The problem, it strikes me, with a lot of the athletics which aren’t straight races is making them sporty. With the throwing you could just give everyone just one go. That seems fair enough. With the high jump they could keep jumping until they fail. But this could all be over too quickly. Best of five then, or your allowed three fails or, or, make the rules up as you go along. But at least in the field events you get a bit of time to face the inevitable.

And the inevitable seems to be a quick trackside interview with some dim BBC track jockey asking you why you lost. I saw a great one in one of the four hundred metres semis where the Brit boy got spanked and romped in last. Within a minute of the most important race of his life, huffing and puffing, BBC mike gets rammed in his face. “So,” says the voice of a nation “what went wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it that you weren’t fast enough?”
“Well, er, yes.”

Best interview ever.
Worst seven minutes ever.
TOTAL OLYMPIC MINUTES: FORTY TWO.

something else one doesn’t normally associate with ice skaters is clothes you might actually want to wear yourself. but in 2006 russia had it goin on. their motif was a kind of cross between a paisley shape and a garland (or a zapf dingbat), and when applied to a straight-up indie gas-station attendant vibe i found the russian outfits almost as irresistable as a certain ice skater who wore them. (they also had their own twee mascot, the venerable cheburashka, who may have contributed to a new Olympic trend.)

it’s unnecessary to detail the hours i spent trying to track down the hoodie in the above photo. oh i was desperate, had taken leave of my senses. 1/2-inch enamel souvenir pins on ebay with the above garland/paisley design were enough to start me salivating. in the end i forgot about it. but here come the olympics again, taunting me with their inaccessible vestments, reminding me of the ones that got away. it appears that the company which made those russian outfits still have a web site and it’s being revamped. a dormant spark of hope flares up. are you out there, boscosport? do you do trackbacks? i’m an easy mark.

It was not ever thus - take Britain’s performance at the Barcelona Olympics. Five golds, and four of the athletes involved became more or less household names. But the Beijing mob surely won’t fare quite so well: in fact looking at the media you can already see who’s being groomed for future stardom (in the British sense of the word, i.e. a comfy berth on a daytime TV sofa whenever needed).

What is the FAME FORMULA for Olympic success? In the grand tradition of bogus equations I give you this:

F = (A * C)/R

F, clearly, stands for FAME. The level of F determines your later station in life, whether it be beloved sporting ambassador, tut-tutting commentator, or advertising WellMan supplements on the tube.

A stands for ACHIEVEMENT. Winning an medal is an achievement, obviously, but this also includes factors like age, overcoming adversity, winning our first medal in something for a grillion years, losing it completely on the podium, etc.

C stands for CELEBGENICNESS, a complex word for a complex concept, as it encompasses things like future potential, down-to-earthness, audience being able to relate to, audience finding hott, and so on.

Finally, R stands for RUBNESS OF SPORT. This is a technical term involving the sport’s esteem in the eyes of the Great British Public, and the extent to which they can understand what happens in it.

A final factor is that there are only so many ’slots’ available in the public consciousness for any given sport - we can win all the rowing medals we like, for example, but Redgrave and Pinsent have a lock on the Famous Rowers slots for now, even though they don’t actually race any more. This significantly limits the chances of any of the new crop becoming famous (at least after these Olympics, but possibly forever: consider the Famous Ice Skaters slot). There are a lot more slots open to track athletes, comparatively few for field athletes, potentially quite a few for swimmers, and so on.

Looking at our medalists in this games and applying the Fame Formula, the blindingly obvious winner is Rebecca Adlington: massive achievement, high celebgenicness, sport we vaguely care about, and an easy (too bloody easy) angle for non-sporting coverage viz. “likes shoes”. You can already see the media getting very excited and I hope she can handle it (this in itself is yet another angle - the oh now her life will change story). Adlington’s high Fame score will have a detrimental effect on some of our other winners, who fit a similar bubbly, down-to-earth bracket. Even though they’re in different sports, I’m guessing if it wasn’t for Adlington, Nicole Cooke would come out of these Games more famous than she will (except in Wales!).

You can see the media sizing up other athletes too - Rebecca Romero’s performance in two different disciplines is awesome, but the angle on her seems to be “she’s a mentalist”: scarily driven and very obviously different from the rest of us, whereas with the ‘nice’ athletes we can sort of ignore all the punishing training schedules and what they might imply about someone’s personality. This will limit her post-Games fame, which is a pity I think.

