You don’t look Judokish

Sudoku, Soduko, Joduko? 

Judoka…. I didn’t know what that meant until the story about Or Sasson hit the headlines. As Craig noted, (great to have you back) (how was Aleppo?) the BBC also got confused, mistaking “Or” for “Os”, which - although it must be quite hard to make a mistake in at two-letter word (or possibly a three-letter word) - was probably because the BBC’s massive Olympic team of reporters and journalists are more familiar with the latter, which is a slang word for Australia, and I suppose also an abbreviation for “Ossie”, as in Oswald, Oscar or Ostrich. 

(No such mistake was made with the opponent’s name, "Islam el-Shehaby" which is obviously more familiar to the Beeb.) 

There have been quite a few political incidents in Rio, which the BBC has reported in their scrupulously impartial manner, not wanting to be caught out while making an unseemly value-judgement. The Lebanese bus incident, in particular, was notable for this,  and the subsequent reprimand -  did the BBC mention the reprimand? 

However my point is that several commenters have defended Egyptian Islam el-Shehaby (or possibly Islam el-Shebaby) on the premise that he made a ground-breaking, nay, defiant  decision by actually appearing with Or (or Ori ) the Israeli in the first place, and he certainly wasn’t going to risk adding insult to injury by looking pleased about it as well.

Since the BBC has made such a big deal about Saudi and other hijabbed women being ‘allowed’ to compete,  I thought they might at least have taken an interest in the cultures that let their political and religious cultural customs override those noble Olympian principles. 

But, no. All that nonsense is accepted without a murmur.  Nary a value judgment to be seen.

I think I said this once before, and I might say it several times more, but we’re not the only ones who regard the BBC as you-know-what.  Do look at the comments below Rod Liddle’s piece here, about those Norwegians. 

Is it time for Craig and me to retire? Nothing would please me more than to become redundant. 

From this blog, anyway. 

We could start another blog entitled “The BBC isn’t Biased”. Catchy though, eh?

Wall-to-wall Olympics

I’m not a fan of competitive sport - or any other type of competitive pursuit, so watching the Olympics is not my thing, but I couldn’t help noticing these Olympics-related stories. 

Obviously, there’s the bus war. 

 

Proud to be Lebanese. No normalization with Israel in any form!

The Lebanese contingent refused to let the Israeli contingent board ‘their’ bus. (Or perhaps it was just a bus that the organisers had laid on for -  you know - athletes)

Well, the BBC did at least report this incident , and what’s more they gave it a reasonably fair headline.

Lebanese athletes refuse to travel with Israeli team. 

It’s better than “Israeli athletes invade Lebanese bus” or some such. After all, aren’t Israelis renowned for Jewifying everything? “Judaisation”, Yolande Knell calls it.

The main body of the article dives straight into a kind of justification for the Lebanese contingent’s appalling behaviour:

 “Lebanon and Israel are officially at war and have no diplomatic relations.”

So that’s okay then?

The BBC didn’t include any of the Lebanese team leader’s gloating:

“Lebanese Minister of Youth and Sport Abdel Motaleb Hannawi told a Lebanese news site that this was not the first time Israel has attempted to embarrass a Lebanese delegation in this kind of circumstance. He praised the delegation’s behavior, Nakoula’s specifically. “His stance was principled and patriotic,” he said. 

Nakoula became the hero of the day in Lebanon after the incident was publicized. The Al Mayadeen and Al-Manar news networks, both associated with Hezbollah, gave Nakoula praise, with the latter also interviewing him. Hezbollah supporters and officials praised him on social media, with one Al-Manar broadcaster tweeting, “The Israelis were sent away from the bus because normalization (with Israel) is not to be had in any  form, and because the Lebanese identity (is that of) resistance. Be proud to be Lebanese.”

 …… and left the impression that Israelis should, once again, be regarded as interlopers on ‘other people’s’ buses. 

Another story caught my eye, this time about problems concerning swimming pools. 

" The Palestinian Olympic Swimming Pool-Sized Lie."

“Introducing the Palestinian swimmer Mary al-Atrash, media outlets were quick to note that the young athlete was challenged not only by the rigors of training for the Olympics but also by the fact that the occupation had cut off her access to a proper 50-meter-long pool, the standard Olympic size. Such stately facilities, the media informed its outraged viewers, were simply not available in Palestine.”

According to ‘Tablet’, this wasn’t quite the case, as she could have had access to a number of suitable pools. But Palestinians never miss an opportunity to blame Israel for all their woes, especially when there’s a sympathetic ear to hear it and a willing voice to spread it around. 

Oddly though, certain women in Luton, yes, that’s Luton UK., are denied access to their Olympic size pool  (for cultural reasons) but not to worry. It’s only on Fridays.

