The Big Off, it's the Tour de France...in England

If you want something done right, do it in Britain.

No matter what your event, it goes better in Britain.  The best Olympics ever?  London.  Best city for a marathon?  London.  Greatest arts festival in the world?  Edinburgh. 

But if you want something done exceptionally do it in Yorkshire.

This is a country with special qualities.  Yorkshire is often described as ‘God’s own country’, especially by Yorkshiremen.

Yorkshiremen are without doubt the lovliest people in the world, who can greet you with a cheery ‘ow do?’ with equal enthusiasm and with their flat cap equally horizontal in sun, sleet, snow or rain…when they are in Yorkshire.

The moment they step outside the County, you truly understand why they refer to it as God’s own country; to hear them endlessly bang on about it you’d think it was the Garden of Eden as they bring a missionary zeal to describing just how bloody great Yorkshire is.  Tirelessly.

So, best stage of the Tour de France ever?  Yorkshire.  Naturally.

It would appear that the simple solution to securing the success of any sporting spectacle is simple; hold it in Britain.

Especially cycling.  And no wonder.  This is a country that loves cycling.  When you’re a lid cycling means freedom, when you’re an adult cycling means being able to purchase loads of cool gear and nod meaningfully when people talk about carbon fibre.  And no wonder we produce such talent.  Every kid with a bike has the capacity to become a world champion.  And plenty of them have a training regime from an early age, up at an early hour summer and winder, putting in the miles.  They’d go even faster if they didn’t have to stop every few yeards and put newspapers through people’s doors.

But it’s not just children.  The sight of men in lycra thundering along Britain’s roads is not at all an unusual one.  Or a pretty one.  The sight of athletes, who actually look good in lycra, thundering along Britain’s roads, is a little rarer.  And a lot prettier, if you like thighs.

Usually the sort of chap to be seen of a weekend, top to toe cycling gear, looks like he is racing towards a pub or pie shop rather than a yellow jersey and a drugs test.  Middle aged, but like many middle-aged men not old enough to know better, men who wander into cycle shops appear to suffer from the same condition that grips the type of man who purchases an insanely powerful motor cycle, or lots of Lego.  They are trying to recapture their youth, which is something of a challenge no matter how hard one peddles.

The Tour de France traditionally starts with a stage called ‘The Big Off’, which takes place outside France.  Usually this takes place in a country so near France that it is indistinguishable from France, like Belgium, which is either a country or a beer and mussels theme park, I’ve never been sure.

In truth, the nation is right to be excited about hosting the Big Off.  It’s actually right to be over-excited about hosting the Big Off.  This is a big deal.

Because the Tour de France is impressive, the race footage tends to be swooping helicopter shots of idyllic villages, castles and monasteries.  It should really be accompanied by a swirling, stirring orchestral score and a telephone number at the bottom of the screen to ring to get your brochure.

The excitement has been building for some time now, developing into expectation.  This is drama, this is excitement, speed, colour, swooshing along roads, flinging water bottles left and right, the crowds loving it and, of course, the names of the villages being rendered in French on the BBC, something that will especially cheer a certain class of claret-coloured illiberal xenophobe and possibly stimulate UKIP membership.

This is the greatest Big Off ever because it’s taking place in a country that loves cycling, is used to putting up with road closures, is enthusiastic to the point of mania when it comes to cheering and is taking place in a country so beautiful one might be mistaken for thinking some of it is CGI for a fantasy film.

Re:cycling

Bikes.  Lycra.  Olympics.

This has been a spectacular summer for cycling.  Not actually cycling, of course, it’s been bloody miserable weather and unless your cycle came equipped with those pontoon things that they fit to helicopters to allow them to land on water and get attacked by sharks, it’s unlikely you will have enjoyed cycling this summer.  Certainly, I get out on my bike now and again, usually when I want to make a short hop and am both to lazy to walk it and far too tight to bother paying for parking at the other end and certainly again, this year, I began to question being too tight to pay for the optional rear mudguard on my bike, as the spray from the rain thrown up by my rear wheel somehow managed to both hit the nape of my neck and soak my arse.

