The Leisure Review: La Flamme Rouge

La Flamme Rouge edition 11; dateline 16 October 2015

An elevated perspective: watch this space
Anyone who has attended any Leisure Review event will be well aware that architecture usually features heavily on the programme, often accompanied by the editor’s estuarine drawl by way of commentary. Now Chicago has launched an architectural biennial to ensure that the city will “continue to be seen worldwide as an epicentre of modern architecture” [see TLR news 89] we presume that a Leisure Review tour to the 2017 Chicago Biennial is already on the drawing board. Details of how we’ll make it work will no doubt be published as soon as the editor can figure out how the parallel motion apparatus on the drawing board actually works.

New podium opportunities
It seems that the IOC has decided that any athletes found to have been cheated out of their moment in the medal spotlight by competitors who tested positive will be offered the opportunity to have their medal retrospectively awarded at a ceremony in the celebratory environment of a proper medal ceremony at a subsequent Olympic Games. A fine idea but La Flamme Rouge suggests that this ceremony could be enhanced by the medals being presented by the athletes that were busted in the first place. If these dopers were obliged to lift the medal from around their own neck and hang it round the neck of the athlete they cheated, so much the better.

Our lives in their hands
Given that until very recently the prevailing attitude to public services among the major political parties in Westminster has been to support the wholesale (and we use the adjective advisedly) privatisation and outsourcing of every action, duty and activity that can be typed into a spreadsheet, might we be allowed a moment to wonder at the efficacy and efficiency of the private sector in whose hands so much of our lives has been entrusted? That the banking sector, which is slowly being bailed out by anyone luxuriating in a disability and back bedroom, was bent surprised no one but now that the behemoths of the German motor industry have been revealed as systematic crooks, who will stand up for the sanctity of the commerce that serves as such a beacon to the poor old public servants of increasingly distant memory?

Getting away with it again and again [repeat to fade]
It has been drawn to the attention of La Flamme Rouge that Coca Cola (and we should point out that other sugar-based marketing conglomerates are available) have been identified among the funders of a professional-sounding research institute that sees fit to publish papers urging people to drink more beverages in the interests of their continuing health. While always amusing to see conflicts of interest exposed, such things no longer have the power to surprise, never mind shock. Of more interest is how grown men and women paid huge salaries to shape the stock market value of such global brands manage to sit around a table and convince themselves that what they are doing is perfectly acceptable business behaviour and will not be embarrassing to them or their employer should it become public knowledge. We would, for example, love to have been in the room when someone at Coca Cola decided that the time was now right to express mild criticism of the way FIFA had been handling the expensive but highly lucrative business of running international football for the last christ-knows-how-many decades. Elsewhere, in the corporate headquarters of Adidas and Visa highly experienced marketing experts and brand managers decided that Sepp Blatter had finally – finally – gone too far and, as long-term and previously entirely silent supporters of the Blatter regime, they felt compelled to issue blistering statements of mild concern that carefully stop short of anything approaching rebuke or regret. This new era of corporate social responsibility has also reached the automobile industry now that Volkswagen has been caught fiddling its legal obligations to publish details of how its vehicles work. The full-page ads inserted in various newspapers stated: “We have broken the most important part in our vehicles: your trust”. Whether it actually qualifies as a mea culpa (is it trying to suggest that somehow it’s our fault for being naive enough to trust them?) it’s as sickening as the liquid that Coca Cola markets as a refreshing and not-very-health-threatening beverage. The marketing departments of VW and all FIFA’s nervous supporters would be better employed to rewrite their ads and their statements to reflect the real brand values of their organisations: “We got caught and we hate it.” They can then book repeat ads for 12 months time safe in the knowledge that their new campaigns will also ring true: “We got caught but we got away with it.”

Anti-obesity research confirms the surprisingly likely
The University of Blimey’s department of Who’d Have Thought It was among the first to acknowledge a report published by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that found that the coalition government’s “responsibility deal” (RD) on tackling obesity, an arrangement by which the food industry agreed to play its part in promoting healthy diets, was a failure. The report, published in the journal Food Policy, found that very few of the companies delivered on their commitments to make their products healthier. “Though reformulation was most commonly listed in the delivery plans,” the report explains, “the act of signing up to the RD motivated few organisations to implement such interventions.” Get your research funding applications in now; there seems to be plenty going.

