How good is winning?
An interesting characteristic of the English mentality can be observed on any game show. Following a final (dance off, bake off) in which contestants, previously hopeless amateurs in the discipline, are judged on their ability to bake a cake, decorate a room, dance a tango or just be popular for a few weeks, the final three (three is the usual magic number) will line up with naked expressions, as if denied the comfort of a blindfold in facing the formalities of execution; some asserting a grim determination to show no emotion, some self consciously embarrassed, concealing their anxiety with a straining smile, some with needy hands, reaching, clutching those of their temporary allies in this fatal experience. As the inevitable long hold extends the tension with the prying camera lingering in judgement over each expression, turn down the sound and wait to spot the winner. At the eventual announcement, the successful candidate will be the one collapsing, face in hands, tears streaming, whole body shaking uncontrollably as if suddenly informed by an insensitive production team of the abduction and gang rape of her only child; while the other two will console her with hugs and beaming smiles, delighted in their failure.
Is this reaction genuine modesty, the release of drama queen stress, or learned behaviour? Although tears might seem appropriate for shows which are genuinely shameful, it does suggest we are programmed to provide acceptable body language to illustrate our embarrassment at winning; or maybe to conceal the genuine lust for triumph and competitive superiority we don’t want others to know exists. How do we find the right balance? How do we become natural winners?
Why enter a competition other than to win? You’d think. The English, who invented most of our modern games and sports, have for so long lead the competition in nothing but the league of good losers, maintaining the traditional public school spirit of privileged satisfaction in merely taking part. Our naturally superior attitude presents us with a dilemma in competitive sport: do we compete with a desire for personal satisfaction or the chance to wallow in victory over the vanquished? Does one necessarily imply the other? When does smiling confidence trip over the borderline into smirking arrogance? Deep down in the scrum of back slapping consolation, beneath the tears and finger-fanning, is the master baker/cook/con artist pinching and squeezing the superior smile off her face?
TV seems to have offered us the shelter of learned behaviour. There has certainly been some extensive teaching going on, reaching Ofsted excellence since the technology has progressed into the 21st century. Look at how far football has changed in this self-aware, media savvy era. The old black and white footage of Bobby Charlton (looking quite old himself in his 20s with his worried smile, his Munich baggage and his combover) was a rare treasure of live national broadcasting (only two years after the first screening of MotD) and has now receded into a blurred distance: we watch him leaping and punching the air as his arrowed 30 yarder is still fizzing the net against Mexico in 66 , unaware of the extravagance of this gesture at the time (as suspiciously ‘continental’ as the simulated injury) in a history of modest, manly handshakes. This was the 60s, however, the watershed era, and Charlton had hit the opening goal in the only World Cup England were ever to win. Iconic or ironic? Five years later Arsenal’s Charlie George lashed home the winner in the 71 FA Cup final; dropping his long frame into that seminal horizontal crucifixion, he remained starfished, awaiting joyful teammates to raise him from the dead into North Bank glory (and the painful memories of Arsenal’s Jewish North London rivals). At least George had the merit of spontaneity (and the exhaustion of a hectic extra-time on a hot day in May). With the inception of the Premiership came Sky and the dramatic explosion of the media experience: multiple cameras, multiple angles, the viewer offered every seat in the ground, the player centre stage in repeated replays (in real time and slow motion); analysis longer than a week’s coverage of the sport only a decade before. MotD used to be just that (one day, one match), now the viewer was seduced with every match on every day in a long, dirty weekend; the whole business organically evolving, hand in hand, with a developing self awareness of the players. Drama breeds its attention-seekers, its divas and its sluts,. Even as Blackburn took the title in 95, in the infancy of the Premiership, Alan Shearer’s trademark raised arm as he wheeled away from goal already seemed a throwback to the 50s. Now the choreography is part of the training. Football has rarely, if ever, been an arena for originality (try finding a torso free of tattoos): a single knee-slide will produce a thousand imitators. Now the knee-sliders, badge-kissers, ear-cuppers, Samba dancers, disco robots and corner flag sparing partners are ten a penny even in the Sunday league hangover zone. How ironic in a sport where homosexuality is taboo to find shirt-lifters with homemade messages on concealed T-shirts and half a team gathered in training to rehearse the mime of rocking a baby, a strike in ten pin bowling or a scenario from a West End musical in preparation for a goal celebration.
