FraserWords

Have I been seduced by the Olympic miracle?

Well, let’s look at the good things the Olympics has brought.

Nobody’s watching ITV any more.

The evening news doesn’t over-labour us with poor people or conflict or economic misery or, indeed, news. It just smiles at us and shows us happy people.

It is a great celebration of multi-cultural Britain and a society of which we should be proud. The Daily Mail, for example, has been enabled to abandon its tattered bigotry for a moment and instead of labelling Mo Farah a job-stealing immigrant jumping to the top of the welfare state’s queues, celebrate him for what he is – a great Briton who’s achieved great things through talent, hard work, commitment, friendship, support and inspiration.

It has given us Boris Johnson suspended from a wire.

In Cardiff at the weekend for the Olympic football, I saw lots of supporters wearing the flags of both competing nations tied together round their neck in an endearing gesture of friendship.

We shared a bus with some Japanese families in full national dress and our kids and theirs were able to meet.

We watched a women’s football match and for 90 minutes none of the players rolled on the ground in “agony”, tried to cheat their opponents by feigning injury, argued with the referee or indulged in any of the other forms of petulance that disfigure the more common face of soccer.

We’ve seen a rainbow of nations coming together, mostly in friendship.

We’ve seen a healthy, widespread disrespect – though not, sadly, to the point of civic disobedience – for the corporate tyranny that corrupts the so-called Olympic spirit.

And in the torch rally, we’ve seen people of all ages, abilities, colours and creeds applauded warmly and generously.

Those are all great. In fact the positives are so great I’m only going to bang on about three negatives. But they’re big ones…..

In bronze medal position, the Olympics has cruelly exposed once more the pitiful standard of British journalism. Those covering it have been shamelessly partisan and therefore completely unobjective. They have incessantly, unendingly orgasmed about how fantastic, oh my Gooooood!, it all is for Team GB and repeated their pathetic ‘how do you feel?’ questions. And they have assumed they speak for us all: if I see one more weeping alleged ‘journalist’ comfort a weeping athlete and tell them “the nation is proud of them” I shall insert a javelin up somebody. How dare they? Who the hell are they to speak for the nation? Mum and Dad and kids and friends who’ve contributed something can be proud, but to assume ‘the nation’ has the right to be proud of any of the athletes is breathtakingly patronising and arrogant, if you can be both at the same time. We can be impressed by them, pleased for them, rejoice in the pleasure they’ve brought their supporters, admire their skill, courage, talent, commitment or even their Lycra, but we have no right or need to be proud of them.

In silver: what is all this legacy guff about the spending of billions on the Olympics inspiring children to take up sport?

This is craziness: since time immemorial all you needed to do with children was show them an open space with a ball in it, or a pony, or a bike, or even just a track through the woods and they’d be off, running, jumping, climbing, riding, laughing. Why do we need to spend billions to persuade them to do what comes naturally? Because we’ve sold off, paved over, put cars in, built houses on all our green spaces where kids can run and play? Because the powers-that-be in sport will do anything – flog replica kits, sell their souls to Sky – anything rather than enable free and open public access to all children to the paraphernalia, or even the watching, of their money-making industries? (For example, tennis – millions from Wimbledon, no free courts where my kids can have a go). Because the rise of media tyranny and the alleged but well-publicised collapse in law and order means parents will no longer let little Timmy run free in a field? Is that why we need the Olympics? Well, we don’t. We need less junk food, less laziness, more open spaces and more free facilities. Less schools turning to vending machines and McDonald’s sponsorship because of Michael Fucking Gove and his free schools and his academies. Money spent on enabling children, not on enabling corporate advertising or Lord Coe and David Beckham or official visits or limousine lanes or dancing NHS beds.

And finally, thirdly, just for all you waverers, here’s the gold medal-winning irrefutable unarguable negative: it has been reported that The Spice Girls are going to perform at the closing ceremony. Just the threat is enough to chill the blood.

Improving our service

Here’s one of the many reasons my Management refuses to accompany me to public places (the poor woman lives on the knife-edge of my temper going up like a firework, which is so completely unfair and unjust on her it makes me… erm…. it makes me lose my temper).

I queued in the bank in order to pay in a couple of cheques. When I’d completed the business, the cashier said: “Did you know, Mr Fraser, that you could just pay in automatically with no need to queue?”

“Did you know,” I asked, “that people doing that sort of thing will put you out of a job?”

“We’re just trying to improve our service to you,” he said.

“No you’re not,” I said. “You’re trying to get me to do what you want me to do so that the bank can sack more staff and make more profit. That is why I don’t want an internet banking PIN and that is why if ever I have the misfortune to have to call you I insist on speaking direct to my branch. As far as I am concerned (his eyes were beginning to glaze over by this point) I do not wish your bank to make one single penny piece more profit out of me than it already has thanks to my woeful financial management skills, expensive tastes and voracious drinking habit. And as for improving your service to me, I wish you only to put my money in a cupboard and then let me know how little of it I’ve got every month. That is all.”

It’s such a familiar mantra, isn’t it, “improving our service to you”? And it is, of course, nonsense. It is an absolute truth that any organisation that blathers about “improving its service to you” is in fact trying to find ever cheaper ways of providing you with the absolute basic minimum service possible without you stalking off in fury, using the least amount of expensive employees possible.

British Telecom, for example, “improved its service to us” by first of all creating call centres and then placing those call centres in oh-so-cheap foreign countries. Now, has that improved the service to you?

Coming home with the family the other day, I stopped at a pub I remembered from years ago, not far off the M5. Then, it was somewhere you could get food that tasted like food, decent coffee and somewhere clean and quiet for a loo stop, all at non-motorway services prices. Now, 15 years later, its proximity to the motorway means its service to us has been “improved”. People queue like patient but morbidly obese sheep to be permitted to shuffle slowly along a carvery counter where meat and vegetables glow orange in the eerie light of the heat lamps, all to the echoing scream of illiterate pop music and the banging and crashing of children unsupervised by their fat-arsed heavily tattooed parents chewing their way through plates groaning under the burden of carbohydrate upon them, everybody smelling faintly of urine splashed liberally on the surfaces of over-used and under-cleaned loos.

I think I preferred things before they were improved. When £2 million in profit was enough if people were in jobs and making money and nobody thought it should be turned into £200 million or the world would end, creating the remorseless drive for “growth” that makes the economy boom and bust and unsustainable, leading to endless improvements that make all our lives just that little bit more subservient, just that little bit more difficult.

Mr Benn and the BT Tower

While on the subject of British Telecom, here’s a great story from Stuart Maconie’s book Hope and Glory: The Days That Made Britain (Ebury Press), which I heartily recommend. Maconie recalls making a TV documentary with Tony Benn in the restaurant at the top of the GPO Tower in London, now allegedly the BT Tower:

“The gentleman from BT’s marketing division said unctuously before the cameras rolled ‘Now you will remember to call it the BT Tower, won’t you Tony?’ Benn bridled courteously: ‘No I won’t. This tower was paid for from the taxes of the British people. Margaret Thatcher had no right to sell it off and give it to you. You stole it, but that doesn’t mean I have to call it the BT Tower. It belongs to them, not you’.”