Chicken Yoghurt: Just what we need - more bread and circuses

Just what we need - more bread and circuses

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

If I hear one more of the patronising, punchable, enormo-egos that constitute the British Olympic bid team say, "this isn't just about London but the whole country," I might very well go postal.

Unless the marathon runs past my front door here in Brighton, the Olympics coming to the UK will impact on my life not at all - apart from, of course, all the money that will swill away to pay for this smug back-slap. I'm sure if you live on a sink estate in Glasgow you must be jumping for joy right now. As you will be if you run any of the functionally redundant yet highly lucrative marketing consultancies or advertising agencies that swarm around London like mussels around a sewage outlet.

How this helps even Londoners I'm not quite sure unless any of them are desperate for a velodrome on the doorstep. "Oooh, think of the regeneration in Stratford in London's East End," squawk the feeble-minded. Well, I used to commute through Stratford every day of my life. It's a toilet and no amount of lottery money is going to change that.

It's not as if the proles are going to get anywhere near the best of the action. You'll be allowed to watch all the gymnastics and synchronised swimming you like but forget about being able to watch the 100 metres final in the stadium. The corporate tickets have probably already been paid for. But the clock is ticking on how long it takes for the first person to say "these Olympics will be the people's games". Care to place a bet on who it'll be?

"London. I don't think I've heard a sweeter word in all my life," Sports Minister Richard Caborn has just excreted on Radio 5. Christ, we've got seven years of this. "I was welling up," said the odious Nicky Campbell with his usual sense of perspective. What a girl. Christ knows what would happen to him if he saw something genuinely moving like raped children in Darfur or a holocaust museum - he'd probably explode in a lachrymose shower of snot.

On the upside, maybe it'll mean the Government won't be able to afford to cluster-bomb anywhere else anytime soon.

Another silver lining will now be to watch the chaos as the mighty organisational skills of New Labour are brought to bear on bringing in a massively complicated and expensive enterprise on time and on budget. I'm hugging myself at the thought. It's going to make cataloguing the population look like taking a provincial primary school's register.

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13 Comments:

On July 06, 2005 2:01 PM, dearieme said...

And the skills that A. Campbell has honed so successfully with the Lions in NZ will doubtless be expensively deployed. Vomit-provoking.

On July 06, 2005 2:58 PM, Oscar Wildebeest said...

It doesn't help Londoners at all, for the information. We'll be paying for this until after I'm dead, if Montreal's experience is anything to go by.

On July 06, 2005 3:09 PM, Scaryduck said...

Speaking as Devil's Advocate (and one who stands to make a killing in 2012 to boot): you bunch of cynical bastards!

On July 06, 2005 3:33 PM, David Duff said...

I wish you'd tell John B all that, he doesn't believe me. Can't think why!

On July 06, 2005 5:33 PM, john b said...

"We'll be paying for this until after I'm dead, if Montreal's experience is anything to go by."

Or, it'll be massively successful and within budget, if Sydney's experience is anything to go by. Or, it'll cost a bit but will finally get assorted important bits of infrastructure built, if Athens's experience is anything to go by. Any justification for Montreal.

On July 06, 2005 5:34 PM, john b said...

Err, "any justification for picking Montreal as your example?", even.

On July 06, 2005 5:48 PM, Katie Bartleby said...

Just a quick question (and a style-theft) as someone who's not lived in the UK for a while: is it always only the overbudget failures that get in the news then, or can anyone name me a major state-supported project in Britain under NuLabour that hasn't gone overbudget and/or been a failure? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

On July 06, 2005 5:55 PM, dearieme said...

Katie, when I was growing up in the 50s, the standard tease to Labour canvassers was to say "groundnuts", an allusion to a ludicrous, failed, over-budget government scheme. A friend says that the only technological decision that a British government has ever got right was Churchill's, to change the fleet from coal-burning to oil-burning!!!! That was before The Great War.

On July 06, 2005 8:39 PM, dave bones said...

it-ch shport innit? how can you dis shport? A bit of shport is going to save the world innit?

On July 06, 2005 11:23 PM, GrecianEd said...

As someone above suggests why pick on Montreal? There are examples of successful games with a good legacy.

Furthermore, the UK has a good record of running international sporting events: Manchester Commonwealth Games and Euro 96. But don't let that stop you excreting (good word) the cynical diatribe! ;-)

On July 07, 2005 11:13 AM, David Duff said...

Dearieme, Churchill made another huge, technological decision at the same time as the switch from coal to oil-powered ships. He decided that the new Queen Elizabth class 'dreadnoughts' should be armed with 15" guns which 'expert' opinion thought were unworkable. He inisted that the ships were built in tandem with the new gun development, and much to everyone's relief, the new guns worked. You can see a pair of them outside the Imperial War Museum.

You can bring dinner parties to a complete halt with facts like that. Not that I would know these days, because I'm not invited to many dinner parties!

On July 07, 2005 11:26 AM, Monjo said...

Sporting successes are the bedrock of British national pride these days. Just hark back to November 2003 when every schoolchild in the country was pretending to kick rugby balls using the exact mannerisms of Jonny.

London doing the Olympics well (even for a loss) should guarantee us a FIFA world cup by 2022 - which will be profitable.

On July 07, 2005 2:57 PM, dearieme said...

Look here, Duff, how dare you trump my yarn? More seriously, the UK government did get the atom bomb right (you know of course that the Admiralty held the patent) and then eventually got a fast-asleep US govt to take up the baton, not least by employing Einstein as a British agent and getting him to help harass the sleepyheads into action.

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