One, Two, Three, Four, Bang!
Come on, confess it, you have not enjoyed a story so much in years. A round-the-world marathon with all-in wrestling, kick boxing, rugby tackling and sanctimonious steeplechasing, staged free of charge in the streets of London, Paris and San Francisco by the International Olympics Committee – and before the Beijing games have even started. To add to the joy, nobody gets hurt except politicians.
On one side are Gordon Brown, the Chinese politburo, Tessa Jowell, Ken Livingstone, the IOC fat cats and 1,000 jogging policemen, all playing “protect the holy flame” as if in a scene from Harry Potter. On the other side is an old-fashioned mob. The mob wins and the nation splits its sides with glee.
I have enjoyed it especially as I detest the Olympics and all the nationalistic fervour around it. I watched Kelly Homes winning the gold last Olympics but otherwise it wouldn’t occur to me watch someone running. It’s a patriotic fix, which is harmless in small doses, but there is such a colossal expenditure and cod ceremonial fuss to give the crowd its patriotic fix.
If you’re good at anything you want to compete with other people. Competition is part of humanity since the most cunning hunter was patted on the back by the most deft gatherer. Rejoicing that the strongest and the best is a member of your tribe is older than David and Goliath. But £30 billion spent for this little frisson is not worth it, and the good PR that the host regime tries to make out of it can be an ugly performance.
Imagine a music Olympics. Huge sponsorship by Sony, complaints about how poor investment in musical education was letting our musicians down and everyone, including the tone-deaf, cheering on their nation’s bands.
Musicians are competitive of course. At one end they get miffed if they are not chosen as the headliner at Glastonbury, at the other they gauge whether they got more applause than the other acts in the pub. With overt competition comes corruption. A Battle of the Bands is won by the band who has the most mates. Introduce nationalism and see how a pursuit can be distorted from enjoyment of its intrinsic quality to other baser ends. As it is, a Scottish contestant in X-factor will get the patriotic vote, however talentless they are.
The Eurovision must be the closest thing to the Olympics in music and what a farce it is, from the lousy songs to the partisan, nul points judging. If we took it as seriously as the Olympics or the World Cup we’d be entering Radiohead or Franz Ferdinand, instead of the nobody singing a nothing song that we do put on and in the same way that footballers leave their clubs to play for their nation during a World Cup, so would musicians be summoned from the tour or the recording studio and put under pressure to win one for the country.
Beckham’s broken metatarsal generated agony and suspense – will he play? won’t he? Imagine the news media in desperate question mode about whether Amy Winehouse would be sober enough to sing. Tom Yorke is having one of his Green fits and insists on amplifiers powered by human-treadmill generators. Sting denies rumours that he is writing the song, and it is given to Richard Thompson (as it should be, but it would really be given to Amanda Ghost and James Blunt).*
Unlike athletics music cannot be judged by an objective standard of first across the finishing line. If the judges are from countries that have a dark view of the UK – which is likely – we know we wouldn’t have a chance, and Westlife, the Irish team, would be standing on the podium, with tears on their pretty faces.
Special acoustic stadia would be built in every host country for the music Olympics and underused for the rest of time. A microphone once used by Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix’s guitar would be carried about in procession all around the world. Afterwards, a few people would be inspired to try playing a musical instrument but soon give it up again.
And everyone but everyone would fail the drugs tests.
*(Best known song – You’re Beautiful)
