Welcome to the silly season, and what better way to celebrate it, than have the French stage an Olympics. Is anybody else still scratching their heads – as opposed to holding severed ones — about the beyond bizarre Opening Ceremony.
It was like a surreal nightmare in a thunderstorm though I’m sure everything made sense to someone. Expect the closing ceremony to get high ratings.
The Olympics, as an event, prides itself on making bizarre sports and activities look like ordinary pastimes. There’s an endless list of weird activities from Street Skateboarding to BMX, from trap shooting to fencing.
The only other place you’d be expected to see fencing now (apart from a club) is in Bridgerton when some flaky chap “insists on getting satisfaction” for being dishonoured. Or, if you catch a repeat of The Three Musketeers, where you might see Oliver Reed brandishing a sword in anger – but only before opening time.
Air rifle shooting should go on the quaint list too, not least for the outfits they’re draped in. With wide-flared trousers, they’re straight out of the 70s and Star Wars. At least they can be reused in the costume department.
It’s another one of these sports in which you haven’t got a clue what’s really going on – until a tiny hole appears on the screen. Oh well done!
With sports like this, they’re invariably won by the Chinese. Gosh, they’re good! How do they do it? They must practise a lot or start at a young age. Good luck to them. We’ll just have to try harder next time….
My favourite moment of the Olympics this week happened on Olympic Breakfast (BBC) which will always be a big plateful at the LittleChef. After Tom Daley and Noah Williams picked up their gallant silver medal against the gold-medalling Chinese we returned to the studio where presenter JJ Chalmers almost went un-PC, describing the Chinese dive “as more like an AI generation”. Careful now.
Most bizarre is that the BBC employed First Dates presenter Fred Sirieix to be French. When something “very French” happened, they dispatched him outside a stadium and he spoke a lot of very fast French to other locals while the ignorant like me marvelled at the wonderful linguistics. Why isn’t linguistics a sport, with people flinging their own language at each other across a banked course? They could use the BMX track at night.
How did that sport ever get through health and safety – “a rider flings the bike over his head in a 360-degree flourish before realising he and the bike are plummeting to the ground and hopefully rights the wheels in time”.
Surfing is another sport which used to involve “hanging Five” or even 10 but has now been given daredevil status. It’s also being held in Tahiti at the same time — which must make commuting from the Olympic Village quite a feat even on a jet ski.
I watched one Brazilian rider shot through a “barrel” wave before propelling himself 20 feet into the air with the grace of a trapeze artist. Astonishing — or “slightly extra” as they say. No one likes a show-off.
Speaking of whom, reality show regular Joey Essex was turfed off Love Island (ITV, Sun) by his fellow contestants the night before the final. Strangely enough he didn’t appear to mind very much – and given the size of his generous fee (surely, significantly more than the winning fee of £50k), he’s going to be laughing all the way to the Big Brother house.
By anyone’s standards, this was one of the least entertaining series. It doesn’t really matter who won but it wasn’t Nicole and Kieran who had spent the entire series together. You can break up now!
Finally, Cooking with the Stars (ITV, Tues), has returned, improbably, for a fourth series. This is the show in which celebrities who can’t cook learn how to cook only slightly better in front of the cameras. It’s what Celebrity Masterchef would be like if it hadn’t gone beyond pilot stage.
There are more celebrities and top chefs corralled in a TV studio than I’ve ever seen before. Surely there’s a collective noun for this? A “reduction” sounds about right.
There’s no one who works harder on this set than presenter Tom Allen – together with his eyebrows. Blimey me, they were going for it. It’s like a whole new way to communicate for him. They go up, they go down, they go sideways, they snake across his forehead — all highly entertaining.
There are three rounds which fit nicely into an hour’s television, with ample opportunities to mention Marks and Spencers’ asparagus. Other supermarkets — and greens — are available.
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