Now every cup final ends in the same lame choreography. The captain raising the cup is obviously an expected public tradition; but the whole team arranged carefully behind a sponsor’s banner before the regimented pogoing can begin? If there is a more banal sight in football, of tradition turned to travesty, it has to be the accompanying lap of honour. Originally, this ritual must have been some way of not only accepting the gladiatorial glory of the victor, but connecting with the fans who were part of the same club, at a time (of home grown players, limited wages and modest transfer fees) when a common bond existed. Now we watch a spectacle of corrupt and learned behaviour in which each player must have his turn at wearing the lid on his head, dancing a jig as if no one in history had ever before attempted such a ‘mad’ jape: a ritual of collective memory on a par with cargo cults or the lost Easter islanders (as if by echoing Nobby Stiles '66 cakewalk we can salvage the bankrupt present through a reproduction of the glorious past).
So, what’s new? It is hardly a novel idea, after decades of escalating television contracts, to discover football has lost its innocence. So, why condemn football, a relative latecomer to media and the money business? The predictable procession of Formula One is tedious enough on the tarmac but what would be happening on the podium if the champagne grape died on the vine for a year? Does anyone really watch these millionaires at their food play in a scene which, in most cases, is so redundant, so lacking in the spirit of real celebration, it could have been filmed even before the race.
Perhaps genuine unsocialised celebration requires genuine innocence and genuine joy. The whole world witnessed such an experience in high definition and intimate close up, time and time again in the 2012 Olympics, where even the pizza, burger and beer pouched antichrist of athletes could not fail to experience empathy with the struggle, the culmination of a four year programme of dedicated training, destined to end in triumph or wasted years; the sacrifice of energy, love, relationships never to be retrieved, lives never to be relived. We wept with our medalists as they collapsed, heads bowed in sculls, on judo mats, on their knees crawling over running tracks (in sports whose annual rank and file coverage in the media would barely outlast MotD’s goal of the month); somehow we lived with them their genuine raw emotion: relief. joy, fatigue. triumph, humility,
Perhaps this is it, the real thing, the Olympic ideal; without money, without hope: the pure, innocent will to win; the triumph of the will, to drive yourself to achieve the thing you know you can.
What opera, what drama, what great TV.
DG 2013
An interesting characteristic of the English mentality can be observed on any game show. Following a final (dance off, bake off) in which contestants, previously hopeless amateurs in the discipline, are judged on their ability to bake a cake, decorate a room, dance a tango or just be popular for a few weeks, the final three (three is the usual magic number) will line up with naked expressions, as if denied the comfort of a blindfold in facing the formalities of execution; some asserting a grim determination to show no emotion, some self consciously embarrassed, concealing their anxiety with a straining smile, some with needy hands, reaching, clutching those of their temporary allies in this fatal experience. As the inevitable long hold extends the tension with the prying camera lingering in judgement over each expression, turn down the sound and wait to spot the winner. At the eventual announcement, the successful candidate will be the one collapsing, face in hands, tears streaming, whole body shaking uncontrollably as if suddenly informed by an insensitive production team of the abduction and gang rape of her only child; while the other two will console her with hugs and beaming smiles, delighted in their failure.
Is this reaction genuine modesty, the release of drama queen stress, or learned behaviour? Although tears might seem appropriate for shows which are genuinely shameful, it does suggest we are programmed to provide acceptable body language to illustrate our embarrassment at winning; or maybe to conceal the genuine lust for triumph and competitive superiority we don’t want others to know exists. How do we find the right balance? How do we become natural winners?
Why enter a competition other than to win? You’d think. The English, who invented most of our modern games and sports, have for so long lead the competition in nothing but the league of good losers, maintaining the traditional public school spirit of privileged satisfaction in merely taking part. Our naturally superior attitude presents us with a dilemma in competitive sport: do we compete with a desire for personal satisfaction or the chance to wallow in victory over the vanquished? Does one necessarily imply the other? When does smiling confidence trip over the borderline into smirking arrogance? Deep down in the scrum of back slapping consolation, beneath the tears and finger-fanning, is the master baker/cook/con artist pinching and squeezing the superior smile off her face?
