Whoa, hey! Is this thing still here?!
Only kidding, folks: you’ve not been forgotten. We’ve just been incredibly busy here at The Twaddle HQ (in the sleepy county of Gunpointshire). At least, Gardner has.
Being a rookie journalist and all, he’s been spending his days plugging away tirelessly, deep in the bowels of the Journoplex. At the moment, his office …well, he doesn’t strictly have an office, really. It’s just a desk.
…
OK, so he’s got a pile of old pizza boxes he uses to steady his laptop, in lieu of any real office equipment. Anyway, that’s in the lower sub-basement of the Journoplex—where all the the junior news-botherers begin their broadcasting careers. It’s well grotty down there.
Deep in the lowliest, mankiest parts of the world’s journalistic hierarchy—that far down—the walls are unplastered, and the girders that barely hold them up have almost rusted away to nothing. Journalists: rubbish at architectural engineering.
Further up the ’Plex (as all the trendy young journos are calling it), wonderfully oblivious to the structural instability below, live the bigwigs—your Rupert Murdochs and your Huw Edwardses: journalistic royalty. And they’re treated as such: the floors are even numbered “92”, “93”, “Rageh”, “95”…
The further up you go, the shinier, spiffier and metallic-sheen-ier it gets. That, of course, is where Gardner wants to be going, and why he’s spent the last few weeks trying to attract the attention, approval and eminence of all those lucky people further up the reportage pecking order.
—The ones whose windows have a nice view of the sky, and some trees and things; instead of his backdrop of slimy sewer gunk, raw fossil fuels and rat crap. And whose windows have glass.
See-through glass.
In order to curry favour with the Journoplex’s upper echelons, then, he’s been investing all of his time in being furiously and resolutely distracted by Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife.
I, meanwhile, have been paying attention to world events. I’ve seen enough scripted television dramas—and what is life if not a scripted television drama?—to know that seemingly-unrelated concurrent events are always related.
And then there’s that bit when all the loose ends come together and tie up neatly just before the credits roll. Now, I’m not suggesting that you’re gonna wake up next Friday to find the sky covered in scrolling text, compressed to 47% of its supposed size in order to accommodate a massive picture of Adrian Chiles’s face, and interrupted by a voiceover describing this evening’s edition of The One Show—that’s quite unlikely.
But hear me out.
On the 13th of July 2001, Beijing was named as the host city for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Four years later, a pungent slap was delivered to the collective face of the French by London becoming the venue for the 2012 Olympics.
Come 2008, the Chinese government is under international pressure over its relationship with the people of Tibet (…to put it mildly). 2008’s Olympic torch relay, in which a flame is symbolically carried around the world by a succession of former athletes and Blue Peter presenters, as an evocative symbol of both the Olympic Spirit and the Third Reich, arrived in London this week.
It was met by angry mobs of peaceful protesters, angrily—but peacefully—protesting, in mobs. Their logic being that if the relay is disrupted every ten seconds, Chinese state TV won’t be able to show it off and censor the outside world’s reaction to the Tibet situation, without someone having to push the big, red, star-shaped “Censor Me Hard!” button every ten seconds. Eventually, that person’s gonna get bored and/or tired, and unilaterally abandon the whole censorship approach. Or something.
In addition to this well-meaning—albeit non–censorship-penetrating—disruption of its journey, the torch was also met in London by our fearless leader Gordon Brown.
Or not. ’Cos if Tony Blair taught him one thing (apart from “no, it’s still my turn”), it was that spin is crucial. You have to be seen to be doing something that looks—to a Sun reader—like it’s probably the best idea at the time.
And that means going “Yeah, China! How ’bout some Tibet? Eh?!” loudly, in capital sans-serifs, next to a picture of Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife’s knockers looking “statesbooblike”.
But the Olympic Games are nothing if not a brand—not even Formula 1 can out-sponsor an Olympiad. The International Olympic Committee would never have let Murray Walker within a 500-mile radius of a Grand Prix, because his surname carries connotations at odds with the ethos of motorsport.
The Olympics’ professed ideal of “One World, One Dream” (and I’d be genuinely unsurprised if the IOC complained about my unauthorised use of their slogan here) is adhered to relentlessly. It would harm the Olympic brand—and purse—if the 2012 host was seen to be anything but a Barney the Dinosaur–grade best fwend (yes, with a W) to the current Olympic brand-wielder.
And so Gordon needs to be seen to be huggably friendly with, and sternly critical of China—simultaneously. Too stern, and he’ll arouse the ire of the IOC, and make investing wadloads of cash in Britain (and Scotland) seem imprudent. Too friendly though, and at the next election he’ll be even voted-outer.
If only there were some way he could covertly disrupt the Olympic flame—perhaps make it look like bad luck that its journey was impeded. Or maybe it wouldn’t even arrive at its destination at all…?
Back to 2001: (yeah—he was really thinking ahead, but with Tony around, he had no choice;) on the 20th of November, planning permission was granted for a fifth terminal at London’s Heathrow airport. On the 14th of December, less than a month later, there was an annular solar eclipse.
Not really relevant, but it happened nonetheless.
This Terminal 5 idea had been knocking about since the 1980s, but it was only finally approved in 2001, just a few months after Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics.
Fast-forward back to 2008… —Fast-forward forward to 2008… —In 2008: Terminal 5 has been built, complete with its revolutionary new baggage-handling system (so we’re told). And on the 7th of February, there was another annular eclipse, though again, that’s not really relevant.
The new terminal was scheduled to open for business just a week or two before the Olympic torch hit Britain: long enough beforehand to make sure that any delays to its opening had been resolved, but not (evidently) long enough to work out all the kinks in that revolutionary new baggage-handling system.
Trillions—literally trillions—of suitcases, briefcases, miscellaneous cases of other kinds, and all sorts of exotic luggage have been delayed, misplaced and lost since Terminal 5 opened.
Now: I don’t know how the Olympic torch is supposed to be leaving Britain. But if a revolutionary new airport terminal designed for international flights had just opened, and I were in charge of deciding, it would be flying BA.
…once they’d found it again, anyway.