A fresh start for athletics but not too fresh
In something of a break with the usual seasonal traditions, autumn 2015 seems to have become a period of organisational renewal, not least for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). Our favourite non-elected politician, Lord Coe, has been elected to the position of president and the Little Baron has acknowledged that he has ascended to the pinnacle of athletics administration at a troubling time for the sport. In his first in-post pronouncements he was keen to talk the language of transformation, his aim to rid his beloved athletics of the miasma of accusation and doubt, to move on from the current agenda of crisis so that we can all remember that “my sport is more than piss and blood”. It is an arresting image, one familiar to anyone who has followed the drug-fuelled damage done to sports such as, off the top of our heads, cycling. Cycling’s international governing body, the UCI, has worked hard, albeit belatedly, to tackle the issue of doping and the many conflicts of interest that created a fertile environment in which cheating could breed and grow. It was therefore a disappointment for many observers to hear Coe making it quite clear that he did not see his long-standing employment as a global special adviser to Nike as any cause for concern. Coe told the Guardian: “For a conflict to exist it needs not to be registered, you need to not be able to stand behind the processes and procedure and thirdly you have to behave badly. I don’t intend to do any one of those three.” All this will be reassuring for those who have unending faith in Coe’s integrity but of little solace to those who believe that for the good guys to win the battles that need to be won conflicts of interest need to be removed rather than merely acknowledged, managed and invoiced. La Flamme Rouge carries no particular torch for athletics beyond a passing interest in the sartorial debates regarding the design of the GB vest but we have learned a thing of two during those endless hours of sofa-based sporting endeavour, not least that when a sport has become dominated by piss and blood its administrators have to start the cleaning process by removing the bullshit.

BBC placed under review by DCMS
And speaking of bullshit, the BBC is to be subject to a “root and branch” review following the publication of a green paper that will explore the corporation’s remit and funding structure. The review will be led by culture secretary John Whittingdale and a panel of experts but the context of the debate has been set by a recent licence fee settlement that has seen the BBC take on responsibility for the funding of free viewing for over-75s, the chancellor suggesting that the BBC website should be curtailed, and the culture secretary’s own history of criticism of the nation’s broadcaster. As one would expect, close attention has been paid to the impartiality of the expert panel, although were you to be among those who would expect a vested interest in the demise of the BBC as a non-commercial broadcaster to rule you out of the running as a panel member you would be disappointed. The panel includes: Dawn Airey, former chief exec and chair of Channel 5; Andrew Fisher, chief exec of Shazam online music service; Darren Henley, MD of Classic FM; Ashley Highfield, chief exec of regional newspaper group Johnston Press; Steward Purvis, former chief exec of ITN; and Alex Mahon, former chief exec of independent producer the Shine Group. This doesn’t, of course, mean that any or all are automatically minded to put the knife into the world’s most respected broadcaster but it does rather make you wonder who picked the team; and why.

The ageing process redefined
Few people look to the Californian hills and its film industry for artistic nuance or enlightened employment practices but surely even hardened Hollywood watchers will have been obliged to raise both eyebrows by Maggie Gyllenhaal’s account of being told that at the age of 37 she was too old to play a character in a relationship with a male character played by an actor aged 55. In an interview with the Wrap, an online film trade magazine, Gyllenhaal explained her astonishment: “It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh.” Laugh or cry seems to be the only option, although the American Civil Liberties Union has asked US government authorities to investigate the “rampant discrimination” in the employment practices of the major studios.

Gideon’s guide to northern Britain
How many column inches, how many acres of newsprint, how many hours of screen time were devoted to the potential prizes and pitfalls of the chancellor’s pet scheme of the “northern powerhouse”, a zone of economic energy and entrepreneurial innovation that would showcase the best that Britain had to offer and serve to balance the policies that had seen London suck the lives and livings out of the rest of the country? And when the chancellor stood up to deliver the first Tory budget for decades, a budget that would make good all the promises made by him and his colleagues before the general election, how long was it before the promise of the northern powerhouse confirmed as a fantasy foisted on a terrified and gullible electorate? About five minutes is our estimate. Good luck, Britain. You’re going to need it.

Tehran gets the cultural call
Meanwhile, in Tehran a project titled “a gallery as big as a town” took over all the city’s billboards for ten days to replace the usual advertising for gadgets, food and household items with works of art, including works by foreign artists such as Picasso, Magritte and Matisse. The project was curated by Saeed Shahlapour, an Iranian artist, and managed by Mojtaba Mousavi, who confirmed that the billboard companies were initially reluctant to take part but finally relented “because it was a cultural activity”. Culture, it seems, can melt the most theocratically hardened of aesthetic arteries.

