Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (32 page)

Soon the waiting will be over, and we shall be able to find out whether a Kenyan man we've never heard of can jump further into a sandpit than an American man we've also never heard of. Plus we shall be able to see Russian women with scrotums like tractors hurling hammers about the place. And with a bit of luck, one of the triangular-torsoed diver boys will bash his head on the board. As you may have gathered, I'm no fan of London's forthcoming running and jumping competition, and in recent weeks I've joined in wondering why its officials, among others, should be given one lane of a dual carriageway while 8 million Londoners have to hutch up in the other.

However, even I am now starting to grow weary of the salivatory anticipation that the Olympics will be a soggy festival of incompetence, and that the wall-to-wall television coverage is bound to be ruined by Fearne Cotton saying ‘wow' a lot.

When any other Third World country is asked to stage an international event, it doesn't actively hope for it to be a failure: Inner Mongolia, for instance, is hosting this year's Miss World and no one in the local press is saying that all the competitors are sure to get a nasty bout of genital itching.

Here, though, things are rather different. A lone American athlete arrived last week and tweeted to say his first impressions of London weren't good. And somehow this was seen as proof that the whole event was turning into a fiasco.

Of course, what we should have said is, ‘Why? What
happened? Were you barked at by a furious immigration official and made to go to the back of a two-hour queue because you'd accidentally said on your visa waiver form that you had committed genocide? And then did you climb into a taxi that had no legroom at all and was being driven by a non-English speaker who had no idea where he was going? No. Well, shut up, then, you disgusting little ingrate.'

Then came news that some of the on-site cleaners were being asked to share a shower. Like everyone who goes to a £30,000-a-year public school such as Eton. Not that you will have noticed this little nugget because you were too busy watching
Twenty Twelve
on your iPlayer.

Meanwhile, a hastily organized select committee was trying to find out why Nick Buckles, the G4S boss, had announced with just two weeks to go that he'd been unable to find enough guards to sit at the back of the stadium, smoking.

But instead, a Labour MP called David Winnick, who couldn't even do up his tie properly, shouted, ‘If I demand over and over again that you admit it's a humiliating shambles, can I appear on the front of all tomorrow's papers?'

Where was he going with that? And why didn't poor old Mr Buckles, with his Bay City Rollers haircut, simply tell the publicity-hungry moron that a much better question would have been, ‘Why did so many of Britain's 2.5 million unemployed people decide they'd rather stay on benefits than put on a high-visibility jacket and do a job?'

Whatever. We now get to the hated Olympic lanes, which have been provided in the hope that visiting journalists are made to feel so warm and fuzzy that they go home and encourage business leaders to open an office here.

Do we see it that way? No. What we see instead is one tiny little mistake on one tiny little road where one lane is for
buses and one is for someone from the
Kampala Gazette
. And for this, apparently, Seb Coe's head must be amputated.

There's more. One woman went to the papers to say that her son hadn't been allowed to wear his expensive training shoes while practising in an east London gym because they hadn't been made by Adidas, one of the Olympic sponsors. Well, yes, I too despair about the commercialization of sport, but the truth is that without Adidas and EDF and BMW, there'd have been no stadium.

Not that we need one, scoffed the cynics, because no tickets at all have been sold for any of the basket-weaving events. And anyway, it's just going to be a white elephant for the rest of time unless Bernie Ecclestone can be persuaded to remove the Monaco race from the grand prix calendar and replace it with an event through the streets of Newham.

By Wednesday last week the hysteria and general sense of impending doom had reached such a pitch that observers were quoting a German magazine that claimed the Games would be a washout because of the weather. And instead of saying, ‘Well, yes, but at least the Queen won't storm out if Usain Bolt wins,' we took this as yet more proof that Britain is seen around the world as a useless, wet rock full of tax dodgers, benefit frauds and cheating bankers.

Even Boris Johnson, London's mayor, jumped on the bandwagon, saying that because the swallows were flying backwards and the cotoneaster berries were a little paler than usual, the whole of east London would be soaked for the duration of the Games. Really? Because the weather forecasters say that the jet stream is moving north, that sunny skies are on the way and that as a result the beach volleyball girls will be allowed to perform naked as usual.

I'm not saying the Games are bound to be a triumph, but I am heartily fed up with the mongers of misery who think
they'll be a rain-spattered orgy of mud, incompetence, striking bus drivers, disgruntled staff, angry Americans, corporate greed and empty stadiums. And that the army is almost certain to shoot down a patrolling Eurofighter with one of its Fisher-Price ground-to-air missiles.

We need to think positively. We need to imagine that the opening ceremony is rather more than a celebration of diversity and sustainability. We need to picture a bright summer sun glinting off all the gold medals our athletes have won. In short, let's enjoy the hope now and deal with the despair later.

