Ten years ago, London 2012 began. It was the culmination of a dream, and now a dream is all that it has become. Enraptured from an early age by the idea of the Olympic Games, of its people, its contests and its principles, I had so wanted to see one of the Games. Then, whenRead More
The Game are ending. A strange summer Olympic Games, which many in Japan and elsewhere thought ought not to have taken place, given how Covid-19 is afflicting the people. Yet it did, and the moment it did so everything else disappeared, and all there was were people in contests against one another, participating in somethingRead More
In a world of websites, databases, digital archives offering every kind of information, and every manner of finding such information, why do I cherish some printed reference works? In part it is familiarity – there are works that have sat on my shelves for many years, old friends, reassuring to see, pleasing to handle. InRead More
The other day it was the sixth anniversary of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games. I’d forgotten the date but spotted a reminder the day after, and decided once again to look at the video of the ceremony. I’ve seen it many times now – the original broadcast, the repeat broadcasts, theRead More
I’ve been producing a series of posts on my personal cultural highlights from 2017. They have covered things online, music, books and artworks. Last in the series is a list of highlights. These are some of the one-off events or publications that particularly stood out for me in 2017, and against which 2018 will haveRead More
Next up in these reviews of 2016 is television. Television as receivable in the UK is going through a purple patch, thanks largely to the box set phenomenon. There is as much trite tosh on conventional TV as ever there was, and I despair of supposedly informative history programmes which are little more than aRead More
In the Rio 2016 gold medal bout of the 80kg taekwondo between Lutalo Muhammad of Great Britain and Cheick Sallah Cisse of Ivory Coast, Muhammad was ahead on points with one second to go. In one second he would win the gold. The clock had been stopped while the athletes got once more into position.Read More
Following on from that post about the value of sport and live television for helping to define what television is, I saw something else to note about the BBC’s coverage of the Rio Olympic Games. The BBC used three terrestrial channels to broadcast Olympic video, plus its website and app – BBC One and BBCRead More
There was an interesting moment in the heat of the Olympic Games coverage on the BBC when the presenter Clare Balding told us to look to at some sport in progress – I think it was the golf – saying “let’s see what he does next”, or words to that effect, as some crucial puttRead More
The Olympic Games will be upon us soon, and I don’t know how I feel about them. It’s not the stories of political corruption, or of state-sponsored drug-taking, or even the mounting absurdities of the Games themselves, but simply that I haven’t got over the last Olympic Games as yet. London 2012 was perfect. WhatRead More