Who else? Christine Ohoruogu will get a big push as a Londoner, though the raging arguments on the BBC Sports Blog (and elsewhere) over her missed-tests bans suggest that the route to future fame won’t be that easy. The rowers are doomed, as is the Laser class sailing guy since i. his event is deceitfully named and ii. people have only just got their heads around Ben Ainslie being properly famous. Cycling is an interesting case - enormous medal haul means people will know more about it, so the R score decreases and more slots open up - Wiggins and Hoy will both step up a fame grade.

Then we’re into the “minor medals”, where people will also be a bit hard done by owing to the sheer bulk of GB medals around: ordinarily a couple of silver or bronze medalists push on to future fame, but in Beijing Louis Smith looks the only likely candidate so far, and in the current medal-drunk climate Britain winning a men’s gymnastics medal has been downgraded from “HOLY SHIT” to “only bronze?”. No room either for plucky losers, which is probably a good thing for the future success of British sport but I feel a bit sorry for Tom Daley, who’s turned from glorious hope to pub quiz answer inside of a week. (I don’t feel that sorry though, since he reminds me weirdly of James Harries).

I’m sure that come 2012 even the forgotten names will come flooding back to those of us who only pay attention every four years, but - like seeing what happens to Big Brother contestants - it’s going to be fascinating watching the ebb and flow of medalist fame. At the very least, this bumper crop should mean some vicious battles for commentary slots come 2024.

What is the relationship between the charts and everything else? The charts are a show home for pop music, filled with its shiniest mod cons, but one stuffed with hidden doors and tunnels, records that can tumble you out of pop and into other worlds which have their own codes and rules and no cosy countdown to set things in order. And in those other worlds - some of them, anyway - the charts are a sunlit palace of temptation, but to step (or be plucked) into it is to risk having your life and art and the world it came from turned higgledy-piggledy.

Every so often a door between the palace of pop and one of these other worlds opens so wide that every visitor can’t help but notice it and the walls between what’s mainstream and what’s not suddenly seem very thin. “Double Barrel” is one of them, so you could argue is “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”. So is this: it promises a sharper, smarter, more dangerous place than Number One hits generally admit you to.

This wasn’t a fluke, either, a canny act taking advantage of the January lull: it sold close to a million copies, a megahit in an era of them. “Rhythm Stick” is the sound of a band well aware that they’ve written a smash, and pushing themselves to make the delivery count. There isn’t a wasted note or fluffed decision on the track, but the whole thing comes off as wonderfully simple - a darting, jabbing groove designed to seduce even the most stand-offish of blokes onto the dancefloor, and a superb backdrop for Dury’s amazing performance.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Ian Dury - like a lot of highly quotable songwriters, he works best for me quoted. But on “Rhythm Stick” he makes every word count, caressing the line-end “-o” and “-an” sounds, wheezing and gasping through the chorus, then kicking off on the coda as the guitar shrieks him on. This is one of the first number ones where the hip-hop concept of “flow” really seems relevant: riding a rhythm, racking up bonuses with multi-syllable combos. 

Like “Y.M.C.A.”, this is an ostensibly inclusive lyric, celebrating the universality of dancing (or screwing), but there’s also something mocking, even sinister about it: check the promo clip of Dury onstage, surrounded by darkness, blinking, contorting, urging the dance on but always apart from it. That goblinoid malice doesn’t come across so fully on record - “Rhythm Stick” got to No.1 because it was infectious and jolly as well as demented and sardonic - but it’s there.

The distance, as much as the playful aggression, might make this one of the most laddish dance records. It’s never beery or off-putting, though: there’s just a thread of cheek to it, which if followed might lead you quite out of pop and into some very rum places. Though just then the top of the charts was as rum a place as any. The people who didn’t fit in anywhere were getting their chance not just to make, but to define pop music: interesting times ahead.

One place where I am surprised to see a lack of the mixed version of the game is the hockey field. (Or field hockey field if yr expecting ice hockey). The mixed game is pretty established so its surprising the Hockey Federation doesn’t try to wring another medal out. I caught a bit too much of the British Women vs the USA match yesterday which ended in a 0-0 draw, effectively ending both of the teams medal hopes. But then I have always been a bit of a sucker for hockey which, but for a few flaws in the games design, should be a major spectator sport. Watching about ten minutes of GB under the cosh reminded me that the game is as tactical, and brutal, as football. But the ball is a bit too small to comfortably see, and when played well it moves to fast for a cameraman to comfortably follow. There is also a few rules which are less easy to explain (the short corner / long corner rule). I forgot, for this ten minutes, that it was in the Olympics - though I should have remembered as it is about the only time hockey is on the TV. Apperently our result does mean we qualify for the World Cup or something, so there may be more hockey, which I can enjoy outside the pervasive losing atmosphere of the Olympics. And why not mixed hockey too?

