I remember the extraordinary final of the 1985 World Snooker Championship, and the screams of delight echoing around the neighbourhood when Dennis Taylor finally potted that last black ball. It wasn’t that people disliked Steve Davis per se, simply that anyone who challenged his hegemony at the time acquired automatic plucky underdog status.
Plenty of other folk remember it as well, it seems, to the extent that the whole final frame is being restaged as a live event, a simulacrum of a match, a bit like one of those re-enactments of Civil War battles, but with cues replacing pikestaffs. It’ll be a lot of nostalgic fun, but what made the original event really exciting – as with any sporting event – was the tension, the jeopardy, the fact that nobody, including those pacing round the table, knew what was going to happen next, how the whole thing was going to end, who was going to lift the silverware and who was going to look rueful on the periphery. Short of tweaking reality so that Davis wins, I’m not quite sure how they can bring that back.
In 20 years’ time, will athletes be fencing and diving and underclad-volleyballing in near-empty stadia, accompanied only by the tap-tap-tap of a few accredited live tweeters?
The Times runs a regular Q&A column called My Culture Fix, in which people are asked to offer up their favourite books, films, music and so on. And this week we are welcomed into the soul of Bradley Wiggins, the celebrated cyclist.
Things get interesting at the very start when he declares – not “admits” or “confesses” because he doesn’t appear to be embarrassed about it – that he doesn’t really read books. But it’s his response to the next question, when he’s asked to identify his favourite play or playwright, that really sets the agenda: “No”. In its own way, it’s magnificent, a brutal shutting down of an entire art form, a refusal to let the merest whiff of greasepaint come anywhere near his nostrils.
But he does like Only Fools and Horses.
PS: That said, if you want to hear someone talking about his own cultural favourites intelligently and sensitively, but without getting too technical or highfalutin’, you could do much worse than listen to Derren Brown on yesterday’s Desert Island Discs.
And it’s the Winter Olympics, when we suddenly become experts on the strangest sub-zero pastimes, and then forget about them for another four years. This time round I’m particularly fascinated by the skeleton, but that may be down to my youthful obsession with 1930s horror movies.
Lewis Hamilton, a man who drives cars very fast, has written a poem dedicated to the memory of Princess Diana, a woman who died in a car that was was being driven very fast (but not, it must be said, by Mr Hamilton).
Englands Rose The day we lost our Nations Rose Tears we cried like rivers flowed, The earth stood still As we laid her to rest, A day you & I Will never forget The people's princess Who came to see, The love from a Country We'd hope she'd lead, Englands beauty Captured in one sweet soul, Carried the torch God rest her soul, With the gift she had She'd light up the way, With a smile to show us a brighter day, Hearts still full of the love she gave, 20 years since she laid in her grave There will never be another like you, Now a shinning star in the midnight sky I will always remember you, Princess Diana As our sweet nations Rose🌹
It’s not terribly good, is it? I mean, even if he’d taken the trouble to sort out the punctuation and spelling, and find some better rhymes, and learn a bit about scansion, it would still be fairly mundane. But, hey, what do I know? Many people appear to have liked it. “Beautiful” is a very common response. “Heartfelt” as well. And, in one case, “I can’t wait to call me nan later. Read her this poem. God is great.” Some are even prompted to respond in kind:
A rose, you never used your thorns, the ones you loved abandoned you, your angel face made hearts so warm, you helped the sick... but who helped you?
wow your just too easy to please, now go read a John Keats poem , and see if Lewis 's poem still ranks with you!!! Yeah it probably would!
suggests simonnoble389. But sofiashinas shoots back:
You can't compare Lewis to Keats, apples and oranges. One is a champion race car driver, another is a brilliant poet. Either way Lewis's homage to Diana goes straight through my heart ❤️ and bring tears to my eyes .. he obviously loves her spirit as most of us did and still do.
Of course, Sofia is setting up a false dichotomy here; one can be “a brilliant poet” and something else as well. TS Eliot worked in a bank; Wallace Stevens sold insurance. Keats himself was a doctor. There’s nothing to say Lewis Hamilton can’t be a champion driver *and* a brilliant poet as well. I mean, his homage goes straight through Sofia’s heart and that’s what matters.
My own response to Mr Hamilton’s efforts was simple and, I hope, sincere.
I’m profoundly uninterested in motor sport, and also very wary of investing too much symbolic significance into silly little moments, but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable about Lewis Hamilton’s champagne celebrations following the Chinese Grand Prix. It’s long been pretty obvious what the uncorking and spraying of the fizz represents but we don’t need to delve too deeply into the semiotics of porn tropes to decide that there’s a big difference between a general splurging in the rough direction of the watching fans (who apparently rather like the experience) and firing it into a specific woman’s head (and she clearly didn’t).
