Just a bit of fun… as Conservative MP for South West Surrey and Secretary of State, Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport and friend of the Murdoch’s Jeremy Hunt unleashes Olympic terror with a bell end.
Let’s see what else Jezza can do…
Big Ben is probably still ringing in London to herald the start of the XXX Olympiad. The bell began to toll at 08:12. Radio 4 played it, but there was another sound played too. A terrible, horrible sound. A sound like hyenas discovering, finally, a leader and worshipping it… Whooping.
One of the things I’ve liked about the British – the English, Welsh and Scottish at least – over the years is that they do not ‘Whoop’ or ‘Holla’. I suppose that, given I was born in England, that should be “We don’t Whoop”. I’ll be plain, since returning to the island after many years away, I feel unconnected from ‘Britishness’ or ‘Englishness’. The world is just more interesting than that.
What happened when Big Ben began what I’m sure will soon be called “Belling”, is much, much less interesting in every way.
It happened, however, in London this morning. The mighty, historic, stoic, strong and occasionally comforting sound of Big Ben was washed into the air by the sound of “Whoop!”
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In the lead up to the London 2012 Olympics, a judge had banned the BBC from broadcasting a program that featured interviews with people who rioted in the UK’s capital in August 2011.
The BBC has offered a brief statement:
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I lived in Sydney during the 2000 games and I don’t recall the level of extreme cock-up + nastiness (well, if you exclude Kevan Gosper’s daughter) in the lead up than is occurring at the moment with the London Games.
This maybe whimsy on my part, my memories of living in Sydney are almost all positive. It maybe that SOCOG had the same entrenched, mean-spirited, profit-centred (not driven), secretive agenda as LOCOG.
BoingBoing has pointed out that London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) committee, “says you’re only allowed to link to their site if you have nice things to say” and that calls for some investigation.
(Please assume some ‘Detectivey’ music to suit the sort of sleuthing that appeals to you – I am playing the music from the scene from All the President’s Men where Woodward and Bernstein are sitting in the Library of Congress and the camera pans up and away from them.)
Oh, here we go, from LOCOG itself:
“a. Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner.”
(My emphasis) That excerpt comes via the excellent Index on Censorship and its prime mover Padraig Reidy. IoC, that’s Index on Censosrhip not the nastily unpleasant International Olympic Committee, is a must-read. As a declaration of self-interest, I wrote one single piece for it few years ago, but no one else is going to blow my trumpet about that.
This suggests that, I can’t link in a fair-comment, critical manner that is also derogatory to a website of a commercial interest – and remember that LOCOG is a private and commercial organisation.