Stickball Minutes: Ten
TOTAL OLYMPIC MINUTES: Thirty Five!

*Perhaps the presence of watersports in over 50% of UK lonely hearts ads as an interest is not actually some sort of sexual code, and people actually just want someone they can Yngle with.

The other writer I follow most faithfully is Mark Millar. Again, I should declare a bias, as many years ago I gave him his start in comics, with Saviour (i.e. I had enough sense to recognise an obvious genuine talent when it showed up in my mailbox). In recent years he’s been one of mainstream US comics’ biggest stars, and deservedly so. His Ultimates series, with Bryan Hitch art, was particularly superb. Marvel’s Ultimate line is a fresh universe, starting from scratch with new versions of their biggest characters; The Ultimates is that world’s equivalent of the Avengers, and they are wonderfully reimagined. His Ultimate X-Men was also excellent. He does a lot, mainly for Marvel, and it’s all at least worth a look. I particularly recommend, from their regular universe, his Wolverine story ‘Enemy of the State’, in which the character, who I’ve always been much less keen on than most, is brainwashed into a deadly assassin; and the current ‘Old Man Logan’ story, set in a future after the supervillains have won, which is exciting me as much as any superhero book in years. There is plenty more - he’s currently writing an astonishing number of comics, and I’m enjoying them all.

I’d also recommend The Authority, a title that started under Warren Ellis, another writer well worth trying, and he was followed by Millar. This is another superteam book, featuring characters who are new takes on a lot of the archetypical superheroes in something like a Justice League. I love the stories in this, Ellis’s and Millar’s, perhaps especially Millar’s inspired casting of a Jack Kirby analogue as a supervillain.

I have some friends, good judges of comics, who hate Brian Michael Bendis, but I’m a big fan. His long Daredevil run was exceptional: revealing his secret identity was a motor for countless gritty stories. His strengths had always been dialogue (he’s one of the best ever at that) and the fringes of the superhero world - cops in that world in Powers, a retired superhero and would-be private eye in Alias, a magazine about superheroes in The Pulse - and characters with low-level powers, like DD, so even his fans had doubts about his abilities on the Avengers titles, but they have been tremendous, and the big Secret Invasion crossover event now happening cements that, though he still sometimes loses momentum with his digressions.

Darwyn Cooke has made his way into comics from the animated Batman and Superman shows. His New Frontier was a wonderful work, reimagining the start of the Silver Age (late ’50s into ’60s) DC superhero revival. It’s beautiful to look at, but also very smartly constructed, introducing the characters in the same order that DC first published them in this period (some were revivals). His Catwoman stories, written by the very fine Ed Brubaker, are also terrific, and he is to produce a series of adaptations of Richard Stark’s great ultrahardboiled Parker crime novels, which could easily be great.

The figures

There’s no doubt that this was the fastest Olympics ever:

World records set: 25 (in 21/32 events)
Olympic records set: 65 (in 30/32 events)
World records set in the LZR Racer swimsuit: 92%
Gold medals set in the LZR Racer swimsuit: 94% (89% of ALL medals)

Here’s the swimming medals table (no. gold medals shown in brackets):

Well done us!

4th is a brilliant placing for Great Britain - three medals in one games is more than we’ve managed since the 80s, and to have two of them be gold, well, it’s absolutely brilliant. Rebecca Adlington broke a world record older than herself, and has automatically become an inspiration to every club swimmer grinding up and down the pool at 5am every morning.

As well as the medals, we also got a couple of 4th places and one or two swimmers in nearly every final - although you might think that’s not something to be particularly proud of, it shows how competitive we are compared to Sydney and Athens, and will make those swimmers who came in fourth even hungrier for medals next time round. Liam Tancock deserves a special mention for making three finals (backstroke, IM and medley relay), as does Fran Halsall who had a real chance to medal in the 50m free, the 100m free, the medley relay AND both freestyle relays. She looked so gutted after her last race (as well as absolutely exhausted).

