"Holy moly, I've come over all previous"
I have to say that paying my way past The Times's paywall online is worth it, for Caitlin Moran's TV reviews alone:
by Caitlin Moran
The Times, September 15 2012
Paralympics Closing Ceremony (Channel 4)
And, so, the Paralympics - Use Your Illusion II to the Olympics’ Use Your Illusion I; Superman 2 to their Superman. We loved the first one so much, there just had to be another one. Let’s face it - if, halfway through, they’d announced a third global sporting event - Childlympics, maybe; or Nanlympics. Even Catlympics - we’d have been all over that, too. We’re in the rhythm of the whole thing now. Sag off work as much as possible, ignore all world news in favour of sporting glory, spend a lot of time on YouTube going, “Christ, look at Oscar Pistorius’s thighs. Look at them! They’re like two BEASTS in Lycra. Like two leg LIONS, pumping in tandem. Gngngnk. Imagine him coming at you. Holy moly, I’ve come over all previous.”
Although there was some culture shock switching from the BBC’s imperial coverage to
Channel 4’s - adverts! What? How uncouth. People shilling in the middle of a
sporting tournament? It’s little better than having some chugger coming at you in a
church, waving an empty bucket, screaming “GIVE US A POUND!” - the presence of Clare Balding soon smoothed it away again.
Oh Clare! Clare Balding! With your combination of headgirl sport-swottiness, and air of being excellent company for a night on the gins, you have been the cherry on London 2012’s cake, first on the BBC and then Channel 4. How sorry I feel for other countries - such as Canada, and Greece - who did not have you as their anchor. I’d like to think those countries had an equivalent of Clare Balding, but I suspect they do not. Only we have the daughter of the Queen’s former racehorse trainer, who, as we learned last week, invented the Mobot. That’s one we’ve got to be proud of.
Only Britain had Eddie Izzard, too, presenting medals for the Men’s 800m T54 event, handing David Weir his gold - nails carefully lacquered with red nail varnish. A multilingual transvestite comedian who himself ran 43 marathons in 51 days, for charity, with no previous training. They didn’t have guys like that handing out the gongs in Beijing.
China also, notably, didn’t have an armed services like ours: Friday was also the day that servicemen and women from the Navy - on security duty in the stadium - led the 80,000-strong audience in the dance routine to infamous gay anthem In the Navy.
“What’s happening to this country?” my husband asked, as we stared at another day’s headlines about the people formerly known as “cripples” and “spazzes” being lined up for the New Year’s Honours List, and making their countries proud. “It’s like this country’s spent the last 50 years inadvertently being fed some Miserable Uptight Curmudgeon Pills, and they’ve finally worn off.
“Perhaps they were putting it in the reservoirs, and all the early summer rain diluted it. It’s brilliant. This is what the second Summer of Love would have been like if it had affected everyone - instead of just 258 E’d-up nutters in Chorley.”
The closing ceremony on Sunday, then, allowed the nation to gather for one last time to stare upon the wonders of a London possessed by the Olympics - a city as radically and magically transformed as if it had suddenly been designated a major Dragon Port, and massive beasts were regularly banking over Regent’s Park, gliding over the Thames, to finally dock, via long silver chains, on Tower Bridge.
As night rolled in, the BT Tower flashed red, white and blue, and scrolled the message: “Take a bow, London.” You wondered: how will they end it all with enough pomp and finality for us to accept it’s over?
But they did - and they did it the same way the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics kicked everything off in a reconfiguring white-light bang; by just stealing a ton of its licks off the Glastonbury festival, with all its mad, brilliant sorcery.
As a convoy of fantastical steampunk vehicles entered the stadium - a gigantic fish
on wheels; a pirate ship; a rusting horse - Glastonbury-goers might have been
reminded of Block 9, the far-flung fields of the festival where these vehicles can
usually be found wheeling around at night, belching fire and freaking out dozens of people who are off their tits. That these renegade areas of a rock festival were being brought into the Paralympic stadium, in front of a worldwide audience of millions, gave the closing ceremony an immediate and enjoyable air of wonky, f***-you loucheness.