TV seems to have offered us the shelter of learned behaviour. There has certainly been some extensive teaching going on, reaching Ofsted excellence since the technology has progressed into the 21st century. Look at how far football has changed in this self-aware, media savvy era. The old black and white footage of Bobby Charlton (looking quite old himself in his 20s with his worried smile, his Munich baggage and his combover) was a rare treasure of live national broadcasting (only two years after the first screening of MotD) and has now receded into a blurred distance: we watch him leaping and punching the air as his arrowed 30 yarder is still fizzing the net against Mexico in 66 , unaware of the extravagance of this gesture at the time (as suspiciously ‘continental’ as the simulated injury) in a history of modest, manly handshakes. This was the 60s, however, the watershed era, and Charlton had hit the opening goal in the only World Cup England were ever to win. Iconic or ironic? Five years later Arsenal’s Charlie George lashed home the winner in the 71 FA Cup final; dropping his long frame into that seminal horizontal crucifixion, he remained starfished, awaiting joyful teammates to raise him from the dead into North Bank glory (and the painful memories of Arsenal’s Jewish North London rivals). At least George had the merit of spontaneity (and the exhaustion of a hectic extra-time on a hot day in May). With the inception of the Premiership came Sky and the dramatic explosion of the media experience: multiple cameras, multiple angles, the viewer offered every seat in the ground, the player centre stage in repeated replays (in real time and slow motion); analysis longer than a week’s coverage of the sport only a decade before. MotD used to be just that (one day, one match), now the viewer was seduced with every match on every day in a long, dirty weekend; the whole business organically evolving, hand in hand, with a developing self awareness of the players. Drama breeds its attention-seekers, its divas and its sluts,. Even as Blackburn took the title in 95, in the infancy of the Premiership, Alan Shearer’s trademark raised arm as he wheeled away from goal already seemed a throwback to the 50s. Now the choreography is part of the training. Football has rarely, if ever, been an arena for originality (try finding a torso free of tattoos): a single knee-slide will produce a thousand imitators. Now the knee-sliders, badge-kissers, ear-cuppers, Samba dancers, disco robots and corner flag sparing partners are ten a penny even in the Sunday league hangover zone. How ironic in a sport where homosexuality is taboo to find shirt-lifters with homemade messages on concealed T-shirts and half a team gathered in training to rehearse the mime of rocking a baby, a strike in ten pin bowling or a scenario from a West End musical in preparation for a goal celebration.
Now every cup final ends in the same lame choreography. The captain raising the cup is obviously an expected public tradition; but the whole team arranged carefully behind a sponsor’s banner before the regimented pogoing can begin? If there is a more banal sight in football, of tradition turned to travesty, it has to be the accompanying lap of honour. Originally, this ritual must have been some way of not only accepting the gladiatorial glory of the victor, but connecting with the fans who were part of the same club, at a time (of home grown players, limited wages and modest transfer fees) when a common bond existed. Now we watch a spectacle of corrupt and learned behaviour in which each player must have his turn at wearing the lid on his head, dancing a jig as if no one in history had ever before attempted such a ‘mad’ jape: a ritual of collective memory on a par with cargo cults or the lost Easter islanders (as if by echoing Nobby Stiles '66 cakewalk we can salvage the bankrupt present through a reproduction of the glorious past).
So, what’s new? It is hardly a novel idea, after decades of escalating television contracts, to discover football has lost its innocence. So, why condemn football, a relative latecomer to media and the money business? The predictable procession of Formula One is tedious enough on the tarmac but what would be happening on the podium if the champagne grape died on the vine for a year? Does anyone really watch these millionaires at their food play in a scene which, in most cases, is so redundant, so lacking in the spirit of real celebration, it could have been filmed even before the race.
Perhaps genuine unsocialised celebration requires genuine innocence and genuine joy. The whole world witnessed such an experience in high definition and intimate close up, time and time again in the 2012 Olympics, where even the pizza, burger and beer pouched antichrist of athletes could not fail to experience empathy with the struggle, the culmination of a four year programme of dedicated training, destined to end in triumph or wasted years; the sacrifice of energy, love, relationships never to be retrieved, lives never to be relived. We wept with our medalists as they collapsed, heads bowed in sculls, on judo mats, on their knees crawling over running tracks (in sports whose annual rank and file coverage in the media would barely outlast MotD’s goal of the month); somehow we lived with them their genuine raw emotion: relief. joy, fatigue. triumph, humility,
Perhaps this is it, the real thing, the Olympic ideal; without money, without hope: the pure, innocent will to win; the triumph of the will, to drive yourself to achieve the thing you know you can.
What opera, what drama, what great TV.
DG 2013