The spectacular cycling was mainly happening in the velodrome of the Olympic Park and in the streets around Hampton Court, where Team GB showed two things; that if you are one of the greatest cyclists in the world at the peak of your form, you are likely to be looking at the arse of the member of Team GB in front of you and thinking very dark thoughts indeed, and that if you wear lycra, you need to have the body of an Olympian underneath it.

Cycling is, apparently, the new golf.  This, I think, means that middle-aged men have something to get them out of the house at the weekend for a few hours and also something to spend vast sums of money on in order to have a better time doing it.  I have no idea where carbon fibre comes from but I do know that bikes made out of it are very expensive and, presumably, whoever owns a carbon fibre mine spends most of their evenings rolling around in cash, hookers and coke.

The worrying words in the paragraph above are ‘middle-aged’.  In isolation, not a cause for concern.  Let me throw in another word.  Lycra.

I know, I know, we all thought that the practice of wearing lycra as a surface layer finished in the eighties, at the conclusion of which it was tossed in the huge cultural skip along with ra-ra skirts and rolling up the sleeves on your jacket.  Apparently not so.  Middle aged men are wearing lycra to cycle.  The result…have you ever seen sausage meat being squeezed into its skin?  No?  Lucky you.

Because the reality is if you want to be a champion cyclist, you have to be superhuman.  This is why the only people who should appear in public wearing lycra are those with super-powers, or the sort of people who have got up at four in the morning every year since they were eight and spent all day practicing pedalling.  By which I mean Olympians.

Because to be a champion you need an unhealthy degree of obsession.  You may think all you need is enough steroids to make a racehorse break the sound barrier and more blood bags than a vampire banquet, but not so.  You also need a bike so advanced it makes a Formula 1 car look like something that clowns pile out of in the Big Top.

Middle aged men will proudly show you their carbon fibre bikes so light that they can pick up with one finger, after they have unscrewed the GPS system, the water bottles, the on-board defibrillator and so on.  This is a far cry from the bicycles of my youth that gave so much joy, machines that appeared to be made out of scaffold poles welded together and were practically indestructible, or at least child-proof, which is practically the same thing.  These same hearty beasts of burden in grown up form propelled district nurses around and were often to be seen with bags of groceries suspended from both handlebars as stately matrons returned from the shops.

The Olympics came to London to inspire a generation.  They did.  In this case, it’s the generation of blokes over forty who walked past the Harley showroom and straight into Action Bikes for some serious kit and some very tight pants.

Bikes today are so light they have to be tethered to railings to stop them floating away.

Olympic glory

The best way to explain a visit to the Olympic stadium in London is to compare it to a pilgrimage, and in particular the effect that seeing a cathedral and a crowd for the first time would have on a rural medieval mind.

It's that profound. Entering the Olympic park is exciting enough, as more and more people join a mass all travelling in the same direction, but getting up close to the Olympic stadium is something else. It's immense, the culmination of every stadium ever built, from a circle scratched in the dust to the Colosseum to Wembley, distilled, rolled into one and constructed on the scale of the gods. It's like Karnak with a running track.

And appropriately, it has it's myths. Like the transport system is crowded. Far from it, travel to and from the park was smooth and easy. And that the airport style security would take two hours. All I can say is that I wish security at Gatwick was that friendly and efficient. The troops were fantastic. No doubt about it, these guys seen close up have moved beyond the status of troops and are now officially Warriors, and are obviously enjoying the novelty of having kids wanting photographs with them rather than being shot at by angry bearded men.


The same goes for the police. Most police spent their time lending their helmets to small children to have their pictures taken in. The mounted police horses showed great patience as they were continuously patted and the police were presumably thinking that this was a lot, lot better than a year ago, when people were throwing things at them. Things that were on fire. Even the police snipers on the roof of the Holiday Inn were probably having a good time. I hope they were in a good mood anyway.

Inside the stadium, the atmosphere was such that one suspects that there is actually a noble gas called 'euphoria'. I was giddy to the point of nausea with excitement, the early start and the altitude that our seats were at (second to back row, meaning you don't miss a thing happening on the track or field, or indeed anywhere below cloud level).

The best way to describe the Olympic experience, seeing an Olympian in action? It's like watching your team go a goal up in the last minute of play in the final, it's like your favourite band hammering out the opening chords of your favourite song at the gig, it's being pushed into your seat as the airplane accelerates down the runway, it's pure, unadulterated exhilaration. With added cheering. And it's like that all the time.

The crowd's reaction to the athletes was incredible. As Mo Farah ran his 5000m qualifier, the crowd applauded as he passed and the sound circled the stadium like an audible Mexican wave, for twelve and a half laps of the track, building every time until on the last lap it was a constant cacophony of clapping, shouting, cheering and screaming. Mo qualified and I believe the correct sporting term is that the crowd went bananas.

There were also moments when the reaction of the crowd made one ridiculously proud to be British, like the athlete who pulled a muscle and limped home, helped across the finish line by 80,000 people cheering, or the woman competitor from Saudi Arabia, last in the race, first woman competitor from her country, and the reason the entire stadium erupted as she ran for home.

History was made. To be part of that, to be making that history is a privilege and the crowd knew it and embraced it and applauded, cheered and shouted it. It's no wonder that Brits have been using the word 'proud' unironically.

And when the crowd got behind the Team GB competitors, it lifted them, with Lynsey Sharp in the women's 800m doing the last 200m like a rocket, gifted wings by every raw hand and throat.

Team GB was also much in evidence on the front of every tee shirt and baseball cap and if anyone was in any doubt about who was supporting what team, the Union Flags worn as scarfs, capes or sarongs banished that doubt. Thank God that the Union Flag is such a design icon and looks fantastic on everything from socks to hats, imagine coming from a country that features some sort of fowl as your national emblem. We don't care how well you do in the games, there is no getting away from it that that your flag has a chicken on it.

And to put one argument to bed, rock music + athletics = fantastic! Anyone that has ever run with a running mix will appreciate that the right beats gets the heart pumping, and apparently it goes for the spectators too!

And of course, I had to visit the largest McDonalds in the world. It was...excellent. Oh god, the shame. I've not been to a maccy dees in twenty years but that cheeseburger tasted just the same as it always did (fries were a bit sweeter than I remember though), just as good as it always did, just as satisfying as it always did. Once through the door at the express lane a lovely young woman took our order on a hand held gadget and by the time we had paid it was ready. Out to the garden area, got a seat no problem. The place was heaving but super-slick and rather relaxed. It's also maybe reversed my prejudice about the golden arches that started with the McLibel trial and rolled on from there but now, maybe it's time to start wolfing down those big macs again. I still recall with affection the result of a big mac meal, with a greasy wrapper and that curious feeling of satisfaction and nausea that comes from inhaling 250% of your recommended daily allowance of fat, grease and clumsy slaughterhouse worker.

And the restaurant was great place to take a break, because the Olympic park was home to, what looked like, half of the population of the planet. The were people everywhere, including volunteers (happy to take your photograph) and folk with insulated backpacks peddling beverages - the beer comes in plastic bottles, how about that for a culture shock? No matter, I wanted to bribe one of them to follow me round all day like a mobile mini-bar. Maybe that's the way forward, not one bloke with beer and another with water, but one chap with overpriced beer, spirits and toblerone. And not just at the Olympics either, I think it could catch on in everyday life.

There is a lot to be impressed by when watching athletes that are doing things in front of you that you would normally associate with CGI, but one of the most impressive things is their focus. The pole vault, 5000m qualifying race and hammer throw are all happening simultaneously and each athlete is in a world of their own, oblivious to the incoming wildly thrown hammer or bloke falling to earth like an angel. It's this focus, I think, that makes an Olympian, the ability to separate yourself from the dross of everyday existence. It's probably this same quality that gets you up at five in the morning on a wet winter day to go on a training run.

The Olympic hype began the moment we secured the 2012 games and the build up has been on the hysterical side for months but nothing, nothing can actually prepare you for being in a place which, for a brief period, is arguably the most important place on the planet.

Just to prove the point, the only event that even came close in terms of human achievement this week happened on Mars.

Best. Broadcast. Evah!

Live broadcasting. All the enjoyment of normal broadcasting but with the extra element of danger that one might hear the word ‘cunt’ on the television (thank you ‘I’m a celebrity’) or on the radio (thank you ’Today’ programme). You are of course, free to use the word yourself around the house (it’s best to do so in private, as public usage, say in a boozer, could land you in a spot of bother) as often as you like, repeating and repeating like somebody trying to learn Tourette’s using one of those language tape things.

Live broadcasting lets us look behind the curtain at the performance of presenters who, in pre-recorded programmes look shiny, slick and flawlessly professional. The only time one saw fallibility was on the occasional clip shows made up of out-takes, where one witnessed an increasingly distressed presenter trying to record a segment containing the word ‘topple’ without getting a fit of the giggles, or being attacked by an enraged gibbon. Hil-hairy-arse.

On live broadcasts, anything can happen and it’s a wonder that it doesn’t more often. The most common threat is somebody larking about behind the presenter as they report from the sort of place where the public have not had media training, such as a council estate. And how much fun would it be to see MPs or Peers misbehaving behind Nick Robinson as he reports from Parliament? If I was an MP I would at no time be without a cardboard sign that could quickly be unfolded and read ‘hello Mum!’.

Normally, live broadcasts are reserved for occasions where larking would be unsuitable, featuring a regional BBC reporter in a North Face anorak (please address your letters of complaint about product placement to ‘your composter, the end of your garden, Little England’) looking sombre in front of a flooded high street or an otherwise unremarkable stretch of street made tragic by the abundance of petrol station bouquets or, god forbid, soft toys that line the perimeter of the police cordon.

Sports reporting is the exception. Sport tends to be covered live and a particular breed of presenter has emerged – somebody that can talk with passion about twenty two overpaid nancy boys sex pests kicking around a ball for ninety minutes, or two blokes clacking balls around a green baize table for, well, forever in my experience or, my very favourite, commenting on a Grand Prix, where it’s acknowledged that the most exciting bit is the start, requiring the commentator to begin the commentary at a pitch of excitement that horse-racing commentators normally conclude with, then maintain it for the next two hours. The god-like presenters of ‘Test Match Special’ cope with a five day schedule by only occasionally remarking on the play, the rest of the time discussing the local wildlife, what they got up to last night, last week or last decade, cakes and so on.

Football commentary, on the radio, is perhaps the apex of live commentary. There’s a quote reported by the late, great, Alistair Cooke that radio was preferred to television because ‘the pictures were better’. Fair enough but that quote is from the late 1940’s and whoever said it plainly hadn’t seen a fifty inch plasma job. So football commentators on the radio know they have to work extra hard to compete with somebody who can watch the match. On the telly. In a pub.

This possibly explains the approach that BBC Scotland took yesterday in its ‘Sportsound’ programme, where, around five o’clock in the afternoon, when all the Scottish Cup football matches were ending more or less at the same time (injury and stoppage time staggering the final whistles over a few minutes), they kept an open microphone to all the commentators at all the grounds.

No matter how close a commentator at a football match presses their special one way microphone to their lips, you can still hear the roar of the crowd, including the occasional fruity wanker fuck and cunt. It’s like somebody organised a flashswear. In the last minutes of the Scottish Cup, where the fans were urging their sides to either score to go through to the next round or to equalise and get that lucrative replay, the sound of the crowd was such that having the radio on was like standing under a waterfall.

That was as nothing though compared to the excitement of the commentators, one of which, reporting from Firhill (home of the greatest football team on the planet – Partick Thistle), managed a textbook ‘curse of the commentator’ with the fabulous ‘the score here nil nil and likely to stay that way and Queen-Of-the-South have just scored!’. There was lots of this sort of thing and, frankly, it was probably the best ten minutes of live broadcasting I’ve ever heard. The anchor/presenter/ringmaster/conductor orchestrating the whole thing did a fabulous job and, I don’t know about him, but I was wrung out by the time it had finished and needed a sit down and a fag.

Awards, rewards, honours and disgraces - people of the year

It’s traditionally still just about the time of year where there are reviews of the past twelve months, and awards and honours are handed out to those that have made a positive contribution to society in general or the lives of the rich and influential in particular.

Here at G&P we, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, take a more egalitarian view about who and what should get an award or, shall we say, recognition. We are always pleased when somebody is honoured for outstanding contributions to the world of science, medicine or just having great hair, but do feel a little uncomfortable at the meaner awards and recognitions handed out by those who want to throw a spotlight on badness. This year, in particular, no such spotlight was needed, as bad behaviour was exposed in the full light of day.

So, in no particular order, the G&P awards for people of 2011 are:

Man of the year – lots of competition here, mainly in the shape of dead tyrants and terrorists who’s passing made the world either a better or simply a better groomed place. But without doubt G&Ps man of the year is Sconald MacDoon, the genius Glaswegian chef d’celebe who this year introduced the world to the hot scotch egg, a core of piping hot haggis surrounded by an egg, surrounded by whatever the hell it is that surrounds a scotch egg, and deep fried. The science has something to do with using the same technology that allows egg to be placed inside square pork pie and we understand that the hot scotch egg is to be official snack of the CERN team for 2012. Official snack for 2013 – Rennies.

Woman of the year – again, a year where women took centre stage, be it in CCTV footage showing a cat being placed in a wheelie bin (much more entertaining was the footage of the enraged cat being released) or Rebekka Brooks showing that you didn’t need to be smart or good looking in order to edit a national paper, all you needed was a readership slightly dimmer than you are. But the G&P woman of the year is Delcasier Fernandez, the Chipping Hombury housewife who, after a three year battle with her local council to have the street lights stay on longer and later to make the streets of her village safer for women, finally threw in the towel and instead opened a taser shop in the village. Sales have been brisk and in just three short weeks two flashers and a bloke who was out late hoping to see owls have been tasered in the goolies.

Animal of the year – while wheelie bin cat and Fenton (or to give him his full Kennel Club name ‘Fenton Fenton Jesus Christ Fenton Fenton Jesus Christ’) snatched headlines, G&P prefers to recognise working animals, be they the sniffer dogs that protect our troops in foreign parts, gun dogs of a different type that bring back the bird after a shoot, faithful hounds that savage hunt saboteurs or the weapon dogs that guard their masters’ crack dens. This year’s animal of the year is the regimental goat adopted by the Second Afgan Regiment of Foot as their mascot who, thanks to being tethered too close to a field kitchen one evening, was not just a source of regimental pride but also a sauce of regimental pride as, thanks to a bit of a cock-up in the catering department, ‘Belzie’ was served up as the winning dish in the regimental Masterchef cook-off the next day. Recipe available at www.passthesalt.co.af

Norfolk notes - Hunstanton

Hunstanton prides itself on being a proper seaside town. It ticks all the boxes; slightly seedy, near the sea, large number of pensioners and seagulls that will engage you in a life and death struggle for your chips. It also has tat shops. Rather, because of the size of Hunstanton, it has tat emporiums. There's a shop on the front that sells everything from post cards to high-vis anoraks and, of course, comes with the requisite surly staff.

Hunstanton's claim to fame is that it faces west. Hence, you can watch the sunset from the cliff tops. Now, you have to admire any town that makes a virtue out of a sunset, something that most of us can appreciate simply by turning ourselves in the right direction.

Hunstanton has tat shops, arcades, amusements and a theatre. It also has a joke an novelty shop with a sign up saying 'no photographs'. This is obviously to discourage the sort of people who can spend hours trying on funny hats, laughing themselves sick, take a photo and then bugger off without buying so much as a fake dog poo. I guess the owner has a point, it must be difficult enough trying to make a living selling novelty faeces without some joker accidentally sneezing inside your best masks and then discreetly replacing them.

