Squint!

Sports branding: adidas and the “legitimate ambush”

2011-07-27T13:18:00.003Z

The following train of thought may expose me as a conspiracy theorist and a crackpot. Or, more likely, as a particularly boring individual who watches too much sport, as it's also on possibly the most ridiculously niche topic I've ever bothered to tackle. But still, I’m sure I’m onto something (as are all conspiracy theorists, of course).

Anyway, in the strictly controlled world of sports marketing, it’s natural that brands take ownership of any possible foothold. By looking at adidas, I think we can see a move towards colour-ownership branding that other manufacturers may try to emulate.

Though the most obvious examples of “alternative branding” in the sports arena are those of ambush marketing – the orange clad Bavaria ladies at the 2010 FIFA World Cup being the highest profile –more subtle and legitimate practises are coming to the fore.

The green and pleasant land, evoked via the England team's armpits.

At the 2010 T20 World Cup in the Caribbean, which England eventually won, the rules on kit and sponsorship for the tournament were very tight, and adidas were robbed of the chance to use their iconic three stripes on the sleeve. Instead, they introduced a lime green panel under the arms. Needless to say, this had absolutely no relevance to England whatsoever. Adidas were trying branding by colour – just as Bavaria had tried to do with its sea of orange at the football World Cup. Only adidas had done this legitimately.

Even the bracelet is suspiciously green

This green panel has been kept for England’s training shirts, caps, and the like, so is now seemingly an ongoing brand equity in cricket. Kevin Pietersen’s bat and gloves feature a similar colour, introducing a lime green / fluorescent yellow colour into the whiter-than-white arena of test cricket. Just a hint, but (to me, and those like me who gather late at night on sports kit chatrooms, at least) clearly there.

Is the away shirt, always seemingly chosen by the manufacturers (witness England rugby’s flirting with anthracite thanks to Nike during the 2010-2011 season), set to become a branding battle ground?

But it’s also been seen elsewhere, in other sports, suggesting that it is a concerted effort rather than me simply seeing things. The adidas-sponsored Golden League athletes are all wearing lime green this season. Chelsea, of course, have a truly eyewatering adidas-designed lime green away shirt, too.


Oh, so you support the rainforest now, do you Brad? Name me one indigenous Amazonian tree. GO ON.

And beyond this, call me a grumpy old cynic, but I wonder how pleased adidas were when Team Sky decided to change their adidas kit colours from blue to green for the recent Tour de France, in support of Sky’s own rainforest-saving partnership with the WWF.

Kit manufacturers will always have to contend with the pre-existing colours of the team whose kit they’re making. There have always been certain styles used by manufacturers that identify the kit as being theirs, whatever its colour (Puma during the African Cup of Nations being a great example, Umbro’s recent efforts in the Premier League less so). But will we now see manufacturers trying harder to send their own brand messages through colour, rather than iconography (three stripe sleeve) or style (common neck shape and patterns for all teams in one season)?

It might help manufacturers restore some parity between themselves and the shirt sponsors whose logo gets emblazoned in as big a typeface as possible across the players’ chests.And it'll continue to give me and fellow kit geeks something to talk about. But what kind of longevity does one colour have? It'll be interesting to see whether adidas keep the colour but change the styles each season, or whether they eventually find they are obliged to start again with a new brand colour?

What Happened to the Scene?

2011-07-22T14:45:00.000Z

Our shrinking attention spans, and music’s flawed imitation of fashion’s trends model, have combined to rob our generation of a scene that could define our era

Though previous decades are defined by the cultural movements that set them apart from their predecessors (Motown, Grunge, Britpop, Hair Rock, take your pick), it’s much harder to pin down for recent times. Despite a monumental recession and a change of government, no significant cultural movement has taken shape.

Instead, there is something uniquely cross-bred about culture, and music in particular, today. The Queen of Now, Lady Gaga, sums it up: “The mark of a great song is how many genres it can embody”. Substitute the word “great” for the words “likely to sell”, and she might well have defined the nature of the modern mainstream music industry. In fact a Lady Gaga album is so disparate as to leave little of consistency to engage with bar her superbrand personality – which suits her bank balance just fine. The Gaga model is widely imitated, to varying degrees of success – turn on the radio and hear songs leap from dubstep basslines to soaring trance keyboard to europop vocals, before a rapper collaborator is drafted in to deliver a middle eight.

This is echoed in fashion – vintage clothing has gone mainstream, skinny jeans are worn by emo kids and fashionistas alike, and everyone’s look seems to borrow at least a little bit from everyone else’s.

Though cross-genre influence is nothing new in music - the Rolling Stones wouldn’t have existed without Keith and Mick skimming off the best of American blues, and Keith’s later fascination with country - in chart music today, this borrowing isn’t an homage or a celebration of a different genre, it’s a calculated rip off to lend credibility to a hollow commercial enterprise, defined entirely by the “personality” of the artist, not the music itself.

And it seems clear that one thing this has robbed us of - we of the noughties and beyond - is a real sense of a defining “scene” for our times.

Is It Us?

Well, partly - we just don’t seem to have the attention span to sustain a cultural movement in that way any more. When the Arctic Monkeys’ first album stormed to what seemed like an era-defining position in the early 2006 with the album “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not”, it was a debut unlike any before it. Dragged to the big time by fans, not by promoters, these guys looked like likely candidates to define their era.

But they haven’t. As soon as the novelty wore off, we were looking for the next one – and though no-one quite came close (and my God there were dozens), people were less interested when the cheeky Sheffield lads returned. Their subsequent work was good, but it hardly seemed to matter. Their new album, Suck It And See, can win all the awards it likes (and it’s already doing its bit for the trophy cabinet), it’s not enough.

This lack of attention span isn’t all bad, however. Indeed there’s a strong argument for the lack of a dominant movement being a good thing. Arguably the cultural cross-pollenation we see now makes people’s personal musical horizons much more broad. Though a lot of this is down to ease of access due to the internet, people have never been so interested in so many things at once – where in our parents’ day a person’s record collection (a few shockers aside) would stay close to one genre, or at least tell a linear story of that person’s taste from one genre to another as they grow older, now a person’s iPod will have hundreds of different types of music, waiting to be deployed for any occasion. A teenage girl (or a middle aged suburban man, for that matter) might have everything from saccharine hairbrush pop to electro and drum and bass on their iPod, and there would be nothing unusual in that. There’s far less identification to one single type of music, certainly, but that means there’s far less resistance to dabbling in different types of music. It might be shallow interest, but it’s there, and it’s to the enormous credit of tireless new music champions like the Tiggerishly enthusiastic Zane Lowe that this is growing.

This shows a lesser emotional attachment to music - maybe a damaging effect of the disposable nature of chart music, and possibly of the click-now, think-later download era – but in some ways at least, broader experience is better. It at least shows a measure of curiosity, and a level of curiosity based on the music itself, rather than personality or promotion. The kaleidoscope of genres even the most average iPod houses should offer some crumbs of comfort to acts slaving away on the periphery. This shallow support, hidden on iPods in bedrooms everywhere, needs to be linked together somehow to gain momentum, which is where some acts – Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys, et al - have successfully used (the seemingly now-irrelevant) MySpace for in the past.

The Shape Of An Industry

That lack of attention span plays right into the hands of the much-maligned but terrifyingly successful Cowells of this world. Much of the music in the charts seems designed to just intrigue for long enough to induce the all-important 99p iTunes click. So rather than a genre of music seizing the moment, and the minds of that day’s youth, to storm to popularity in the way the Beatles or Nirvana did, chart music today channels the spirit of a scene without ever having to represent it - deliberately transient, seemingly not meant to last any longer than the duration of its radio play.

This brings a nondescript track, and possibly its celebrity vehicle, some temporary credibility, but prevents the underground scene it is borrowing from to break through in a meaningful way. Radio tracks are given just enough of a dancey edge to be suitable in clubs, and people dance the night away without ever engaging properly with the scene they’re enjoying the bastardised nuances of.

Music, then, is following fashion – where trends are set at the extremes, and are then watered down and re-purposed to sell in volume in the mainstream centre. This works beneficially for fashion, because at the extremes are the pinnacle – the couture houses, the international designers, whose work costs the most.

In music, there is no such high-returns equivalent. You write a song, record it, and it’s available for 99p on iTunes. You can’t charge more for it because it’s avant-garde and trendsetting, unlike the catwalk shows of New York, Paris, London and Milan. More to the point, there’s no free download of high-fashion clothing, so prices don’t have to be so low as to deter the free downloaders.

So nowadays, rather than a meritocratic ladder, the music industry is more of a circular fortress – the money is in the centre, but it’s increasingly hard to get there without a hell of a lot of corporate support or an all-too-rare populist tidal wave such as the Arctic Monkeys once enjoyed. And, to stretch a metaphor a bit too far, those guarding that fortress catch whatever you throw at them – the hallmarks of your scene, the characteristics of your craft, and use them as ammunition against you. There are talented acts who achieve chart success of course – look at Adele for the most recent and heartening example – but she’s not a trailblazer representing a generation. Nor has there been one, arguably, since Britpop.

Acts now need to take the fight elsewhere, to capitalize on the curiosity of the masses, rather than wait for the anointing hand of the charts. But they also need to play to the short – and shortening – attention spans of even the most interested audience. The increasingly clichéd role of “curator”, where an artist reaches outside their role of musician and tries to own a bigger collection of cultural artifacts, may be the answer – though this rather plays into the hands of the “superbrand” personalities- Gaga, Kanye West, et al – rather than those slaving away for recognition at the periphery. Or, it may be that multi-channel experiences like Bjork has just released – rather than albums – are the answer, although the amount of artists besides Bjork who could successfully carry a musical vision through other media as well might be few (without resorting to collaborators or recording company minions to add all the non-musical channels).

For those acts that can make the most out of shallower support, perhaps all hope is not lost. However it seems that the age of the era-defining “scene”, and a place in cultural history is dead.

The Dark Art of Brand Naming

2011-06-14T10:17:00.000Z

Naming brands is a mysterious business. It can be a fraught process that, no matter what “fool-proof and reliable” methodology you’ve developed, produces ideas that stand at least a 75% chance of being torpedoed for a reason you never, ever saw coming. We need to bear lots of things in mind, not least that the client probably feels they should be doing this themselves, and may well have been having nightmares of being present at their firstborn’s birth, only to be handed a baby with “Accenture” already written on the wrist tag.

So, a few thoughts based on the projects I’ve worked on that might minimize the trauma for both the sleepless client with the corporate branded baby and yourselves, the naming people.

1) Know what a name can and cannot do

A name can’t do everything. There are plenty of terrible companies out there who have pretty cool names – and vice versa. This means it’s really important to get to the root of why they’re asking you to name their brand – are they too close to it? Have they been wrestling with it for a while? Have they changed purpose? Are they putting distance between themselves and a past crisis? Or are they unclear about their trajectory, and are hoping by a miracle that their name will help them define that?

2) Establish the brand’s trajectory, not just its personality

It may sound obvious, but a naming project should look to the future above all. Ask what does this company want to be famous for in 10 years time, not just how you can express what they’re famous for now. This is a key question for new brands, but no less important for existing ones – they wouldn’t be changing their name if they weren’t thinking about the future.

3) Keep the client involved
Let’s face it, it would be weird to outsource naming your firstborn to a third party, and it probably feels quite strange for your client to be asking you to do their naming for them. Even if the client is unable to have numerous face to face meetings, use online brainstorming tools like Mindmeister (www.mindmeister.com) to make sure there is an online repository where they can add their thoughts to yours, even if it’s in the middle of the night and they’re in a hotel at a conference 10,000 miles away.

3) Embrace the subjectivity of naming
Consumers don’t respond to brands with a ticklist. So we should be wary of how rationalized we make the process. A brand name can be a real turn-off, or a real turn-on; I use these romantic terms (rather than “sales driver” or something like that) because emotional bonds are stronger than rational one. Don’t try to explain everything away with logic – if a name is cool to say, and helps create a unique personality, that can be every bit as strong as one that makes a clever statement about meeting point of brand promise and consumer need.

4) Cast the net wide, wider, and wider still

It puts a hell of a lot of pressure on yourself if you just sit down and hope for inspiration. So borrow from the world of product design a bit - make sure there’s a proper “divergent phase” to your process. Be as impractical and tangential as you like that this point. Look as far and wide as humanly possible for inspiration, deliberately cast the net wider than seems likely to be fruitful, and keep chucking ideas at the board. Bring in as many people as possible, at all stages. Get a mix of visual thinkers and verbal thinkers (a designer, for instance, will describe things in a different way to you, and makes more unpredictable associations between things that look alike, than more a verbal thinker, who often associate more literally).

5) Do as the Rolling Stones did
This is an expression of both the previous points – but when you hit a wall, do as Mick and Keith did. Womanising and hellraising aside, one of the Glimmer Twins’ songwriting methods was to piece together stories through unrelated newspaper headlines. So surround yourself with magazines and newspapers, skim read and just pick out words and phrases that appeal to you. Shout them out, string some together, and see what sticks. It forces you to break the walls of the brief, and work inwards from a much looser set of options or areas.

6) Plot the taxonomy of the market

After all the instinctive, random word-association stuff, you’ll need to bring the project back to the realities of the market a bit. The client no doubt has a very clear idea about what their competitors do and what their brands stand for. But it can be useful to plot those competitors onto a taxonomy chart, to show what kind of names their competitors use, and how that contributes to carving out a niche in the market. Are there lots of literal names in this category, without many experiential ones? Is it a market full of made-up, wacky names? If so, why? It can help show an opening in the market, or at the very least the areas to be avoided like the plague. Naming agency igor have a very thorough taxonomy chart with examples for several categories (www.igorinternational.com).

7) Test to find the best

Make a long list, then test it using some key questions to develop your shortlist. They might be a bit pseudo-scientific, but you’ve got to thin the list out somehow, and each will have different strengths - some names will express the brand’s function better than others, while others will be very memorable, and a few might perfectly encapsulate the brand’s vision for the future. They’ve all got to sound reasonable in their context – so if it’s a new toy, could you hear a kid asking their parents for it? Or if it’s a business, how does it sound if you were to answer the phone with it? The best will tick numerous boxes, though it’s unlikely any will tick them all. So give each name a total score and take forward the best – and always allow a wildcard or two to make the shortlist.

8) Never present just one “right answer”

Share at least four options when you present. There’s never just one right answer, so make sure the client isn’t expecting a single solution. Visualise the name using four of five key images, and pick a font that expresses the name. Don’t make it look like a logo (unless you’ve got time to properly develop one for each) – just do enough to give each a distinct feel.

Rooney loses his Coke Deal – but should Coke have put up with him?

2011-04-06T07:35:00.000Z

Wayne Rooney has had his connection with the Coca Cola Company severed, after what seems like several months of gardening leave since a scandal-ridden 2010. Coca Cola will have rightly thought that he’s not really “Open Happiness” material, what with his ugly tattoos and aggressive, stubbly face. He’s been embroiled in scandals of varying seriousness, involving fraternising with prostitutes (but he did that already, as we all knew- who could forget the Auld Slapper?!), urinating in the street, smoking, and latterly, using foul language within a supposedly criminally small distance of a TV camera.

But he wasn’t an ambassador for Coca Cola, he was brand ambassador for Coke Zero, and in that role I liked him. It’s patronising to describe him as “gritty”, of course, but it’s pretty accurate – and Coke Zero seemed to be all about ramping up masculinity to the maximum to get guys to drink something a bit like Diet Coke. Guys can’t drink Diet Coke, of course, because their mind starts playing Etta James’ I Just Wanna Make Love To You, and they can’t help worrying that they’re sending out the wrong signals to any glistening, ripped men who may be cleaning the windows at the time (I’ve never seen window cleaners like that. Maybe I would if I drank Diet Coke?)

Rooney meant Coke Zero’s masculinity didn’t just escalate into action hero, superhero mode (which, let’s face it, most blokes would struggle to empathise with). It was grounded, realistic, and at the same time a high-performance but a bit balding and ginger.

The deal involved a TV programme, Wayne Rooney’s (or Coke Zero’s) Street Striker, which was pretty on-brand too. The essence of street football, Rooney’s Alma Mater, distilled into fairly arbitrary tricks and set in classic urban situations – under a bridge, by a canal, that sort of thing – was a nice extension, which made for some decent TV. Not great TV, but watchable enough, and the kids competing on the show were always plausible enough urchins to feel a bit sad for them when they failed to get the football through the 3^rd hanging tyre and had to go home.

