The Leisure Review: La Flamme Rouge

La Flamme Rouge edition 3; dateline 4 April 2014

Clearing the organ pipes for takeoff
The Royal Festival Hall pipe organ is back in service after a nine-year absence from the performance programme. The 7,866-pipe organ, restored to full working order thanks in no small measure to a £2.3 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, will now offer a testing challenge to even the most respected virtuoso organists. From the perspective of the instrument’s hot seat, the array of key, knobs and pedals is likely to bring to mind an early version of the 747 cockpit, albeit with insufficient space for a co-pilot. A very quick count-up reveals four keyboards, more than two dozen pedals and some 300 individual stops, buttons and switches, all of which have to be negotiated, utilised or ignored in accordance with the musical score propped open above it all. However, given the scale of the investment in the restoration, it is reassuring that pride of place goes to one of the few instructions made available to the organist. To the right of the lowest keyboard is a small sign affixed to the woodwork: “Definitely no smoking at the console”.

A new funding model for culture: obfuscate, stall and cash in
The culture secretary (it’s Maria Miller) may well have stumbled on a financial model to solve many of the funding problems being experience by her department, their partner agencies and local authorities. The parliamentary standards commissioner published a report into allegations that Miller had claimed more than £90,000 over four years for a second home in Wimbledon, in which her parents lived, while designating a home that she rented in Basingstoke as her main residence. The investigation also took in allegations that she had claimed mortgage interest payments as expenses on a mortgage that was much more than was required to purchase her property and that this mortgage had been extended without reference to the parliamentary authorities. The commissioner subsequently recommended that Miller pay back some £44,000 in unwarranted expenses. However, having stalled and frustrated the enquiry for 15 months, Miller found that she was only obliged to pay back £5,800 by her parliamentary peers, who decided not to heed the commissioner’s recommendations but did acknowledge that Miller’s behaviour warranted severe criticism. And of course the property purchased with the mortgage paid for by the ever-generous UK tax-payer has appreciated like the proverbial house on fire thanks to the runaway housing market artificially inflated by the chancellor using public funds; this vastly increased sale value is of course no business of ours and represents the legitimate business of the culture secretary. We look forward to Miller’s next explanation of why local authorities should stop moaning about their funding situation and get on with making the difficult decisions.

Talent, skill, commitment and experience: cheap at the price
Casual anti-immigration racism acquired a fresh, slightly elevated twist along, a splash of educational conservatism and a side order of artistic anti-modernism with a claim by two British film-makers, Hugh Welchman and David Parfitt, that they have been obliged to employ 60 Polish artists as animators on a new Van Gogh-based project. It seems that they could not find British artists with the appropriate figurative skills. Messrs Welchman and Parfitt were lamenting the inability of the products of UK art schools to match their Polish counterparts’ “incredible skills”, something they ascribed to art schools pushing students towards conceptual art. And Parfitt did happen to mention that the Polish artists were also cheaper, which may have swayed the decision.

The huddled masses yearning to be Irish
In common with most quasi-religious, tourism-driven constructs, St Patrick’s Day came and went largely unnoticed at TLR Towers but in the United States of America they take these things rather more seriously, perhaps as an opportunity to remind the rest of the world that the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty is now an excellent demonstration that modern America can do irony. In New York and Boston, cities with lengthy connections to the Irish diaspora, St Patrick’s Day parades are a big deal and big business but organisers of the parades are rather picky when it comes to who is allowed to pretend to be Irish and who isn’t. Definitely off the guest list is anyone or any organisation that chooses to be open about its non-heterosexuality. This stance prompted Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York, and Marty Walsh, mayor of Boston, to remove themselves from the guest lists of their respective cities’ parades to acknowledge the simple wrongness of excluding certain people within the community from commemorating America’s founding traditions of freedom of worship, expression and speech by dressing up as a leprechaun. With less than 24 hours to go before New York’s outpouring of Oirishness, even Guinness’s marketing department got with the equity programme and decided to pull its sponsorship.

On the ball and kicking in the right direction
In the public relations miasma that is professional football, the FA has been winning some plaudits for its adoption of determined positions in support of all that is right and proper. Therefore it is only fair that those who have been critical of football’s national governing body should acknowledge such rectitude. Not only has the FA let it be known that it pushed for harsher punishment following Nicholas Anelka’s display of on-pitch antisemitism but it has also turned down the application by the owners of Hull City to change the club’s name to Hull Tigers. After their recent outpouring of frustration about the state of grassroots game [see the article ‘Will we miss football when it’s gone’ in the March issue of TLR for just one example] our colleagues down the corridor at the Leisure Review are rightly contrite. Their suggestion that “we are also entitled to ask whether the leadership of the national and international game is of sufficiently high quality to guide an enterprise of such commercial heft and such social importance” now seems rather harsh, as does their suggestion that “this leadership has, in terms of vision, integrity and courage, repeatedly been found wanting over the years”. Clearly football has turned the corner and is now heading towards the light. Pipe down fans of Cardiff City, Coventry City and Wimbledon; it’s time to move on.