Talking of wankers and cars, apparently the very notion that A WOMAN, not to mention A LESBIAN WOMAN might take the place of Jeremy Clarkson in Top Gear has prompted some of his halfwit catamites into wishing said woman might burn to death. Look, I’m not arguing that a deep and intimate fascination for all things automotive correlates with being a socially inept thug but, yes, well, I am really.
To be fair, though, just to prove that such levels of abject idiocy are not confined to people with penises: Jon Ronson is getting grief for a line about rape in his new book that might be misconstrued — despite the fact he removed it from the published edition, lest it be misconstrued. You know what? I need a drink.
The bizarre tale of the college football star Manti Te’o and his non-existent, non-dead girlfriend clearly says something about modern society but I’m not entirely sure what. We’ve got the media’s demented desire to create narratives and
backstories for celebrities, which means that it is no longer enough to
be good at football or acting or economics; the modern sleb has to
embody some sort of wider narrative as well. And of course there’s also the plausibility of the virtual world, that ensures solid relationships, love even, can develop without the mediation of physical presence (meatspace, as I still like to call it).
I only really began to think about this sort of thing when I started blogging, at which point I realised that relationships of a sort could be formed from ones and zeroes and words and ideas. In reality of course, this was nothing new; there have been epistolary relationships for hundreds of years, but they lacked the immediacy of comment boxes and messaging and e-mail. And then, when I discovered how easy it was to track the numbers of people coming to my blog, and where in the world they were based and which pages they liked and what time of day they were reading, it humanised the process.
Until of course I realised that great many of these apparent eyeballs were in fact spammers and bots and various long-leggedy digital beasties; and that many blogs, begun amid the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the mid-Noughties, had also been taken over by sellers of Viagra and Ugg boots. What once felt like human dialectic, action and reaction and interaction, had become a matter of machines talking to machines, like a Turing test run amok. Which brings things back to Manti Te’o; we know that his girlfriend doesn’t/didn’t exist, but how do we know that Manti himself isn’t entirely a fabrication of the media; two unrealities, cuddling up in a fake but beautiful romance?
Having been away from London for the whole summer, I feel a little disconnected from the all-pervading jubilation that seems to have seized the city. Not that I didn’t love the opening ceremony and punch the air over Mo Farah’s triumphs and I’ve even grinned a wee bit at the non-Olympic excitement that will inevitably get folded into the cake mix of memory, such as Andy Murray’s nailbiter a few hours ago. (I bet when Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France, he thought “Well, that’s the BBC Sports Personality of the Year wrapped up.” Now he may not even get a nomination.)
And I did notice this vignette from the Paralympics, in which the Brazilian sprinter Yohansson Nascimento pulled up injured but insisted on crossing the line. Of course, Lu Xiang did much the same thing a few weeks before in the 110m hurdles; and older readers will recall Derek Redmond being helped towards the finish by his dad in 1992, a clip that always makes me well up.
Now, I’m not a professional athlete, so I’ve no idea what it feels like to have all your dreams dashed in a split-second, all that training gone to dust, your body turning round and biting you on your/its own arse. What are they setting out to prove by staggering, stumbling, falling over the line? We know that they can cover the distance. And we know that they’re injured, so we understand why they haven’t won. In the depths of their misery and agony, maybe they think, “At least if I finish I’ll make it onto the feelgood clips at the end of the tournament, when they play the Chariots of Fire music.”
And it’s only in race events, isn’t it? After Murray won the US Open, I bet Djokovic didn’t knock a few more balls over the net, just to prove he could.
PS: You are reading my Infinite Jest blog, aren’t you? It’s jolly good, you know. And not as long as the book. Yet.
I’ve just realised that in the midst of the most spectacular sporting event to grace my native land since they cancelled We Are The Champions, I’ve written three blog posts about the opening ceremony and precisely none about the actually running and jumping and throwing and all that malarkey. You see, when healthy lads of my age were glued to Grandstand and World of Sport, or out in the park trying to emulate Kevin Keegan or Brendan Foster, I’d be stuck in my bedroom using the continuous paper my dad brought back from work to recreate in prose form the dystopic sci-fi that dominated my imagination and TV viewing.
So while I have the deepest respect and admiration for plucky Victoria Pendleton and her success in the keirin yesterday, I have to admit that to me, this is not so much a sport, more a combination of
Well, the Olympics have already started, with comedy flag mishaps and racist tweets aplenty, but at the same time they haven’t started, because the opening ceremony hasn’t happened yet. Apparently Schrödinger’s Cat has managed to sponsor the bloody thing without anyone noticing.
