The Leisure Review: La Flamme Rouge

La Flamme Rouge edition 9; dateline 12 February 2015

From 4-4-2 to phone numbers
Amid all the discussion surrounding the £5.1-billion, three-year deal to broadcast Premier League football matches, the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Scudamore, took time to reiterate a statement of fact about the competitive pinnacle of what some still fondly refer to as the national game: “We're not set up for charitable purposes,” he said, prompting, we presume, a nation to utter the obvious response as one voice: “No shit, Sherlock.” Other figures relevant to the debate include: £12 million – the amount the Premier League puts into the Foootball Foundation (£20m in 2000); 5% – the percentage of broadcasting deals agreed in 1999 that should be passed to the grassroots (estimates range from 1 to 3% passed on from the current deal); £100 million –value of that 5% if the agreement had been honoured.

George under the microscope
Recently the chancellor took his chair in front of the Treasury select committee and announced with that special brand of confidence that only really comes with an expensive education and inherited wealth that by the end of the next parliament the public purse will be showing a surplus of £23 billion. News of polls suggesting that the public do not share the chancellor’s zeal for cuts and want to maintain the public services that they see as an essential part of a civilised society did little to remove his trademarked expression of contempt, which has been calculated by experts in superciliousness to be three parts smile four parts sneer. The key question for the electorate is, of course, to what end? What will Little Georgie do with the national wealth so fiercely gouged from the poor and the public sector? Perhaps the political debate of the last five years can be summarised as: what is the point of George Osborne?

Culture: bigger than politics unless it suits
Anyone who follows the culture secretary on Twitter (some 13,700 people at the last count) could be forgiven for being surprised by Mr Javid’s recent pronouncements on the value of culture. Speaking recently at an event hosted by the Union of Jewish Students [see ‘Culture is bigger than politics, says Javid’ on the TLR news page] our beloved culture supremo explained, in the context of shipping works of art of disputed ownership to a nation against which the UK is currently applying economic sanctions, that “culture is bigger than politics”. These seems at odds with the Javid Twitter feed which frequently drops party-political bons mots among the pictures of the culture secretary glad-handing those blessed by his presence. Retweets of blather from Conservative Central Office and the Tory-fawning output from the Telegraph suggest that culture is quite able to get down and dirty in the political mire when it suits.

Social media: get it right
And while we’re on the subject of social media and secretaries of state, the younger members of the LFR team are getting increasingly irritated by Javid’s abuse of selfie protocol. The far-from-shy culture secretary is prone to peppering his followers’ timelines with images of himself at hard at work on our behalf. However, unless the culture secretary has 40-foot-long arms, it is increasingly obvious that the Javid selfies are taken by staffers poised with a PR-focused camera. This means that they are not really selfies at all, more an obvious attempt to big yourself up with the aid of a team of flunkies and a Twitter account. This wouldn’t be too heinous a social media offence were Javid not so keen to bang on about party politics as though he was actually getting busy with the keyboard himself.

Defending the honour of hockey
Lest we forget, Twitter is a medium for sniping, moaning and messing about. That anyone takes it seriously is a bit of shame, not least because its status as a publishing medium means that it can get you locked up. Never the less, we still we gambol among the 140-character epigrams in the hope of entertainment rather than enlightenment. We found much of the former and a little of the latter in a brief conversational flirtation on the timelines between official friend of the Leisure Review Duncan Wood-Allum and Sharron Davies MBE, semi-official face of swimming and the personification of personal grooming. Duncan expressed disappointment that Sharron had implied in an interview that hockey was something of an old-school pursuit. Sharron immediately went on the attack, dismissing his comment was an example of “ignorant rude tweets”. DWA politely rebutted the suggestion and the micro-conversation continued until Sharron felt obliged to concede that she is a “hockey netball running fan”, which DWA is now promoting as a new version of triathlon for people who cannot swim. He has also quietly let it be known that he will settle for nothing less than an OBE.

Libraries and literary aspirations
Much to our surprise at La Flamme Rouge, two of the most inconsequential and unimportant aspects of modern culture, Twitter and the Leisure Review, combined to create something of mild interest recently when the Leisure Review timeline inadvertently hosted an interesting debate on the future of libraries. Instead of the usual Twitter debate, which is swiftly reduced to name-calling and comments about parentage, this discourse included considered comments on capacity-building, leadership, the roles of volunteers and funding. The teenager who looks after the TLR Twitter feed was clearly bemused by what they were witnessing and quickly promised to make sure that it would not happen again.

Sheffield’s finest
At La Flamme Rouge we’ve always had a soft spot for Lord Coe. We still like to remember him as the fleet-footed Sebastian who nipped round the streets of Sheffield on his way to world glory and still had time to take late-night undergraduate bar-room competitions very seriously [see Row Z passim]. We should say that we only refer to him as the Little Baron from a position of deep affection, albeit with a significant marbling of scepticism and sarcasm as befalls anyone prepared to serve time as a Tory minister, speak supportively of the leadership abilities of William Hague and continue to claim that London 2012 left a legacy beyond the Olympic Park. For all his achievements, he may find that the promise of tackling doping within international athletics may yet prove to be his biggest challenge. Just as the Little Baron was launching his bid for the post of president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) German television was showing a documentary in which a former Russian international athlete was alleging that the Russian athletic federation ran an organised doping system that resulted in almost all the Russian Olympic team being on the gear. People who know about these things suggested that the documentary seemed to be offering very persuasive details of how the doping programme was pursued and, as surely as night follows day, denials followed. The gentle thonk we heard could well have been the sound of a large ball of ordure landing on Lord Coe’s side of the net. The loud thwack thatfollowed almost immediately was probably the sound of Lord Coe’s hand making sharp contact with Lord Coe’s face.

Factory life as interpreted by a Tory
Among the details of the chancellor’s autumn statement and talk of creating a “northern powerhouse” via investment in the cities of Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool came mention of a £78 million grant to Manchester city council to create a new arts facility on the site of the former Granada television studios. The venue is to be called the Factory in recognition of the cultural impact of the club and record label of the same name that was launched nearby in the 1980s and transformed the music and dance culture of Manchester and the north-west of England, perhaps even the world. Little Georgie is probably too young to remember and too rich to care that Factory rose and thrived in response to the another recession created, exacerbated and exploited by a Tory government. They didn’t cover that sort of thing when he read history at Oxford and it would have been terribly bad form to mention it during a Magdalen tutorial.

High tide and high time
It’s no doubt high time we drew a line under the activities of the football family but just before we avert our eyes forever we should at least recognise the ability of the Football League to accept that a convicted fraudster was in fact guilty of an offence that could, were one to take a long look at it, be viewed as dishonest. Thus was the ownership of Leeds United by Massimo Cellino apparently brought to an end, the Football League deciding that he was not quite the right sort to be an owner or director of a football club. We hope that the English branch of this particularly dysfunctional family will be enjoying this moment of apparent moral fortitude while it lasts. At LFR we are fairly sure he’ll be back before long.

Dull, Dulwich, duller
Dulwich Picture Gallery is hanging of a reproduction of a masterpiece among the many genuine works on its celebrated wall. While it is an interesting experiment, there is a suspicion that this is merely a continuation of a current joke that has been running for some time. The gallery has commissioned a painting from one of the numerous workshops in China that will get their accomplished artists to knock out a close approximation of the real thing. Some unkind observers have suggested that the Conservative party is playing a similar joke with the prime minister.

Mrs Smith