It seems that Coca Cola – the master brand of “open happiness”, standing for everything joyful, have been trying to have their cake and eat it. They wanted Coke Zero to have its own identity – to be as masculine as Diet Coke was famously feminine – but they got spooked when their ambassador contravened their happy-clappy, Tellytubby-Land brand values.

Managing a portfolio of brands like this is tricky, and the extent to which you allow your sub-brands their own identity is a difficult question to resolve. Were people drinking Coke Zero because it was like real Coke, but with no sugar? Or were they drinking it because it was actually building a decent identity for itself away from the master brand, one that was more about confident masculinity than it was about ‘Open Happiness’? Probably a combination of both, a nice combination of product benefit and consumer connection. I would argue that the Rooney connection and the TV show were better for the brand than the pretty crap ad campaign, which showed sort of action-movie clichés. I can’t even remember them properly, so for the purposes of today, that makes them crap.

Yet these days, brands need any help they can get to keep moving, to not be seen to stand still. Brand storytelling is a phrase used often, but rarely means what it should mean – a story has ups, downs, changes of pace, a beginning, middle, and an end (though brands probably aren’t interested in The End just yet). Rooney’s trials and tribulations were bad, of course, for him, his family, and for Coca Cola. But they knew they weren’t signing up a saint – that’s the whole reason why they chose him. He wasn’t, err, a Tiger Woods golden boy.

Brand storytelling isn’t about writing a manifesto for a brand and hoping that will do. It’s not about someone crafting a monologue that tells people who the brand is and why they’re here – how many stories can you think of that are one-character stories? While Coke Zero probably didn’t want Jenny Thompson to be a character in their brand’s narrative (though she would have brought a bit of sexy to the story, something that Rooney sadly can’t deliver) Rooney’s ups and downs could still have brought some valuable realism to Zero’s brand. Trials and tribulations are what happens in stories, because they happen in real life.

To my mind, the best thing for Coca Cola to do would have been to renegotiate themselves a cheaper deal with Rooney, and be prepared for more controversy (though hopefully for his family’s sake, nothing of the magnitude of the hooker scandals). Take him off his pedestal next time he gets into real bother, punching a granny in the supermarket or biting the head off a bat. But be prepared to bring him back – surely there’s no more masculine, Coke Zero-esque quality than picking yourself up from the canvas and fighting back. As it is, Coke Zero might have lost a valuable asset, though Coca Cola won’t be shedding too many tears.

Mirror plumb the depths of journalism – anyone shocked?

2011-04-01T09:28:00.000Z

The appalling way that the three victims died in the case of the ex-Bulls flanker, Joseph Ntshongwana, and his axe murdering rampage in the KwaZulu-Natal townships this week (one was decapitated, another’s head was left hanging on by a nerve, there are no details of the third victim) is as terrible as anything real life or fiction could conceive.

Yet the way this story has been reported is, in journalistic terms, as appalling. Here in South Africa, the story broke gradually, and to the SA media’s credit, nothing was taken for granted. One almost-victim who escaped reported that the axe-wielding Ntshongwana accused him of having raped his daughter, infecting her with HIV. SA sources were careful to stress that at this stage, there was no confirmation of this event having taken place, or even whether Ntshongwana had a daughter.

They were also careful not to name the suspect, for fear of how this may affect his daughter (if she existed).

The Daily Mirror, however, came out with a horrible piece of lazy, sensationalist ‘journalism’ – under the headline “Rugby ace held after rapists are murdered with axe”. At this time, the facts seemed to point more towards random killings, rather than systematic tracking down of a gang of rapists. No matter, the Mirror’s headline ran as above, slandering those who had died such awful deaths as rapists, and the killer as an avenging father.

The first paragraph read “A former rugby star allegedly butchered three thugs with an axe in a vigilante attack after they gang-raped his daughter.” Not “in the belief that they had gang-raped his daughter”. Maybe it’s less snappy. But it’s accurate. To be even more accurate, some mention should have been made of the fact that this gang rape may never have taken place, and at that stage it hadn’t been confirmed that the suspect even had a daughter.

Today, the SA police have confirmed that there is no evidence or suspicion of any rape having happened to any member of Ntshongwana’s family. The Mirror’s ‘journalist’, Adrian Shaw, had written a story without considering that the killer might just be a crazed killer, and the victims, one of whom was a security guard on his way home from work, carrying dinner for his family, innocent victims of tragically brutal violence.

Nice one, Mirror, you bunch of cretins. Particularly Mr Shaw, who seemingly checked no facts, and couldn’t care less what drivel he writes, confident in the knowledge that his readers are stupid and wouldn’t question it.

I followed this story really closely because I live in South Africa, and was interested in how all sources, both in SA and in the UK, were reporting it. The question is, how often is this happening in other stories, where no one is checking the minutiae of the story? How much of these kind of newspapers is total and utter irresponsible drivel?

Cricket: A round of applause for a job half done

2011-02-03T18:32:00.000Z

Normally I am the last person clinging to old routines and traditions as they sink, eclipsed by new thinking and gimmickry. Especially when it comes to cricket; I mistrust T20, umpiring referrals and, if truth be told, batsmen wearing protection beyond a rolled up newspaper stuffed down inside the sock.

It follows, then, that if I were alive a certain number of decades ago, I would certainly have been one campaigning against the covering of pitches. A batsman’s skill is never clearer than when he is scoring runs on a swamp of a track that threatens to swallow the ball as it fights to evade the clutches of the boggy strip.

However even I acknowledge that this change happened. Though I shut my eyes when Hawkeye comes onscreen, and curse when the sainted umpire is proven blind, possibly drunk and probably lunatic by an action replay, pitches have been routinely covered for decades now. As a result we get a hell of a lot more cricket per season than was once the case, where your average club player spent roughly one eighth of the time on the field of play on a match day, five eighths smoking woodbines under the eaves of the pavillion looking skeptically at the sky, and the remaining two eighths (a quarter, I suppose) getting a head start on something dark and frothy in the club house.

This minor positive of roughly 300% more cricket aside, life has got a hell of a lot easier for the batsman. Watching test cricket over the last few years has niggled me, and not just for the odious technological advances that seek to introduce such things as “fairness” and “consistency” into umpiring. What, I wonder now, is the point of a fifty? The half-century these days is only notable as a milestone en route to a ‘proper’ century, yet the crowd still applaud out of deeply ingrained routine and the batsman still raises his bat to acknowledge the crowd’s robotic appreciation of what is barely even a job half-done.

Think of the amount of test matches that include at least one innings of over 450. Think of the amount of test matches where the groundsmen have used their diabolical modern methods - covers and minions wielding ropes included - to ensure five days of play to maximise audience revenue. In this climate, where 400+ is attainable in one day cricket, never mind the five-day variant (did I say variant? I meant ‘pinnacle’), how often is a 50 a truly game-changing or innings-defining occurance?

It could be as part of a spirited lower-order fightback. Or an exceptionally fast-paced middle order gear shift to defy a batting collapse. Perhaps, ever so rarely, a batsman at the top of the order could feel proud of their day’s work if they score 50 as the rest of the side is bowled out for 97.

Yet this happens so seldom these days that it seems perverse to have a round of applause and the bat-raising celebration for a half century. Some batsmen now shirk the celebration in favour of a cursory bat waggle so as not to seem rude, juggling acknowledging the custom while being desperate to show that they understand the job is not done yet.

We celebrate the 50 because it is a statistical remnant of bygone days when 50 runs were hard to come by, and the number of people reaching this milestone was much lower. Commentators now read out things such as strike rate, first class average, and past performance against current opposition. These things are infinitely more relevant and interesting. Yet because the 50 remains a linear milestone, easily digested and applauded by the live in-stadium audience, it somehow retains its position in the statistical canon as worthy of a stoppage in the game and a round of applause.

There is something interesting in the frequency of a batsman’s “conversion” from 50 to 100; and once, in those glorious, dangerous, unpredictable days of uncovered pitches, the 50 represented a real achievement. Yet now a 50 is synonymous with a job not yet done, an unsatisfactory and frustratingly uncompleted task. Does this warrant its own column in a batsman’s statistics? I would argue not any more.

While the newpaper industry dies, Rod Liddle rejoices

2009-05-12T09:48:00.004Z

This weekend, the national papers gave us an indication of just how many freelance sub-editors they have laid off during the recession. A smaller band of regular subs is now trawling through more and more content, and standards are slipping, with the appalling result that Rod Liddle is being afforded more and more space, like a creeping, insidious plague.

As an example of the mistakes creeping in around the industry, The Independent, as part of its double-page graphic spread about MPs' expenses, had John Prescott listed as the Prime Minister. It's almost possible that this was a joke, but in the circumstances you would think not. Nontheless, there he was; his picture, his little info-box detailing his expenses claims, and there underneath his name was his title: Prime Minister.

Elsewhere, and arguably less embarrassingly, The Sunday Times published an article about England cricketer Ravi Bopara. David Gower wrote the words, and with it came a helpful info-box to guide the reader through the young batsman's career so far- except they had him down as a Sussex player, when he is actually an Essex player. It's how the England coach Andy Flower, who used to be at Essex, knows so much about him. And defeats the point of an info-box, really.

Yet this was far from the most heinous of the weekend's errors. In what can only be described as a monumental error, some editorial misadventure, some diabolical breakdown in communication, allowed Rod Liddle almost two full pages of The Sunday Times sport section. It may be wishful thinking to call this a mistake, but the idea that he would be given so much room by an editor sound of mind and proficiency is frankly unthinkable.

There he was, postulating and posturing: he, Liddle, the fan's voice of the Sunday times. An antidote to the elitism of the rest of the paper - he brings a taste of the terraces, a glimpse of Millwall circa 1989. Hence this weekend's missive, containing a list of which Chelsea players he'd like to punch, and how Millwall never get a penalty, so by some twisted logic, Chelsea shouldn't be upset when they are denied two or three genuine claims in a Champions League semi-final, a level of football Millwall haven't threatened to reach for a while.

Except he doesn't really like to do the terrace view any more. He's started writing like a 'proper' sports writer, diagnosing problems in Chelsea's team, the reasons why he, Rod Liddle, who seeth and knoweth all, was happy that they lost to Barcelona - as if his spiteful feelings on the matter are somehow newsworthy. The headline shouldn't have been about Chelsea, it should have been about Liddle.

"Monumental arrogance and the belief in their divine right to win, that nothing should stand in their way" is what Liddle points to as the worst of Chelsea's sins. If he's going to pose as a proper sports writer, Liddle needs to start reading some proper sports books - Ed Smith, author of What Sport Tells Us About Life, may well agree that Chelsea exhibited these characteristics; but in his book he recognises that those very traits are what make these players so fascinating, often the very reason for their success, and if they're not appealing, at least they make for good theatre.

It is part of how they operate at the highest level; Smith's analysis of Zinedine Zidane being a perfect example. Zidane, he wrote, was a man who had all his life believed, and proved, his ability to choose his own future, to decide destiny by virtue of his extraordinary talent. Then, in the match meant to be his swansong, Zidane wasn't winning, wasn't controlling the play, or his destiny - and had no mechanism with which to cope. His destiny was out of his hands, even his talent could not win the World Cup for France and allow him to retire on that note. So he headbutted the Italian defender Matterazzi, and a new destiny was chosen.

It may be self-indulgent to credit the pampered, whinging footballers with being anything more than just self-aggrandizing egomaniacs. I say self-indulgent because we all want sport to mean more than simply people more talented than us making money out of our adoration for them. But it's got to be a better way of looking at things that Liddle manages.

Chelsea aren't a pleasant bunch to watch sometimes, but to play at that high level, there is an element of the Zidane mentality in every one of those players; even when their talent is a fraction of his, the mentality of being a professional sportsman demands a bit of that arrogance, that often-curious belief in destiny. In many cases, it's the entire point.

Down with Brown! Here comes- oh God it's the Tories...

2008-03-19T14:29:00.004Z

The world, built partially out of rock, but mostly out of money, is melting. The ice-caps are bleeding away, swamping our lands with a flood that will take with it most of our capital.

Banks are tumbling down, their foundations shattered, and it's all down to dodgy mortgages. It makes many of us happy to see rich people lose their city bonus. It makes us less happy to see hundreds of jobs being cut at Northern Rock.

In this climate of bad debts and worse decisions, it seems painfully obvious that a Labour government, obsessed as it is with throwing millions of pounds at problems without planning how to fix them, maybe isn't what we need. Gordon Brown sold off millions of our gold reserves at the bottom of the market, and now criticises the Tories for advocating some spending cuts.

Has he looked out of his window? The mortgage market is tightening up to such an extent it is strangling even the most frugal of fledgling homeowners. Spend spend spend was the way of the 1990s, and now in a debt-laden demographic riddles with bad credit, we're saddled with the aftermath.

Of course some tax cuts would be nice, too. The Tories aren't committing to them yet, waiting to see whether the economic conditions suit tax cuts if and when they gain power. To an extent, they're missing the point too- because it's those very tax cuts that would stimulate the economy into behaving as they'd like in the first place. It seems to make sense; less outlay from government requires less tax. Less tax from the householder is less outlay; the nation tightens its belt and rides out the storm.

There is a time and a place for complex economic forecasting. There surely also must be a time and a place for some simple common sense. The Tories shouldnt be acting as though tax cuts are an act of benevolance; it is giving people back their own money. Labour, meanwhile, need to stop carping on about how the Tories would cut public spending- because for all their outlay, and with little to show for it, in this climate, they sound a bit silly.

Blade Runner

2008-03-03T15:16:00.000Z

Greatness is not quantifiable, but it has something to do with the capacity to inspire awe in competitors and spectators alike. Lots of people attain "great success", but far fewer can genuinely be described as "great" themselves.

Far fewer still get to deserve this accolade at the age of 21.Yet there is something- the unmistakable hallmark of greatness- about South Africa's double-amputee, treble-World Record holding Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius.

Pistorius, fitted with controversial carbon-fibre prosthetics which lend him the nickname "blade runner" is a clear distance ahead of any of his competitors in the Paralympic field, and as such, has sought to make the switch to able-bodied races. He did so with some success; he came second in the 400m B-race at Rome's Golden Gala last Summer, with a time of 46.90s. To put that in context, Pistorius' World Record is 46.56s, and the able-bodied record 43.18s.

That record is held by another true, undisputed great- Michael Johnson. What the two athletes share is that quality of inspiring awe. Watching Johnson was like watching a machine- he had an unconventional running style which only added to the impression of relentless intensity.
Pistorius is still almost three seconds behind Johnson's World Record, but his success has shocked the International Association of Athletic Federations into amending their competition rules to prevent him from competing in able-bodied competitions under their jurisdiction- including the Olympics, which had been Pistorius' goal. This at first seems a jarring decision, which doesn't sit well with our sentimental streak, which pervades much discussion of Pistorius' astonishing success.

This is how we view disabled athletics' great successes. There is a comparison to be made between able-bodied athletes, who make us think of what we could have done had we had their genetic good luck, and disabled athletes, who make us think of what is possible when fortune and fate conspire against an individual. It is altogether more humbling spectacle.
Yet such sentiment is dangerous, and though it offends our best wishes and heartfelt thoughts on the matter, the IAAF has made the correct decision to introduce the clause banning "any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device".

However much we want to see Pistorius competing at the Olympics, the precedent cannot safely be made to allow him to do so. In the days of Roger Bannister's four-minute mile, perhaps, it would have been unthinkable that someone would take a decision detrimental to their own health in order to win a medal. However, decades of athletes abusing steroids have shown us that athletes will not let genetic shortcomings stand in their way, no matter how detrimental the effects. It is far-fetched, and the IAAF no doubt recognise the flippancy of the notion, but they cannot risk the possibility of an athlete literally giving their right leg (or rather, both legs) to win a medal.

As for Pistorius, he must have had his doubts as to whether he'd be allowed to compete. But what a statement he has made by attempting the cross-over. He is a great in whichever field he competes.

A Sports-Eye View of Life and Death

2008-03-03T15:07:00.000Z

"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death," said Bill Shankly. "I'm very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you, it's much, much more important than that."

Never has a falser word been spoken. And as should be acknowledged, Shankly didn't actually believe it.

