bow out of the space race. After all, it’s only another competition for us to potentially lose, or at best crash out in the quarter-finals.

For all its bells and whistles, from what I can ascertain, the Phoenix scout cannot actually do very much. It has an arm, with which it intends to dig down to reach a layer of permafrost, but may not be able to tell us a great deal once it has done so. Apparently, though the whole mission is geared around the ancient ‘life on Mars’ hypothesis, the Phoenix does not have the equipment on board to test for existing or past life. It is primarily concerned with finding ice just below the surface. Given that aerial probes have long since confirmed the existence of ice on the red planet, it seems that the half-billion Dollar Phoenix will do little more than to confirm that it is indeed frozen water.

Experts will argue that there is much more to it, and perhaps there is, but the pragmatic reality of space exploration has the unfortunate drawback of playing second fiddle to Science Fiction, which has given us far more excitement over the years than simply sticking a metal finger into the red rock of Mars, and is way more fun. It won’t be truly captivating for the public until we send someone there in person. I have a diary opening next week so will volunteer. Who knows though, perhaps in 200 years time, we’ll all be living the Mars dream. Elton John once sang ‘Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids’, but I am not so sure; I hear there is a lot less knife crime…

Toffs and Trollies

2008-05-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

'Does one know the way to John Lewis?'

A little while ago, my local Sainsbury’s closed temporarily for refurbishment in order to rearrange the store to resemble Jamie Oliver’s face. Instead, I was forced to go to ASDA. If you ever need to feel a little better about the state of your life, I suggest you visit. The trolleys may have minds of their own, but the check out staff for the most part do not, and as for the clientele, they are less ASDA and more ASBO. It was cheap mind you, and I felt strangely compelled to pat my back pocket accordingly as I walked back to my car. I also learned that ‘George at ASDA’ was not in fact a helpful man behind the cheese counter, but the designer tasked with dressing the nation’s council estates.

I was reminded of this excursion recently when I heard that ASDA held the second biggest share of the UK grocery shopping market. They are overshadowed only by TESCO, whose titan-like grip on British (and increasingly world) shopping poses as big a threat to our planet as Climate Change. In fact, environmental and economic experts estimate that by 2100, rising sea levels will have covered 80% of the Earth’s landmass, and the remaining 20% will be covered in nothing but TESCO express stores.

This got me thinking. Assuming the lower paid, working classes of this country are reflected in the demographic seen at ASDA, then this comprises a huge proportion (17% to be precise) of potential voters in the next general election. Class has been put in the spotlight of late with Labour’s attempt to paint the Tories as ‘Toffs’, planting two activists in Top hats and tails during the much publicised run up to the Crewe & Nantwich by election.

Also in the news has been the resurgence of the debate over MP’s expenses, which, entirely paid for by the taxpayer, can amount to twice the salary of each MP and include furnishings for their second homes in London. To standardise these expenses and justify all the gold-plated kitchen sinks in Westminster, a list has been compiled using prices from John Lewis, the department store that also operates Waitrose. This is hardly a reflection of everyday British retail, and ensures that unlike most of the population, MP’s can enjoy the finer things in life. As such, whilst the Prime Minister reclines in his John Lewis hot tub, he should think twice about throwing accusations of ‘Toff’ at other parties and takes a moment to consider that many ‘ordinary people’ might consider his party to lead a privileged existence too.

There does of course exist one obvious solution. In an effort to help level the playing field, MP’s expenses should from now on be calculated against prices at ASDA……

'Tis the (end of) Season'

2008-05-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

Derby County celebrate their first ever
Premier League title in an alternative
reality at Pride Park on Sunday

And so the curtain goes down on another Premier League season. In an afternoon totally orchestrated by Sky TV, kick off at the JJB stadium was delayed in order that simultaneous split screen pictures from Stamford Bridge could be beamed to every Manchester United fan in the Home Counties and beyond. In the studio, dozens of possible permutations were enthusiastically hypothesised. Jamie Redknapp was particularly buzzing, although he is still new to punditry and will have to endure a few 0-0 draws on dreary Monday evenings in Middlesborough before he becomes lobotomised like some of the rest. Ray Wilkins, who looks more and more like a potato every time I see him, is a good example of this.

