Sharply written and directed by John Morton and starring Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, the first series won Best Sitcom at the British Comedy Awards. It captures beautifully the nonsense surrounding the modern obsession with ‘diversity’ and ‘sustainability’. Meetings are a barrage of meaningless buzzwords and management bull.
The organising committee spends its life either cravenly appeasing or unintentionally offending special interest groups. The problem with satire, of course, is staying ahead of the game. Writers can construct the most absurd scenarios only to discover that life has already beaten them to it.
For instance, Twenty Twelve would be hard-pressed to come up with an episode in which Olympic volunteers were issued with official advice about what to do if a man in a dress approaches them asking the way to the toilets. But that’s precisely what has happened. ‘Do not make an assumption about their gender unless directed by their name. If you are asked, provide instructions to the male/female and accessible toilets.’ Staff have also been told that they must avoid ‘patronising words’ such as ‘young man’ and ‘dear’. They shouldn’t use ‘able-bodied’, either. The approved term is ‘non-disabled person’.
When that advice was published, I wondered how long it would be before the organisers decided that instead of actually running races, medals should be allocated by quota, based on ethnicity, gender and sexual proclivity.
There’s still time. If you pay attention to some of the pronouncements coming out of the mouths of certain members of the real-life London 2012 Organising Committee (LOCOG) you may well draw the conclusion that swimming, running, jumping and throwing things is of secondary importance.
It would appear the real purpose of the Games is job creation and ‘celebrating diversity’.
Stephen Frost, the committee’s Head of Diversity and Inclusion — a title which could have been plucked from Twenty Twelve — told a Canadian newspaper:
‘The London vision will definitely empower change, enhancing the hiring of disabled people, including gays and lesbians and dealing with homophobia in sport, bringing cultural communities together.’
Mr Frost was recruited by the Olympics organisers on the basis of his extensive experience as a member of the gay rights pressure group Stonewall. He also admitted that LOCOG has paid well over the odds for building and services contracts to meet self-imposed diversity commitments which were ‘drawn up on the back of an envelope’.
Work was awarded to firms which agreed to employ disabled or ethnic minority staff, not to those which submitted the most competitive tenders. ‘We’re not going to solve the world’s problems, but we are going to use the power of the Games for change,’ Mr Frost boasted.
Incidentally, the cost of the Games now stands at £9.3 billion and is projected to rise still further. The original bid set the total budget at £2.37 billion.
For the record, the £6 billion overspend is equivalent to the entire ‘savage’ cuts in public spending allegedly being imposed by the wicked Tory-led Coalition, but there hasn’t been a peep from the BBC or any of the usual suspects. Still, it’s only money. What’s six billion quid when measured against the universal benefits of ‘celebrating diversity’?
Mind you, not all countries are quite so keen on celebrating diversity as we are in Britain. Saudi Arabia originally planned to send an all-male team and only relented when the organisers agreed to allow Muslim women to wear specially designed outfits to protect their modesty. But I wouldn’t put money on the Saudi women’s beach volleyball team winning gold. Bouncing about in a burka isn’t ideal when you’re up against a bunch of fit Aussie birds in bikinis.
Just as well they’re not holding the beach volleyball in Bradford. The bikini babes would be lucky to get out without being stoned to death.
Then there’s the very real prospect of athletes from some of the world’s more oppressive countries absconding and applying for asylum. The Home Office is trying to head this off at the pass by issuing visas which prevent competitors and spectators from outside the EU getting married or forming civil partnerships to allow them to stay in Britain.
Fat lot of good that will do. The yuman rites lawyers are already circling. Don’t be surprised to see the Syrian 4 x 400 relay team running straight across the finish line and heading directly to the immigration centre at Croydon.
When the Commonwealth Games was held in Manchester, the entire Sierra Leone squad disappeared and hasn’t been seen since. As for the ‘legacy’ of 2012, once the Games are over we’ll need the Olympic Village to house all the foreign athletes and officials fighting deportation.
And I don’t want to depress you, but the World Health Organisation is warning that Britain faces a full-scale flu pandemic this summer, spread by tourists arriving in London for the Olympics.
Apparently, the huge crowds will create the perfect conditions for the transmission of bird flu and swine flu. Let’s hope all those vaccines ordered by Labour during the last scare aren’t past their sell-by date.
For the moment, the authorities seem to be more concerned about sexually transmitted diseases. Over the past year, more than 80 brothels near the Olympic site in East London have been closed down and prostitutes are complaining they are being driven from the streets. Some have been given Asbos and curfews to stop them touting for business. Sounds to me like another losing battle. A major international sporting festival without hookers is as unimaginable as Cheltenham races without Guinness.
Even if the police succeed in preventing prostitutes picking up punters on street corners, it won’t stop all those VIP members of the ‘Olympic family’ ordering up escorts on room service in their swanky West End hotel suites, all expenses paid courtesy of the British taxpayer.
Anyway, prostitution has a proud traditional link with the Olympics. At the early Olympiads, which began in 776 BC, winners were invited to take their pick of prostitutes from the Temple of Aphrodite. Perhaps the 2012 organisers would like to truly celebrate diversity by bringing back chariot races and human sacrifices. That would attract a lot more viewers than the dressage.
It seems the only people who have really captured the spirit of the original Games are the builders working on the stadium. They have been staging their own cut-price Olympics — hurling mallets in a mock hammer-throwing contest, using half a breeze block as a shot putt and charging round the track in their wellies and hi-viz jackets.
And don’t get me started on the fatuous ‘Cultural Olympiad’ costing the thick end of £100 million, just so the ‘arts community’ don’t feel left out.
This involves, among other things, creating a ‘corkscrew of mist’ on Merseyside; building a 10 metre-high puppet of Lady Godiva in Coventry, which will ride to London on a white horse powered by 100 push-bikes; and staging a West African arts festival in Manchester, inspired by a speech by Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah, in which he said: ‘We face neither East nor West, we face forward.’
Beat that, Twenty Twelve.