Yet as we line the terraces at weekends, singing and shouting and screaming as though our lives depended on it, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a universal truth; a mantra followed up and down the land. And tragically, we know there are people who really do believe it, in other countries as much (if not more) than our own. In very recent times, two Leeds United fans lost their lives in Istanbul after an away match against Galatasaray. A Middlesbrough fan was stabbed to death in Amsterdam after a UEFA Cup match against AZ Alkmaar. And we, the sporting public, wonder about the fans of our own teams, and which club will next feel the weight of such a tragedy.

We are conditioned to do so, but it exacerbates a very real problem when we think of such tragedies in these terms. They were, for the record, not "two Leeds fans", or "a Middlesbrough fan". They were Christopher Loftus, Kevin Speight, and Brendan O'Connor.

Sport simply does not do real life; it does not understand or have the means to comprehend real, human tragedy. A case in point has been the enduring, excruciating debacle of former Pakistan Cricket coach Bob Woolmer's murder. Reduced to a caption on the Sky Sports News ticker, the world looks on through its sport-shaped lens and therefore is wilfully blind to the human side of the story- Woolmer's wife, Gill, looking forward to spending time with her husband at their home in South Africa. Woolmer's two children, hoping to see their father on the other side of the World Cup during which he died. That isn't to say that the sports media didn't present such news as sensitively as was possible. But there remained something troubling about seeing such human tragedy squeezed inbetween stories about contract negotiations and transfer rumours.

The inquest into Woolmer's death has been one of the grisliest spectacles in sporting history. At length, an open verdict was returned, and Gill Woolmer remains in the dark as to what claimed her husband's life. His death was initially thought to be foul play- and even then, with the horror of murder staring us in the face, we wrestled with the event trying to fit that squarest of pegs into the round hole of sporting familiarity. It seems that we look to sport as our escapism, which is fine. But when tragedy occurs, there's a bit of us which wonders how to ignore it.

Sport and cliche go hand in hand, and an alarming number of those cliches encourage the view of sport as a microcosm of life itself, rather than a tiny, individual component. A passage of play can now routinely described as "do or die". The end of the game is "at the death". The sound of a cricketer's stumps being shattered is "the death rattle." We love to talk sport up, to make a game into a battle. But all this serves to do is further alienate sport from real life, paradoxically by veiling sport in the guise of real, human drama.

It was John Doherty, one of the most promising of Manchester United's Busby Babes, who had perhaps the best perspective on sport's problematic relationship with truth and reality. Arguably the most outrageously talented of the lot, an horrendous knee injury meant he retired aged 23. Had he not suffered that injury, he would almost certainly have been on the plane which crashed in Munich in 1958, killing eight of his former team-mates."I grew up making my living by playing a game, then I went on to a gloriously happy family life, while lots of my mates were dead before their time. What's to complain about?"

A Tale of Two Imperfect Tens

2008-03-03T15:06:00.000Z

Two sporting heroes who have made the number ten synonymous with their name. Two twenty-eight year olds who made their England debuts in 1998. Two prolific scorers who ply their trade in black and white, in the North-East of England. Two players who should be at their peak.

The players in question are Michael Owen and Jonny Wilkinson, both of whom, you could argue, are past their peak. Both were given debuts young, aged eighteen, and in both cases it seems their best form is behind them; in Wilkinson’s case one need look no further than World Cup 2003. In Owen’s case, perhaps we look as far back as his hat-trick in England’s 5-1 victory over Germany in 2001.

Wilkinson has undergone a lengthy catalogue of injuries, to his knee ligaments, arm, shoulder (both a dislocation and a nerve problem) and even to his kidney. Owen has endured one catastrophic knee injury during the 2006 World Cup, but also has been troubled by problems with his hamstring and a broken metatarsal.

England has relied on these two men as much as it has relied on any player in any sport in recent times. From their debuts, rarely has anything other than injury precluded them a starting berth in international competition, and still that is the case. Yet now we are faced with the prospect of a Michael Owen robbed of the searing pace that made him so dangerous to play against. When allied with his finisher’s instinct, he had all the qualities that led the England fans to feel that, no matter how badly their team were playing, Michael would pop up with a goal. We may never feel that reassurance again.

Wilkinson, meanwhile, has lost some of the imperious presence he once brought to the rugby field. His length of kicking from hand is shortening, and a row about illegitimate match balls at the France World Cup aside, even his metronomic goal kicking looks less than inscrutable.

It is illustrative that before he re-committed himself to the North-East, Wilkinson’s possible departure from the Falcons was widely discussed. His motivation for leaving, so we were told, would be that his personal fitness and rehabilitation guru Steve Black had departed. No-one worried that Wilkinson might leave when Rob Andrew, who brought Wilkinson on from an 18-year-old playing alongside him and then oversaw his meteoric rise under him as head coach at the Falcons, left to assume his role as Director of Elite Performance at the RFU. Such is the scale of Wilkinson’s preoccupation with injury.

Wayne Rooney took Owen’s crown as the youngest player ever to score for England. Yet even he, aged just twenty-two, has been regularly suffering with injuries of his own. Perhaps we should only expect to have the Rooney we know and love for another four or five years; it seems that while our national sides and top clubs are willing to use the “if they’re good enough, they’re old enough” mantra, they are unwilling to consider the long term implications of too much, too soon.

Inner demons we shouldn't covet

2007-08-28T17:50:00.000Z

The month of August brought with it, during the comedic melee that is the Edinburgh Festival, the sad news that elsewhere on Planet Comedy, Thick of It star Chris Langham was on suicide watch after being convicted of child pornography charges. While comedy as an entity swept excitably north of the border to the Scottish capital, it seems to have abandoned the forlorn figure of Langham, who will remain in custody until his sentencing.

History is littered with examples of people in the public eye, especially comedians, who have a skeleton or two in the cupboard (or one in the swimming pool, in the case of Michael Barrymore, though to call him a comedian would probably bring legal action from the Guild). Michael Jackson, for instance, though never willingly a comedian, has entertained millions through his sheer lunacy and baby-dangling antics. And he's the man who brought us Thriller. Rumours abound about his juvenile bedfellows; this unfortunate consequence of his childishness may, nevertheless, have been the secret to his success- like Samson's hair, or Pete Doherty's tourniquet. While I have heard it whispered, muttered surreptitiously, that the man who brought us Thriller should be allowed as many kids as he likes, I stop short of advocating this course of action.

What does intrigue me is this tragic link between the distasteful (Doherty), or unforgivable (Jackson)- with performing in general. A comedian may use whatever material they can draw upon, all in order to make us, the fickle audience, laugh. Comedy itself is such a fickle mistress; look at TV comedy of the last couple of decades. Some lasts, some does not- the cult favourite Red Dwarf now, apart from the irregular lines of gold that keeps it popular, looks dated and the dialogue stilted; even old favourites like Blackadder have their weaker moments which just haven't stood up to the ravages of time. And few critics would argue that the current absurdist mess that makes up acts like the Mighty Boosh will have as short a shelf life as any of its predecessors; Little Britain would be a perfect example of the one-hit-wonder who should never have returned for a second, let alone a third, series.

Langham is a troubled man. Though he was cleared of sex offences against a young girl, the drawn, sunken-faced figure he cut while in the dock admitting to using child pornography (and spinning a scarcely-believable excuse that it was "research") was undoubtedly one of a shamed man; a hunched, embarrassed, flawed human being. Yet this is also the man who for the last few years has been the driving force behind The Thick of It, one of the most incisive and sharp comedies of the last decade. Reminiscent of Yes, Minister (one comedy so clever it will never suffer from the ravages of time) it showed us all the right way to look at politics. So prescient were some of the scenes that, well, it could have been real. And it was still hilarious, more to the point.

Langham shows us clearly that entertainers are not, and alot of the time can not, be role models. Amy Winehouse will continue to self-destruct because she is a self-destructive being; it is that very quality which, when shining through her unique voice, makes her so marketable and desirable. Chris Langham finds it easy to be funny in front of a camera; yet as an actor and a writer, we must now assume that his profession was an escape, a direction in which to point his troubled, restless mind- and one that brought him great success and many plaudits. As such, then, we must face the unhappy possibility that it is this turbulence of mind, the tortured nature of his spirit that forced him into the creative path he pursued so successfully. He admitted during the trial that he had been the victim of abuse in the past- he as a man, never mind as a performer, will never be the same after this admission, made in the full glare of the media spotlight.

Uncomfortably for many of us, we will never be as precocious or as talented as those we watch routinely on TV. Yet if that means we are free of the inner demons Chris Langham has suffered from all his life, we may all have reason to be thankful. We of course cannot go easy on him just because he is funny, nor can we realistically keep Neverland supplied with children in honour of Michael Jackson's glorious past. Perhaps we need to learn to be less envious; we never know what drives the creative minds we once admired.

A Tale of Two Departures

2007-08-25T21:57:00.000Z

Politics is something we're, fortunately, becoming more and more desensitized to. We may approve of one of David Cameron's ties, or at a push, one of Gordon Brown's. Cameron's hair may look especially bouncy and voluminous. But we rarely feel compelled to invest anything in it, or rely upon it at all.

Yet this week, we are all forced to look to our leaders for something, anything, to reassure us that the senseless shooting of an eleven year-old boy is really the bottom of society's trajectory. That this, after all things, will be the one event that shakes us out of the malaise we find ourselves in.

It says much, and all of it horrendous, that a boy of eleven could be gunned down in a car park, by an assassin making his escape on a bike, weaving his way through the rat-run alleys of the estate he has spent his misspent childhood learning like the back of his hand for just this kind of occasion. Yet are we being foolish to imagine that this could be a turning point? We think back to Damilola Taylor, we think back to Kiyan Prince, and we think back to Sharlene Ellis and Leticia Shakespeare as examples of previous nadirs of our moth eaten social fabric.

Where the real problem lies is that one nadir seems to be quickly eclipsed by another event that we, in our naive blinkered way, can never imagine being outdone. But nothing is ever so quickly rectifiable; the vast estates which form the rat-runs dominated by gangs and their hangers-on will not be swept clean with any kind of political new broom.

The other notable departure this week, an almost polar opposite to the tragic murder of Rhys Jones, was veteran newspaper journalist and former Tory Cabinet member, Bill Deedes. Why I bring up this doyen of journalism now, is that, in 70 years of journalism, he had seen it all. And you can bet that he knew better than to look towards our politicians for real, on-the-ground help with societal evils that we can so scarcely comprehend. It is simply not enough, in this day and age, in our desensitized, apolitical society, to turn our gaze to Westminster and expect help when everything goes wrong. We whinge and we moan. We wax lyrical on the decay of moral fibre, the ease with which weapons can be come by, and the lack of conscience with which they can be used to brutal, savage effect. The problem is not with legislation imposed from the top- though perhaps the swathes of council estates built in the 50s, 60s and 70s, which started their decaying decline in the 1980s, have provided a breeding ground. Legislation and politics in general is a slow, reactionary process; to be proactive, people need to convince themselves of the necessity of change.

When Deedes visited South Wales, West Cumbria and Tyneside in the eighties, to compare these places with a previous visit decades earlier, he lamented that while jobs had gone, and new industries were slowly taking root with some hope for the future, the family bonds that had kept previous generations together were irreparably damaged. He also wrote, "our way out, our way to improve order in society, lies in a willingness to rethink attitudes and policies, and to admit that wherever each of us have has taken our stand on law and order, conceivably we have been wrong." We need neither strong bombastic leadership, nor aggressive militant Neighbourhood Watch zealots patrolling with pitch forks. Both of those approaches are too rigid; flexibility is what we, evidently, need. To persuade people that, for instance, a young black male from a single parent family in a London council estate is not a lost cause or an inevitable foot soldier of the future. Stereotypes help nobody. Arguably the most depressing thing is that Deedes wrote that in 1971. Here, in 2007, we are only just starting to see his sense.

Attitudes can change. People can stand up for their communities, once they are given the reassurance that they will have support from the police to do so. So what we need, as we inevitably and misguidedly look towards PM Brown for a thunderbolt of a quick-fix, is less debate, and more encouragement. More promises of support for initiatives that can change attitudes and futures. More support for police and communities to stand up and do what they can to protect their communities; hopefully some erosion of the gangs' power, and some viable alternatives for the next generation of 11 and 12 year olds being recruited, can be the first step in reversing a steep decline. Deedes spotted it.

Bottoms and breasts sag. MPs go on holiday.

2007-08-17T18:33:00.000Z

This week, we were told that the bottom of the lads-mag market had fallen through (presumably a scantily-clad, pert and airbrushed bottom). Publications such as the popular 'Zoo' and 'Nuts', as well as their less famous sister publications "Tits!" and "Twat!", have seen their sales plummet and the once arrestingly buoyant cleavage that was their market share has become, alas, rather saggy.

There must, obviously, be reasons for this. One obvious candidate would be that as it is currently the Parliamentary summer recess, the grizzled old backbench MPs who I like to imagine religiously purchase such magazines in order to steal a cheap erection before a debate are temporarily out of the country. This would promise a swift upturn in the turgidity of the market once parliament reconvened; however sadly it can not be the cause. This downward trend has been too recent a discovery- Parliament has been gradually voting itself longer and longer holidays year on year, to the point where now by my calculations, the summer recess in fact lasts two thirds of the year ("But we work such long hours!", they cry. Well so would we all if our workplaces had as many bars as the Houses of Parliament do).

Elsewhere in the world, in much more trivial matters, a matter of several billion dollars (at current exchange rates, each billion dollars roughly equates to around eight pounds sterling) has been wiped off shares as markets crashed in the wake of a monumental crisis in the US mortgage sector. Greedy idiots lending money to poor idiots with bad credit ratings have been stung by the fact that, in the end, these folks couldn't pay the money back. Cue worldwide panic- every bank and lender is now in debt to every other one across the world, so they're all buggered. This, too, could be a cause for a slowdown in the market of lads-mags. But, let's be honest, even if Joe Pratt in his Transit van might be worried about a bit of a pinch on his mortgage, it shouldn't stop him shelling out his regular pound or so to buy Nuts or Tits.

No, the reason must be elsewhere and much more radical. Equivalent figures were unavailable for girls' magazines such as Heat and, err, the rest of them, but I have a hunch their sales will have climbed. The metrosexual influence of so many preening, prancing, ballet-dancing footballers getting 80% of the country's attractive women and roughly 95% of the nation's GDP has finally turned most of the men in this country functionally gay. If not fully, actively homosexual, men have, in their swathes, become desensitised to the sight of hundreds of different silicon-enhanced breasts spilling out of the page. Instead of now taking a sneaky look at their girlfriends' copy of whichever coffee-table magazine she may choose as her own favourite, I believe men are now buying their own copies. Just this morning I saw a lorry driver, unashamedly and almost indecently, purchasing a copy of Heat without claiming it to be for his other half. These impressionable men are buying partly to learn something about moisturising, effective shaving of the armpit and eyebrow-plucking. And also, I imagine, because they can look at some pictures of women with their clothes on.

This is no good to the MPs, of course. They will, I hope, provide a bit of extra buoyancy to the sinking ship of lads-mags. But, I fear, outside the corridors of power in the Houses of Parliament, that ship has sailed.

Britain develops gills; the news fails us

2007-07-26T09:33:00.001Z

Apparently, so the BBC News tells me, Britian is under a bit of water. Ooh, not a bit, they cry- a lot. We as a nation are busily acquiring useful webbing around the digits, and in Gloucestershire, the first man in the world to develop gills is having, err, well, a whale of a time, swimming around evading the pitchfork-wielding "norms" who are jealous of his underwater prowess. When the flood receeds, he'll look like a prat, but for now- he's laughing. In more than one village in our sodden nation, there is a doomsday naysayers with a beard adding the finishing touches to the ark, which he has been busy building since retiring in 1982. They'll look a bit ridiculous when it all dries up, too.

This might all seem a bit flippant, in view of the enormous financial (and tragic human) cost of it all. But, I'm afraid, this is what the mind is pushed into by the way the crisis is presented to us. We get five minutes of serious discussion of water shortage and relief efforts, and then twenty minutes of gormless reporter in wellingtons interviewing a variety of wet labradors, and a quirky shot of a couple tying up their dinghy in the local short-stay car park. You wonder whether onlookers like myself, perched upon high in the relative safety of County Durham, might take it a bit more seriously if we had less of the human interest rubbish afterwards.