It was put to Wigan boss Steve Bruce before the deciding game that some had questioned his allegiances, and that his managerial integrity was in question. The three-time title winning Manchester United captain and ingratiating friend of Alex Ferguson, with an obviously burning desire to some day return to Old Trafford, was of course quick to dismiss these rumours. The real question of his managerial credentials should have been why, as a defender himself, he still employs the stumbling calamity that is Titus Bramble

All Chelsea could do to prompt a frantic dash with the trophy down the M6 was to score a goal or two at home to Bolton, something that pretty much everyone else had achieved at some point in the season. A Manchester United win would see a second successive title for Alex Ferguson’s men, and so any impartial viewers’ hopes of a nail biting finish rested with Wigan putting a stop to United’s dominance. To their credit they gave it a good go, they defended sternly and Heskey came close to scoring on two occasions in the second half. The afternoon belonged to the defending champions however, with a penalty in the first half converted by Ronaldo, whose behaviour was more toddler-like than usual, followed by a strike from none other than Ryan Giggs, who secured his tenth league winners medal with the club fifteen minutes from time and nearly caused Fergie to choke on his gum with excitement.

Meanwhile in West London, the news filtering through from Wigan gave Stamford Bridge an atmosphere akin to a funeral, and was compounded when Bolton equalised in injury time. Indeed a funeral march may have been an apt choice as some of the Chelsea players left the field, a chance for the fans to pay their last respects to the likely departure of Lampard, Shevchenko and possibly Drogba in the summer.

At the bottom of the table, Fulham continued their impressive run of form to ensure Premiership survival, beating Portsmouth away from home. Victory for the West London club resulted in heartbreak for Reading and Birmingham however, whose valiant efforts saw them both score four and win their respective games only to be swallowed up by the relegation quagmire that drowned Derby sometime back in September.

Elsewhere, as a two fingered salute to Thaksin Shinawatra, owner of Manchester City, Sven guided his team to an impressive 8-1 defeat in what is likely to be his final game in charge, and with so little to play for, with their holidays imminent, Liverpool’s match with Spurs was presumably played out in Flip flops.

Everton secured fifth place to ensure European football next season with Yakubu proving himself quite the opposite to the total waste of money and (considerable) space his acquisition seemed to spell.

Cue the summer break then, when the tabloids crank up the rumour mill with wild transfer speculation. I am told, for instance, that Elvis has just signed for West Ham.
Elsewhere, Newcastle boss Kevin Keegan plans to strengthen his squad by selling everyone he owns, apart from Michael Owen.

Finally, I would like to propose a moment of reflection for Derby County. An epitaph of their catastrophic season was beautifully delivered via text message upon the final whistle to my brother from his friend at Pride Park. It read simply ‘Crap.’

MyFace, Spacebook...

2008-05-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

An article i wrote for a website some time ago....

//Accept friend invitation?//

26/11/07

Facebook, Bebo, Myspace. What do these words say to you? Some will have no idea, and probably guess that they are pop groups vying for this years Christmas number 1 spot. For the majority of people in the 15-40 demographic however, they are as common in daily vocabulary in the same way as words like ‘Big Mac, ipod and tomtom.”

For those at the back, the aforementioned are websites. Social networking sites to be more precise. They were designed with the sole intention of linking people together more easily and efficiently. The idea is pretty simple; first set up an account (your profile). This is done by answering a million questions from what music you like to whether you would prefer to sleep with Brad Pitt or Jonny Depp. You then upload a photo, and search for some ‘friends’.

This is where it becomes interesting. Most of us could probably write our list of real friends on the back of a fag packet. I mean, the word friend suggests someone you ring up on a daily basis, someone you meet with at the pub/gym/church/S&M club, right? Wrong. If you give yourself over to the online dark side, then prepare to completely change the way you operate. Even with casual use, a slightly geeky thirty something with no real friendship group in real life, can notch up a good 60 friends within a month using one of these sites. He enters the e-mail address of his one drinking buddy, whose list contains another 5 people he went to school with. A click of the mouse here and there and e-presto, he has 7 friends. These people in turn have mutual acquaintances and before you know it, our once greasy recluse seems at first glance to be more popular than the Pope.

Sites such as Facebook can be both a blessing and a curse. A sceptical friend of mine remarked how invasive she felt the site was. This is all too true. When I first joined up, I reviewed my page and began realising the extent to which my life could become a published article. I don’t necessarily want everyone I have ever known knowing about everything I do from here on in. I’m not saying I lead a double life like Batman or Clark Kent, but we all have a past. The main problem is that these sites bring our past, present and sometimes future colliding together in one potential online pile up. One comment typed out of turn, and before long, the worldwide rumour web starts spinning.

You hear more and more of marriages and friendships being destroyed through malicious web untruths, and while I know gossipers have always existed, they have now been given an extension of the tongue with a boundless audience. One badly timed post on someone’s profile can effectively ruin him or her. There are stories about potential employees’ online behaviours being under surveillance so as employers can ascertain whether or not their new receptionist is or ever has been a hooker.

