Hugo Rifkind
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No other sport, I appreciate, is quite like this. But the surprise we’re supposed to feel when golfers are so bored they’ll have sex with anything, and tennis players are so boring that we find it hilarious that they have sex at all? I don’t get that. It’s not the activity that bothers me. Cricket I find merely alien, on account of its Englishness, and rugby I can even occasionally feel quite fond of, on account of my Scottishness. Park me in front of any sport, in fact, and if I can be bothered to make the effort to concentrate, I may, for half an hour or so, find myself quite gripped. But the culture which surrounds it — the badged blazers and affiliation, the hero-worship, sponsorship and celebration of competition — it leaves me somewhere between cold and furious.
Spare me your cod psychology, for I can easily do my own. I can see this for what it is. It’s a resentment born out of my own inadequacy, and fuelled by wilful ignorance. I have always been one of those who, as Lord Melchett puts it in Blackadder, ‘sits on the touchline with the half-time oranges and the fat wheezy boys with a note from matron’. This comes coupled, probably, with an equally unattractive snobbishness about the nouveau riche edge that a true meritocracy will always have. Like I said, I’m not preaching here. I’m sharing a self-diagnosis.
Whatever I’ve got, though, I’ve got it bad. The very existence of the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year competition is something I find close to unpalatable, even though I’ve never watched it. You know how al-Qa’eda is about gay discos? It’s like that. Unjustifiable fury. Indefensible, unsustainable. I thought, for a while, I might be able to join in the Olympic fun by ignoring the sport aspect altogether. Nobody cared about the sport in China. It was all about the architecture, the choreography, the naked, spectacular ambition of an emerging superpower. There aren’t enough big macro issues here, though. Just a grim, impoverished year, where the only show in town is the one being run by the people dressed as Alan Partridge. Resenting all this is just going to be too much work. Help me.
•••
Has the Sherlock backlash started yet? Stephen Moffat’s rewriting of the Conan Doyle canon returned this week, and it just wasn’t … it just didn’t … hmm. It just wasn’t or didn’t.
This was a shame. The last series, which broadcast last year, was brilliant. It could have just been the general January sense of hating everything that turned me against this one, but I don’t think so. Last time around, Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) and Martin Freeman (Watson) were more firmly rooted on planet earth. In series one, each episode, a few people got murdered. In the first hour of series two, we’d had a plan to topple the monarchy by means of a blackmail plot involving a lesbian dominatrix, the CIA and international terrorism. Towards the end, they threw in a jumbo jet full of dead people, as an afterthought.
Sequels always do this. Consider also The Killing. Series one kept us going for 20 weeks with one murdered schoolgirl. Series two had a whole murdered army platoon and, sigh, international terrorism again. These people always get so carried away.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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