There will always be an England
The success of the England women’s football team raised plenty hurrahs and plenty of questions as they made their way to the semi-finals of the World Cup. As the first England football team to reach the last four of a major competition since the men reached the semis in 1990, the Lionesses were celebrated and feted for their achievement, not least by live coverage of their games on the BBC. Why women’s national teams have to have a charming epithet rather than be known by the name of the nation they represent is the first question. How England teams so often manage to engineer situations that ensure their exit from the competition by the cruellest possible route rather than just taking a decent beating is the next (own goal in the last few minutes of the game in this competition, the ball looping off Paul Parker’s outstretched foot and over a mysteriously hobbled Peter Shilton for the men in 1990). More disturbing still, why on earth did Ukips MEP Louise Bours see fit to issue a press release congratulating and commiserating with the team?

Now wash your hands
Ms Bours’ intervention does at least offer one question to which the answer is both swift and simple. At the foot of the press release is the following statement preceding a hyperlink: “
If you would rather not receive future communications from Paul Nuttall MEP, please go to…” Imagine the state of his inbox if anyone apart from La Flamme Rouge had actually read that far down the page; or rather opened the email; or not just hit ‘delete’ as soon as it appeared.

One Sepp beyond
As the dark star of FIFA drifts towards the long-awaited and much anticipated implosion under the weight of the greed, graft and stupidity accumulated over the course of its lifetime, United Passions may well become the symbol of its decline, the final straw of hubris that broke the back of the camel that shat the golden eggs for so long. United Passions, of course, is the feature film that tells the story of the world’s most powerful governing body of sport and captures the brilliance of its leading lights, Messrs Havelange and Blatter. This epic of egotism, described rather charitably by some commentators as a hagiography, prompts many questions, not least what on earth Sam Neill and Tim Roth were thinking when they said, “Yeah, go on then, I’ll do it.” However, unusually for FIFA, there are also some answers available. How much did it cost to make? $26.1 million, $22.2 million of which came out of FIFA’s coffers. Where did the money come from? Mostly from the budget for the 2014 World Cup. How much has it made at the box office? In its opening weekend in the US market – generally thought to be essential in the marketing of a film – it apparently took several hundred dollars at the box office. President Blatter, whose announcement of his imminent retirement coincided nicely with the film’s launch, was reported to be very pleased with the project.

Shocked but not shocked enough
Given the mild obsession with professional cycling exhibited by some of our colleagues just down the Leisure Review Towers corridor, La Flamme Rouge has had plenty of time to listen to interminable debates about the ethics of cheating in sport over the years. Thus we are always amused to hear athletes of any persuasion explain how they have been wronged by allegations of doping or other forms of performance-enhancing jiggery and easily explicable pokery. Recently a number of athletes working with Alberto Salazar have had aspersions cast but not, as every media outlet was very quick to point out, the much-loved Mo Farah, whose name could not be printed without the words “no suggestion of wrongdoing” in close attendance. After being surprised to find that his coach tainted by allegations of wrongdoing, Mo rushed back to Oregon to demand answers. He announced himself satisfied by the Alberto’s defence of his position. Perhaps they were able to rely on the character witness statements of some of Alberto’s former friends and associates, such as Mary Decker (tested positive 1996) and a certain a Mr L Armstrong (self-confessedly never knowingly under-doped).

A new perspective for Versailles
Artists, particularly those who enjoy a high profile, are used to having to defend themselves in the face of critical commentary so Anish Kapoor will not have been surprised to find that his latest work, Dirty Corner at the Palace of Versailles, has provoked a little Gallic outrage. To our untutored eye the piece could best be described as a large rusted-steel funnel, something of a Kapoor motif, set amid a generous sprinkling of broken boulders. However, Kapoor’s description of his work as “the vagina of the queen” does make us wonder whether Kapoor’s anatomical expertise is quite on a par with his artistic abilities. He did admit that the work was a “provocation” and many French commentators leapt declare themselves suitably offended, even before it was daubed with graffiti. At Leisure Review Towers we’ve still not come to terms with the thought that the traditional but now rather antiquated bowl-shaped champagne glass was created in homage to Marie Antoinette’s breast so we may have to steer clear of the Parisian suburbs for a while.

Credit – but no cash – where it’s due
Chapeau to the sports minister, Tracy Crouch, for taking a swipe at the Premier League’s distant relationship with grassroots football as one of her first ministerial actions. She declared herself “appalled” by the tiny proportion of the Premier League’s broadcasting income that trickles down the footballing pyramid and how little of it ends up at the literal grassroots of our widely derided stock of footballing facilities. Let’s see how much of this ethical rigour survives the first meeting with the brass hats of the footballing elite and how much support she gets from her line managers, the culture secretary and the prime minister. Our bet is that there won’t be too much radicalism left by Christmas.

Mrs Smith