Actually, ignore that. Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony has happened, but it was only a trial run and everyone who was present has been put on spoiler alert, encouraged to keep schtumm by the slightly emetic Twitter hashtag #savethesurprise. One wonders why there was all that trouble about G4S security guards not turning up; the terrorist threat could be neutralised at a stroke with a hashtag along the lines of #pleasedontblowusup.
Well, this isn’t Twitter. Apparently, what Boyle has done is to remake his first and best film, Shallow Grave, with Sebastian Coe, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt finding that their new flatmate George Osborne has died of acute self-awareness, stealing his suitcase full of cash and using it to rebuild a replica of the Millennium Dome which turns out in fact to be a Ron Mueck sculpture of the Duke of Edinburgh’s inflamed bladder, stuffed with sheep and WAGs and Morris dancers, all of whom perish horribly to the strains of the theme song from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. As the only-slightly-racist Land of Hope and Glory bit fades away, all that’s left amidst the carnage is Princess Beatrice, dressed in nothing but that bloody hat and a single fake Burberry sock, attempting to recite the words “They think it’s all over... it is now!” but failing, again and again, forever.
The news that the North Korean barmy army is in fact made up of Chinese actors, and that the Chinese are entirely open about the fact, shouldn’t really surprise us, especially after the gloriously brazen stage management of the Beijing Olympics. But it does raise the question of what purpose the fans – the ones who actually show up to the World Cup stadiums – actually serve.
Clearly, at this exalted level at least, the revenue from ticket sales is pretty much negligible when compared with TV and sponsorship money. Look at the case of the 36 orange-clad lovelies who were ejected from the Netherlands-Denmark match; the objection was that they appeared to be indulging in a spot of ambush marketing on behalf of a beer brand that wasn’t one of FIFA’s approved ‘partners’. The fact that they got in thanks to Robbie Earle’s ticket allocation seems to have been little more than a minor irritation to the tournament’s organisers, and it was down to his employers at ITV to discipline him. Surely we can infer from this that FIFA is more concerned about upsetting Budweiser than any legitimate Dutch or Danish fans who couldn’t get in?
And yet, at one level, FIFA needs fans at the grounds. They provide the atmosphere, the noise, the excitement that enhances what has, for the most part, been a pretty uninspiring tournament so far. And the TV viewers tend to agree; they refuse to dampen those vuvuzelas with the mute button, not because they’ll miss the inanities of the commentators (see here for a particularly savage indictment of the sheer crapness of TV pundits) but because they feel there’s something weirdly sterile about watching millionaires playing badly in silence.
This doesn’t just apply to sporting events, of course. With a few exceptions, most comedy and game shows on TV and radio are still recorded in front of a live audience; supposedly, it makes the armchair viewer feel more involved in what’s going in the studio. And yet, anybody who’s been in the studio while one of these programmes is made knows that the experience can be deeply frustrating and tedious, with constant glitches, hold-ups and retakes. The most enjoyable bit is often the warm-up person who’s sent out to distract the punters from thoughts of mutiny during these pauses; and the TV audience doesn’t know he even exists. Moreover, if the show being made isn’t particularly established or popular, it’s quite feasible that a large chunk of the audience has no idea what it’s about or who’s involved until they’ve taken their seats. Several American sitcoms used to be prefaced with the boast that they were “recorded in front of a live audience” because that reassured TV viewers that they weren’t listening to canned laughter. But the live audience is prompted and chivvied and prodded to give the desired response; and if they don’t come up with the goods, the producer can always tweak the recording afterwards, to make them sound more enthusiastic than they really were.
Which takes us back to those TV viewers, who almost feel as if they’re there because of the ooh-ing and aah-ing and paaaaaaaaaaarp-ing coming from the flatscreen. But if they know that a good proportion of the noise comes, not from diehard supporters of the teams involved, but from actors hired by the Chinese authorities, or models hired by a Dutch brewery, or friends of friends of a bloke who used to play for Port Vale, will they still want to play along?
I just watched two matches with the sound off. OK, now for the oil spill, then the economy.
PS: Nice piece by Daniel Trilling in the New Statesman, comparing the maligned plastic bugles with some rather more respectable uses of drone, including Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris. (Loyal fans might recall that in Chapter 11 of my OK Computer book, I point out that the string arrangement for ‘Climbing Up The Walls’, in all its waspy, unnverving magnificence, was inspired by Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), which was also sampled on ‘You Love Us’ by the Manic Street Preachers.) But if vuvuzelas are appropriated by the musical avant garde – I can see Ornette Coleman getting into them, for example – will the armchair grouches stop complaining?
PPS: And more on the subject from the excellent Robin Tomens.