But that wonky, louche, steampunk theme was apt - as presenter Ade Adepitan pointed out later: “So many athletes customise their equipment, making them functional for the needs they have.”
These are sports men and women who have to take a welding torch to their wheelchairs, to fit them exactly to their torsos and sand and hammer prosthetic legs and blades. These are people who learnt to run - then lost their legs, and had to learn to run again. Anything we venerate an Olympian for, we find fourfold in a Paralympian, because these people holding gold medals have been blown up and rebuilt. Or delivered by doctors who stumbled over the words: “I’m afraid your baby has some problems ... but these days, the prognosis is very good.”
These are people who have a different relationship with science, machines and vehicles. As a mass of performers came into the stadium wielding blow torches, and burned crop circles and fractal patterns into the ground, tattooing the turf, it mirrored the many tattoos we saw on the Paralympians’ bodies. Another way of reclaiming your body from the things its had to endure - a needle used in celebration, rather than necessity, when in pain.
In this manner, Coldplay were a brilliant booking as the night’s only band. Although the focus of much contrarian hipster disdain - they are subject to the same sniffiness as fellow, earnest stadium-fillers U2 used to be - I truly believe that, in my lifetime, it will be acceptable for people to admit they like Coldplay. They’re a band who wear their hearts on their sleeves so guilelessly they essentially have ventricle cuffs: the whole bowl splashed with neon pinks, blue and aquamarines as they choired through the ceaselessly pretty Strawberry Swing with the Paraorchestra. Trumpeter Clarence Adoo - paralysed below the shoulders in a car crash - played the trumpet by blowing through a straw onto an electrical sensory pad. Later on in the set, The Scientist had the line: “Questions of science/ Science and progress/ Will not sing as loud as my heart.” It was as good a description as any of what we were seeing.
As dancers holding bunches of giant lightbulbs floated into the sky, below them a floor full of paraplegic kids freaked out to the sky-punching bit in Paradise, and I wondered what the legacies of these Games will be. One of them is an actual, literal “legacy” - in that huge swaths of the population now fancy people who’ve got no legs. As the closing ceremony woozed into flashback montage, Twitter filled with lustful discussions of its favourite PILFs, which Oscar Pistorius - sex on no legs - won, like his races, by a mile.
Is it social progress to want to shag the arse off Paralympians? In a world where a
teenage kid would previously only have had Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and
Long John Silver to look up to, probably yes. It’s progress, also, for a society to
By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. You can change this and find out more by following this link. acknowledge how nothing is won easily in the Paralympics - each gold here was paid for five times over and above any gold won in the Olympics, and the athletes were respected accordingly. For if we love Usain Bolt for his guileless, effortless dancing over the finish line, how much more do we love Richard Whitehead scything down the final straight of the Men’s 200m T42, legs like piston-powered scissors? Or Ellie Simmonds, the smallest thing in the pool, smashing through the water like a fist?
But the big thing about London 2012, in the final analysis, wasn’t all the superlative stuff - architecturally wondrous velodromes, 295 new world records, cannons shooting glitter into the skies. It was what it made normal, instead. For a month, having no legs was normal. Smiling on the Tube was normal. Seeing hefty women throwing shots was normal. Having a mod cyclist as a national hero was normal. Having lavish opening and closing ceremonies based on the culture and heritage of the working classes, the civil rights movement, travellers, pioneering homosexuals and the counter culture was normal. Having your kids drop their Wii to run out in the street and “play Paralympics” with their friends was normal. Kids spent this summer pretending that they had no legs, or only one arm, because it made them feel heroic. My God.
Being hopeful, and unexpectedly excited, about being a human was normal. It seemed to wake a muscle memory of what Britain was once: able to pull off magnificent acts of planning and construction, able to meet the focus of the world’s gaze with grand innovations, and febrile theatre - but, this time around, without all the baggage of Empire and conquest.
At the time of the introduction of the NHS, a US diplomat sneered, “Britain has given away its Empire in exchange for free teeth and orange juice” - obviously oblivious to the fact that that sounds totally awesome.
With London 2012, it felt like Britain had again given away its Empire - in exchange for these Olympics and Paralympics where men ran on swords, women flew, and the whole summer was on fire with wonder.
