Word of the day appears to be LEGACY, folks – I hope you’re going to use it liberally because everyone else is using it and frankly, if you’re not using it, you’re not one of us. So have you secured yours? Your little bit of legacy? Well, have you? COME ON, DO SOME FUCKING PRESS-UPS, SECURE YOUR LEGACY!
Tell you what, if this had happened when I was at school, I’d be a bit scared. I hated PE, I’d do anything to get out of it so that I could read a book or play the piano (yeah I was a nerd). So now they’re talking about two hours a day of the stuff – two hours a day! Sweet jesus, what fresh hell is that? Is that any way to treat the sports-hating kids of our country? The ones that would rather sit down and read something than run around the school sports field in their pants on a freezing cold November morning?
And why don’t we have this legacy talk on Last Night of the Proms? Why don’t we have Boris Johnson thrusting his hips and doing the boogie thing at Albert Hall, promising that schoolchildren are going to spend two hours a day playing classical music in order to secure the legacy of The Proms 2012?
The kind of legacy I’d like to see is not two hours a day running round a sports field, it’s the kind of legacy where we take on the best bits of the last two weeks and build on that. For example, politeness. Apparently we’ve been very polite and very happy and very nice to each other. But this morning, as I pulled out of my drive, I saw nothing coming in my rear view mirror (there’s a blind corner so most drivers slow down). A transit driver, some shaven-headed neanderthal, came screaming round the corner at about 50 miles an hour and tailgated me all the way down the road, gesticulating wildly. As we pulled up at the traffic lights, he wound down the window and spat out some neanderthal grunts, effing and cunting at me because I’d slowed him down by, oooh, a couple of seconds and didn’t let him drive like a deranged cuntnugget fuckmonger. Seriously, do you need to drive like a knob? Do you need to behave like a knob all the time?
I’m not being particularly nice to him now, and he wasn’t particularly nice to me. But what if we could all get on? What if we could just slow down a little, and wave nicely to each other? Like we did during the Olympics? That would be a terrific legacy. Instead, the reality is that we’re quite rude to each other.
The Premier League starts again next weekend, and as always, Premiership footballers are going to call each other rude words, and roll around on the floor at the slightest touch of a feather. How’s about a bit of legacy here? We’ve been watching athletes for two weeks who have been very nice, very grown-up and very sportsmanlike. Or sportswomanlike. So if a footballer swears AT ALL, send him off. If a footballer writhes around on the floor – and hasn’t broken every bone in his body – kick him until he has broken every bone in his body. No, only joking. Send him off. That would be a nice legacy, to have footballers behave nicely. Like Old Corinthians used to.
I was kind of hoping that another legacy would be that people would be inspired not by Jessie J and Tinie Tempah (did I get that right?) but by Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah. Instead of going on X Factor, they’d go to the velodrome or something. And after last night’s fuckshambles of a closing ceremony, in which some nonentities lip-synched (or sang out of tune), I feel that legacy is pretty much secured.
And as for playing sports in schools – well, let’s not have two hours a day of running round the sports track in your pants. Let kids choose something they enjoy doing and encourage it. If that’s not a sport, who cares. It’s not the bloody Hitler Youth, is it.
The Olympics has just given kids some role models they can aspire to other than X-Factor contestants, and frankly, the fact that we haven’t been doing that before is our fault. It’s our fault that kids look up to X-Factor contestants, not the fault of kids. So put more sports on telly. Get the cricket back from Sky and put it on the normal telly. Put more cycling on the telly. Show some taekwondo. Kids watch telly and repeat what they’ve seen (you show X-Factor all day, they’ll want to become singers)… responsible programming could be the real legacy of London 2012. It could also save us from the hell that is reality TV.
So go forth, people, secure your legacy. And just for fun, the moment that defined last night’s dreadful closing ceremony:
