Is sport journalism even more bereft of originality and creativity than news? When I started out I wanted to specialise in sport but I soon realised it had very little to say. I like watching sport and occasionally taking part but reading about it, listening to it and watching pointless pontifications are a waste of life.

 

Someone once said to me that most sports interviews amounted to little more than someone saying, ‘I’m going to do my best,’ in different ways. I disagreed at the time but now I see what he meant. And post-match-race/game/competition interviews are little more than, ‘How do you feel?’ (Although I am impressed that anyone who has just finished can muster enough breath to say anything. And perhaps any question beyond ‘how do you feel?’ is asking a bit much).

 

Football is surely the most vacuous of sports journalism genres. No one in the game can stare into the abyss that is their career and admit, none of it matters. Yes football can be great to watch and be breath-taking in the moment but either side of the 90 minutes it has nothing to offer. Match of the Day is the most tired of the programmes; the same old talking dick-heads spouting platitudes at 40-grand a throw. Why do they assume that an ex-player is necessarily best placed to anchor the programme? Where is the journalistic content? Just look at how clueless they are in their coverage of a real issue.

 

They are ill-equipped. Alan Hanson, Gary Lineker, Mark Lawrenson, Alan Shearer, Lee Dixon – the cozy lads club who haven’t changed their act in nearly 20 years.

 

Then there is this toadying coverage of Sir Alex Ferguson’s ‘mind games’ as if he is some psychological genius with an innate ability to get under an opponent’s skin. No he isn’t. He’s a football manager, not Sigmund fucking Freud. Yet the media picks over every comment and reads into it some sub-text which will undermine the other lot. The analysis of this drivel fills column inches and air-time as if they are the wisdom of the Oracle. Bollocks; it’s just a former Glaswegian welder saying he aims to win the next game. Really? Who would’ve thought?

 

When Eric Cantona announced he was taking up acting when he retired, Ray Winstone announced he was going to Upton Park to ask if he could turn out for West Ham. Why do the media slavishly recruit ex-sports people to do a journalist’s job?

 

Even when journalists do a sport story do they do any better? This weekend Cheltenham Town will play Spurs in the Third Round of the FA Cup. In planning Friday’s Breakfast Show the talk was of portraying the tie as a real community event which is engaging the whole town. But it isn’t. I live in Cheltenham and there is no sense of the town getting behind the team. There isn’t much interest beyond those who follow the team. It’s this need to construct a narrative – which doesn’t necessarily reflect reality. And we still get those FA Cup early round clichés of part-timers doing their day jobs before taking on the Big-Time Charlies, the old David and Goliath crapola.

 

Horse racing is even more insular – it’s a sport which dismisses any outside comment as the ill-informed ramblings of people who know nothing. Witness the recent furore over the whip rules; most jockeys and trainers showed no appreciation of how their sport was perceived beyond the barriers of the parade ring. They just trotted out the same old we-know-best mantras.

 

Before that there was the re-mounting debate; should a jockey be allowed to remount after falling? Ruby Walsh claimed they should be allowed to re-mount after he climbed back on board a horse and went on to win – EVEN THOUGH the horse had picked up a minor fracture in the fall. Choc Thornton says the jockey is the best person to judge if a horse is fit to continue after a fall. No he isn’t. He isn’t a vet, injuries aren’t obvious, the horse will be so pumped up with adrenaline that it might not feel any pain and the jockey will also be so keyed up he won’t be thinking objectively. And yet for the most part the pros who front the programme are toeing the party line.

 

Sports journalism is unimaginative, inward looking and self-important. How do I feel? Bored.

 

 

 

2011

Getting Burned by the Olympic Flame 5 Nov 2011

The Nazis invented the Olympic Flame.  Just remember that as you read this.

 

This week the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) revealed the locations which will be visited by the Olympic Flame next year.

 

Where I work the Olympic Torch will be run through several towns and villages next May.  As the local BBC station we were ‘allowed’ to report where the flame would be going – but NOT the routes it would take.

 

In some cases there is only one possible road between locations, but we still couldn’t broadcast it.  

 

Why?

 

The official reason is that old catch-all – security.  LOCOG didn’t want to create a security risk along the route.  So it will ‘release’ details of the routes two weeks before the event.

 

The unofficial reason – sponsorship.  There are four partners in the Torch Relay; Coca-Cola, Samsung, Lloyds Bank and LOCOG.  The commercial sponsors are worried competitors might try a bit of guerilla marketing along the route.  So as the cameras follow the torch through Cotswolds the cameras might pick up banners urging people to Drink Pepsi or bank at HSBC.  That’s in addition to any political protests which might be staged.

 

So they figure two week’s notice would be too short for anyone to organise a guerilla marketing campaign or a political protest.  These people clearly exist in a world without Twitter, Facebook or any other of the social media which have been used to mobilise masses of people at the click of a mouse.

 

But what’s more worrying, for me, is how the BBC has signed up to all this.  As the ‘preferred broadcaster’ it means we can tell any other media to the sling its hook, leaving the field clear for us to report the event.

 

I don’t think that’s right.  Whatever your opinions of the 2012 Games, they are supposed to be for everyone.  And if some people want to hear that through Heart FM, Sky or the local newspapers then let them.

I have always been very dubious about the word ‘exclusive’ on a story.  I don’t think you can ‘own’ information.  ‘Exclusive’ doesn’t mean that only your listeners/viewers/readers have got it.  It means many, many more people are out of the loop and you are celebrating their ignorance.

 

So why should we be proud if we exclude a sizeable number of people from the event?  LOCOG boasts that 95% of the population will live within an hour’s journey of the Torch route.  But it is happy to hand over the event to a narrow cartel of organisations – of which the BBC is one.  I hope the BBC WON’T use its right to tell other media to leave town.

 

I am extremely uncomfortable that the BBC has allowed itself to be co-opted into this commercial, personal and political oppression.

 

LOCOG and its backers are tremendously powerful and it is wrong that commercial interests should limit civil liberties.  It is wrong if ANYONE infringes civil liberties but it is particularly insidious for capitalism to weild such power.  For example, since 2009 Olympic officials and the Metropolitan Police have had the LEGAL POWER to enter a home.  For example, if you live on the route of the Marathon and chose to hang a banner with a political message out of your window they could ask for the police to come in and sieze it.

 

The police will also have the right to raid the Olympic Village to search for banned substances.  Whilst these drugs might be banned by a sporting body, they are not necessarily illegal.  So is it right that the police should be used to enforce the rules of a sporting organisation?  Quietly and slyly, police powers are being extended under cover of the Olympic Games.  Clearly an example of Mission Creep.

 

The other day I wanted to find out how many days there were left until the start of the London Games.  I found a clock on www.theolympicgamescountdown.com.  Underneath the clock there is a message saying ‘Next summer games (Can’t be written  due to legal threats).’

 

The sharply observed television satire on the Games had to be called ‘Twenty Twelve’ in words because the organisers have copyrighted ‘2012’.

 

So LOCOG has copyrighted time.  That is some achievement and testament to its power. A commercial organisation owns a year.  It’s so gobsmackingly Capitalist, I am actually impressed.

 

Remember one thing about the Olympic Torch; it wasn’t even a part of the modern games until 1936.  It was introduced by the Nazis in Berlin as a symbol of National Socialist pomp and ceremony.  The Olympic movement adopted it for subsequent games and quietly ‘forgot’ its origins.  

 

There is, then, a symbolic correlation between the Olympic Flame and a political machine dedicated to coerce and manipulate the people.

 

 

 

The Star-Dazzled Wanker 9 Oct 2011

I thought I was wrong about something but today I realised I was right all along.  I realised that it’s not famous people who are a pain in the arse but the people who hang around them…..the pilot fish of celebrity.

 

I have spent much of this afternoon getting in the way of Joanna Lumley.  Or rather NOT getting in the way of Joanna Lumley but getting too close for the comfort of the antsy press officer who was with her. Her Lumleyship was lovely, warm and co-operative.  The Press Officer with her was a jiggy bag of irritation and superiority.

 

Joanna Lumley has been at the Cheltenham Literature Festival today and I was riding shotgun for the reporter doing the interviews. Joanna arrived in the Writer’s Room and I liaised with the press officer and her publicity assistant.

 

The Festival press officer set herself up as some sort of gatekeeper to the presence of the Divine Miss L and made being granted an interview seem like being granted a papal audience.

 

Let’s call this press officer, Amy.  Joanna Lumley actually came to sit on the sofa already occupied by me and Amy asked me to moved because obviously she doesn’t share sofas with mortals.  Whilst Joanna Lumley was conducting one interview I asked Amy if we were next.  ‘NO’. Oooooh.  Then she said, ‘Could you take a step back please.’  At this point we were about 30 feet from the actress…….actress, mind you – not royalty.  So I dutifully stepped back to 31 feet.

Then Amy said I was standing where Joanna was going to have her photograph taken.  I vacated the space but JL didn’t stand there for another half-hour.  By this time I was getting seriously pissed off – with Amy Upherself, not Joanna L.

 

Some people become star-dazzled.  Celebrities pee and poo like the rest of us. Interestingly this treatment was only extended to someone from ‘showbiz’ rather than the literary figures who were there, even though it’s a LITERATURE festival.  Sure, Joanna Lumley has written books and campaigned for the residency rights of retired Ghurkas.  But let’s not forget she’s Patsy from Ab Fab and Purdy from the New Avengers.  She’s not Aleksandr fucking Solzhenitsyn.

But that aura dazzles the Pilot Fish.  I found it rather annoying that there were proper writers around just getting on with things whilst this entourage treated a posh actress like royalty.  As I said, Joanna Lumley was fine – and probably unaware of all this pychophancy.

 

Yesterday I interviewed Caitlin Moran which was a far bigger deal for me than meeting Joanna Lumley.  She just pitched up with her publicity guy, gave he a hug and sat down on the sofa with a let’s-do-the-show-right-here attitude.

 

We’re not all so star-struck.  In fact it’s why I HATE dealing with Slebs; not because of them but because of the self-important fuckwits and numpties who bathe in their reflected glory.

 

So, people like Amy – get over yourselves.

 

 

 

Caitlin and I kiss and make up – well, not literally 8 Oct 2011

I interviewed Caitlin Moran at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. It was arranged through her agent and she hadn’t seen my e-mail. I apologised for the ‘lovely pie’ comment anyway in case she did see it. She looked blank; she had no memory of writing anything about it. ‘Is it about fanny?’ she said eventually. Yes, I said. ‘Oh don’t worry about it’ she said. So me and Caitlin are cool.