ARTS
A winning line-up
Sensing my discomfort as we waited for the VVIPs to emerge from the Old Beijing Tea House, a student assured me that in her home town of Wuhan the climate in July was hotter and even more humid. Apparently her mother used to say, 'So hot, even the furniture is sweating.'
We were gathered at the Sun Dong An shopping mall for the fifth leg of what the Times recently described as a 'startling' attempt by the British Council to flaunt around the world images of Britain's 'gnat- brained thugs and pot-bellied yobs'. No, this was not Britart on tour again, but an exhibition called Football Nation that dares to celebrate our contribution to the world's favourite sport. 'All subsidised by the tax- payer' too, thundered the newspaper's arts correspondent.
His sister paper, the Sunday Times, later added its own barbed coda, labelling Foot- ball Nation — which was launched by Prince Andrew in Qatar last November, and is currently on a three-city tour of China — a flop, because it failed to win any votes for England's 2006 World Cup bid (that unseemly scramble in Zurich last month which, you may recall, wrought global infamy upon the frail shoulders of a blazered old New Zealander). But how else could it have been, sniffed the ST, when the exhibition's organiser, working in the British Council's London HQ, turns out to be of German parentage?
Had the reporter dug only a little deeper he would have found that this German had appointed as his curator a Jew, and worse — I confess it freely — an avid fan of Aston Villa FC. And that the exhibition's designers, Graven Images from Glasgow, all support Scotland. (I believe the exhibi- tion manager also has Norwegian blood.) So when it raised £300,000 to launch Foot- ball Nation — almost enough to buy an arm if not a leg of the Dome's Body Zone — what on earth was the British Council thinking of? Inadvertently, a Widmerpool- like chap from our Beijing Embassy provid- ed the answer when he informed me that the vast majority of Chinese people only know three people from Britain (in ascend- ing order of fame): Mr Blair, Mr Bean and Mr Beckham. Manchester United, it is said, now boasts considerably more sup- porters in Shanghai than in the whole of Manchester, and possibly, may I add, Sur- rey too.
Certainly the whoops of delight herald- ing the arrival into the shopping mall of a fourth British B, as in Sir Bobby, as in the famously balding, former Manchester Unit- ed and England inside-forward Robert Charlton, suggested that the Embassy man was spot on. Introduced by Beijing TV's equivalent of Gary Lineker, Song Jian Sheng, and accompanied by the vice-presi- dent of the Chinese Football Association, Britain's ambassador Sir Anthony Galswor- thy, and three Chinese VVIPs called respectively Wang, Yang and Zhang, Sir Bobby (best not to call him plain 'Bobby', I was advised) palpably radiated superstar status as he stepped forward officially to open Football Nation. Cameras flashed. Newsmen pressed. Eager faces looked down on us from balconies ringing the mall's atrium, while young policemen stood around seemingly bemused. Three weeks before, Football Nation had been visited by 82,000 people in Shanghai — in seven days that is — to add to the estimated 40,000 who had seen it earlier in Bangkok, Riyadh and Qatar.
Serving in the vanguard of Britain's gnat- brained yob culture, my task was to guide the VVIPS around the exhibition. Its theme is this: that the British not only invented the game of football as we know it today, we also effectively 'designed' it. More important, we Brits continue to come up with some wizard ideas for its future through a number of what the DTI likes to call SMEs, small- to medium-sized enter- prises. Shamelessly flying the same flag that only last month had yet again been sullied by our boys in Charleroi, I showed our guests examples of pitch protection systems from Derby, turf technology from Mans- field, goalposts from Lowestoft, photogra- phers' work from Liverpool and Cumbria, and stadium architecture from Bolton, London and Manchester. I led them on a virtual reality tour of a new stadium for Leicester City, before exchanging the head- set for headphones so that they might enjoy a 1932 recording of Gracie Fields singing 'Pass, Shoot, Goal'. The Chinese much enjoyed a display of shirts bearing the wis- dom of great thinkers, as supplied by a company called Philosophy Football. (They were particularly interested to learn that Albert Camus used to play in goal.) Simon Topman, whose Birmingham company has been making referees' whis- tles since the 1870s, then presented silver Acme Thunderers to Sir Bobby and friends, while a stadium architect com- plained to me that whenever he met senior Chinese officials to discuss business all they wanted to talk about was English football. Like it or lump it, was the inference, when it comes to selling Britain the likes of Sir Richard Rogers and Hugh Grant don't even merit a place on the substitutes' bench. The key aim, someone added, must be to win the affections of those 100 mil- lion or so Chinese (out of a total popula- tion of 1.26 billion) who have a few spare yuan to splash out on non-essential items. Dunhill, apparently, has just opened its 13th shop in China, whereas it is rumoured that Marks & Spencer is pulling out from Shanghai. The Chinese, you see, are rather good themselves at turning out popular, affordable goods. It's the luxury items they can't manage. This even pertains to the ubiquitous red Manchester United shirt. On the streets of Beijing, where such shirts are more numerous than branches of McDonald's, labels of authenticity are, lit- erally, worn on sleeves to distinguish them from counterfeits.
The day after the opening I chaired a British Council seminar on stadiums of the future. Two architects showed some stun- ning new designs. Dr Rogan Taylor from Liverpool University, a controversial candi- date for the government's new Indepen- dent Football Commission (to be headed by Jack Cunningham), spoke of how British football depends on its loyal supporters far more than it does on corporate sponsors, and a marketing man called Alec King showed footage of Geordie schoolkids learning on computers provided and housed by Newcastle United as part of a community education initiative.
Aware of how damaging these images might be to the stereotype of British foot- ball, I can only hope that Newcastle's Num- ber One fan, the greatest living Mr B, will order his Foreign Secretary to stop this monstrous exhibition forthwith, before it Poisons more impressionable young minds at its next destination, Guangzhou, later this month.
Indeed, as I perspired madly in the midst of the Beijing throng I began to think that the Times might have been right to call the Whole enterprise 'bloody daft'. While Sir Bobby signed autographs and Mr Topman chatted to an agent about setting up a joint whistle-making venture, I could have sworn the exhibition furniture was starting to sweat. If only someone had been able to douse us down there and then with their fire hoses. But then the Belgian police never seem to be there when we English fans need them most.
Simon Inglis's Sightlines — A Stadium Odyssey is published by Yellow Jersey Press, at 418.
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