© Times Newspapers Limited 2012
by Caitlin Moran
The Times, September 15 2012
Paralympics Closing Ceremony (Channel 4)
And, so, the Paralympics - Use Your Illusion II to the Olympics’ Use Your Illusion I; Superman 2 to their Superman. We loved the first one so much, there just had to be another one. Let’s face it - if, halfway through, they’d announced a third global sporting event - Childlympics, maybe; or Nanlympics. Even Catlympics - we’d have been all over that, too. We’re in the rhythm of the whole thing now. Sag off work as much as possible, ignore all world news in favour of sporting glory, spend a lot of time on YouTube going, “Christ, look at Oscar Pistorius’s thighs. Look at them! They’re like two BEASTS in Lycra. Like two leg LIONS, pumping in tandem. Gngngnk. Imagine him coming at you. Holy moly, I’ve come over all previous.”
Although there was some culture shock switching from the BBC’s imperial coverage to
Channel 4’s - adverts! What? How uncouth. People shilling in the middle of a
sporting tournament? It’s little better than having some chugger coming at you in a
church, waving an empty bucket, screaming “GIVE US A POUND!” - the presence of Clare Balding soon smoothed it away again.
Oh Clare! Clare Balding! With your combination of headgirl sport-swottiness, and air of being excellent company for a night on the gins, you have been the cherry on London 2012’s cake, first on the BBC and then Channel 4. How sorry I feel for other countries - such as Canada, and Greece - who did not have you as their anchor. I’d like to think those countries had an equivalent of Clare Balding, but I suspect they do not. Only we have the daughter of the Queen’s former racehorse trainer, who, as we learned last week, invented the Mobot. That’s one we’ve got to be proud of.
Only Britain had Eddie Izzard, too, presenting medals for the Men’s 800m T54 event, handing David Weir his gold - nails carefully lacquered with red nail varnish. A multilingual transvestite comedian who himself ran 43 marathons in 51 days, for charity, with no previous training. They didn’t have guys like that handing out the gongs in Beijing.
China also, notably, didn’t have an armed services like ours: Friday was also the day that servicemen and women from the Navy - on security duty in the stadium - led the 80,000-strong audience in the dance routine to infamous gay anthem In the Navy.
“What’s happening to this country?” my husband asked, as we stared at another day’s headlines about the people formerly known as “cripples” and “spazzes” being lined up for the New Year’s Honours List, and making their countries proud. “It’s like this country’s spent the last 50 years inadvertently being fed some Miserable Uptight Curmudgeon Pills, and they’ve finally worn off.
“Perhaps they were putting it in the reservoirs, and all the early summer rain diluted it. It’s brilliant. This is what the second Summer of Love would have been like if it had affected everyone - instead of just 258 E’d-up nutters in Chorley.”
The closing ceremony on Sunday, then, allowed the nation to gather for one last time to stare upon the wonders of a London possessed by the Olympics - a city as radically and magically transformed as if it had suddenly been designated a major Dragon Port, and massive beasts were regularly banking over Regent’s Park, gliding over the Thames, to finally dock, via long silver chains, on Tower Bridge.
As night rolled in, the BT Tower flashed red, white and blue, and scrolled the message: “Take a bow, London.” You wondered: how will they end it all with enough pomp and finality for us to accept it’s over?
But they did - and they did it the same way the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics kicked everything off in a reconfiguring white-light bang; by just stealing a ton of its licks off the Glastonbury festival, with all its mad, brilliant sorcery.
As a convoy of fantastical steampunk vehicles entered the stadium - a gigantic fish
on wheels; a pirate ship; a rusting horse - Glastonbury-goers might have been
reminded of Block 9, the far-flung fields of the festival where these vehicles can
usually be found wheeling around at night, belching fire and freaking out dozens of people who are off their tits. That these renegade areas of a rock festival were being brought into the Paralympic stadium, in front of a worldwide audience of millions, gave the closing ceremony an immediate and enjoyable air of wonky, f***-you loucheness.
But that wonky, louche, steampunk theme was apt - as presenter Ade Adepitan pointed out later: “So many athletes customise their equipment, making them functional for the needs they have.”