Update:

It seems that the IOC has reprimanded the head of the Lebanese delegation, Al-Haj Nakoula, who apparently responded that the whole incident was the result of a misunderstanding.

Doesn’t say precisely what the nature of the misunderstanding was, but a separate source said that Lebanese athletes are "committed to the national position in refusing to be in the same place as the Israelis." He added that Lebanon will remain part of the resistance against Israel. 

I fail to see where a misunderstanding comes into the picture. Am I missing something?

Excitable BBC commentators, and Russell Brand getting his comeuppance

Talking on the Sunday papers, here's a selection of stories from today's newspapers (well, one of them) concerning the BBC.

Call me biased and inconsistent, but if there's one bias I don't mind the BBC displaying it's a spot of restrained jingoism during sports competitions. The BBC has been getting complaints, however, that its jingoism has been anything but restrained. 

Martin Johnson at The Sunday Times (£) has an amusing article on the subject today: 

TELEVISION coverage of the Winter Olympics began with the BBC fielding complaints that the commentary team became overpatriotic when one of our girls won a bronze in the snowboarding. Whenever, for example, a rival competitor flew headfirst into a snowdrift, viewers took the view that a quiet “oh, bad luck” was a more appropriate response than a series of whoops, hollers, way-to-goes and cartwheels so acrobatic they would have brought us a medal in the freestyle aerials.

Who are these curmudgeons? When you’re disappearing down the plughole at cricket and haven’t won anything at football since Bobby Charlton sported a decent combover, ruling the world in the noble art of hurtling downhill on a tea tray would seem to be a more than legitimate cause for jingoism. 

Indeed.

And, finally, moving from the Times to the Daily Mail, and from the BBC to Channel Four, there's a piece about an interview between Jon Snow and Russell Brand that I really wish I'd seen.  I think I might have whooped, hollered,way-to-goed and cartwheeled at Ol' Russ's complete discombobulation at the hands of Jon Snow.

How different to his treatment on the BBC!

Glittering incarnations of a great poetic tradition

It's a peculiar thing, but whenever I read the inestimable Clive James I always hear his voice in my head as I'm reading. I don't consciously decide to hear his written pieces in my head in this way. It just seems to happen. 

See if the same happens to you too when you read his latest piece for the Daily Telegraph, from which this is a taster - and a very tasty taster at that: 

To my perhaps jaded eye, the Winter Olympics has been, since the opening ceremony, all downhill, especially when the skiers are not going downhill at all, but are slogging along the level snow for miles before lying down to fire a rifle. A lot of the winter sports are dead boring. But there are a few unmissable events, mainly on the ice-rink; and anyway there was the opening ceremony, which featured Vladimir Putin and, helping to carry the Olympic flag, a young lady rhythmic gymnast who might very well be, we were told, Putin’s unofficial inamorata.

We were told this by our normally strait-laced BBC commentary team, headed, for these Olympics, by the doughty Clare Balding, now thoroughly established as the Beeb’s go-to girl for flogging excitement into a dull sport. Clare can keep a straight face while referring enthusiastically to “legends of the luge”. According to my researches, there is nobody alive who can name even a single legend of the luge. There are people who own a luge who can’t name a legend of the luge.

Theoretically, to watch someone lying on their back as they ride a tea-tray into the pit of doom should be madly exciting, but it is not. Nor are the heavily publicised new acrobatic snow-board events all that gripping after you have seen the first competitor do all the tricks. The next competitor does all the same tricks and it is up to the raving commentator to provide the excitement. “There’s the double upside inside switchback triple twist!”

But hush, the skaters are on the rink, and once again the Russians have manufactured a 15-year-old miracle girl. Linking her jumps in a legato line, she is cooler than the ice. We have seen it all before, but it’s still pretty wonderful. There were a few real-life episodes missing from the dramatised Russian history spectacular in the opening ceremony, but they can be legitimately proud of some of their skaters, those glittering incarnations of a great poetic tradition.

Putin, Tchaikovsky, snowboarding and the BBC

Did you watch the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics? 

The BBC broadcast it live yesterday on BBC Two. 

Not BBC One, obviously, as all right-thinking types disapprove of these games being held in Putin's homophobic Russia, and the BBC is about as right-thinking an organisation as it's possible to get. BBC One wouldn't do for the Sochi Olympics.

So, yes, the BBC gets the glory of broadcasting it - and to bask in any gold medals we might win - but they shove it all on BBC Two because it's a 'bad Olympics' (according to Stephen Fry, The Guardian, etc).

Well, that's their decision.