I totally disagree with the notion that you can suss out any given human being on the strength of their Facebook page. For one thing, their comments may not be a true reflection of what they think, but instead a contrived ploy to either glorify themselves or to put others down. We must remember that unlike audible conversation, typed comments can be carefully mulled over for hours before utterance, and are immortalised in digital ink rather than the comparitively forgiving timescale of sound waves. Secondly, the list of one’s friends should be taken with a pinch of salt too. Whilst I have very few contacts on my profile that I would not gladly go for a drink with at a moment’s notice, others accumulate friends they don’t even know faster than their laptops accrue viruses.

Another thing that gets my goat is those who actively seek a person’s ‘friendship’, acquire it, and then never get in contact. I mean, you wouldn’t introduce yourself to someone at a bar, shake their hand, and then blatantly ignore them having sat at their table would you? In my mind, people should stop hiding behind the online shroud, and treat socialising online the same as they would in the dying habitat of the real world. Only last week, I had a friendship request from a guy I have not seen since school, and even then I barely knew him. Despite him actively seeking my approval, I saw him days later in the local pub. I recognised him from his picture, as did he with me, but he avoided my eye contact and did not even approach me. Needless to say, I wimped out royally, accepted his request for fear of being deemed rude, and shall probably never speak to him; online or otherwise. So much for the increased ease and simplicity of social networking. It was much less confusing when it all took place down the pub….

Handbags and Gladrags

2008-05-12T11:52:00.001-07:00

I have literally just set up this blog page so the first few posts may be a few weeks old or possibly longer as they have just been sitting burning a hole in my hard drive!

2/5/08
After Sir Alan Sugar’s tumultuous reign at Spurs, he remarked that all footballers were ‘scum’, and that most of them would probably be in prison were it not for the sport. An extreme view perhaps, but I certainly agree with the sentiment.

I am writing this with last week’s farcical scenes from Stamford Bridge fresh in my mind. There are of course farcical scenes emanating from Stamford Bridge and every other Premier League ground on a weekly basis, but this week’s winner goes to the visiting Genii of Manchester United, and their two-man vigilante gang of Ferdinand and Evra.

Firstly, after being substituted, Rio childishly lashed out with his foot at a wall that was cleverly disguised as a woman, in a manner about as threatening as a Derby striker. The wave of ‘ultra violence’ then continued post match, when for reasons unknown but seemingly inherent to French footballers, Patrice Evra launched himself at a ‘civilian’, who, considering his employment as a pitch side security guide, would have probably knocked him out had the fight not been split up (or exacerbated? It is not clear) by a mob of United players and coaching staff. And the reason for this pathetic behaviour? Yes, United had lost. It is precisely how I myself would have acted, had I been six years old and defeated at Tiddly winks by my brother. The only difference here, apart from that Tiddly Winks is a game of immeasurably more skill and finesse, is that we are not talking about children.
Fully-grown men’s acting in this way is disgraceful, and when coupled with the iconic status they hold to the nation’s young it becomes completely indefensible.

Professional footballer. Analyse the term. They play football, and by definition they are paid for it. It is their profession, and automatically demands a degree of professionalism right? Wrong. In the same way rock stars in the 70’s were plied by the record companies with as many drugs and women as needed to keep them sated, footballers are so heavily mollycoddled; surrounded by cars, Gucci sunglasses and Girls Aloud members to the extent where they feel immortal and certainly not subject to the same rules and regulations that govern the rest of us. I realise I may sound a little jealous (I concede I have a soft spot for Ferraris) but it angers me that this particular demographic are not reprimanded heavily enough for their habitual displays of petulance.

Let me put it in this way. I am a successful solicitor, I work a defence case, my client is found guilty, I smash up the bench and call the judge a c*nt. Consequently, I lose my job, my wife, my friends and my licence to practise law. Rightly so.

I am a Premier League footballer, I get riled by the smug defender whose leg I tripped over (deliberately), I stamp on his legs to gain retribution, I call the referee a c*nt, I receive a yellow card, I finish the game, get fined a morning’s wages (£4000) and go home to my adoring model wife. Hardly seems fair does it?

A case in point; though the incident was uniformly condemned, Eric Cantona received a mere one season ban for his attack on a fan at Selhurst Park. To put it into context, if a plumber attacked his customer in this way, it would probably have carried a five-year jail sentence as assault.

The exorbitant wages paid to players and the comparatively low fines for misbehaviour are also instrumental in promoting this behaviour amongst these young men. If I had the chance to punch a particular bloke from my office knowing full well that the most I would receive would be a ticking off and a 50 quid fine, I would take it, and probably every week.

The intrinsic ego of the modern day footballer must be reigned in. The salaries must begin to be capped worldwide by FIFA, and referees and managers must take a harder line with offenders who persist with childish behaviour similar to what we saw at Chelsea last week.,. Professional football needs to start becoming exactly that, before it descends even further into pathetic childish pantomime.

So, given his contempt for the game, perhaps the FA should hire Sir Alan to issue an ultimatum; behave or ‘you’re fired’.

Pete Grant