These are sports men and women who have to take a welding torch to their wheelchairs, to fit them exactly to their torsos and sand and hammer prosthetic legs and blades. These are people who learnt to run - then lost their legs, and had to learn to run again. Anything we venerate an Olympian for, we find fourfold in a Paralympian, because these people holding gold medals have been blown up and rebuilt. Or delivered by doctors who stumbled over the words: “I’m afraid your baby has some problems ... but these days, the prognosis is very good.”
These are people who have a different relationship with science, machines and vehicles. As a mass of performers came into the stadium wielding blow torches, and burned crop circles and fractal patterns into the ground, tattooing the turf, it mirrored the many tattoos we saw on the Paralympians’ bodies. Another way of reclaiming your body from the things its had to endure - a needle used in celebration, rather than necessity, when in pain.
In this manner, Coldplay were a brilliant booking as the night’s only band. Although the focus of much contrarian hipster disdain - they are subject to the same sniffiness as fellow, earnest stadium-fillers U2 used to be - I truly believe that, in my lifetime, it will be acceptable for people to admit they like Coldplay. They’re a band who wear their hearts on their sleeves so guilelessly they essentially have ventricle cuffs: the whole bowl splashed with neon pinks, blue and aquamarines as they choired through the ceaselessly pretty Strawberry Swing with the Paraorchestra. Trumpeter Clarence Adoo - paralysed below the shoulders in a car crash - played the trumpet by blowing through a straw onto an electrical sensory pad. Later on in the set, The Scientist had the line: “Questions of science/ Science and progress/ Will not sing as loud as my heart.” It was as good a description as any of what we were seeing.
As dancers holding bunches of giant lightbulbs floated into the sky, below them a floor full of paraplegic kids freaked out to the sky-punching bit in Paradise, and I wondered what the legacies of these Games will be. One of them is an actual, literal “legacy” - in that huge swaths of the population now fancy people who’ve got no legs. As the closing ceremony woozed into flashback montage, Twitter filled with lustful discussions of its favourite PILFs, which Oscar Pistorius - sex on no legs - won, like his races, by a mile.
Is it social progress to want to shag the arse off Paralympians? In a world where a
teenage kid would previously only have had Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and
Long John Silver to look up to, probably yes. It’s progress, also, for a society to
By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. You can change this and find out more by following this link. acknowledge how nothing is won easily in the Paralympics - each gold here was paid for five times over and above any gold won in the Olympics, and the athletes were respected accordingly. For if we love Usain Bolt for his guileless, effortless dancing over the finish line, how much more do we love Richard Whitehead scything down the final straight of the Men’s 200m T42, legs like piston-powered scissors? Or Ellie Simmonds, the smallest thing in the pool, smashing through the water like a fist?
But the big thing about London 2012, in the final analysis, wasn’t all the superlative stuff - architecturally wondrous velodromes, 295 new world records, cannons shooting glitter into the skies. It was what it made normal, instead. For a month, having no legs was normal. Smiling on the Tube was normal. Seeing hefty women throwing shots was normal. Having a mod cyclist as a national hero was normal. Having lavish opening and closing ceremonies based on the culture and heritage of the working classes, the civil rights movement, travellers, pioneering homosexuals and the counter culture was normal. Having your kids drop their Wii to run out in the street and “play Paralympics” with their friends was normal. Kids spent this summer pretending that they had no legs, or only one arm, because it made them feel heroic. My God.
Being hopeful, and unexpectedly excited, about being a human was normal. It seemed to wake a muscle memory of what Britain was once: able to pull off magnificent acts of planning and construction, able to meet the focus of the world’s gaze with grand innovations, and febrile theatre - but, this time around, without all the baggage of Empire and conquest.
At the time of the introduction of the NHS, a US diplomat sneered, “Britain has given away its Empire in exchange for free teeth and orange juice” - obviously oblivious to the fact that that sounds totally awesome.
With London 2012, it felt like Britain had again given away its Empire - in exchange for these Olympics and Paralympics where men ran on swords, women flew, and the whole summer was on fire with wonder.
© Times Newspapers Limited 2012