Because, in the time we've been frantically giving prime-time news slots to George Alagayah's anorak and squirrels backstroking through Tewkesbury, we have been told nothing of the tragic death of a South Korean Christian Missionary, held hostage by the Taleban, shot when his captors panicked en route to collecting a ransom for the prisoners' release. Nor have we seen anything about the team of Bulgarian nurses, finally returned home to Sofia after being held captive on death row in Libya for nearly a decade after being convicted of deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV, when they were in fact just there to help. The children were found to have had the HIV virus for up to three years before the Bulgarian nurses arrived; yet they were apparently tortured with electric shocks to force a confession which may or may not have ever even existed. It's not an exact science, of course- a news show is a TV programme like any other, and, unfortunately for the truth-hungry people who watch it to actually find out what's going on in the world, we get a pretty skewed impression. I for one would have loved to have seen those Bulgarian nurses kneeling down and kissing the tarmac at Sofia airport- surely much more of a feel good image than Worcestershire's wettest corgi being winched through an upstairs window to safety.

Wembley hums to the tune of a changing climate-the nation cringes

2007-07-08T10:44:00.000Z

It was instructive and, in a typically modern "cringable" type of humour, funny. Live Earth came, and after an elongated and horrendous day of supposed awareness-raising, it slipped away into history, and mercifully so. Yet this monstrous display of self-congratulation wasn't, of course, instructive in the way it was meant to be. The people who came to watch, and even the couple of dozen who watched on television, were likely to either know all the facts and stats of global warming and climate change, or simply not care. At least half the assembled throng, I would like to imagine, were just there to see Spinal Tap re-form and perform.

What was in fact instructive about the day was just how much of a hollow exercise it all was. Radio 1 had instructions to cover it when they would clearly rather have been covering the T in the Park Festival from Scotland; their reporter at the Live Earth event sounded palpably (though quite rightly) embarrassed to have to talk about the message behind the event. To top it off, the embarrassed reporter asked embarrassed artists for their views on climate change- cue the expected stream of drivel. "We know that, being a band, we're not in the most carbon-neutral of professions", spake the prophet Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol. at least he was decent enough to admit the hypocrisy, and hinted at the real problem of this event. Performers were never going to say "no, I will not perform at a packed Wembley in front of a large TV audience. I love to fly aeroplanes, drive 4x4 trucks, and consume massive amounts of electricity on-stage too much". The artists were trapped into a cause they were, at best, indifferent to. Only the sweet Corinne Bailey-Rae sounded remotely sincere, and that was because she was mostly talking about her hair, and how afro hair "saves the planet" by not requiring as much electrical tending-to as the straighter Caucasian variety.

These artists were fine. They got up and did their thing, and hopefully by playing good songs well, led people to pay attention to the organisers, who could deal with the "message" in between acts. It was, as ever, Madonna who was the real disgusting spectacle. This woman, this almost bionic, soulless wraith of a songstress, penned a special song for the occasion. Of course she did. Why wouldn't she? Never mind her portfolio of shares in some of the biggest polluting companies in the world. It's those shares that allow her to afford her home in the UK. And without her being in residence in our fair nation, we wouldn't have seen her at Wembley, promoting climate change awareness. Ergo, ipso-facto, she's good for the environment. Bravo, Madge, buy yourself a private jet as a pat on the back.

It's difficult to write about this event without mistyping, and accidentally describing an event "promoting climate change". The awareness bit is crucial to the humble scribe. Yet, with its enormous lighting rig, huge speaker systems, and all in a concrete and metal stadium, promoting climate change is exactly what it did. This may well have pushed us that little bit closer to meltdown. On the plus side, within a decade we'll be able to make a truly decent Scottish wine.
Chris Moyles was right on the money when he pointed out that this hollow effort was nothing more than a carbon copy (no pun intended) of the equally annoying but at least 100% sincere Geldof & Friends Live 8 production of 2005. Their "Make Poverty History" rallying cry may as well have been, as Moyles said, transposed to this weekend's Wembley embarrassment. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we're here to Make the Earth History." It'd be nice to think he was over-doing it for the sake of comedy, but faced with this embarrassed cast of artists, plus the usual cause-whores Madonna & Co, he was right on the money.

Black-tie Brown misses the point...

2007-05-27T13:39:00.000Z

Good old Gordon Brown; he's so very in touch with what people want, isn't he? While the last few weeks of his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer drag on, and we are left to reflect on his choices on how to handle the nation's money, he is "making a stand" on the issue of- wait for it- the traditional black tie dinner suit. His ludicrous decision to sell off Britain's gold reserves at the very bottom of the market for a sickeningly low price to cover his own shortfalls, for instance, is brushed under the carpet so as to allow Gordon to discuss this most pressing of issues. Or his criminally careless mistreatment of the nation's pensioners, raiding pension funds left right and centre to impoverish thousands of our elderly, again to cover his own decisions. These are things which, all things considered, it would be nice to hear him defend himself against- but alas, we are denied.

Instead, this week, we are told that, groundbreakingly, dear Gordon will not be wearing the customary black tie attire for functions where it is required- he thinks it "smacks of privilege and elitism". Well good for you, Mr Brown- you no doubt think this is an easy way of sounding socialist and pacifying some of the "little people", and indeed Labour left who have become disillusioned with Tony Blair's tenure as Prime Minister. How about putting some money back into the pocket of the pensioners you ripped off, Gordon? Oh, I see, we haven't got any... because you've spent it all. Good lad.

Of course, what is blindingly obvious to even the most obtuse of observers is that nobody could care less what he wears. To be blunt, a bloated Scotsman with a few too many chins isn't really meant to think too much about sartorial matters. A further problem is that one of the functions which Brown is refusing to dress up for is a forthcoming dinner to honour the Queen. The danger is that, while taking a half-hearted stance against elitism in clothing, he becomes the focus of attention, instead of our dear old Queen. And he will, no doubt, look like a petty attention-grabber, stealing the limelight at an event that has little to do with him.

And if black tie dress smacks of elitism and privilege, then what about the tailored suits his image consultants have had him buy from London's most expensive (dare I say it) 'elite' tailors of Savile Row. You would think that, all in all, the kind of people who would object to black tie would also object to the lounge suit he will be wearing instead, given that it cost more than your average blue-collar worker's monthly wage. Perhaps a better idea would have been to forego the stand against elitism and instead humbly comform for the sake of the occasion; but let it be known that his dinner suit and bow tie came from Matalan. His campaign to prove that he can, in fact, fill Tony Blair's shoes has seen him indulge in all the horrendously spin-doctored PR rubbish that characterised all that was bad about Blair. The saving grace for Blair was that it quite worked for him. The term "polishing a turd" comes to mind with Gordon.

Try telling the scores of secondary school leavers who, in the coming weeks, will enjoy indulging in the anachronism that is the black-tie dinner that they are indulging in something which is elitist. My own leavers' dinner at the particularly un-grand Staincliffe Hotel in Hartlepool surely makes a mockery of this. One female PE Teacher brought a change of clothes because, halfway through, she disappeared upstairs with a man- noone's quite sure who he was- and returned an hour later looking slightly dishevelled. The pupils and half the staff alike had smuggled bottles of vodka in to avoid the prices at the bar. The poorest of kids from the poorest of schools will still, on the whole, quite enjoy the irony of dressing up like Edwardians, in their suits hired for the weekend from Greenwood's.

Fun, it appears, and indeed irony, are not things that el Gordo is particularly familiar with. If ever a turd was worth polishing, he is surely not it.

What Team America Did Next

2007-05-24T14:31:00.000Z

The International Olympic Committee must have, at one time, thought that sending that famous torch in the direction of Beijing was a good idea. Whether they would privately maintain that opinion is something that seems increasingly doubtful, given the ludicrous firestorm of abuse they have received recently from some unlikely sources.

In a scenario that is oddly reminiscent of the movie Team America (for the uninitiated, Hollywood’s elite form a politically active union called the Film Actors’ Guild- F.A.G for short), the IOC have found themselves harangued by none other than actress turned UN Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow. The sixty-one year old starlet of yesteryear has gone so far as to call the Beijing games “the Genocide games”, and has forced the powers that be to answer some very awkward questions about the Chinese government’s support for the Government of Sudan after atrocities carried out in Darfur in 2004.

What Jacques Rogge, the IOC President, must be feeling is anybody’s guess. His organisation runs itself on a strictly non-political mandate to use sport as a power for good around the world. To be accused of being in favour of genocide by a greying Hollywood veteran is, I would venture, new ground for them.
Mia Farrow did not stop with the organising committee, however. None other than Steven Spielberg, that grand old duke of Hollywood, has been dragged into the melee because he is currently acting as an artistic director for the Olympics. In a comment either devastatingly critical or horrendously unfortunate, the man who brought us Schindler’s List is told he is in danger of becoming “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing games”. Leni Riefenstahl was, of course, the woman who produced all sorts of Nazi propaganda films for the 1936 German Olympics- you would imagine for Spielberg, the Jewish director of the world’s most famous holocaust movie, that’s got to smart just a little. He immediately joined in with Farrow’s criticism and demanded that China condemn Sudan’s behaviour.

Rogge, for the record, avoided the Darfur question when it was put to him recently, but did insist that he hoped the Games would eventually be a "force for good" in China. In fact, all this ludicrous celebrity pressure seems to have worked, and the Olympics may well end up being a force for good, as Rogge wishes. The Chinese Government, clearly unused to dealing with the pressures of high profile celebrity haranguing, promptly sent officials to Darfur and asked the Sudanese government to clean up their act. It is unfortunate that it was they who sold the weapons to Sudan in the first place for them to commit such atrocities, but let us not nitpick. Let us dwell instead on the reassuring power of Hollywood.

Soon, we must hope, Angelina Jolie and Madonna will arrive in Beijing, each with shopping trolleys full of Sudanese refugee babies, freshly exported for the inevitable photocall in Tiananmen Square. Arnold Schwarzenegger will appear to add his considerable weight behind the “Genocide Olympic movement”. Alec Baldwin, the leader of F.A.G in Team America, will also be there, taking his eleven year old daughter on an apology holiday for recently calling her a pig in a voicemail message that found its way onto the internet and into the homes of millions. Soon the cause will be the perfect way of salvaging credibility for the disgraced celebrity- Jade Goody and Danielle Lloyd will offer to carry the Olympic torch. And everyone will forget that behind the scenes, in the parts of Beijing they won’t let you see, the government are happily bulldozing swathes of centuries-old traditional Chinese homes, glad of the celebrity distraction Hollywood is providing.

Jacques Rogge may well be scratching his head at the onslaught of criticism; or maybe he’s delighted at the publicity. Perhaps, after London 2012, he had pencilled in North Korea and Iran as the next two hosts. A fabulous idea; by that time McAuley Culkin will be forty years old and in need of a Geldof-like reinvention, Lindsay Lohan will be onto her third nose, and Daniel Radcliffe will be looking for “a new challenge.” Countless others will join them under the flag first raised by the venerable Mia Farrow. Ridiculous though it is, in the case of the Chinese, it may well have worked.

Danger! Peril! Oh for goodness sake what NOW?!

2007-04-22T14:48:00.000Z

We, if we are to believe what we are told, must live in the most perilous society on Earth. It is a wonder any of us are able to summon up the courage to leave our homes, as there are at any one time seemingly hundreds of studies going on to tell what new and interesting dangers are lurking around every corner.

In one newspaper we are warned that "a cluster of 31 cancers existed in one street" and that "this woman is one of more than 30 people in her neighbourhood to have developed cancer" underneath a picture of a vulnerable but resolute-looking elderly lady. The reason, we are told, is that the neighbourhood in question is in close proximity to two mobile phone masts. This is undoubtedly scary stuff- and is worth taking note of. These studies could have serious repercussions on the heath (and the communications networks upon which we so heavily rely) of the country. That story appears on the front page, and then continues inside.

Yet in the same newspaper an article appears headlined "Women in cities face higher risk of breast cancer". The reason for this is, according to the health expert consulted, "believed to be due to increased exposure to oestrogen, possibly due to the chemicals in pollution."
No mention here of mobile phone masts, of course. It might make sense to link the two stories- cities have the highest mobile network coverage of any areas of the country. There is another article discussing the risks of women who choose hormone replacement therapy. Oh, and a small note mentioning the high (and rising) percentage of woman graduates who are childless because they leave it too late to conceive.

My point is not to question the validity of these facts. But if the women of the nation chose to plot their lives according to these stories- just three articles in one newspaper on one day- they would not attend University, would live in the countryside (and even then, at least a mile from a phone mast? and would have children as early they can. The newspaper, effectivelty, is advocating a mass migration of women away from the cities, away from education, and into young motherhood. Like hundreds of years ago.

It would be a safe life; and let's not forget the myriad of other scaremongering stories that one could read during the course of a week. There'd be less cancer. Healthier chances of conception. Far less rogue door-to-door salesmen. Less danger from traffic. Greatly reduced peril of falling masonry, terrorist attack, and sexual harrassment from grubby men on public transport. And if they became self-sufficient, then their food would be entirely organic, again reducing their apparent cancer risk.

But this scenario of Britain's womenfolk retreating to the hills to form a community of country-dwelling, frantically procreating adolescents isn't especially likely to occur. It would involve undoing all the hallmarks of progress we are so proud of. All these stories serve to do is sew seeds of doubt in the mind of the women whose choices of career, education, and place of dwelling puts them squarely in this bracket of risk. There is such a constant stream of research occuring to feed these lazy column inches that one wonders if some of them weren't commissioned to study these perils (that people can't easily avoid while trying to fulfil their own potential in career or lifestyle) we mightn't have got a step or two closer to actually curing the ailments we're told pollution, mobile phone masts, and HRT can cause. If mobile phone masts' power is turned down, and they cease to be built near to schools and residential areas, then an important step will have been made. But people will still get cancer; and people will still look for something to blame- and too many easy column inches will be gained from it, without getting near a proper solution.

The Most Skilful Sport in the World?

2007-04-19T10:46:00.000Z

In the recent weeks, a recurring conversation with a number of Australians has kept alive an argument that they will not let go; which sport is the most skilful in the world?
Naturally, the Australians feel they have the winner, or else they wouldn’t be so keen to continue the argument. Their beloved AFL (“Aussie Rules”) is, according to them, the perfect blend of speed, accuracy of passing and kicking, strength and toughness. It is certainly tougher than the similar sport we sometimes see played, the Irish Gaelic football. But can it really be the most skilful sport in the world?

I always point to the football we see from week to week in our Premiership (and, of course the leagues below),which must be up there in terms of skill. With the likes of Michael Carrick and Steven Gerrard fizzing passes around, and players with Wayne Rooney or Thierry Henry’s control receiving them, soccer must eclipse anything that Antipodean version of “footy” has got. Aussie Rules is a game that is very impressive because of its scale- they play on a cricket pitch, so it’s enormous, and they play with eighteen players a side. In a nation so enormous, perhaps they find all other sports rather meagre in comparison, and the AFL is the only one that suit’s the grand scale of size they’re used to. My response has always been to boast soccer as an infinitely more skilful sport- there is nothing so cultured as the raw skill of Cristiano Ronaldo or Cesc Fabregas in the ungainly efforts down under.

Now I have thought about it, however, I would probably look elsewhere than soccer. Each player does a fairly well-defined separate job, not all players master all the skills involved (apart from in League Two, where the mighty Hartlepool have recently shown themselves masters of the trade on all fronts en route to promotion). And something as simple as size can make a difference, whether particularly skilful or not- Duncan Ferguson made a career out of being tall and ludicrously short-tempered.

That rules out a lot of team sports, however, including rugby and cricket. While the jobs of, for instance, the scrum-half, the fly-half, and the blindside flanker are very skilful, they are also very specialised. Cricketers, too, stick to their own discipline of bowling or batting, with little scope for truly excelling in both as an all-rounder. The art of bowling spin in cricket must be more difficult than anything you see in Aussie Rules- they simply run around punching the ball to each other and bouncing it every few metres to avoid being penalised. But spin bowlers don’t tend to contribute all around the game like Aussie Rules players do.

