It was a great pleasure to hear Peter Hitchens on the Today programme this morning. I read his Mail on Sunday column yesterday, in which he warned that 'you can now be arrested for not smiling when an Olympic event is taking place', and I feared for his safety.
Happily it turns out that he hasn't yet been detained, and the worst that seems to have happened is that he's invited to discuss his thoughts with James Naughtie to an audience of millions.
It's good to know that the 'totalitarianism' Hitchens fears hasn't quite kicked in yet. He still sounded very cross, though. Almost as cross as his Mail colleague Stephen Glover, who was so upset by the opening ceremony with its 'Marxist version of our island history'.
Showing posts with label Olympic Games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Olympic Games. Show all posts
Monday, 13 August 2012
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
The Hills Have Eyes
I was reminded yesterday of what Paul Merton once called the 'spontaneous poetry' of live Teletext subtitles. I was waiting to be served in a pub and there was a feature on some local news programme that included a snippet from the Olympic opening ceremony; the bit that included William Blake's thoughts on the building of Jerusalem among the 'dark Satanic hills'.
Monday, 30 July 2012
A gratuitous plug
I assume that we all start from the position of seeing Danny Boyle's national pageant as a work of genius, an evening of terrific, mood-altering entertainment that cost around £27 million and, coincidentally, attracted a TV audience of around 27 million. For a quid a head, this is great value.* And the BBC are even good enough to offer a version on iPlayer without commentary.
It would be churlish to find fault with anything that was included (that's what we have backbench Tories for) and absurd to imagine that it could cover anything more than a tiny fraction of its potential subject-matter. Having said which...
My only regret is that the section celebrating British music, movies and television seemed to reinforce what's becoming a default position in the media: that popular culture started in 1963, 'between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP'.
And that's rather late for me. Just in terms of rock and roll, I'd have loved to have seen an acknowledgement of British pop in the pre-Beatles years: Rock Island Line, Move It, Maybe Tomorrow, Shakin' All Over, Telstar: that would have been sufficient.
Happily, the artists who made those records - and many, many more - will feature in the exhibition of Harry Hammond's photographs, Halfway to Paradise, which finally reaches the V&A in London this October, after touring the country for two years. And it will be accompanied by a reissue of the book of the same name.
Just thought I should take the opportunity to plug one of my own books.
*Just by way of comparison: Liverpool paid £35 million for Andy Carroll and are currently trying to off-load him for £20 million, after just 56 appearances for the club. Assuming they get that figure (which they probably won't), and assuming that half those appearances were at the 45,000-capacity Anfield, that works out at £11 a head. (There is another way of evaluating his contribution: since Carroll's job is to score goals, and he's scored eleven times for the club, perhaps one should see the return as being somewhere around £1.3 million per goal.)
It would be churlish to find fault with anything that was included (that's what we have backbench Tories for) and absurd to imagine that it could cover anything more than a tiny fraction of its potential subject-matter. Having said which...
My only regret is that the section celebrating British music, movies and television seemed to reinforce what's becoming a default position in the media: that popular culture started in 1963, 'between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP'.
And that's rather late for me. Just in terms of rock and roll, I'd have loved to have seen an acknowledgement of British pop in the pre-Beatles years: Rock Island Line, Move It, Maybe Tomorrow, Shakin' All Over, Telstar: that would have been sufficient.
Happily, the artists who made those records - and many, many more - will feature in the exhibition of Harry Hammond's photographs, Halfway to Paradise, which finally reaches the V&A in London this October, after touring the country for two years. And it will be accompanied by a reissue of the book of the same name.
Just thought I should take the opportunity to plug one of my own books.
*Just by way of comparison: Liverpool paid £35 million for Andy Carroll and are currently trying to off-load him for £20 million, after just 56 appearances for the club. Assuming they get that figure (which they probably won't), and assuming that half those appearances were at the 45,000-capacity Anfield, that works out at £11 a head. (There is another way of evaluating his contribution: since Carroll's job is to score goals, and he's scored eleven times for the club, perhaps one should see the return as being somewhere around £1.3 million per goal.)
Sunday, 22 July 2012
An Absolute Disgrace
All day the news bulletins on BBC Radio Five Live have been reporting the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, as saying that the proposed strike by border staff at Heathrow scheduled for next Thursday is 'an absolute disgrace'. Well, he did say that, but a little context might help.
The comment came from an interview conducted by Garry Richardson on the Sportsweek programme this morning. Richardson seemed to lose sight of the fact that he's supposed to be an unbiased, impartial reporter working for the unbiased, impartial BBC. But this was serious stuff. Someone was failing to be swept up in the BBC-sponsored Olympic fervour, and Richardson was having none of it.