22 July 2012

Many people in the civilized world were a bit surprised when they heard that the good Christian folk of Denver, Colorado, had responded to the cinema killings by rushing out the next day to stock up on sub-machine guns.

Firearms permit applications were up 40 per cent.

What were they thinking of? ‘Right. Good. I have in my belt a Mac-10, so now if I'm interrupted while out for a romantic dinner with my wife, or walking the dog, I shall be able to kill the assailant before he kills me.'

This is extremely unlikely. Gun-toting maniacs tend not to announce their intentions with a shouted warning. Which means that by the time you have located your weapon, withdrawn it from its hiding place, taken off the safety catch, aimed and pulled the trigger, you're already fairly dead.

And even if by some miracle you aren't, have you ever tried to hit a target with a gun? It's pretty much impossible, even if the target is an American. Once I was given a machine gun by a member of the army and asked to hit, quite literally, a barn door from a range of perhaps fifty yards. The first round was successful, but thereafter I was mostly spraying the sky while stumbling backwards with my eyes closed and my face all screwed up as if I were sucking hard on an unripe lemon.

There is no metaphor that quite captures the sheer violence of pulling the trigger on an automatic weapon. One second, it's as still and as silent as a rock. The next, you are attached to a living thing that is trying desperately to break free from your
grasp. If you are a trained soldier, you can just about deal with this. If you are an overweight solicitor out for dinner with your wife, you will end up blind, deaf and surrounded by the thirty bodies of all the people you've just shot by mistake.

It's interesting. Since the
Batman
shootings, a handful of teary Democrats have been saying that automatic weapons with large magazines should be banned. In other words, they want to ban baddies from buying precisely the sort of gun that can't actually hit anything.

Mind you, a pistol is not much better. Only recently a deeply worrying man in North Carolina took me to his outdoor shooting range and asked me to ‘double tap' one of his Osama bin Laden targets. So, aim carefully at the man's heart, fire and then straight away put the next round in his head. Seen it done in a million films. Simple.

It isn't, actually. The first carefully aimed round grazed Mr bin Laden's shoulder. The next hit a bush several hundred yards to the right.

Americans must know this. Many are descended from cowboys and gunslingers. So they must be at least aware that in the hands of an amateur, in the heat of the moment, a gun is about as useful as a pencil sharpener.

Politicians must know it too. So Mr Barack should simply explain that in the olden days, when there were Indians and Frenchmen and bears rushing about, it was fair enough to keep a Winchester above the fireplace. But today it's ridiculous.

He doesn't say this, though. After the Aurora massacre, instead of announcing an amnesty or a change in the law, he mumbled something about the need to address violence and explained that every day and a half the same number of young Americans are shot to death as died in Denver. It was a presidential shrug.

That's because asking a working-class American male to hand in his gun is like asking him to hand in his penis. Mr Barack knows that Bud and Hank won't vote for him if he takes away their right to have a machine gun. Which gets us back to the question: why would you want one in the first place?

Well, first of all, you grew up in the Cold War. You were taught by your leaders that when the bad guys have intercontinental ballistic missiles, you must have intercontinental ballistic missiles too. Plus the constitution says you can have a gun to defend yourself from the British.

But there's more to it than that. It's because guns are fascinating. If someone came round to your house today with a 9mm Glock, I can pretty much guarantee that if you have a functioning scrotum, you will want to handle it. And if the person in question has some bullets, you will want to go outside and shoot at a tree.

This probably has something to do with mating. When you have a gun in your hand, you are the most powerful person in the room. Which means you're like those birds that appear on natural history programmes with their feathers all puffed out, making themselves look manly and virile in front of all the girl birds.

A gun is also a comfort blanket. You know that if it's just you, with your weedy little arms, versus a bad man with a gun, you stand no chance at all. However, if you too have a gun about your person, there's a slim chance that as you blast away at all the furniture with your eyes closed, he won't stroll over, punch you in the face, take the gun from you and shoot you in the head with it. A gun doesn't level the playing field. But it does tilt it slightly back in your direction.

There's another thing. Guns are fun. I once spent a pleasant evening in the Arizona desert with a man who had a Mack
truck filled from floor to ceiling with every kind of weapon you can imagine. He even had two 8,000-round-a-minute mini-guns mounted on his helicopter.

I was especially fond of something called a squad automatic weapon and spent many hours bouncing tracer rounds into the night sky until the desert actually caught fire. There's no reason, in a civilized world, why a member of the public should have this gun. And no reason why anyone should cackle and squeal with joy as they fire it into the void. But I did. And you would too. And that is the problem.