There are so many sports which you feel could challenge the Aussie Rules fans’ arrogance- ice hockey is a sport that, having tried it, I have utmost respect for. Hockey skills are tricky enough without strapping a pair of blades to your feet and sliding around a treacherous surface. Similarly, Polo must be an awkward sport to master, having the unpredictability factor of having to aim your shots while astride a living, breathing, beast of burden. Even so, I would probably go for a multi-sports discipline as my final answer to the Australians- a decathlon (or heptathlon) is a fantastically sadistic way to bludgeon the body into submission, where often competitors perform at world class standard in all but one or two of the total amount of disciplines tackled. The range of skills on show there is phenomenal; but as for a team sport that beats the all-round skills of the AFL? Soccer’s probably closest. But, to my dismay, the Australians might just win this as well.

Any government making David Icke sound sane needs to look hard in the mirror...

2007-04-13T16:42:00.000Z

Sometimes it takes a madman to make you see truth.
A case in point was last Christmas time, and was brought about by none other than David Icke, who, for the uninitiated, is a somewhat enigmatic character who was written numerous book espousing the view that all the major players in the world’s history have been descendants of- and there’s no easy way to put this- reptiles. A reptilian master race, apparently, spawned The Queen, George Bush, in fact any major player in world politics, past and present.

I need surely say no more to convince you that the man is mad. Should you remain, for whatever reason, unconvinced, however, peruse if you will the title of just one of his many books- Tales from the Time Loop: The Most Comprehensive Expos of the Global Conspiracy Ever Written and All You Need to Know to Be Truly Free. Oh, and he once told Terry Wogan, on air, that he believed himself to be the Son of God (what Jesus Christ might have to say about this- and whether Jesus was himself a reptilian- he didn’t say).

Yet Icke’s flagrant insanity isn’t what made Channel 5’s “David Icke: Was He Right?” a chilling piece of documentary television. It’s the fact that he, for a while at least, made sense. Not about the Reptiles, and not about the myriad other conspiracies he’s convinced of. Before he got onto this stuff- his bread and butter material- he was making convincing noises about the nature of modern government, and in particular whether ours may be considered a Police State. It was convincing not particularly because of what Icke was saying, but because of footage of Brian Haw, an anti-war demonstrator who has been camped in Parliament Square since 2001. Haw has been a thorn in the side of Parliament and the Police throughout his five-year vigil, falling foul of numerous laws and legal tussles along the way.

Police succeeded in denying Icke’s wife, filming him talkin to Haw, the right to film, despite there being no legal basis for doing so. It made uncomfortable viewing .This was right before the Lizard conspiracy was discussed at length, reminding the viewer of just who it was that we’re dealing with here. The question is, why did the Police bother? What harm was the filming of that one already well-publicised man going to do? Even if they didn’t like the idea of it, what happened to shrugging the shoulders and accepting people’s right to do things that don’t break any laws?

Icke’s job is made easier, when speaking to groups of hundreds of paying devotees at a time, because he can so easily dovetail conspiracy theories in with the post-9/11 climate of suspicion, human rights infringements, and press restrictions. Global politics is now easy pickings for someone like him, given the climate of mutual mistrust between governments and people. He can push the “Bush is a terrorist” argument. He can prey on people’s suspicions about Blair. He knows that we don’t really trust what we’re being told from day to day.

In a lot of ways it’s a lot like listening to George Galloway. The man is, to be frank, frightening. He has, over the last five years, been accused of being complicit with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, after his name was found in documents following the Allied invasion in 2003. He has been ejected from the sanctity of the Labour Party for bringing the party into disrepute after speaking out against the invasion (which hardly made him look innocent of the prior accusation of impropriety). He formed his own party, Respect, and managed to become MP for Bethnal Green. He was then accused of deserting those very constituents by ludicrously entering the Big Brother house, ostensibly to spread his political message to a new audience, but in reality ended up dressed as a cat, crawling around at the feel of Rula Lenska.

Yet to hear him speak is a troubling affair. He is obviously convincing enough, even in his new Respect guise, to win a constituency election. He speaks uncompromisingly and skilfully on all manner of Middle Eastern issues, and sticks to his guns fiercely. The problem for the listener is, that both he and David Icke, men who few would choose to agree with if they had the choice, have got so much ammunition. Galloway will have a constant supply of material on which to rally because of the simple fact that, on many topics, he is right, and is certainly not shy about telling us so. Our government has failed to listen to its people with regard to the War in Iraq, and as such, men like Galloway become to the torch-bearers for the people. His Talk-Sport weekend phone-in is evidence enough of that, and all the more worrying for it.

Even the lunatic Icke. Ninety-nice per cent of his credulity-stretching tirades are nonsense. But it doesn’t matter if you are a mad ex-Coventry City goalkeeper turned conspiracy theorist and holocaust denier , as Icke is- the footage he presented spoke, worryingly, for itself. Not, perhaps, enough to make you start examining Blair’s face for reptilian features. But enough to make you think.

Cricket World Cup Sex Doll Shame

2007-04-13T16:34:00.000Z

As a fan lucky enough to travel to the Cricket World Cup in the Carribbean, I can report that it has been an experience full of fun, and a credit to the islands hosting it. Or rather; everything outside the tournament itself has been.

To describe the competition itself, I'd like to highlight an episode of officialdom gone mad, involving a self important Security Guard and a sex doll, Misguidedly, the security official tried to confiscate the aforementioned doll from a bunch of rowdy New Zealand fans during their match with the West Indies. As he picked it up and carried it away- with no mention as to what crime the unsuspecting doll had committed to warrant her ejection- he realised that, carrying under his arm a fully-inflated polythene woman, he probably didn't look quite as clever as he usually felt when telling people to keep their feet off the seats and other such nonsense. He in fact looked like a fully-fledged kidnapper, as the wind was making the unfortunate doll's legs flap frantically in the breeze as though she was struggling to break free.
He then, safely back in his Security chair at the front of the stand, had to negotiate how to deflate the pneumatic woman. His search for the air valve was priceless; as was his face when he realised where the love-doll manufacturers, with the sense of humour you'd expect of them, had placed the valve.

This poor, unfortunate doll was an important symbol for this World Cup. Her unexplained ejection was symptomatic of the overbearing, American-run Security in force at the grounds- an attitude which stretched to the almost complete eradication of any Carribbean flavour from the matches themselves. Cricket in the Carribbean is usually a festival of music, dancing, barbecues, and overall, fun. The organisers of this World Cup thought it was enough to provide this with staged, tacky displays of "culture" in the lunch breaks. Of course what we all really wanted to see was an event which retained the real flavour of watching cricket in the West Indies; unfortunately that couldn't happen because of the American security, and the fact that the tickets were priced so highly that the local people we'd all hoped to share these events with were simply unable to afford entry to more than a match or two.

The Kiwi fans' doll's plight was more than just symptomatic; the doll was the embodiment of this World Cup- picked up, gripped too tightly, kicking and thrashing. In this case, the overly officious man doing the kidnapping was Malcolm Speed, the chief of the International Cricket Council. This tournament could have been an explosion of culture, colour, music, and sport all rolled into one. As it is, the grounds have been largely half-full at best, and the tournament has effectively been superimposed onto the Carribbean without allowing the islands themselves to interact with the tournament properly. The tournament had the air squeezed out of it by planning committees.

Occasionally, the matches were good enough to allow us to forget the stranglehold of the ICC. England's match against Sri Lanka was by far and away the best game of the tournament so far, the last-ball defeat coming as a bitter blow to all of us English fans shouting ourselves hoarse and waving the flag of St George manically. Unfortunately even the flag-waving was a bit of a flop; flags were allowed in the ground, but only when security personnel had removed the stick ( to be crude, "removing the stick" would have been a good idea for the security men themselves).

Amid all of this, the tragedy of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer's murder a week or so beforehand was brushed under the carpet- it barely made the local press, our only information on the murder investigation's laboured progress came from the copies of the British papers we managed to get hold of. There was talk of this tournament needing to be stopped after Woolmer's murder- the response was that it should go ahead, as a man who devoted himself to the game, he wouldn't want the tournament to stop. The final stages of this tournament will have some considerable work to do in order to make it a tournament befitting Woolmer's memory. Let's hope it happens.

A Sporting Chance?

2007-03-21T17:43:00.000Z

Excuse the dramatic opening, but here’s a story for you: imagine you’re fifteen years of age. You’re looking for your next meal in roadside bins- and you‘ve been doing this regularly since you were seven. Your Mother is a crack addict. She has twelve other kids; all from different fathers. Your own particular father disappeared, and was later found murdered, as was your grandfather. Not all of your family are victims; indeed an uncle redresses the balance somewhat, being, as he is, on death row for murdering his wife. You’ve grown up learning only one lesson, that of how to stay alive.

This kind of abandoned, tragic, feral childhood isn’t something we hear about too often. But it’s a story that has been brought to the consciousness of the American sporting public because it is the story of Michael Oher, one of the hottest properties in American Football, currently sitting pretty dominating college football in Mississippi and waiting for the inevitable NFL draft when he graduates.

It’s dramatic, it’s heart-rending, and it’s inspirational, but only thanks the intervention of a wealthy family of Republican Christians who took him in after his lucky (and initially most likely temporary) entry into a wealthy private school where their own children were educated. It’s a story that is being used worldwide as an example of sport’s ability to save; even this borderline illiterate, almost entirely mute kid from Memphis’ meanest streets.
When he was accepted into the Briarcrest School, Michael Oher’s IQ was rated as 85. By the time he left, after countless hours of hard work and the nurturing influence of his adopted family, his IQ was rated well above 100, enabling him to go to college and further his football career. But the real point here is not that sport saved Michael Oher from a tough, dangerous life in the projects of Memphis. Nor did Christian love or round the clock tutoring save him. It was genetics.

What you should also know about Michael Oher is that, when he was taken in by the Tuohy family as their own, at age fifteen, he was already 6ft5 and weighed over 300 pounds. He could also, it was quickly discovered, run faster over ten yards than any other boy in his team, and he could throw further and harder than the team’s Quarterback. He is a specimen of unparalleled enormity, and it so happens that his incredible size and speed make him fit exactly the profile of an NFL left tackle, one of the highest-paid positions in the game. His job is to protect the blind-side of a right-handed quarterback from the marauding opposition trying, frankly, to mince him.
Good for Michael, of course. We all love a rags-to-riches story, and the riches at stake here could hardly be further from the rags Michael Oher grew up with. Yet if there is one Michael Oher, there must be dozens of others in Memphis. Multiply that by all the cities in the USA and you’ve got thousands of similarly neglected, wild kids roaming free without hope. Out of all these tragic children, Michael Oher is only one; one who happens to be genetically blessed like few others. For us to say that sport can save lives, help the helpless and rescue the lost simply on the back of Michael Oher’s story is to ignore the thousands of other kids like him who will never get the benefit of excruciatingly random coincidence and genetic fortune like he has.

Another story now: you’re seventeen, you’re a talented sportsman, and you’ve been earmarked as being a good enough role model to help in the coaching of the juniors at your club. Only the day before a routine Saturday match, you’re gunned down in the street. This time, forget the convenient distance Memphis is away from us; this happened in London. The sports club in question is Greenhouse Bethwin, a football club run from the same North Peckham estate as where Damilola Taylor bled to death in a stairwell. Many of us have played team sports at some level- imagine, if you can, turning up for a match to find out that one of your key players was shot dead the day before.

This football club was established and nurtured by the knight in shining armour of this story, a man named Abdullah Ben Kmayal (known to all simply as Ben). While millions of pounds of sponsorship and wages may not await the graduates of the Greenhouse Bethwin junior ranks as await Michael Oher when he graduates college to turn professional, this corner of London is an infinitely more appropriate place to look for evidence of sport’s qualities of salvation. Run on the principle that the most committed, hardest-working players will get to play at the expense of even the most talented players should their attitude not come up to scratch, it is a club where the London equivalent of all those feral Memphis kids who are unlucky enough to not be Michael Oher can access sport and all the discipline, hope and positive attributes it can provide.

Sadly, of course, it is unable to lift its players entirely clear of the danger they face every day in the way that Michael Oher was lifted clear of the violent mess that was his homeless, abandoned youth. But at Greenhouse Bethwin, there are nearly twenty football teams that run to offer an outlet for over 400 young people, boys and girls, no matter what their skill or physical attributes. The Greenhouse charity, an umbrella organisation including Bethwen FC, also runs dance, drama, table tennis, basketball and half-term multi-sport courses for the underprivileged of London.

Here in Manchester a similarly positive set-up exists, with John Amaechi’s ABC Basketball Centre in Whalley Range. Once the highest-earning English sportsman of all time, playing centre for the Utah Jazz, Amaechi put £2.5m of his own money into building this centre for Manchester’s youth to explore the sport, encouraging participation from social games to serious team matches. All this taking frustrated bodies off the streets and onto the basketball court, giving them an outlet.

The frustrating irony is that, having said Michael Oher’s story isn’t the place to look for sport’s powers of salvation, both Greenhouse Bethwin and the ABC Centre required, and continue to require, similarly improbable gestures of goodwill. Abdullah Ben Kmayal has given countless hours of his time, over sixteen long, frustrating years. John Amaechi gave millions of his own money to set up his centre. Both institutions provide opportunities for anyone, regardless of how genetically normal or freakish they may be; a worthy and humbling attitude. Yet neither could have happened without the vision of a guardian angel. Ben says that, with funding for facilities, his club could cater for at least double the amount it can at present, but the bureaucratic minefield faced by even this most worthy cause make it almost impossible. Amaechi bemoans the “diabolical infrastructure” of basketball in this country, a description seemingly appropriate for all sports funding.

Nelson Mandela said, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire in a way that little else does.” Yet professional sport, despite the efforts of some, struggles to appear as anything other than a self-serving, money-obsessed industry. It would be fantastic to say that amateur sport was thriving, proving Mandela right, working its magic on the lives of the young; but at present, places like Greenhouse Bethwin and the ABC Centre work despite the government, not because of its help. So, it’s left to stories like Michael Oher’s, one in a million, to reassure us that sport can work for the power of good. Sadly, in context, one in a million isn’t quite convincing enough.

Drugs in Sport

2007-03-21T17:42:00.000Z

The Government have recently announced plans to implement a harder line on drugs in sport in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics in London. A report by a House of Commons Select Committee accuses UK Sport, which overseas drug-testing in Britain, of “unacceptable complacency” and said more needed to be done to identify and prevent doping scandals; including a suggestion that the responsibility for testing for drugs should be removed from UK Sport, due to a conflict of interests as they are the body that fund athletes’ training and preparation. Sports Minister Richard Caborn has yet to agree, preferring instead to discuss increasing the length of bans handed out to competitors found guilty of drugs offences.

Yet drug abuse in sport has been rife for years, and though lifetime bans from the Olympics are now automatic for any athlete guilty of using performance enhancing drugs, we must surely question whether the present system in any guise can ever truly work.

At the 2001 World Athletics Championships in Edmonton, Canada, the golden girl of British athletics, Paula Radcliffe, caused a stir by holding up a sign saying “EPO Cheats out” while watching a heat for the 5,000m. Her anger was directed mainly at Olga Yegorova, who despite recently testing positive for EPO, a blood-doping agent, was taking part in that 5,000m. Since then some of the biggest names in athletics have been implicated and occasionally banned from competition. Britain’s own Dwain Chambers has served a two-year ban; the USA’s Tim Montgomery has been banned and all his successes (including a world record) have been removed from the history books. Another USA Sprinter, World Champion Justin Gatlin, has been punished similarly. Yet Athletics is still suffering; recently Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou, the two disgraced Greek sprinters who tried to mock the sport and disguise avoiding a third consecutive drugs test by the invention of a spurious motorcycle accident, have said that they hope to return to competition, Kenteris even suggesting he will compete at the 2008 Olympics to regain his 200m gold medal he won in 2000.

An automatic four-year suspension for a serious doping offence is again being looked at by the World Anti-Doping Agency, but it is believed that many professional sports would find it legally unworkable because it could be challenged in the civil courts. Only now that the British Government have decided to investigate how to punish drug cheats in order to avoid potential embarrassment at the London 2012 games has this become an issue worth really debating. Yet every year, countless young athletes around the world are unable to resist the competitive pressure that drives people to taking performance enhancing drugs. A recent documentary about the misuse of steroids in bodybuilding showed, as an aside, the story of a 17-year-old, 6ft1 high school baseball pitcher whose coach had told him he needed to “bulk up” on steroids in order to make the varsity team. Within two months he was dead, having committed suicide after the uncontrollable mood-swings he had suffered from as a side-effect.

