The Leisure Review: Row Z

Row Z edition 71; dateline 10 December 2012

“Failing to plan is planning to fail” – J. Price
Sideliner was as pleased as almost anyone to note the results from the recent Active People survey which shows a marked increase in sports participation by adults since the Stretford Sports Day. Naturally the good people at Sport England were far more pleased than anyone at Row Z as it means they have dodged the bullet of a merger with UK Sport and can carry on drawing their salaries and occupying one or more of the many empty chairs around the set of London offices they contracted for before our national sports development agency caught the eye of various governments’ quango-busters. Sidey was particularly pleased to read that cycling and sailing had seen major boosts in their figures as what this country really needs is more of its middle managers spending more of their sales bonuses on expensive bikes and boats. One paper (it was the Guardian) put these sports’ success in the post-Games rush for numbers to winning lots of medals but Jennie Price was reported (by the same organ) to have said that “the sports that had done best were those that had planned to capitalise on the Games”. We worry that Mrs Teasdale (that’s our pet name for the Jenster) has rather shot herself in the foot, if indeed she really did say that, as, with her being chief executive of the soi-disant grassroots funding body, one might have hoped that maybe a couple of years ago she would have made damn sure everyone had a coherent and deliverable 2012 legacy plan. But she didn’t.

Another one flies the nest
A popular diary column in a leading leisure magazine is not the place for gratuitous praise for commercial companies quite capable of paying for their own advertising so its probably OK for Row Z to bring to your attention the work of Brick Lane-based branding, design and content specialists, Speak Media, whose work with Berghaus, Kickers and T in the Park many readers will, subliminally, already have been influenced by. Of lower profile is their work on behalf of the European Parkinson Disease Association which is of particular interest as this portfolio is currently being carried about in a modish manner by former TLR intern, Tom Owen. We wish the Floppy-Haired Intern, as he was styled by the Editor in his time with us, all the very best in his new berth and would urge both of our regular readers to Google Speak Media and forward the link www.speakmedia.co.uk to their marketing department. The bad ones will be put in a funk thinking you are going to outsource the work to someone who knows what they are doing; the good ones might recognise real talent and buy themselves – and your organisation – some creative excellence.

Do you know who I am, my little swamp duck?
The recent passing of Bill Tarmey caused many who love Coronation Street (the soap opera not the Cambridge thoroughfare) to shed a silent tear. For many years Tarmey inhabited the character of Jack Duckworth, an increasingly gruff northern ne’er-do-well whose utterances were often less than 100% intelligible. The guttural chunterings, it seems, were as much Tarmey as Duckworth, a fact born out by members of a Greater Manchester hospital’s speech therapy department, possibly apocryphally. It seems the actor fetched up at the department’s reception desk one day and was as bemused as the woman behind the counter as to why. He explained that when he had asked the whereabouts of the children’s ward, which he had come to open, the main hospital receptionist had given him precise directions which he had followed scrupulously only to arrive where he now stood. His interlocutor made enquiries and was told that when the old chap in the flat cap had made his enquiry nobody could understand a word and had assumed he had arrived for a regular speech therapy appointment.

Haka-ing off the All Brands
While none of the members of the Row Z massif are dyed-in-the-wool rugger buggers (wrong schools, wrong accents, wrong racial heritage), we do all share a predilection for watching some or all of the BBC’s coverage of the Six Nations and for dipping into, but mostly out of, the games organised to milk the cash cow that is international rugby in the autumn. Naturally we sat up and took notice on hearing that England’s young Turks had trounced the apparently unbeatable New Zealand XV over on Rupert Murdoch’s satellite channel and most of us subsequently found a Sunday lunchtime sofa to catch up with the BBC’s highlights programme. Sidey was particularly buoyant, having watched only two minutes of the Wales game against Australia, the two it took for the Wallabies to scoot down the left wing and pop the ball down behind the line to inflict the principality’s fourth loss of a four-game series. Pausing only to snort “Best team in Europe, my eye”, our leader expected to spend 30 more minutes smiling broadly but was surprised to laugh outright before the game even began. Swing Low, whatever your views on its appropriateness, tunefulness or actions, is inextricably linked to the England Men’s 1st XV and in Jonno’s playing days it was heard so often as to become almost tawdry. These days, given that nearly everyone in the stadium has to be giving it voice for it to work (not for us the Millennium Stadium’s hi-fi dialled up to 12) you don’t hear it so much and hardly ever before a ball has been kicked. On the day in question it was heard again, and while the All Blacks, as they are now indelibly branded, were performing their haka. As Sidey’s chortling rose in a crescendo to match the singing, a colleague was heard to complain about “disrespecting a fine tradition”. No, my friend, there’s no tradition here. The haka, as performed by Colin Meads, Ian Kirkpatrick and all those other legends of rugby, was a Maori war dance, misappropriated by white settlers admittedly, but handed down over the years and properly respected for where it originated. Recently, however, a new dance has been devised (possibly by the Arlene Phillips of hakas) and copyrighted to the All Blacks. Well, we play New Zealand, not the All Blacks, and are as likely to revere the three Adidas stripes on the shoulders of their warm-up coats as we are any other part of their branding. Come on you, Lilywhites. Etc.

Tin hats, everybody. Incoming!
Thanks to the eclectic nature of our network – with everyone from a picture-painting glorified water bailiff to a superannuated Cornish sports development officer on our roster of gossip-mongering coffee sharers – we get to hear about all manner of foible, fancy and foolishness. From one of our many coaching colleagues who is too afraid for her job to be identified comes this sentence from a recent Sports Coach UK missive. We quote: "The questions at the forefront of many people's minds this month are: How can we successfully implement the legacy of The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games?" and then there was another one. Ignoring the capitalisation of that ‘the’ for no good reason except to satisfy the arrogant and fanciful brand guidelines of an event now passed, we find ourselves incredulous that anyone is still blithely punting the idea that the Games' legacy can somehow be salvaged and the implication that all along we intended to leave it until the December after the September in which the medals were won before even starting to talk about how we were going to make the most of them. Anyone would think this SCUK lot were part of a self-sustaining cabal propping up a corrupt (as in rank, as in rotten) structure which exists to serve its "system-makers" and not the poor, bloody infantry actually in the trenches trying to get people active. Oh. They are? Right.

As Morse once said…
And finally. Before it finishes, can we just repeat the Strictly predictions made by the man who does the Row Z garden (on sunny days)? Lewis Smith will win it. And Denise Van Outen will be ousted the first chance the public get. No, really, that’s what he said. NB: his views on Pop Factor were unprintable, consisting mainly of swear words, the word ‘plastic’ and the as yet unproved claims that the British public really aren’t that stupid, Simon Cowell.

Sideliner