. SPECTATOR SPORT
Flight from suburbia
Simon Barnes
LAST WEEK Torvill and Dean retired. A nation is in shock. Half of us thought they had retired years ago; the other half thought they would never retire. They com- pleted their latest and last world tour last week, encore-less on a temporary rink in Poole. Yes, an end to all those stimulating debates: is it really sport? Is it really art? And should opponents be allowed to tackle?
One certainty is that the discipline of ice dance is one of the world's strangest vehi- cles for excellence. T and D have spent their lives trying to force vintage cham- pagne into a Tizer bottle.
Ice dancing has its being in the world of irredeemable kitsch: it is Tretchikoff on the rocks. Torvill and Dean sought to transmo- grify this into high art. They were cuckoos in the nest of Nottingham suburbia: driven towards the making of art, but given ice dance as their medium.
Can you make art out of such a thing? Ruskin would say yes — at least, according to M'Turk in that gloriously subversive work, Stalky & Co. As the trio from Study Five considered the hellish success of their home-made idol, Turkey explained: 'Dead easy! If you do anything with your whole heart, Ruskin says, you always pull off something dam' fine.'
T and D to a T. They are the two most ordinary looking people in creation. Christo- pher Papillon of le Figaro went further than that. He wrote of poor Jayne: 'Chubby- cheeked and bloated, wearing far too much make-up and in an ill-fitting costume, she looks like a London housewife attending the wedding of one of her children.'
This was a piece of traditional French lit- eral-mindedness. Because for as long as the music lasted, Torvill was able to make her- self beautiful as a sheer act of will. The two, under the spell of movement, were able to assume an aspect of exoticism. Even in their last, ill-fated and bronze-medal-win- ning Olympics, they gave the most extraor- dinary performance of the Games with their short programme.
This was a rumba. The two of them, no doubt sick of the sight of each other after 20 years of on-ice grappling, arguing and endless seeking perfection, gave us four minutes of demented lust. You ended up amazed that the two costumes, ill-fitting or not, remained in place at the end.
Ballroom dancing is dross, and ballroom dancing on ice is double dross, but Torvill and Dean were alchemists. They turned dross into refined gold. Fred and Ginge had the same knack. Both pairs did so in accordance with Turkey's Law.
The trouble with the sport of ice dancing is that it is an art: the trouble with the art of ice dance is that it is a sport. It cannot but be haunted by what Stalky & Co's most persistent opponent, Mr King, called 'lust for mere marks', also, as Turkey quotes, `crass an' materialised brutality of the mid- dle classes — readin' solely for marks'.
And, in fact, it was lust for mere marks that caught T and D out in the end. In their final Olympic performance of 18 months back, they tried to play the system and please ice dance's college of cardinals. Affronted, the college withheld the white smoke of the perfect six.
But they had their time, T and D, when the competitor and the artist in each of them were in harmony. 'Bolero' and the dance of death in lilac smocks; or better still, the dance when the fair-haired ex-policemen and Hush Puppy man turned himself by an act of will into a strutting matador on skates. Surre- al concept but still more bizarre, he turned his partner into a cape and performed veron- icas with her.
The pair will remain in the memory as archetypes of British life. 'Bolero' was the dance of doomed lovers: in truth the dance represented a doomed flight from suburbia. Was it worth it? ris Stalky himself said: `Heap-plenty-bong-assez.'
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