Parks and enjoyment: down with this sort of thing
Trouble is brewing in the city of Bristol’s celebrated parks. Responding to in excess of 3,000 complaints over two years about anti-social behaviour in parks, Bristol’s parks department is said to be proposing a range of bylaws to make public open spaces enjoyable for everyone. Some of the proposals, such as a ban on archery and javelin-throwing, would seem to make sense to even the most dedicated anarchist but some others, which according to naysayers would ban barbecues, tree-climbing, skateboarding and playing football in an annoying way, might seem a bit harsh. One of the city’s councillors, LibDem Mark Wright, is widely quoted as suggesting that the proposals represent an “illiberal assault on civil liberty”, so they would at least seem to fit his party’s national instinct to collaborate with a government committed to clampdowns, draconianism and surveillance wherever they may be inserted. Bristol’s mayor, George Ferguson, has asked for a further briefing on what is to be done about people enjoying themselves in parks.

Medal hopes washed away
It had to happen, of course. Having got the nation used to sporting success in so many unlikely places, UK Sport has had to cut its cloth according to its width and a number of sports [see the news page in this issue of TLR] have seen their funding fall off the table. David Sparkes, surely now British sport’s longest-serving chief executive by a clear length, was predictably bellicose, explaining, as far as we can gather, that we were nailed on for a medal in the synchronised swimming duet in Tokyo in 2020 and suggesting, in what can only be interpreted as a threatening turn of phrase, that “I’d be amazed if we didn’t take this further”. Given that UK Sport’s decision was a rejection of an appeal against their original decision, we are not quite sure where “further” might be but from our perch a safe distance from the fray we are pretty sure that Liz Nicholl does not look like a woman who scares easily. It could be a match worth watching.

A memorable swish for Amaechi
Meanwhile, still on the funding trail, basketball’s officials attempted to match swimming’s incredulity at UK Sport’s decision, claiming for basketball a “grassroots base bigger than any other British Olympic team sport”. One presumes that this field of comparative competition does not include football, an Olympic sport admittedly but not one in which Great Britain had deigned to take part until London 2012 forced our sporting hand, but the careful terminology does hint that a little sophistry is being utilised to support basketball’s claims. We were immediately reminded of John Amaechi’s presentation to the annual gathering of the Sport and Recreation Association (as they then weren’t) a few years ago. The Leisure Review covered the event [see The CCPR Conference: Fact and Fantasy article via back issues] and noted that Amaechi lambasted the basketball governing bodies for creating a situation in which the UK was the only nation in which basketball was a middle-class sport. “Those involved in sport must find a way to challenge the idea that just by doing sport you’re a doing a good thing,” he said. “In the UK well meaning is often good enough. But it’s not. Great sport is what we need but we have to realise that sometimes sport is just putting a ball in a hole. We have to realise that it is more difficult to bring about the change we want to bring about.” At the time we were reminded that the basketball hoops in the parks local to TLR Towers were set at the edge of small squares of unevenly laid paving slabs and were consequently little-used as breeding grounds for the next wave of basketball players. A few years on from Mr Amaechi’s excoriation of what he termed “the blazerati” that dominates British sport, the slabs are still uneven and the kids are still noticeable by their absence.

Shapps does bingo
The Conservative party’s post-budget beer and bingo poster, assumed by many to be a particularly malicious satire of the chancellor’s speech, was revealed to have originated from that source of sanctity and intelligence, party chairman Grant Shapps. Mystified by the accusations of condescension and simple stupidity, Shapps remained unabashed, explaining, “Personally, I drink beer and I love a game of bingo”. With the burner under the 2015 election now lit, we look forward to Shapps being photographed with a very fat marker pen in his hand and a raft of bingo cards on the table. No doubt George Osborne will be sat next to him, sporting the traditional uniform working-class people and chancellors on a photo op, the hard hat and hi-vis jacket.

Fifa adds couture to its sphere of influence
So fascinated are we with Wayne Rooney’s haircut that the news that Fifa has now extended its powers to include the design of the kits that national teams wear during the World Cup almost passed us by. While we gazed intently at the can’t-see-the-join image of England’s international goal machine, the caption below the photo informed us that Fifa has instructed all nations to wear a single-colour strip “to help referees”. This means that Brazil will be playing in a World Cup on home territory in a strip other than the gold and blue that has become synonymous with the samba rhythms of Pelé and Rivelino. Nor will Italy be sporting the classic blue and white strip in which they have lifted so many trophies. And the Netherlands will have to kick lumps out of opponents, and in all likelihood each other, in something other than their trademark orange and white. Quite how this is going to help the referees we have no idea but we are confident that Fifa will have already have made some money out of it some how.

Mrs Smith