Out of season, the place has a particular charm. The bright colours fade to pastels and the whole town is a lot gentler, if somewhat sadder. Luckily the ice-cream place was still open leading me to discover that all I need to lift me from melancholy is a magnum lolly.

Old Hunstanton is the neighbouring town, so close that the two actually run into one another but, thanks to that 'Old', is a world away. Old Hunstanton is so called because, I suspect, the folks there saw what Hunstanton was turning itself into and wanted to make sure that they had quite a different identity thank you very much, like a prim sister who sees her sibling becoming a star by the simple acquisition of bumps and pumped up bits added to nature, who decides to change her name because she feels just that little bit ashamed of her.

The irony is that thanks to its fantastic beach and amazing cliffs, Old Hunstanton is astonishingly hip. This, you see, is where the kite boarders and paragliders come to play. While the kite surfers rule the waves at Brancaster, here at Hunstanton it's their dry land equivalents who carve endless loops, swirls and curves in the pristine sand, or occasionally have a moment of excitement with a close encounter with a sea defence.

The paragliders were indeed out playing. One chap was just taking his first solo steps, launching from a sand dune and floating about a foot off the ground before coming gently to earth before reversing back up the dune and repeating the process.


It looked a little odd to see somebody apparently content to spend upwards of an hour basically suspended a foot off the ground, all that gear must cost a fortune and you can achieve the same effect with a step ladder. But I guess the point is that practice makes perfect and you don't want to be two hundred feet up when your kite wing folds for the first time. That's when knowing how to speed dial an ambulance as you plummet to earth comes in handy.


The other chap, who was floating high and free, was obviously having a great time and was obliging in that when he saw the camera raised he would swoop and soar, essentially strutting his stuff on thin air. It led me to wonder if these people frequent photo social networking sites, scouring and searching for images of themselves in action? I assume that they must pop up in the background of thousands of holiday photographs, the same way that commuters piling out of the train stations in London must feature in a million snapshots that tourists pour over, maybe never noticing that they are the only people in a crowd of thousands smiling.

Match report

A colleague of mine one mentioned the surprising fact that she was a season ticket holder for Watford Football Club. Presumably, that means she has a designated seat that she always sits it, just like the others who sit around her and presumably that means that the chap who sits in front of her must be getting fairly fed up with hearing her favourite phrase to employ when Watford are underperforming: ‘Oi, Watford, it’s a good lot the other lot are shit too!’.

When, though, does our enthusiasm for sport take on that abusive edge? I’ve just come from my nephew’s little league game, where his team won three two after extra time. Now, I’ve been to little league games before but this was a cup final and, if it was decided on decibels, I would have been impossible to call between our coach and theirs – although I award extra points to their coach for the aggressive way he managed to scream ‘get up!’ every breath. This could refer to keeping the ball in the air, moving up the field or stop rolling on the floor blubbing and wanting your mum to stop the bleeding after a particularly nasty tackle.

I’ve attended various little league matches over the years, watching my nephews progress from basically bumbling tots chasing after a ball to morose teens who, on a Saturday morning, stop: growing, sprouting hair, producing acne or thinking about girls and divert all that energy (and that’s a LOT) into sprinting around a football pitch for ninety minutes like a ball-seeking missile made of elbows, knees and aggression. When the kids are young, every action is met with applause, even when the opposition score a goal. Because we ant them to learn sportsmanship.

Tonight was different, tonight when the opposition scored there was, from our side of the pitch (oh yes, it was like the Sharks and the Jets out there), polite applause. There’s a difference.

So I’m used to shouty coaches and screaming fathers trying to live out their dreams of footballing glory through their sons (or daughters), but tonight as a special treat we had a footie mum. A footie mum is just like a pushy mum, but louder. Think of the sort of woman with scary hair and glittery eyes who breeds show dogs, cross her with somebody who lives in a caravan with a satellite dish attached and who breeds dogs for illegal fights and you’re getting the picture.

Looking at the kids charging round that pitch and listening to a coach screaming ‘fame and glory!’, one does wonder if the kids are doing it for their benefit or our entertainment. It was certainly thrilling, if only because I know that there is no child so inconsolable as one who feels he has let down his team, himself and his coach and the fallout from defeat would be grim, but there was a little bit of guilt, like you always get when you see a kid performing, when you think ‘is this worth it? Look at them, there’s fear and anxiety and desperation but is there enjoyment…is this exploitation?’

Then the final whistle went and I thought ‘fuck it, we won, who cares?’. Then the kids sprayed lemonade like it was champagne. Which is ironic, because when I have the opportunity I drink champagne like it’s lemonade.

Superhuman

In the build up to these 2008 Olympics, the tele viewer was left in no doubt whatsoever that China was a very naughty country. Worse than battering monks (God alone knows how they managed that when everyone knows you never fuck with a bald guy (have these people not SEEN Westworld?)), worse even than rolling tanks over shoppers, China has stopped journalists accessing the entire internet!

That’s right, journalists can’t download porn where a girl sits on a cake (have you seen that?) so the most sophisticated criticism of China was of the county being the equivalent of a moustache-twirling villain tying a girl to some railway tracks. That’s not the outrage, the outrage is that the oncoming steam train, yea, burns fossil fuel yea? Yea? Will nobody think of the penguins?

The opening ceremony was, to be fair, a terrifying endorsement of all we had feared. Note to all superpowers: if you want to make yourself look non-threatening and cuddly, don’t have thousands of your citizens doing the same thing simultaneously, flawlessly. The last time westerners saw footage like those drummers all beating together in time was of soldiers goose-stepping in B&W newsreels. However, if the message is: ‘even our percussionists are terrifying’, then job done.

The build-up and the opening ceremony were all about making regimes look good. This did not work. Politicians never look good, not standing next to normal people and never, ever, standing next to fit people. Politicians have suits that don’t quite fit them and have shiny arses to their trousers and shiny elbows to their jackets – that’s because they spend all day sat at their desk with their head in their hands thinking ‘what the is going on with the economy?’ or ‘why the fuck did I pay that hooker with my visa?’.

Then the games started.

The Olympics is sport broadcasting for people who hate sport – no, correction, the Olympics is when sports other than football make it onto television and the world is reminded that sport can be thrilling and athletes can defy belief.

Russia’s territorial ambitions are as nothing compared to BBC sport, which has annexed just about every digital channel it owns to provide saturation coverage the way that Bomber Harris arranged for saturation coverage of many German cities at the end of the War. You’re never more than a click away from watching somebody do something incredibly dangerous at high speed. Have you seen the canoeing? The only way they could make that sport more exciting is to let lose sharks and crocodiles into the stream and have the canoeists beat them to death with their paddles.

The athletes are amazing. All those mornings of getting up in the dark to go training. All those evenings of going to bed early when all you want to do is get off your tits and party. It all pays off, because suddenly you’re having the time of your life. Win a medal? Great! Get knocked out in the first round? Great – you can now spend two weeks getting pissed, eating chips and cheering on your team-mates!

What’s really cheering is how all the team GB athletes are such ambassadors for their sport and their country. And the teens – bloody hell. First of all you have to check your perving credentials at the door when you remember that the girls doing synchronised diving are in their teens – and also because their Dad has probably spent the last few years of his life really getting into shape to beat the hell out of perverts.

Most of the teens you see on telly are hoodie rat-children, carrying knives, talking jive and looking like there are well on their way to evolving into morlocks. These people are anti-chavs. Bright and enthusiastic. No wonder we never see them though – they do their training before it gets light and they are in bed by eight.

Best of all are the BBC commentators. Just as you sit at home, thinking ‘how can she do a somersault and land on that beam?’, the commentator screams ‘that’s AMAZING, how does she do that? Magic leotard?’ Possibly, or steroids if it’s a foreigner.