Currently Italy is the only nation in the world to have a system in place for bringing criminal charges against drugs cheats in sport. If sports authorities care about the young impressionable athletes endangering their lives by taking performance-enhancing drugs, and not just their own potential embarrassment, it is time more nations followed Italy’s lead. Cases like the baseball pitcher in the documentary must be told, and offenders must be punished as harshly as possible; it’s not simply a matter of making sport cleaner, but about making it safer for all the young men and women whose lives revolve around it.

Heavyweight Heroes

2007-03-21T17:41:00.000Z

Fatness gets a bad press these days. Not only does our media do everything in its power to advocate skinniness and all that “size zero” marketability as the be-all and end-all, our government has demonised the rotund. Lynch mobs of busybody parents are clubbing together to form a nutritional militia seeking to kill the Colonel, burn down Burger King, and tear down the golden arches of McDonalds.

Sport is an unlikely place to look for a beacon of hope for those oppressed by these fascist body images imposed by our media and our government. Yet as recently shown by the 21-stone Bermudan cricketing policeman, Dwayne Leverock, who terrorised the England middle order in their World Cup warm-up match, there is still hope for the fuller figured sports fan.
The recently-retired German cyclist, Jan Ullrich, was a perfect example of off-season bloating just to remind us that cyclists aren’t necessarily naturally whippet thin. Fatty foods, amphetamines and ecstasy were all vices he indulged in away from the cycling season, bringing ridicule throughout his career, while the drugs brought suspension, sacking, and notoriety; but essentially Ullrich was always a fair-weather fatty. Our real icons are those who competed at their peak while at their weightiest.

Golfer John Daly has never pandered to those who argue that sportsmen must be at the pinnacle of physical fitness. If he had, he probably wouldn’t find it so easy to regularly drive 350 yards off the tee; the usual quota of Jack Daniels swirling around inside his sizeable waist clearly adds useful momentum during his swing. He had one memorable round where his swing almost never materialised because of the alcohol shakes he was suffering from, and gloriously he is also sponsored by Hooters. A full life for a fuller-figured male.

Andy “the Viking” Fordham deserves a special mention for services to the stereotype of darts players. While his ludicrous rival Phil “the Power” Taylor was sharing training sessions with ex-England rugby hooker Phil Greening to work on his “throwing dynamics”, the Viking was, almost without exception, in the pub. His own pub, no less. Regularly imbibing 25 bottles of lager as his pre-game preparation, he brought joy to many through his 30-stone efforts of Celebrity Fit Club. However, Fordham’s recent stroke, and Daly’s time in rehab perhaps mean we should look elsewhere for our porky poster-boy.

Snooker in the 1980s was blessed with the presence of Canadian Bill Werbenuik, the first player to split a pair of trousers live on television. Sadly the affable 20-stoner was advised to take the drug Inderal to limit prodigious alcohol intake, which was on snooker’s banned substances list. Curtains for him, but a trouser-splitting honourable mention is well deserved.

Athletics of course has the shot putt; but that would be too easy. Track and field’s overweight icon must be Trevor “the Tortoise” Misapeka, the 21-stone “sprinter” from American Samoa who ran the 100m in an eye-wateringly slow 14.28seconds in the 2001 World Championship heats. He afterwards said it was his personal best, as he’d never run that far before.
American football, meanwhile, is well stocked with stocky players, but one springing instantly to mind is William “the Refrigerator” Perry. Playing at a peak of 25 stone for the Chicago Bears in the 1980s, he was described by one columnist as “the best use of fat since the invention of bacon”. His views on dieting were instructive. “You drink beer, it fills you up, so you don’t need to eat. Then you sweat it out the next day at training.”

Dieting is an interesting topic when dealing with these pioneers of sporting girth. Almost without exception, it is seen as entirely negative to their performance. Golfer Craig Stadler once lost two stones to try and shed the nickname “the Walrus”. His skills deserted him, so gained ten or twelve pounds to test his theory; his game returned, and so he regained the whole lot, becoming the Walrus once again. A similar tale involves Pakistan’s Inzamam ul-Haq, who was once incensed by a spectator calling him a “fat potato”. He in fact gave in to pressure and lost two and a half stones before the 2003 World Cup; after scoring only 19 runs in the tournament, he vowed never to diet again. Australia’s Shane Warne, prone to being slightly roly-poly himself, once described Sri Lankan captain Arjuna Ranatunga as looking as though he had swallowed a sheep whole.

With most of our heroes- the Refrigerator, the Walrus, the Tortoise, the Viking, and the rest- eating a sheep whole wouldn’t be so far out of the question. Hats off to each and every one of them for resisting the body fascism oppressing us all.

World Wide Waffle

2007-03-21T17:40:00.000Z

Professional athletes are, to generalise, not the most rapier-witted individuals in the world. So it is always a dubious affair when they are approached to produce a sporting blog- ghost-written columns and books are bad enough, but with the added assurance that far fewer people will ever read the blog in question, the quality of “insight” on offer can suffer an horrendous demise.

Witness, if you will, the unfortunate collection of scribblings from the online pen of Durham and England cricketer Liam Plunkett. It is unlucky for all concerned- Liam Plunkett, BBC Online, and the poor, defenceless reader- that the man himself was injured at the beginning of the Ashes tour, and then spent the entire tour trying to regain fitness. This, needless to say, doesn’t make for riveting reading; typical was this entry of January 19th: “A lot of you out there might be wondering what I’ve been up to since my last entry. Some of you might even be asking whether I’m still out here in Australia.” It had, in fact, been a month and twelve days since his previous entry. So, in breaking a six-week silence, surely Liam had something groundbreaking to tell us? He came up with the goods, of course. He‘s used to performing on the biggest stage. “Away from the cricket, we’ve had a bit of time with our families, and Christmas was nice.”

Liam, poor Liam, has obviously thought this “Christmas was nice” revelation infinitely newsworthy. He was, amusingly, slated on the “Comments” section of his blog by angry onlookers using his updates about the weather, his girlfriend, and rock concerts he had attended as evidence that the England team weren’t “focused” on winning the Ashes. While I hesitate to argue with such passionate fans, perhaps the online diary of Liam Plunkett, who for all intents and purposes was on an extended holiday, wasn’t the place to look for competitive bluster and fighting talk.

That cricket should provide such a flaccid, dire effort, is somewhat sad considering it is usually regarded a more cerebral sport than football. Yet football beats cricket hands down in the BBC Blogs stakes- Plymouth manager Ian Holloway, never a shrinking violet, at least uses his to get things off his chest- recently on the sensitive topic of referees. Or at least, it’s sensitive to anyone other than Holloway, who typically said it as he sees it- “The word professional means they're full-time, although it doesn't mean they're any good! But are the rules any good? No, they're absolute garbage.”

Owen Hargreaves occasionally slips into what we’d expect from a footballer, with nuggets like “The window opens twice a year - in January and again in the summer - and it is part and parcel of football”, but overall does manage to provide an interesting perspective as an English international plying his trade abroad. Bolton captain Kevin Nolan meanwhile gives a typically frank account of his life as a footballer, his BBC column providing an endearing look into the life of an engaging and down-to-earth character.

On David Beckham’s big-money transfer to the LA Galaxy, he writes, “Beckham has taken a lot of stick from people all around the world but he has just hit back at them with a huge wad of cash…with those sorts of figures I think he would be daft not to.” And, whatever we think to the Beckhams’ move to LA, it’s hard to argue when it is so clearly Nolan’s honest opinion. Of course it’s also hard to argue with Liam Plunkett’s description of Christmas as “nice”- you just get the feeling the BBC might wish they’d offered the column to one of his team-mates instead.

Grandad Grandstand Put To Bed

2007-03-21T17:39:00.000Z

The recent months have seen the sad demise of some of television’s best-loved institutions. Now, as of last week, Top of the Pops and Magnus Magnusson are joined by the venerable Grandfather of TV sport, BBC’s Grandstand in the “Fondly Remembered” section of TV’s archives.
The landmark sports programme that defined the weekend for millions of sports fans throughout its time is no more- the fact its title is so close to “Grandad” is convenient, for that’s the esteem it is rightly held in.

What is sad is not that it has been scrapped, but the manner of its passing. It could hardly be said to have indulged in a grand finale. After a slow but irresistible decline into old age, a large majority of people would be completely unaware it has now disappeared from our screens, while the sports featured in the last ever instalment of televised sport’s original icon were a scant mixof ice-dancing and carpet bowls.

Once upon a time every cup final, every world record, and every medal of every tournament would have been shown on BBC. And Grandstand would have been the vehicle to carry it. Yet these days, now sport isn’t limited to Saturday afternoons, Grandad Grandstand had become a fondly thought-of but largely senile elderly relative; struggling every weekend to claw its way back up to the coverage given by its competitors throughout the week. It was confined to the armchair and wetting the bed.

What reduced it to this state is pretty clear. With the rise of satellite TV, the BBC faced competition from new, advertising-funded, dedicated sports channels. Sport is only one strand of the BBC’s enormous remit, all of which the license fee had to stretch to.
The BBC couldn’t ask every year for money simply to buy the rights to more sport. There would be uproar from all its other services, and from the taxpayers. But as the BBC became increasingly unable to compete in the financial climate of sports television, the quality of service reduced, to the point where the taxpayer was now asking why it was worth paying for at all.

To ask if it could have been saved is really to miss the point- there simply isn’t any amount of re-jigging that could make up for the fact that Saturday afternoon isn’t the be all and end all of sport, at least not on a shoestring budget. It became a haven for obscure sports, and the better-known ones so horrifically painful to watch that they were cheap enough for Grandstand to show. Grandad’s pension doesn’t stretch very far these days, of course.

It was first broadcast on October 11th, 1958, making the show 58 years old. In a way it seemed much older; an archaic remnant of the age it came from. It brought us one of the most memorable theme tunes of all time, and it is entirely possible that the show was kept running just to be able to preserve it. Towards the end it was spruced up; but the introduction of Craig Doyle’s vertiginous hair and some slightly more trendy livery didn’t make up for the agonising lack of real sporting action on show.

It is ironic that, in this age of ruthless TV executives, Grandstand lasted months longer than Top of the Pops, which even to the end had bands to play and a chart to report on. Grandstand really only had a studio, some presenters, and what sporting insight they could conjure from the Swiss Under-21 clay pigeon shooting championships.
And so, while we mourn the loss, we must accept that it was the kindest thing to do. We will miss it; but not as much as Grandstand itself missed being able to do what it did best.

Spoilt Little Rich Boys?

2006-10-27T18:49:00.000Z

Are footballers really the avaricious, spoiled mercenaries we make them out to be?
Aren’t they, when all’s said and done, simply the most visible of our generation’s self-made men? We all admire an entrepreneur; someone born with a skill who has worked hard to earn themselves the kind of life they wanted.

When it’s a footballer, it’s different, apparently. All they do is play a game. A triviality enjoyed by thousands every weekend. Most would kill to do something we love for a living, let alone such an overblown living as our Premiership stars make. Never mind that they too were born with a skill that they’ve worked and trained their entire lives to hone into the skill they show now. Never mind that; it’s only a game.

Football isn’t the only industry to pay young people a lot, of course. Yet we don’t hear shouts to cap the earnings of talented young city traders; and we surely don’t doubt that just as many of them are obnoxious idiots. Hollywood actors, despite many being visibly unhinged , don’t bring the murmurs of discontent that footballers do. We seem to prefer our footballers poor. That way they’re the working-class heroes of old, not the nouveau-riche upstarts whom the wealthy resent and the rest of us can’t relate to.

A salary cap may, of course, preserve young players work ethic; and also stop the dominance of superclubs like Chelsea luring all the big names in world football to their club with exorbitant wages.
It might well work, on both counts- but honestly, would Craig Bellamy be less likely to fight in nightclubs just because his wages are reduced? Would Keiron Dyer be any less inclined to urinate at a bar in a nightclub if he earned £10,000 a week less? Somehow I doubt it. Titus Bramble would have still demolished a garden wall in sleepy Newton Flotman this year- he might just not have been driving a BMW (with 6 passengers in high spirits en route to a nightclub he could have crashed a milk float). And if Chelsea weren’t allowed to pay Michael Ballack’s £130,000 a week, he’d have gone to Spain instead, with all the other stars we take for granted.

Wigan’s Chairman Dave Whelan is all in favour, citing salary cap successes in both codes of rugby- but they protect clubs from themselves, stopping teams being bankrupted by their own ambition in a fledgling professional game that generates only a fraction of football’s revenue.
And therein lies the point- football’s revenue is so massive, especially in the top flight, that they can afford it. They operate in a massively wealthy industry, and so, by default, the people working within it get paid more than those in other, less lucrative industries.

Players like Ashley Cole do sound ludicrously ungrateful and vain when they talk about “deserving” an extra £30,000 a week, especially in Cole’s case from a club who had nurtured him from childhood. But let’s be clear- Cole is not comparing himself to the “normal“ folks who watch him from the terraces every week. He is a footballer, with one shot at a short career, touted as the best in the world in his position. He’s comparing himself to other footballers living and working within the same bubble. He doesn’t believe himself to be several million times better than Dixie Dean or Stanley Matthews; yet our sporting elders are never happier than when pointing out that yesteryear’s heroes were dirt poor and ‘played for the love of football.’ But if offered riches in return for playing the game they loved, would they have said no? Footballers’ Wives wouldn’t work so well in a mid-terrace Barnsley miner’s cottage- and we’d all be the losers for that.

Heineken Cup Preview

2006-10-19T09:52:00.000Z

This weekend sees the kick-off of Rugby Union's Heineken Cup, a chance to see all of Europe's best teams- and some others thrown in as ballast- scrap it out to be named Champions at the end of the year.

Encouragingly there are a number of British clubs capable of being right up there at the end, with some mouthwatering matches being played right from the first weekend.

Defending champions Munster launch their campaign on Sunday with a tough match against twice-champions Leicester Tigers, in what will inevitably and tiresomely be monickered the "Group of Death", also including top Welsh seeds Cardiff Blues and French outfit Bourgoin.
Munster come into this match after a poor defeat to Edinburgh where crucial fly-half Ronan O'Gara was injured and equally important second-row Paul O'Connell didn‘t make the start- both are expected to be fit to take on Leicester, but they have started the season shakily. Leicester should go into this feeling confident after a combative derby victory against Northampton; however with Munster's play being more effective than attractive and Leicester having beaten Northampton without scoring a try, it could be rather hard on the eye.

One promising much more in the aesthetic department is Gloucester's match with Celtic League Champions Leinster on Saturday. Gloucester's precocious all-English backs (with an average age of 23 and three 20-year-olds), who cut apart an impressive Worcester side last weekend, will be facing the likes of Brian O'Driscoll and Shane Horgan- if these backs can be given the supply they need, expect fireworks.

English champions Sale Sharks take on Neath-Swansea Ospreys, who will be fielding Gavin Henson (the permatanned, ludicrously-haired, shaven-legged boyfriend of Charlotte Church) in a team which has been chopped and changed a lot this season already. Sale have started strongly, despite losing to Leicester in this season‘s opener, but the prospect of seeing bearded French neanderthal-man Sebastian Chabal charging at the rather more groomed and metrosexual Henson provides the real intrigue in this match, which has genuine potential- Ospreys have had little trouble against English opposition this season, having beaten both Bath and Gloucester in the last three weeks.

The usually formidable French teams are having very difficult domestic seasons so far, and with the exception of league leaders Stade Francais, should provide opportunities for upset, particularly when they travel. Last year’s runners-up Biarritz are struggling, providing hope for Northampton who play them on Sunday and should be capable of success against the group’s other teams, Italian also-rans Overmach Parma and Scotland’s Borders.
The same goes for London Wasps, who should be encouraged by the poor form of Castres and Perpignan, both struggling to be mid-table in the French league, and should hope to dispose of Bennetton Treviso, another Italian side- one of three for the first time in the competition’s history.

All in all an interestingly mixed bag of matches and genuine reason to be optimistic for a number of our teams, as they start the long road to this season’s Twickenham final.

How does White Van Man become an environmentalist?

2006-09-12T21:36:00.000Z

If we are to believe what we are told, in fifty years time, our gardens will not grow. Our common English plants will simply dry up and topple over in a sad horticultural capitulation, and green-fingered enthusiasts will be tuning into Radio 4's Gardening programme to find which varieties of Meditterranean and desert plants would best suit our new, baked climate. We will tan like Spaniards during the Summer, and soak like Mancunians all through the Winter.

