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Performing
Jeffrey Bernard
Last Thursday morning I felt more proud and grateful to be an Englishman than I have since the late Duke of Gloucester inspected me by peering through the bars of my cell door in the guard house at Catterick Camp in 1951. Only in England could you be up to here in it and get a visit from the King's brother. How awful it must be to belong to a sensible race like the German one or a calculating race like the French. No, I'm delighted to be an indigenous lunatic and it was a headline in Thursday morning's Times that brought it all home to me with a thump. 'London bid to stage Olympics in 1988', it said lying there on the doormat and I sunk slowly, riveted, to my knees and read it all in one boggling mindful.
Not only is the Greater London Council considering 'baking a bid to stage the Games on a site in the London docklands, they're actually allocating an initial £50,000 for a feasibility study. I could make them one for £50. All right then, a fiver. But it is amazing, isn't it? They keep saying we're no longer a world power or a force to be reckoned with, but who else could keep going without any brains except for a decapitated chicken? The Greater London Council leader, Mr Horace Cutler, says he's aware of the fact that the cost of the games has risen astronomically, but what the hell, we are in the space age aren't we? Oh yes, I can see it all now. There's a lot to be said for Mr Cutler's idea — probably more than he's aware of.
For one thing, the Olympics in dockland would be terribly handy for Bloom's Restaurant and the Whitechapel Art Gal lery. The swimming and water polo would fit just nicely into Walworth Place Baths and the Marathon could be run via Isling ton, Kentish Town, Camden Town, Edgware Road, Notting Hill Gate and back along Oxford Street through the anti abortion and National Front demos. Furthermore, Mr Cutler proves he's not daft when he says that the scheme would provide work for about 15,000 people. Actually, I'm surprised to learn that there are as many as 15,000 people who want to work in this country, but I'm willing to believe anything a civil servant tells me. I suppose the work force would comprise roughly one car park attendant, a commissionaire, two prog ramme sellers and 14,996 dishwashers in the gigantic Forte Trust House Olympic centeen. The ghastly Centre Point could house the athletes and Boots in Piccadilly is nicely adjacent for stimulating drugs. But who needs stimulation with the likes of Mr Cutler at the helm?
The only doubt in my mind is whether the usual Olympic events are suited to an area such as dockland. It is a place, of course, that's ideal for many people's dream of the working man's Olympics. Over the years, I have met many, many people who would like to see a slightly more common and vulgar Olympic Games. These would comprise snooker, darts, spoof, poker, gin rummy, bar room fighting, pool, shove ha'penny, Irish joke telling (e.g. Last year's Silver Medal winner: 'How d'you tell an Irish pirate?' He wears two eye patches'), drinking and various sorts of sexual activity. Serious and easily offended people should stop reading this column now.
The thing that has got me puzzling and speculating wildly recently is an idea put forward by one of my more disgusting friends for a sort of decathlon. What you have to do is run three miles, drink four bottles of champagne and have sexual intercourse three times all within three hours. Now it was immediately apparent to me that the subtlety and art required to win this event lies in the order in which you go about things. Obviously you must start by running two of the three miles and equally obviously you must leave a fair proportion of the champagne to last. But how much and in what order do you fulfil the other tasks so as to make it all physically possible? Of one thing I am absolutely sure and that is that somewhere there lurks an Englishman capable of bringing this particular Gold Medal back to England where it belongs. I look to Mr Cutler to root him out and I look to the Greater London Council in their wisdom to give me £1 million to make a feasibility; study of the question. Performed in one of the Royal Parks, as opposed to Dockland, this could be a very beautiful event.
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