FROM FA
Super League to England cricket and rugby teams, 400-metre queen Christine
Ohuruogu to cyclists Laura Trott and Katie Archibald, the profile of women in
British sport has never been higher. There's still room for improvement,
though.
Sky Sports may have done some good,
almost incidentally, through its unrelenting trawl for action to fill an
ever-increasing schedule of broadcast hours.
On the other hand, there's Sky Sports
News (which, I admit, is my default channel) with its set policy of twin
presenters - if a middle-aged chap and a glamorous young woman can be twins.
We have some way to go before any
women's event gets anything like the attention and razzmatazz of a men's
football World Cup. Even, heaven help us, a World Cup draw.
The latest instalment of this almost
entirely pointless four-yearly event, for which assorted officials and
hangers-on from all over the globe were flown to Brazil, and presumably given
generous hospitality there, was as tacky as an early-evening Saturday ITV show.
Never mind England's draw in the
inevitably dubbed "group of death" (isn't every World Cup game meant
to be hard?) or their prospects of losing their way before they get out of the
Amazon jungle. The really eye-catching thing about the draw was the
"lovely assistant" to the right of Jérôme Valcke, Fifa’s general
secretary.
This was the
middle-aged-chap-and-friend routine writ large, with cameras carefully aimed
and focused. I didn’t hear every bit of commentary on every channel, but if
none of the assembled blokeocracy made a joke about "showing lots of
promise up front" on air, you can bet they did off it, even in the careful
world of post-Keys-and-Gray broadcasting.
Football can be a powerful force for
good in the world. At least that's the idea I cling to as justification for my
lifelong fascination with what is really after all just an over-hyped,
over-moneyed entertainment.
World Cups - at least in theory - have
more potential than most things for building bridges and improving lives.
In practice, it's not easy to see how
much benefit the impoverished millions in Brazil will get from hosting the
world's two biggest parties - the World Cup and the Olympics - in succession.
Or how one can take seriously any show
that treats its one participating woman as decoration in a room full of smug,
wealthy men.
That woman may have a PhD in
astrophysics, take a mean free-kick and deliver an unplayable bouncer for all I
know, but none of that is what she was there for. The fact that I don’t even
know her name, though I could identify a fair number of the suits in the room,
says something too.
Maybe this display of unreconstructed
“glamour” should not have surprised me. This is, after all, a world where
ultra-sexist “lads’ mags” are openly on sale in every corner shop. Where the
pop video has become difficult to distinguish from soft porn. Where such shiny
non-entities as Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and countless others I couldn’t name
are famous for no reason at all.
But I still find it all drearily
depressing.
***
I’M sorry
that my inability to be in two places at once kiboshed hopes of my appearance
at the North Norfolk Labour Party Christmas dinner at the weekend.
Mid-50s seems a reasonable age at which to make
ones bow as both a political and an after-dinner speaker.
Not that I’m a party member. My answer to the “are
you now, or have you ever been” question would be “no” and “yes”.
The party and I parted company shortly after Tony
Blair became its leader. I always felt it was not so much that I left the party
as that it left me.
Now, under Ed Miliband, there are encouraging signs
that it may be coming back.
The most important attributes in politics are
intelligence, integrity, compassion and caring – all qualities the present
government is notably deficient in.
In those terms Miliband is the best Labour leader
since Neil Kinnock. Like Kinnock he is a far better man than too much of the
media allow him to seem. As Kinnock would have been, he is potentially the best
prime minister since Clement Attlee.
That, in a nutshell, is what I wanted to tell them
in Sheringham on Saturday.
***
IT’S hard to
imagine which other former president of a foreign country would have been
afforded the tribute of a minute’s applause at every English football match of
the weekend.
Which other 95-year-old’s entirely expected death
would have caused the BBC to place “breaking news” flashes across all its
channels.
Or which other former prisoner’s greatness and
goodness could have been so entirely agreed upon by everyone with an opinion to
express.
Was Nelson Mandela really the greatest man of our
times? You know, I think he may have been.
It’s unlikely, as a human being, that he had no
flaws, though I don’t know of any.
But even if not a perfect man, he certainly was –
and remains – a perfect symbol of humane resistance to injustice.
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