'They're a disgrace, aren't they?' he demanded of Hunt, and Hunt duly accepted the words being put in his mouth, albeit with a significant change in pronoun: 'It's an absolute disgrace.'
Richardson wasn't finished. 'A quick thought for you,' he offered. 'Why not just let those people go on strike, and when they want to come back after they've done all their disruption, say: Sorry, your job's not there anymore. Sack 'em.'
Hunt tried to explain that he was keen not to escalate the conflict with such talk, but Richardson was even more keen that it should be escalated: 'The real militant ones, you'd love to see them sacked,' he urged.
There have been some very dodgy political repercussions to having the Olympics in London, but I never expected a situation in which a Conservative minister is obliged to try to calm down a BBC reporter demanding that workers be sacked for engaging in a legal strike action.
The comment came from an interview conducted by Garry Richardson on the Sportsweek programme this morning. Richardson seemed to lose sight of the fact that he's supposed to be an unbiased, impartial reporter working for the unbiased, impartial BBC. But this was serious stuff. Someone was failing to be swept up in the BBC-sponsored Olympic fervour, and Richardson was having none of it.
'They're a disgrace, aren't they?' he demanded of Hunt, and Hunt duly accepted the words being put in his mouth, albeit with a significant change in pronoun: 'It's an absolute disgrace.'
Richardson wasn't finished. 'A quick thought for you,' he offered. 'Why not just let those people go on strike, and when they want to come back after they've done all their disruption, say: Sorry, your job's not there anymore. Sack 'em.'
Hunt tried to explain that he was keen not to escalate the conflict with such talk, but Richardson was even more keen that it should be escalated: 'The real militant ones, you'd love to see them sacked,' he urged.
There have been some very dodgy political repercussions to having the Olympics in London, but I never expected a situation in which a Conservative minister is obliged to try to calm down a BBC reporter demanding that workers be sacked for engaging in a legal strike action.
Thursday, 7 August 2008
The London Olympics
As the Olympics get under way in Beijing (or Pekin, as some of us still think of it), one’s mind naturally turns to the London Olympics.
Not the 2012 Games, obviously. The prospect of that nonsense is so horrible that all one do is avert one’s eyes and whistle loudly.
Nor even the Austerity Olympics of 1948.
No, I was thinking of the 1988 Games. Not that London actually staged the event. Nor indeed did we even bid for them. But we did think about it.
In 1979 the GLC, then under the control of the Conservative administration led by Horace Cutler, put out a consultative document in an attempt to spark a debate over whether it was worth going for the Games.
Two options were put forward. The first was the budget version, with a refurbishment of Wembley Stadium, the erection of a temporary athletes’ village and the utilization of existing venues for the minor sports. The second was a more ambitious scheme with a new stadium and permanent village to be built in Docklands.
The costs, including in both cases a major investment in the traffic infrastructure, were £545 million for the cheap option and £1.2 billion for the up-market version.
Obviously those figures don’t mean much nearly thirty years on. So I went to the Bank of England inflation calculator, and it turns out that the more expensive scheme would cost a shade under £4.5 billion at today’s prices.
That’s less than half the current estimate for the 2012 Games. Maybe I’m being naïve, or maybe they were being naïve in 1979, but what the hell’s happened to the Olympics that it’s so bloated?
Mind you, the one thing they were at least honest about back then: they admitted that the Games would make a loss, estimated at being around £220 million. We’ll be lucky to get away with that in 2012.
Not the 2012 Games, obviously. The prospect of that nonsense is so horrible that all one do is avert one’s eyes and whistle loudly.
Nor even the Austerity Olympics of 1948.
No, I was thinking of the 1988 Games. Not that London actually staged the event. Nor indeed did we even bid for them. But we did think about it.
In 1979 the GLC, then under the control of the Conservative administration led by Horace Cutler, put out a consultative document in an attempt to spark a debate over whether it was worth going for the Games.
Two options were put forward. The first was the budget version, with a refurbishment of Wembley Stadium, the erection of a temporary athletes’ village and the utilization of existing venues for the minor sports. The second was a more ambitious scheme with a new stadium and permanent village to be built in Docklands.
The costs, including in both cases a major investment in the traffic infrastructure, were £545 million for the cheap option and £1.2 billion for the up-market version.
Obviously those figures don’t mean much nearly thirty years on. So I went to the Bank of England inflation calculator, and it turns out that the more expensive scheme would cost a shade under £4.5 billion at today’s prices.
That’s less than half the current estimate for the 2012 Games. Maybe I’m being naïve, or maybe they were being naïve in 1979, but what the hell’s happened to the Olympics that it’s so bloated?
Mind you, the one thing they were at least honest about back then: they admitted that the Games would make a loss, estimated at being around £220 million. We’ll be lucky to get away with that in 2012.
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