This seems a tale of sad, nostalgic love for the good old English Country Garden; and little more. Yet there are many prongs to this onslaught of environmentalism, which mean worse for out poor, gasping little Earth. Oil reserves, for instance, are running out. The Peak Oil theory- that the world's oil production would peak and thereafter be in terminal decline until it runs dry- was advanced in the sixties, but seemingly nobody can actually agree on when this hallowed peak will occur- the world's scientists seem to have spent fifty years deciding that the only true way to see the peak will be in retrospect.

Others maintain that the world's oil has already peaked, as 33 of the 48 largest oil producing nations are already in decline. This, I think we can all agree, is a "bad thing". The world's scientists no doubt will take another twenty years to make that quote official, but I stand by it. This has brought our own dear Prime Minister Blair to the forefront of environmental concerns, they being so close to his heart these days (they must serve as a nice distraction from all those unpleasant foreign goings on). Alternative energy sources are being championed; soon PM Blair will be spotted riding a solar-powered chariot around London on his farewell tour.

This is all very well and good, of course, and admirable to boot. Even the token gesture of standing up to George Bush over his Kyoto Protocol violations is a positive move, albeit a hollow one. Yet the fact remains that for all this posturing and campaining, there remains an almighty battle on to actually convince the grass-roots folks of this country that environmentalism is for them. Take, for instance, that doyen of British grit, the White Van Man. He has spent the last nine years being outraged at the rising cost of fuel for his beloved white van; this seething bitterness has never abated, and now, he of the White Van and his white-collar equivalent Mondeo Man, are being asked to consider alternative fuels.

General Motors, under the Chevrolet badge, yesterday unveiled their great white hope- a family car powered entirely by hydrogen, emitting nothing but harmless water droplets where we are used to gushing thick, Victorian black smoke. Yet this project flounders when it's considered- it relies on the assumption that people actually want to help the environment. Will White Van Man really see the difference in his lifetime? No? So why would he change his van and his family cars for one of these silver homogenous eco-pods? Certainly the Government of the day will tax the old fuels to hell and back to encourage a crossover, but when it's done so grudgingly, noone will be willing to embrace this as a cause. A resistence movement could even develop, defiantly driving old American Supercars around and delighting in their fuel consumption, while picketing and sabotaging Hydrogen stations. That'd be a turnaround for the environmentalists, wouldn't it?

Secondly, and in a point that is no less important, all this saving the planet nonsense comes over as, quite frankly, a little bit girly. Men will be very slow on the uptake of alternatively fuelled cars, as to jump on such a green-minded bandwagon would seem in some circles to be the ultimate abandonment of one's masculinity. This isn't just a "car-as-phallus-extension" scenario, it's a more innate conservatism. Let others do the radical bit- it won't become "normal" until it catches on with all walks of like. But it won't appeal to all walks of life until it becomes normal- there's the paradox.

White Van Men across the nation will still be driving their gas-guzzling vans long past the time that these cars come on the market- they will no doubt be highly-priced, they will inspire little or no excitement, and they will make men feel like hippies. They will also still be tending their English plants in their English gardens well beyond the year when our new climate has baked all the azalias to potpourri, and all the grass to straw.

Governments and lobbyists can press all they like, but people will not change until there is a noticeable difference to be had for themselves and their families. If it's a long-term fix to a problem that isn't really causing too many problems just yet, how many people will embrace that as a cause? There are more reasons to change garden shrubs than there are to change vehicle fuel- the dead flowers are at least visible. A hole in our wheezing O-Zone layer isn't.

Umpire Darrell Hair vs PM Tony Blair: Bring on Cash For Resignations!

2006-08-26T12:07:00.000Z

The last week has been a turbulent one in the usually placid waters of that most gentlemanly of sports, cricket. After one Australian Umpire, Darrell Hair, decided (with seemingly little proof beyond his Aussie intuition) that the Pakistani team had been cheating, the ensuing furore led to Mr Hair, in his own inimitable way, offering to resign.

But this was no typical offer of resignation; he sent an e-mail to his boss, a man named Doug Cowie, asking for $500,000 in return for his being willing to "retire/stand down/ relinquish my position." This, on the face of it, is a breathtaking course of action however you look at it. Either the man himself had decided that his time was up, and it was worth covering his back in case he is left with nothing, or he simply has had enough of pussyfooting around the law-makers of his sport and wants to get out; offering his resignation in exchange for cash seems to be the action of a man not especially enamoured with the sport he has devoted his life to.

Yet perhaps there is more in this; a precedent that could be applied to our own frenzied political landscape. Image, if you will- Party Conference time comes around this Autumn, and PM Blair is about to take the stage. The audience and throng of assembled media is wondering just what he is going to say. Will he make any pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq? Surely not. Will he, then, make a clear indication of his exit strategy? Possibly, although it could render him even more of a lame duck; all of these have crossed his mind.

Instead of either of these options, PM Blair strides on to the stage, grinning slightly wider than usual, and with a twinkle in his eye that has been AWOL for at least the last two years. His hair even seems less grey, his face ever-so-slightly less wrinkled, as if a great weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He addresses his once-adoring members:
"Friends. Members. Colleagues. Gordon. I stand here today willing to give what most of you seem to want most." The anti-war lobby's collective heart leaps.
"I will retire/stand down/relinquish my position with immediate effect, in return for the sum of £500,000. If paid directly into my account in the Cayman Islands- (don't worry Gordon, you know I've never stopped you borrowing to pay for things, this is no exception) I will be out of your hair. All those in favour, say 'Aye!'"

A fantasy, perhaps, but, as Umpire Hair has shown us this week, a "cash for resignations" scandal could be the next big thing on the political horizon. Cash for peerages fizzled out, cash for questions is just old hat; surely the successor to these two noble scandals is apparent?
Perhaps at the future Coronation of Prince Charles, he could do the same- "I know probably very few of you want me. And quite frankly, I'd rather be somewhere else too. So what do you say? A couple of million and a country estate or two, and I'll happily bugger off. Now, the price would depend on whether you just wanted Wills to take over or whether you're after a complete abolition. That'd cost you extra..."

Yes indeed, a fantasy. But probably no more of a fantasy than something really interesting being said at a Party Conference. Blair's clinging on by his fingernails. Brown's saving all his ideas for when he takes power, lest Tony steals them. No, perhaps we'll just have to dream. And take our conference entertainment from the unfortunate pensioners being jostled by security heavies at the back for sucking too loud on Murray mints in the Auditorium.

Animal Wrongs

2006-08-19T11:17:00.000Z

Today, the Daily Telegraph reports that at a fly-fishery near Lancaster, "A gang on masked animal rights activists attacked a group of anglers", spreading their web of intimidation now into purely recreational territories.

Has this done their cause any good? Are animal testing facilities going to close their doors and set free all the creatures within, because of this group of thugs masquerading as crusaders for a cause. I wonder if they're proud of themselves, knowing that they successfully set upon and threatened a body of fishermen and women including several families. Would they have spared the toddlers with their nets, splashing around near the waters edge? By the sound of things, this group, which found it morally justifiable to chase a young woman (a nurse, no less) with wooden bats shouting "Get her!" while punching another woman in the face, have no grasp whatsoever of what would help their cause.

These pathetic wannabe guerrillas paraded around shouting things like "It's the easy way of the hard way....You've been sabbed!", which sounds more like a cartoon battle cry than the rallying call of genuine dissidents; but the fact that such a rag-tag, frankly pathetic group of people could become violent towards women simply for fishing, says something about the desperation the animal rights cause evidently now must feel.

The real animal rights lobbyists, and it must be acknowledged that there is a genuine lobby to be listened to, somewhere within the melee of masquerading idiots, tirelessly petitioning Parliament for the improvement of animal welfare standards must be ashamed to see their beloved cause taken on by such snivelling, cowardly amateurs.

In a year where animal rights protestors in the city of Oxford have largely been laughed off the streets and treated with widespread derision due to their objections to the new building of an animal testing laboratory, you would hope that the Animal Rights lobby might keep their profile low for embarrassment; all they seem to have achieved is assaulting a young woman angler (who presumably would have been throwing back whatever fish were caught anyway) and necessitating the builders on the Oxford project to wear balaclavas to prevent their being identified and targeted.

This is a group of, though I hesitate to use the word again, "wannabes". They dress as though they're an offshoot of a Paramilitary organisation, wielding bats, presumably attacking families of anglers because it's much easier than the early mornings favoured by the activists of old when attacking testing centres and laboratories. One would hope that some of them would think of examples close to them, where relatives or loved ones have been saved by medication tested safely on animals- but, judging by their apparent braindead recklessness, that might be a forlorn hope.

Everybody Loves Kate....But Why?

2006-08-19T10:48:00.000Z

To continue the vaguely pop-culture train of thought started earlier in the Blog with my post about Pete Doherty, I now move to consider his muse, the model Kate Moss. To get straight to the point- why does the nation love her so? She is drug-tainted, tainted by association with scurrilous men, a seemingly often absentee mother to her put-upon toddler daughter, and yet nothing, it seems, can dent her popularity.

In the last year, Kate has been "exposed" as a user of hard drugs in the Tabloids (though the Police "asked her a few questions", it seemed entering a munti-million dollar rehab clinic was deemed hardship enough for her to avoid any trouble). She has been one half of the most ludicrously on-off celebrity relationship in recent memory, with a man for whom public sympathy seems to have run almost dry; yet for Kate, it does not.

Throughout the whole tabloid storm of the past year, Kate Moss attracted, in real terms, very little publicity for herself that turned out to be genuinely negative. She went through rehab (a luxury hardly available to your average run-of-the-mill Council Estate addict) and immediately then was painted as a Great British Survivor. And trebled her income; all those snooty labels that dropped her when the story broke were replaced in a piranha feeding frenzy for her face to adorn new and exciting products to be marketed.

I was fortunate enough to catch a short feature on TV in the last couple of weeks which dealt with exactly this issue; and the guests they had on to discuss it were illuminating in themselves. Three sycophantic "fashion-types"- a stylist, a photographer, and...well, probably another "stylist"... sat around nodding sagely discussing with the venerable hosts, Richard and Judy, how Kate inspires loyalty in her friends, and commenting on how none of her friends would ever discuss her in the public domain.

Exactly-which tells us that these three wise folks aren't Kate's friends, but people who may have met her once or twice; they probably know little more about her than we do. One of these three fashion oracles proudly, and with the air of a fashion guru, assured us that Kate had told him several years earlier that she never did any drugs harder than marijuana. Or maybe he'd seen in on a documentary. Or heard it second-hand... you get the idea. Their presence there did illustrate the point that none of Kate's friends would go behind her back in the public doman, which was a bonus- but the feature came rather unstuck when trying to show us "the real Kate Moss". There simply isn't one- she doesn't say anything, except through publicists. She goes about her daily business, suspicous or otherwise, with an air of mystery that is constantly cultivated by tabloid photos speculating, and she herself saying (and therefore confirming) nothing.

She knows that she is a model; operating in the most shallow of worlds, where face-value IS everything, and evidence substance or moral fibre can do little more than put people off. By stayling silent almost all of her career, she has managed to ingratiate herself as the fashion muse of a generation; any female between the age of 12 and 32 seems obliged to adore her, never stopping to criticise her decisions or attitudes. She knows her primary function is as a clothes horse, and style icon. For those twin roles, she doesn't need to speak.

She spoke once, a long time ago, in a TV Programme Model Behaviour, in her reassuringly normal Croydon accent, giggly and youthful. Now she speaks as the face of Virgin Mobile, with a rather more polished and artificial accent- again, to put people off would be a tragedy in a career like hers- and in between, even in the press, her public statements have been mostly limited to agents and acquaintances.

There is probably not a male equivalent, because it is only a small circle of manhood that considers fashion in the same exalted manner as the female population at large does; I would guess she is a female-only phenomenon. Few males would be able to keep their mouth shut for quite so long, even if they were convinced it was for the best; Kate Moss has become the master of being in the public eye without seeming like she totally wants to be.

She is, paradoxically, one of the most recognisable faces on the Earth, and at the same time a blank canvas; and, it seems, a commercial genius.

Poor Bob Geldof- You Need to Diversify....

2006-07-26T13:44:00.000Z

One of the more amusing stories of the week's news has come from Italy, where, it is reported, Bob Geldof was forced to cancel two gig dates after less than 400 tickets were sold; and indeed, the Grand Old Man of Boomtown refused to go on stage on one 12,000 seat arena when there were only 45 people in the audience.

This is at first rather sad; after everything he's done, trying his damnedest to rid the planet of hunger, poverty, and unfair trade, no-one can be bothered to go and see him do what he first made his name for, good old fashioned rock'n'roll.

That's entirely the point, though, and one that Bob himself has clearly missed- he went backwards. He obviously felt a nostalgic delving back into his musical roots would be a fun thing to do, and no doubt it would have been- had he found anyone else who cared. Perhaps in his local pub, he may have done. But on a tour of Italy- one would imagine not one of the Boomtown Rats' strongholds of support at any time- perhaps he over-reached.

What he needed to do was move forwards. Not in any genuine, purposeful sense, but to anything new- think about the raft of reality TV shows he could have perhaps joined. Imagine him as an elder statesman on Love Island. Or sharing a pig-sty combat ring with Archbishop Rowan Williams, Bobby Davro and Ann Widdecombe on a new hybrid of Celebrity Wrestling and The Farm. The possibilities, as TV executives keep showing us, are damn near endless.

Another asset Geldof has, of course, is his offspring. Peaches Geldof is making her mark in society despite her tender years, and perhaps he could harness some of her evident popularity in a kind of Father & Daughter Tag Team Gladiators. On Ice. This would be a new way to see him, something the public would no doubt want.

The sad fact for Bob- dear, dear Sir Bob- is that he took a nostalgic step backwards when the world is crying out for new celebrity idiots to lose weight, beat lumps out of each other, kiss each other in a small wooden wendy-house on an island, or otherwise humiliate themselves.

It may of course not be a sad fact at all, however- perhaps, encouragingly for Statesman Geldof, he is just taken too seriously by the world as a charity campaigner for them to be particularly interested in how his singing voice has lasted the years. The magnitude of his achievements on the charity front far outweight his achievements in music, and he should be rightly proud of himself for that; perhaps the lack of numbers at his gigs should be taken as a compliment?

Imagine, if you will, Tony Blair reforming Ugly Rumours, his band from University days. Thousands would turn up, out of curiosity and fascination with the Prime Minister making himself look silly- people desperate for new and interesting ways to take aim at the PM would have a field day. If I were Bob Geldof, I'd be thinking that the failure of his musical tour merely shows him that, unlike Blair, people aren't so interested in finding ways to make fun of him. And if they respect him in his modern-day role as a one-man global pressure group- a very high-profile position- then he should be pleased. Let's face it, he wasn't that great a singer anyway. We all love "I don't like Mondays", but his back catalogue is far from inspiring.

The answer to Bob is this: stick to what you're good at, or try something entirely new that you're unlikely to be good at. That's what people will be interested in. Going backwards, as true in this case as ever, is never the way forwards. Especially when you've only got one famous song....

Why Shouldn't Party Donors Have Knighthoods?

2006-07-26T12:47:00.000Z

Today's Labour Government is, as we are persistently being told, in turmoil- and not least of which among the reasons is that a scandal has erupted around party funding. The Government is accused of a "Cash for Honours" scenario- where their party donors are rewarded by a place in the Honours List.

The Honours List is an opportunity to reward those who have given great service to their particular field- and by doing so have helped the country in some way. So, the victorious 2003 Rugby World Cup Team were honoured; as have numerous footballers. However the same prestige is given to lollipop ladies who have given decades of service to their local community; headteachers, councillors, charity workers, and many more walks of life besides. Often in amongst these worth folk spring up the names of rich successful business people who can be honoured for "Services to Industry" or the like.

The accusation is, however, that rather than being congratulated and recognised for their "Service to Industry", these people are being honoured for something else- for having given part of their wealth to the government as party donors, and are being directly rewarded with a title. The precedent for the legal investigation that seems to have followed is Maundy Gregory, who in 1925, set up an office where he literally did sell honours to all-comers. An OBE for £100 sounds like a decent deal; it obviously was at the time, too, as 25,000 are reputed to have been sold. This is all a bit silly really though, isn't it? It's hardly the same.

If a rich steel magnate wants to give money to the political party he supports, then good for him. Figures released last week detailing the 25m worth of debt incurred by the last General Election suggests that there could be few causes that would need the money more; and although certainly our hypothetical magnate might expect to hold a bit of sway in return for his contribution, so what? If he's so willing to give money to the cause, he obviously thinks the party to be at least competent; and if so, he probably doesn't expect to gain all that much influence
because of his generosity, else the party themselves wouldn't be worth supporting.

As Marcel Berlins of the Guardian wrote last week, aren't people who give the gift of finance to a political campaign more use to it than people who simply ponce around giving "the gift of rhetoric"? Why should the financial donors be frowned on as though they're engaging in some seedy practise, when in fact they're being genuinely useful? And if money is all they have to give, then who should stop them? You can't just think up millions, they're earned- and it's alot harder to give out cheques with multiple zeroes on them than it is to give out soundbites and verbal support.

Newspapers this month have been busy lauding Warren Buffet, super-billionaire in the classic American mould, who plans to give away his fortue to the Gates Foundation, which, set up by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, gave (for example) $287 in one go for aids vaccines. An excellent cause, one of the most admirable foundations, founded by an incredibly admirable man (Gates) and now supported by another (Buffet).

Would we have liked him so much if he'd been British and given a few of his millions to the Labour party? Philanthropy's a noble and admirable thing- surely an act worthy of a place in the UK Honours List. Yet giving to the political party of your choice has now become a filthy, dirty thing to do.

Certainly post-Cash for Questions and post-Major, it's understandable. But during the discussion over whether parties should be forced to name their donors, it was illuminating to see the dismayed reactions from some donors involved. Some said they would withdraw support after being named- some said they'd have turned down an MBE if it had been offered to them. Perhaps it is these shadey donors who'd rather stay in the dark, pulling strings from behind with their financial muscle, that should be frowned on- not the actual act of giving to a political party.

If you don't want to be named, don't give millions to a party. And if you get honoured for it, all well and good- the Honours system is widely regarded as an archaic one, and the benefit of being honoured is questionable, especially when they're given to someone who has already climbed the slippery pole of British industry. Give them a Knighthood if you want, it's unlikely to make an awful lot of difference! Although it is just conceivable that there may be some Lib Dem donors out there who simply want their names off-record for reasons of pure, simple, unadulterated embarrassment....

Jean Charles Menezes must be remembered; and as one of us.

2006-07-11T17:42:00.000Z

Today's date cannot have escaped your notice. 7/7 is now the most emotive date in the calendar of the British consciousness; it is synonymous with sadness, loss, and pure, bitter shock. Yet it must also be said that in the year that has passed, there has been much we can be proud of; shows of strength, resilience, and fortitude. London's circulatory system, if you'll allow the analogy, was hit hard- but its heart beats stronger than ever.Today, as around the country, we observed a two minutes' silence in memory of the victims, their families and their loved ones.

Dozens were killed on three trains and one bus around London. The nation stopped; this was our 9/11.However the week after 7/7, there was a second attack; one that mercifully failed in its aim of echoing the first wave of attacks. We can be proud of London's response to this second attempted assault, and also the Police's reactions- a Europe-wide manhunt for the failed bombers was successful and brought them to justice, plucked from London flats and an Italian hideout to face justice. The search was relentlessly pursued, and during this search, constant news updates followed the search's every lead- and as they were reeled in, we felt safe again.

Yet in this furious search for these unsuccessful second wave bombers, there was a casualty- a young, innocent Brazilian named Jean Charles De Menezes. Lest we forget, he was shot dead at point-blank range at Stockwell Tube Station; the most bitter tragedy after his own was that it was a Police Officer who shot him. He was caught up as a suspect in the frenzied Police activity that followed both 7/7 and the follow-up.In these times of instant-gratification justice and blame, who on Earth do we point the finger at?

It is simplistic and straightforward to blame the Police; criticism have ranged through trigger-happy, bungling, all the way to institutionally inept. Yet the same Police service, all things considered, managed to reel in four desparately dangerous men- people who had proved themselves willing to strap explosives to their body, and detonate them, purely to harm others.I personally don't think any of us can know what goes through the head of a Police Officer confronted with the possiblity that they may be the only person able to stop a suicide bomber; the adrenaline, fear, and responsibility is something noone could ever be prepared for. A mistake was made; a tragic mistake.

But let us remember Jean-Charles Menezes as a victim of 7/7, or of the follow-up attack- not simply a victim of the Police. He deserves to be thought of as a part of this nation, part of the glorous multicultural patchwork that makes Britain what it is; he was taken from us too, by circumstances created by four men with rucksacks, trying to change the world for the worse.

Let us also remember the human stories that have moved us since; the priest who gave up her job because she found she simply could not forgive the bombers that killed her daughter. You can only hope that she reconciles her faith and her situation; if not, she becomes another tragedy to add to the list.As we observed our two minutes' silence, we remembers everyone lost on that awful day. Yet the fallout claimed one more victim; he should have been in our thoughts today. If not, then mark the 22nd of July with a moment's reflection on another tragic victim of Terrorism in the UK. He deserves our thoughts; and let us think of him as one of us.

Hillary Clinton, the blogger, doggers, and a whole boatload of jargon...

2006-07-11T17:41:00.000Z

People in the UK tend to look at American Politics with a slightly snooty, raised-eyebrows kind of condescension, and let's be honest for us to be so dismissive of the political engine driving the biggest economy in the world is, at best, patronising, and at worst, pig-headedly arrogant.But- and there is indeed quite a "but"- we have to concede that American politics doesnt do itself many favours; and as a simple example, take their President, the erstwhile Mr Bush Jr. Competent and passionate he may be; surrounded by a well-stocked cabinet of political thought he may also be (that's not for this article to comment on, however). Yet as a representative of his nation, he is undoubtedly far from eloquent and hardly a figure of dynamism; when we think of all that is synonymous with the American nation, he doesn't quite seem to fit.

The main focus of this post, however, is another example of US Politics appearing slightly out of kilter. Hillary Clinton's recent recruitment of a leading political blogger, Peter Daou, as part of her "team", presumably in the run up to her seemingly inevitable run at the White House, is on the surface not a bad move. Daou himself has written on his Daou Report that he wishes to "close the triangle"- meaning his perception of the three prongs of mainstream media, the political establishment, and.... here it comes.... "the blogosphere".While it may seem odd for me to write, in a "blog", to criticise the use of the word, I just don't feel it lends any credibility to the man or what he can no doubt bring to the Democratic Party.He calls his mission "joining Senator Clinton’s team as a blog advisor to facilitate and expand her relationship with the netroots". Why must he use such ridiculous, convoluted net-jargon to describe his post- he is now moving into the mainstream media, which may find it hard to take him seriously if he insists on using such language.

We all know what he means, of course. Perhaps he is just a little bit too wrapped up in the "blogosphere" to realise that outside of its keen and committed enthusiasts, such terms aren't going to win him any fans, and indeed I can imagine that some prospective readers of his online missives could be put off by him speaking as though representing an online cult of "bloggers".Maybe in the UK we find a problem with the term "blogger" because of its alphabetical proximity to "dogger"- one who drives to shady spots at night to engage in anonymous sex acts with strangers of a similar disposition. Just a thought.

My main point is this, however; the man is a political consultant. He talks at length on his site about how he tries to fuse the two worlds- the world of the blogger, and the world of the consultant. Is he too stubbornly steeped in his own jargon that he can't call himself Sen. Clinton's "online outreach consultant", or something else that would actually mean something in the real world?Just like President Bush seems slightly incongruous when we look at the nation he is meant to stand for, the idea of a man being drafted into a Presidential Candidate's inner circle using words like "blogosphere" just doesn't sit right.

It either seems like a good idea but wrong choice of man (perhaps Sen. Clinton will take Daou to one side and give him a heads-up that he sounds like a teenage computer games enthusuiast) or a fairly cynical attempt to bring Daou, a well respected man in his field, "on-side".The commendable but sad thing is, you can't help but feet Daou's earnestness in everything he writes.I hope for his sake that he gets to bring his points of view to a whole new crop of "netroots" enthusiasts. I just wish he wouldn't call them that....

Pete Doherty: Learn from Russell Brand

2006-07-11T17:38:00.000Z

The nature of celebrity and fame throws up all kinds of moralistic outrage these days. For the last two years the UK has been treated to a one-man show of car crash TV, tabloid intrusion and rock-n-roll excess from the ex-frontman of The Libertines, Pete Doherty.

Widely condemned for rolling from shambolic, heroin-soaked gigs to drugs den, to rehab, and all the way back again via numerous run-ins with the police, he has become a figure of hatred, idolisation and fascination for all manner of folk. If you are twenty years too old to care about his band, you can still shake your head at his disgusting excesses. If you are twenty years too young to remember Jim Morrison, he's the rock idol the world has arguably been missing since Michael Hutchence passed away; a pied piper of disaffected youth to today's generation.But since being arrested and convicted on a myriad of drugs charges and misdemeanours, and even lashing out at a BBC Radio reporter outside a courtroom, he has lost his way entirely.

He has always been interesting to watch; he formed The Libertines, they became a phenomenon, and then was forced to disband them after his drug use spiralled out of control. He formed Babyshambles and watched them descend into an even worse melee of excess ; it was The Libertines with yes-men who couldn't throw him out.The irony of it all is that those fans who were with him from the beginning simply don't view him in the same way anymore. He isn't a Libertine anymore, not in the way he used to be. His dissolute behaviour and lack of restraint was an enchanting call-to-arms to thousands of young fans. Now they hold him with affection, but the affection of a cousin or friend who's lost their way. He isn't idolised anymore, he is pitied. A significant proportion of a generation has its fingers crossed for him; but for too many of them, his aim isn't to entertain them or enchant them any more.

Doherty has always been idealistic, and his fragile persona betrays a naiive and sensitive soul as much as it does his clever songwriting and talent as a wordsmith. Now it seems he is all too committed to writing himself into legend, except that with the only sporadic successes of his music, all he has left is the "Live fast, Die Young" mentality that has claimed too many of the world's great entertainers.The fads and phases created by the tabloid and magazine media's peaks and troughs of taste and decency have created a new hero, of sorts- one equally tainted by drugs, debauchery and self-indulgence and all without Doherty's air of innocence to lend him the excuse of being a young pup led astray.

No, the current flavour of the month is none other than Russell Brand, the fiercely verbose and intelligent comedian and host of E4's Big Brother's Big Mouth talk show and also MTV's 1 Leicester Square, both shows where he and his surreality have total sway over the audience.Brand, in many ways, should never have made it back to his current level- he was sacked from MTV once before, for arriving in to work dressed as Osama bin Laden on September 12th, 2001. Crass, drug-fuelled and arrogant, he could never claim to have been led astray- he always seemed too clever for such an excuse to wash.Yet, despite the fact that most of his audience (on the E4 show at any rate) will struggle to understand him- references to philosophy, classics, and literature abound at any moment Brand feels the urge- he is everybody's favourite. He has even been linked romantically with Doherty's obsession, the Supermodel Kate Moss- and the world is his oyster. Even she, after her own drugs scandals and the loss of numerous high-profile contracts, has come back even more of a success after rehab and a rethink.

The message to Doherty is simple- a downward spiral and glorious exit isn't the only way to make it from here. Since his disastrous Live 8 performance, and subsequent performances at court, there has been a sickening inevitablity about his demise. Yet surely, if Russell Brand shows us anything, it's that people love fighters- careers resurrected by sheer force of will and talent. We love Brand for his pluckiness, the fact that he has blown every chance he's had before this, and yet is grasping his good fortune with both hands.

If Doherty can acquire some of the spine Russell Brand has exhibited, then his place in his old fans' affections will be cemented. His mewling vulnerability isn't doing him any good any more- the only people who care are folks who like the image of all that debauchery without ever needing to go near it, and a whole new fan base of young teenage girls, looking for a controversial figure to idolise, without the slightest care as to what he's saying to them.Every drug-influenced lyric, every abandoned gig, every court appearance- it's all worth nothing it he doesn't come out of the end of it.

James Dean was an icon, but only made three movies where he appeared on the credits. Go back to rehab. Sort yourself out. Cement your place in the nation's consciousness that way; after all, Russell and Kate both did it.

What would the British media do to Zinedine Zidane?

2006-07-11T17:33:00.000Z

On Sunday night, the World Cup of football- or soccer, for those of you that way inclined- was won by Italy. This, however, is not even the main story of the night. Nor is the fact that it is the fourth time "the Azzuri" have won it, putting them one win behind Brazil. No, the night's intrigue centred, as so many times before, on Zinedine Zidane.

Universally regarded as a genuis, voted the player of the tournament by FIFA's committee, darling of the French people- he managed to score his nation's only goal in the first 90 minutes of play, and then get himself sent off for what amounted to a pretty grave physical assault on an Italian player. A running head-butt to the chest was delivered with sickening force to the sternum of Marco Matterazzi, who coincidentally had scored Italy's only goal just a few minutes after Zidane had scored his.

The issue I wish to discuss here is not whether he did was right or not; not whether Matterazzi's blatant mischievious baiting of Zidane was as reprehensible as the subsequent attack, or whether Zidane, in his last ever match, has ruined his own legacy and tainted his own career. Even now, only two days after that fateful night in Berlin, the French people are rallying to support Zidane- the Champs d'Elysees bore numerous messages of adoration for Zidane, whose role is now of fallen hero, rather than the pantomime villain you would expect had be been the English captain. The English captain of this tournament was, of course, David Beckham. Back in 1998, as a precocious youngster, he was sent off for a petulent flick-kick at a nearby standing Argentinian player, while Beckham himself was prostrate on the ground.

This dismissal, warranted or not, earned him the position of Public Enemy number one for a long time. Voodoo dolls were created and burned while the national tabloid media orchestrated an effective hate campaign against him for allegedly ruining England's chances of winning the World Cup that year. Beckham himself has come full circle, of course. Just two years after his ordeal and subsequent trial by tabloid, he was named England captain in a surprise move that stuck well, and can on balance be considered a success. Yet Zidane, by physically attacking an opponent three-quarters of the way through a World Cup Final, as Captain, disgraced himself on a far larger stage, with a much higher stake- his crime (and it was a crime, against football, sportsmanship, and his nation's hopes) was all the more disgusting for that; and more to the point, far more serious than Beckham's was.

What, had it been England and Beckham in that final and not France and Zidane, would have become of the disgraced captain? The answer is simple. Our snide red-topped arbiters of national mood would have banded together once again to form a journalistic lynch mob; pulling the strings like cowardly puppeteers hiding behind their by-line, and letting the passion of the nation's supporters do their work for them. In short, "Beckingham Palace", as Beckham's country pile is known, would have been burned to the ground. It wouldn't be safe for him to return for quite some time. Maybe there is more than a hint of resentment over Beckham's shrewd playing of the fame game, he being the pioneer of "image rights" in football contracts, and using himself and his own sporting profile as a marketing tool on a scale hitherto unseen. Footballers from the 60's onwards have been used for advertising- Brut, Brylcreem, all stalwarts of Sunday League changing rooms, have used footballers- but never quite like Beckham.

Contrast this with Zidane; not only did he perform such a reprehensible act on the biggest stage in the world, but as he was dismissed and walked to the dressing room, showed nothing in the way of emotion. He had the same arrogant look in his eye that he has always had; the same one he had while lifting the World Cup Trophy in 1998, and the same one he still wore while headbutting a Champions' League opponent a few years later, earning him a five-match ban.

The British media would have pilloried him even more for the sheer arrogance of his appearance as he left the field- at least Beckham would have had the decency to cry or at least look disappointed. Zidane yesterday enjoyed a reception with the French President, where he was treated still as a national treasure, and told he was a "man of the heart". Only a handful of French commentators have come out in open criticism of Zidane, even then preferring to bemoan the "shattered dreams of a nation" rather than pursuing an open campaign of targeted blame.

While this sickly adoration of their talismanic Captain seems misplaced given his track record of nastiness and the gravity of his most recent and terminal act, we must surely reflect that it would be preferable to the vicious attack-mode thatwould have swept England had the same happened. And no Englishman would like to admit it- but perhaps the French are simple better losers than we are?