The BBC's coverage of the opening ceremony was hardly a sport-free zone, but it was heavily political too. They even had a BBC political reporter (Daniel Sandford) as one of the three commentators during the ceremony itself. (Has that ever happened before?) The politics of Putin - and his repressive ways - cropped up again and again. 

Perhaps that's as it should be. 

After all the Olympics are often very political, and this opening ceremony certainly showed the political agenda of Vladimir Putin - just as the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony showed the political agenda of Danny Boyle (except the BBC's commenters weren't too keen to point that out at the time).

I had to grin at the BBC's highlighting of the one tiny technical glitch in the Russians' ceremony - a single snowflake failing to turn into an Olympic ring. Hazel Irvine, chief commentator, had a couple of sniggers about that. 

What especially made me grin was that the BBC itself completely botched the opening of its coverage. Hazel did her opening spiel. Then the sound went off. Then she read it out all over again. I sniggered at that. All that time and licence fee payers' money, and they completely bungled it.

What of the opening ceremony itself?

Well, if I could have designed my own dream opening ceremony, this is what it would have been like. It was exciting, technically stunning and full of innovative staging, but also very, very beautiful.

What struck me though is how different it was to London 2012. 

To make a bold, possibly controversial assertion: If London 2012 projected a left-wing view of the world, then Sochi 2014 projected a right-wing one.

It's as if, to be slightly facetious, the world has switched round over the last thirty years. We in the United Kingdom got a Soviet-style Olympics (complete with heroic workers, a hymn to the NHS and the glorification of progressive social change) and they, the post-Soviet Russians, got a rousing, conservative hymn to the glories of their national tradition. 

The Russians exulted in their own alphabet, their flag (raised by cosmonauts) and their landscapes. They proudly extolled the great figures from their past, gloried in their own cultural and scientific contributions to the world (of which there are many) and were unashamed of their empire.

It was a great patriotic pageant of Russian history, sweeping and poetic. I loved every second of it (except, of course, the speeches).

It took us from Russia's beginnings, through a magical, fairy-tale vision of medieval Russia, to Peter the Great and the glittering ballrooms and the literary and musical golden age of Imperial Russia. Then came the cold, dissonant wind of revolution and a harsh nightmare in red, conjuring up the Russian Revolution. A good-humoured, somewhat nostalgic take on the post-WWII Soviet Union (bypassing Stalin) followed, before the little girl at the heart of the ceremony's narrative let the red balloon of communism go and welcomed the new Russia.

The visual images used to conjure all this up just have to be seen to be believed - and enjoyed.

It really is a curious thing that the whole ceremony - even the bits dealing with communism - was so deeply conservative. It could almost have been designed to appeal as much to conservative-minded people in the West (and elsewhere) as to domestic Russians. 

The nostalgic bits for the dying decades of the U.S.S.R. focused on the nice things, people being people, going about their daily lives, Sputnik, Gagarin, the baby boom. (They fairly skipped over the Hammer & Sickle!). It had the feel of an American conservative's vision of 1950's America or a British conservative's vision of 1950's Britain, before Danny Boyle's beloved progressive social changes climaxed - a simpler time. It was affectionate, and a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Another key difference was that the London 2012 was a pop culture Olympics, whereas Sochi 2014 was unashamedly centred on high culture - 'War and Peace', 'Swan Lake', 'The Rite of Spring'. Its soundtrack was largely that of Russia's mighty classical music tradition (from Borodin to Schnittke). The Russian national anthem was sung by a monastery choir, the Olympic hymn was sung as an operatic aria (with chorus) by Anna Netrebko, and the Olympic flame was lit to Stravinsky's 'Firebird'. Ballet ran throughout the ceremony. I loved it!

I've deliberately refrained from reading what other people made of this ceremony, as there will probably be lots of sniffy right-thinking commenters on the radio, TV and newspapers criticising it as 'reactionary' (or whatever's the modern equivalent of that old term of opprobrium). I didn't want them to influence my take on it. (I could be being unduly pessimistic there, of course. Maybe they all loved it.)

***********

I wrote this piece earlier this afternoon but took a break from it, having a life.

A bit like Terry and Bob in that famous Likely Lads episode where they try desperately not to hear the result of a football match, I've found myself being bombarded by snippets of alternative opinion (from various sources, some very close to home), and they suggest that the media is banging on about that incredibly minor technical hitch with the snowflake and the Olympic ring...

I don't know if that's true (yet), but if it is it's absurdly petty on the British media's part.

Thousands upon thousands of complex actions work to perfection, producing around two hours of spectacular magic, and one solitary set of bulbs doesn't work....and yet it's the one set of bulbs not working that gets the lion's share of the attention in Danny Boyle's Britain?

I think that says more about us than it does about Putin's Russia.