The enemy of talent hiLiSIOERSON
To be anybody today, it seems, talent is not enough. Sometimes it doesn't have to be apparent at all. Celebrity is the thing, which means wearing the trappings of 'popular culture'. It is a nauseating spectacle for those who value achievement above flim-flammery but that is the way our world is, and it will get a lot worse.
No sooner had England battered South Africa at Lord's last Saturday, and won the triangular one-day tournament that punctuates the summer's Test cricket, than a radio presenter who probably didn't know his Gough from his Flintoff an hour or two earlier was rolling out sentences of deepest purple. 'I want to see these cricketers on the lifestyle pages of newspapers,' he told Tim Lamb, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, as though he held him responsible for their nonappearance.
Consider that outburst. 'I want to see them on the lifestyle pages.' It is not sufficient for them to be good cricketers, who might win a few matches. No, they must be 'personalities'. They have to join a rota of media playthings that includes 'stars' of showbiz, fashion, pop and — God save the mark! — catering. Can anybody tell me who exactly Tara Tomkinson-Pomkinson is? Or what it is precisely that MarieIla Frostrup does? Out in the sticks we're a bit confused about these people but, as they are held up for our approval all the time, they must be jolly important. It would be so nice to know why.
It's to do with 'image', I suppose. It's the reason why Nigel Kennedy, a gifted violinist, feels it necessary to affect a bogus proletarian accent and swear a lot in the name of 'accessibility'. The act is wearing a bit thin now, but there are still a few useful idiots and breathless cub reporters who will defend him. One of them, who managed to be both, a breathless idiot, interviewed him last week and came away praising a 'rebel' who wanted to shock 'a bombastic. stuffy music establishment'. Never mind the fact that Kennedy is a middleclass chameleon who owes everything to that 'establishment'. Just weep at the boy scribe's intellectual poverty-.
Michael Wood, in his otherwise interesting television study of Shakespeare, is also
guilty. It is simply not good enough to call Shakespeare 'streetwise' and Christopher Marlowe 'hip'. Elizabethan England was not 'a police state', and as for the phrase 'the Religious Right.! Come on, Michael, put that waste matter in the bin. Talk sensibly. That's usually good enough.
Image is the reason why a newspaper with such traditional strengths and solid virtues as the Daily Telegraph has employed Irvine Welsh, the scruffy scribbler, as a 'catch-theyoung' columnist. But it is not the constant yapping about drink, drugs, pop, football violence and me-me-me that has offended readers, young and old. It is the sheer amateurishness of his work, The paper has been sold an expensive pup, and everybody knows it. The sooner they dispose of this tiresome little drip and restore the brilliant Robert Harris, the better.
There are no prizes for image on the sports field. It cannot jump or run. It cannot make centuries, take wickets, score tries or kick goals. Accordingly it should have no place in the vocabulary of sport. 'We don't want heroes,' Michael Atherton, the former England captain, once said. 'We want heroic cricketers.' Oh yes, Michael, yes, yes, yes. What a pity that Miss Pomkinson-whatever can't bowl a googly.
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