I’m worried by Robert Dee’s attempt to sue the Daily Telegraph for identifying him as the world’s worst tennis professional. His argument seems to be based on three key points: that there is a Guatemalan player who is just as crap; that he couldn’t have been crap in 2008, because he didn’t have a world ranking then; and that what with all these people saying he’s crap, he might have trouble getting coaching work.
The last bit is the most irritating, because it suggests that nobody is allowed to say anything that might cause any inconvenience to anybody else, with the logical end point that all objective criticism is now potentially libellous. I don’t know enough about tennis to judge how crap or not Robert Dee is; but if he wins, I might just have to sue him, for depriving me of the right to make money from saying that anything is crap, whether or not it is. PS: A parallel conversation on Facebook reminds me that this is the only way to play tennis:
So I write something for CiF about the Olympics and their tenuous relationship with reality, and in an act of supreme self-sacrifice I leave out all the obvious Baudrillard references, 'cos the punters don't seem to like them and then, bloody hell, that bloody Julian Baggini goes and writes the piece I wanted to write all along. So regard this (which appears the day after JB's) as the Reader's Digest version of his article; or the version that's been edited for airline use, with all the nipples and swearing and postmodernism cut out:
The big story of the Olympics is, we are told, the battle between China and the United States for control of the medal table; a microcosm for the struggle for political, economic and cultural hegemony in the new millennium, as the balance of power shifts from occident to orient.
At the same time, there's another intriguing scrap going on in Beijing: the tussle between surface and reality; what we see and what actually is. Cynics might argue that the Chinese authorities have long had an interesting take on the truth, from the announcement of bumper harvests while millions starved during the great leap forwards, to today's paranoid policing of the internet. But the Olympics have seen a new kind of reality avoidance...
No, I didn't watch England losing pluckily in the rugby, or Lewis Hamilton arsing up, but maybe still winning because someone else used the wrong flavour petrol. As far as I'm concerned, rugby and Formula 1 are only of any interest when stuff goes wrong: a match that descends into a blood-and-mud-bath (the Swamp Thing at the top is ex-England prop Fran Cotton, surely the hardest man ever to have a girl's name apart from maybe Shirley Crabtree); or a race that features a massive pile-up, preferably involving innocent spectators. And neither of those things happens any more, it seems. So I'll stick to croquet, ta.
In any case, while all those manly men were driving nowhere in Brazil, I was at the Joe Louis Theatre at the Suan Lum night bazaar here in Bangkok, watching a traditional puppet show about Hanuman the monkey god. Who's a friendlier bloke than the monkeys of Delhi, it seems.
The reason we lurched into such a self-evident tourist trap is the presence of my old buddy and self-evident tourist Emma, who came laden with the sort of stuff you can't get in Thailand, like decent peanut butter and the latest edition of Plan B magazine. Perusal of which seems to suggest that I'm not really that into new music any more, but I still like reading about it. And without reopening the wounds of the Paul Morley skirmish from last week, beginning a review of a subversive Ethiopian funk compilation with a quotation from Roland Barthes is always going to be a sound move in my book.
Muay thai (Thai boxing) is, of course, Thailand's most thrilling sport, but takraw runs it a close second. (It was actually invented by the Malays, but don't tell any Thai people that.) It's a bit like keepy-uppy; players have to keep a rattan sphere off the ground, using any part of the body apart from their hands and arms. It has several variations, derived from volleyball and basketball, but the purest form consists of nothing more than a few blokes kicking the takraw to each other on any available patch of flat earth. Often, the acrobatic skills on display make Brazilian footballers look like arthritic Cybermen, and they can keep it going for hours (which is more, it seems, than the Brazilians can manage these days).
I mention this because there's a big building near my house. I don't know what goes on there; people come and go during the day, and trucks occasionally arrive at the gates. But there's a Wonka-esque mystery about what's actually happening inside. The only activity anyone can see or hear is a bunch of blokes playing takraw in the car park, all day, every day. Maybe it's a takraw factory, and they're testing them.
There's less mystery about the goings on in the building a few doors down. It's a sauna. Usually, the clients at Thai saunas can have a beer before, after or even while they, um, do what you do in Thai saunas. For some reason, this one doesn't appear to offer such facilities, although there is a bar directly opposite. As a result, it's not unusual to see an elderly, pot-bellied Asian gentleman, wearing nothing but a skimpy towel about his loins and a post-coital glow, strolling across the road for a Singha or two, and then returning, revived, for another session. At 11 in the morning. Land of Smiles, eh?
Where there's sex, there must be death. There's a good line in Tim Hilton's Guardian obituary of sinophile and art enthusiast Peter Townsend: "Avant-garde magazines sometimes change character when editors move to a new pub." And while we're digging out that black tie, anybody called The Reverend Bevan Wardrobe can claim a Telegraph obit on the basis of his name alone, surely?