29 July 2012

Ben Elton is working on a new television sitcom about a health and safety department. Doubtless it will be full of high-visibility ear defenders and there will be many hilarious consequences. British health and safety is a rich comic vein. Or rather, it was before the Olympics came along.

I gathered with about 200 ocean-going cynics to watch the opening ceremony and as the lights went up on those little black and white children skipping around a maypole, all of us imagined the worst. We'd seen the knuckle-bitingly embarrassing handover in China.

We'd heard about the low-budget sustainable eco-plans for east London and we all knew, deep down in our stone-cold hearts, that Britain is a basketcase. We never get anything right. Only this time we wouldn't get anything right with the whole world watching.

Well, obviously we were wrong. It was a triumph and, as I write, the Games are proving to be a triumph as well. Furthermore, the trains are running on time, there are no strikes at Heathrow and London is quiet. This, I feel, is going to have a profound effect on not just Elton's new comedy but everything else too.

After the last world war, Britain lost its empire and slid into a soot-blackened well of dirt, discontent and despair. People lived in a monochrome world with outside khazis that didn't work, had no job and, as often as not, had a hideous lung disease. And it was here, in the misery pit, that our world-famous sense of humour was forged.

You knew your new Austin Princess wouldn't work properly. You knew the pubs would shut every time you were thirsty. You knew there'd be a power cut very soon and you knew that the little cough you'd developed yesterday was the onset of pneumoconiosis. And the only way to deal with it all was to have a laugh.

Think about it. How much comedy do you find in British literature that was written when we were rich and successful and ran the world? How many laughs are there in
Wuthering Heights
or
The Return of the Native
? Not many. We were known in Victorian times for many things. But being funny wasn't one of them.

However, when unemployment was running at more than 3 million, the miners were all throwing stones at policemen and your rubbish hadn't been collected for a year, Elton was bringing the house down in the Comedy Store and we were all gathered around the television, laughing our heads off at Frankie Howerd. Titter ye not. But titter we did.

When the people of other countries are displeased with their leaders, they chase them into drains or hang them from lamp posts. Us? We employ Ian Hislop to machine gun them with jokes. When John Cleese was unhappy with the service at a dreary seafront hotel, he didn't write an angry letter. No. He wrote
Fawlty Towers
. I spend my working life on TV praying to all the gods that ever there were that James May will catch fire. Because then we can all have a jolly good giggle.

Adversity and hardship are the cradles of comedy, so what are we to do now the Olympics have shown that, actually, Britain can be rather more than Belgium with a bit of drizzle? What if we're all inspired to succeed and everything we do from now on is equally well run and magnificent?

You really do sense this tide of optimism, certainly in London. Most of us watched that opening ceremony, with
the inspiring semi-animated rush down the Thames and Kenneth Branagh as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and we've all plainly decided Britain doesn't need to be rubbish at everything.

People talk about how the achievement will change the way other countries feel about us. Far more important is how it will change the way we feel about ourselves. That's what happened after Barcelona hosted the Games. Basking in a Ready Brek glow of pride, it went from a crummy little fishing port to one of the coolest cities in the world.

That could well happen here. The Olympics have injected us all with a long-forgotten sense of contentment, and who knows what effect this will have?

What if Terminal 2 reopens at Heathrow on time and all the passengers' suitcases end up on the correct planes? What if we build an aircraft carrier that can be used as a launch pad for actual planes? What if the people in charge of parking meters in some London boroughs scrap the pay-by-phone system, which doesn't work, and bring back the coin slot, which does? What if the banks examine what Sebastian Coe has achieved and think, ‘Hey, chaps. Why don't we lend money to people who can pay us back?'

Where would that leave
Have I Got News for You
? Paul Merton may still be able to offer up some nugget about a squashed cat, but poor old Hislop would be castrated. And who's going to find Elton's new show funny if health and safety officers start to behave sensibly? Certainly I bet you would have found
Twenty Twelve
far less chucklesome if you'd known then what you know now.

If Britain becomes as well run as Switzerland, we could end up with a Swiss sense of humour. In other words, we'd end up with absolutely no sense of humour at all. You'd have John Bishop and Michael McIntyre and all the other
observational comedians walking into empty theatres and saying, ‘Have you noticed how all the trains run bang on time …'

The only crumb of comfort we can take from all this is that Germany is in a pickle. Thanks to the curious machinations of the European Union, various southern euro states have decided it's best if they sit under an olive tree all day and get Hermann to pay for all their public services.

As a result, Johnny Boche will soon be bankrupt. The country will have strikes and riots, and everyone's Mercedes will break down all the time. This could well mean that in the not-too-distant future, all the world's best comedians will be German.

5 August 2012