Media and morality: it's a funny old game.

It’s a funny old game, was the catchphrase of Jimmy Greaves, the 1960s free-scoring legend turned ‘pundit’ in the early days of televised football, one half of the ‘comedy’ duo ‘Saint and Greavsie’. Think of Ant and Dec on an uninspired, tiresome day in the jungle (quite a regular event at this stage in their career): Greavsie’s lame, obvious one-liners accompanied by 30 grueling seconds (so it seemed) of the Saint’s laboured laughter. Top class players indulged and living off their reputations in sport. They were top class players, they weren’t expected to be top class comedians.

The recent furore over Tyson Fury suggests we expect so much more of our sportsmen today. They have to be role models. In public life. To be outstanding models of excellence in their own sport is not enough. They must exhibit some form of purity of the human spirit seen nowhere else in society. They must be genuine all round Hollywood heroes (or at least inoffensive to those so willingly sensitive to offense). They must be Jesus Christ among the Pharisees. They must be gods.

If this is what we expect of those who have spent their formative years devoted to the systematic destruction of heavy bags and sparring partners, what then might we expect of those whose job it is to deal in diplomatic discussion, those we elect to make the laws on our behalf? Surely these must be the most severely judged of all our role models.

In the same week as Fury relentlessly held the front pages and thousands were signing up to have him removed from the Sports Personality of the Year (a BBC institution even older and more tedious than Wogan), the scandal of an unknown MP was buried so far into the depths of the same papers only those seeking out crosswords and horoscopes would have found her name. The scandal? She falsified an email (objecting to her decision to vote for the bombing of Syria) from one of the people she represents,  adding words which turned an unwisely vigorous expression of an alternative view into a death threat; before reporting this ‘threat’ to Scotland Yard. Fortunately for the constituent he had the evidence of his original copy. Manipulative? Lacking sound judgement? Criminal? Or just plain stupid? Surely, whatever your position, for an MP it has to be an act which requires instant dismissal; if anyone knows about it. Somehow a gaggle of editors judged this misdemeanor to be so far down the scale of public interest, few even now can remember the MPs name. The fact that Lucy Allan was a woman and a Conservative in a marginal seat, highly vulnerable to any hasty by-election conducted during a heightened wave of Corbynism, had, of course, nothing to do with it.

This is our world today. An immoral and criminal act carried out by someone who might in the future be constructing laws to govern our behaviour (and possibly our freedom) is seen as nothing in the face of a few casual comments from an uneducated boxer, indistinguishable from those heard in any bar throughout the country on any day of the week. Ironically (if irony still exists in this world), Fury’s attention-seeking antics will continue to sell more seats; Boxing has always courted the world of Show Business, where no publicity is bad publicity. And no publicity has helped keep Lucy Allan (or Alan Lucie or whoever) off the radar, preserving the career she would have lost, not through any moral judgement but merely the embarrassment of exposure.

It’s a game, all right; but funny? I’ll leave that up to you.
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​DG