the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Today is the start of another instalment of The Great Diversionary Spectacular, better known to all as the European football something. Anyway, England, much to everyones delight, are competing and nowhere will this delight be more keenly welcomed than in 10 Downing Street. 

For the longer that the English team remain in the competition, the happier the incumbent of that house will be, because football – more than any other sport – fulfils many functions in a society, but the primary one is one of distraction.

Because from now until England get kicked out – traditionally after just managing to escape elimination from the Group stage – this will be the main issue pre-occupying peoples minds. If your ears should be bedevilled by a sports phone-in between now and then, you’ll hear a bewildering array of opinions on what the teams tactics should be, what the manager is doing right or wrong and how these might affect the teams success or lack thereof. 

The media will only be too happy to do perform their usual cheerleading role, to either dress it up as some non-jingoistic and non racist patriotism or to trumpet it as a superb celebration of a diverse, vibrant and modern multi-cultural society. To show not just the matches, but also the pre-match build ups, the post match analyses. News items about the matches, the players, their wives and girlfriends, the fans – be they harmonious and in good spirits or drunken hooligans on a violent rampage, will be reported on, and those reports will be reported on.

This also has the added benefit of eating up time that could be put to much better use discussing actual news and to act rather like a shiny object might distract a small child. Because if one can understand football enough to have an opinion about it, one can understand politics 

Quite why there persists in people’s minds the idea that politics is complicated baffles me, as politics isn’t complicated at all. One is meant to think that it is, and that suits the main political parties just fine and dandy. Political parties claim to want voter engagement but actually they fear an informed electorate. Largely because, just as Dorothy discovers in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, the electorate will realize when they pull back the curtain that the wizard is not a wizard at all, but in fact an ordinary man, and they will react with anger that for so long the truth has been hidden from them.

And anything that is so complicated that at its most basic level it cannot be explained to anyone with an I.Q. larger than the radius of their kneecap, suggests that the fault lies with the person attempting to simplify the complicated thing, not the people hoping to have it simplified for them. This isn’t, I believe, accidental, because in the same way one teaches a toddler to walk, once the basics are mastered, progress is rapid.

The more that the media use jargon, quote endless statistics, baffle us with with talk about GDP, the RPI and the OBR. The more that they fixate upon the narcissism of small differences, – the lack of any real ideological gulf between any of the main political parties, – the more they distract, confuse and ultimately alienate the electorate.

And sport because costs less to cover, the more sporting organisations will charge for the broadcast rights to these events because they know that the cost will be cheaper per minute for a broadcaster than the cost of say a drama.

Consider the amount of airtime both the BBC and ITV will devote to this nonsense, how it will lauded over and fetishised out of all proportion relative to its actual importance. Football – or indeed any sport – provides a welcome distraction, and why politicians love it so. From the Romans, with their colosseums and gladiators, to Hitler and the Berlin Olympics, sport has always served the same function. It won’t improve in any way the life chances of those watching it, won’t make their life any the easier and it won’t change the priorities of the society that they exist in, but it does have understandable rules, a known duration and at the end of it all, a winner.

Actually, if TV executives did have the balls to update the Roman concept of a gladiatorial combat thing, I’d watch it and so would you, in addition to millions of others. A live and uninterrupted, as long as it takes, last one standing amidst the dead bodies of their former rivals, fight to the death. No weapons, no time limit, no adverts, no time-outs and of course, no rules. Taking place in ring the size of a five-a-side football pitch, a ring that was fenced in and with crowd baying for blood. Talk about fighting for every vote! There’d only need be one of these and it’d certainly far more entertaining than last nights shout and lie fest.

Julie Etchingham was so far out of her depth that I thought she might drown.