Looking to the future - Rebecca and Fran are still teenagers, and at least half of the GB squad had never been to an Olympics before. In front of a home crowd, who knows what can happen in four years’ time? Hey, it took Michael Phelps two Olympics before he won gold…

America v Australia

On the whole, the non-Phelps favourites going into the games (e.g. Katie Hoff, Grant Hackett, Dara Torres) did pretty badly in terms of gold medals. Let’s find out just *how* badly they’ve done - in graphical format! Here’s the American and Australian gold medals since 1988:

Oh dear! The American women and the Australian men barely won anything this year! The Australian men failed to get a gold medal for the first time since 1976 - ouch. Where’s Ian Thorpe when you need him, eh? They were banking on Grant Hackett to deliver in the 1500m freestyle, and he just wasn’t up to the job this time. The American men obviously did pretty well thanks to SuperPhelps, and Stephanie Rice nabbed those vital medley wins to bump up the Australian women’s total from previous years. But we still can’t discount both AUS and USA’s enormous depth of talent. Here’s their total medals won since 1988:

Their overall team performances are still improving overall thanks to the demise of the Eastern European and Russian swimmers - the dip in Athens was mainly due to very strong showings from the Dutch, French and German swimmers. If Britain’s medal tally for the last twenty years was plotted on the same graph it would be lurking right at the bottom. We’ve still got a long way to go.

Tell you what though, the rest of the medals were really spread out - Brazil, Germany, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Tunisia all got golds thanks to sterling individual performances. France and China both got six medals each, and a whole bunch of European countries picked up silvers and bronzes. Swimming success is finally starting to be consistently found away from the American/Australian centres, and that’s got to be good news for anyone watching.

*Apart from the 10km open water races on Wednesday and Thursday of course - tune in and cheer on David Davies, Keri-Ann Payne and Cassie Patten.

The baton passes from one manufactured disco band to another, but “Y.M.C.A.” is superior to “Mary’s Boy Child” in absolutely every respect - well, the dancing in the video is just as awful, but in “Y.M.C.A.”’s case the wisdom of crowds soon provided a better alternative. A big part of this song’s success is Victor Willis, who gives his broad-chested lead vocal absolutely everything, starting stentorian and then going steadily more berserk (”PUT YOUR PRIDE ON THE SHELF!”) - gutbucket shouting put to the service of disco goodwill.

This remarkable year is the triumph of disco at the top of the charts, but more than that it’s the triumph of a particular effect of disco: the way the disco pulsebeat could work as an identity accelerator, its unobtrusive addictiveness pushing the spotlight onto performers and emotions and magnifying them, turning stars into icons, expressions into anthems. With a four-four backbone, cool would become cooler, resolve more resolute, cynicism more curdled. And “Y.M.C.A.” is an example of this, turning Willis into a kind of prophet of inclusiveness, and turning mainstream disco’s achilles heel - anyone could dance to this stuff - into a mission statement: everyone welcome. The gap between “it’s all the same” and “we’re all the same” is a thin one.

As a kid I loved this song - everybody did. It wasn’t just the dance, it was the dressing-up: five of the six VP costumes are standard kids’ birthday party fancy-dress - all that’s missing is a superhero, unless Leatherman qualifies. And this for me was an exotic record - vigorously, powerfully American: I remember my shock and disappointment at discovering a YMCA in Britain, an unglamorous blocky building on Great Russell Street. When it was a hit I was three or four years off even knowing what ‘gay’ meant, by which point “Y.M.C.A.” had become a great survivor of the disco era, entrenched in wedding disco playlists, its campness obvious but somehow hardly noticeable. In other words I feel utterly unqualified to even speculate on how it resonated at the time, within gay culture or in the mainstream. All I do know is that somehow, 30 years on, I’m still not sick of hearing that chorus.

So it appears that the “GOLD RUSH” means we are third in the Medals Table, a table where it is mainly about the number of golds (silver and bronze columns see to be there for goal difference purposes). Which, incase you can’t see it with your eyes when they put the medal table up, means we are above Australia and Germany - which some people seem to think is significant. What I would also like to see is an actual medal table, of the actual number of gold medals we will be taking hime, bearing in mind that a few of ours would be in team sports. This would also make sense for those teams taking part in football, hockey and handball - where only one medal is available. It means we’d have six golds in the rowing, four in the sailing so far. It may also skew the other most ridiculous stat that is starting to be bandied around…

In a talkie bit on News 24 with the sports guy, the following assertation was made: “If you take out the achievements of Michael Phelps the UK has the same number of golds as the USA. Indeed if Michael Phelps was a country he would be fifth in the medals table”.

IF MICHAEL PHELPS WAS A COUNTRY? How would this work exactly? Can you be granted membership of the UN just because you are quite good at swimming. The GDP of Phelpsland one assumes would be from the sale of gold medals, which would need regular top ups every four years. And if Russia are so gung ho to go into Georgia, I think they would see an opportunity to regain their Olympic golory days and instantly send a tank in to Phelps to annexe him. Nevertheless feel free to send in what you think the flag if this autonomous, fast swimming nation would look like, so he can hoist it up his flagpole.

STEALTH NEWS MINUTES: Six
TOTAL OLYMPIC MINUTES: Twenty Five

It’s good to see that some people are still keeping this great event alive though:

*two of these were in the intercalated games of 1906 which kind of don’t count, BUT ANYWAY…

the walls are dense with weird bric-a-brac, posthorns, ladders, a silhouette of a scarecrow; they don’t take credit cards, they forgot to even offer us dessert, and weren’t around to be asked for stuff half the time — there was a mysterious noisy party going on somewhere deep in the bowels of the place; the pictures on the stairs down to the kitchen and washrooms were just frames with no pictures in; the menu is italian on one side, french on the other — tho fondue is surely swiss… and it was totally haunting and recommendable

40 redchurch street, just off the brick end lane of bethnal green road

THEY DON’T SERVE BUTTER <— wtf?? this is bafflingly awesome

But there has been so much cycling. And so much swimming. And quite a lot of diving (though considerably less now we are rubbish at it). Put it like this, there has been more than I would expect from sports where you are racing over distances where one would think the medals may go to the best over 100m, 200m, 400m etc like in the athletics. Instead though the minor sports which make up the gravy of the Olympics are well aware that this is their one moment in the sun, every four years. And some of them have worked out the key part of making their sports seem more important: to have more versions of them so more medals are available.

A number of techniques it appears have been developed to do this, and here is your handy guide in case you want to beef up Handball (Hitler’s favourite sport):

Different Weight Classes: A great idea from boxing, it suggests that it is unfair that a shortarse should have to fight a beefcake. And perhaps it is true, but in rough and tumble fighting outside a pub, you don’t get to stop a fight because one of the protagonists is considerably lighter than the other. Nevertheless this idea has been stolen by many of the martial arts and in particular the weightlifting – where it seems that the basic question of this simplest of sports “how much can a human lift” has been bastardised to “how much can a human lift if that human weighs X”. A great way of multiplying the available medals in your sport, it also has the plus point of implicitly suggesting that the short and light people are effectively disabled and should be in the paralympics.

Diff’rent Strokes: This is one of the best innovations of swimming. Not only do they want to know how fast you can swim a certain distance, but they gve you different races for different ways to getting there. So Breast Stroke, Butterfly, Back Stroke, Freestlye (crawl) : WNY NO DOGGY PADDLE! Not only that but they then have a race where you do all of them, the awesomely names freestyle. Which means in total there are five different 400m races! Athletics is missing a trick here, the only time they have nicked this idea is for mincing walking. But imagine the 400m where each hundred is in a different syle. 100m running backwards, 100m hopping, 100m walking and 100m freestyle (probably running!) Get to it.

Synchro: Yes swimming but when I discovered synchronised diving the lightbulb tinged above my head. There seems very little implicit in the sport of diving that suggests that doing it synchronised with another person is anything but a bit hard – but not key to the development of the sport. Except it doubles the number of dives there are. Doing anything synchronised with someone else requires a lot of training, and why there is no synchronised gymnastics, or dressage I have no idea. Synchro pole vault, that would be good.

Multiplicity of equipment: This is posh sport heaven. Rowing and yachting seem to have hundreds of classes based on the number of different boats they can invent. It is almost worth it for the invention of the word Yngling. In gymnastics if they invented a new piece of awesome equipment tomorrow there could be a good chance that it got included – I am very keen on adding a bucking bronco to vault over.

Coached / non-coached: As an old cox myself, I am constantly impressed by the trick rowing played to double the events in their sport. Namely the version of their sport where they have a cox in the boat versus the coxless versions. Bearing in mind that the main job of a cox in river rowing is steering, and Olympic rowing takes place on a straight course, this is even more impressive. But surely other sports could benefit from this. Boxing with the trainer in the ring, cycling with the coach doing a backie.

Let’s team up: I like a good relay race (I like watching people drop the baton). But the “group pursuit” cycling seems like the oddest type of relay I have ever seen. And this suggests that you can make up any relay you like and call it a “team version”. Indeed the eventing and gymnastic teams are a way of squeezing another medal out of individual sports. They really should do it in weightlifting so we can discover the World’s Strongest Country.

So as you can see, I saw more sport in the last two day than I expected. Over ten minutes of blimmin’ cycling. Infact the only way to avoid it properly was to come and write this rant.

FOURTEEN PUSHBIKE MINUTES
NINETEEN OLYMIC MINUTES IN TOTAL

My highest mark for 78 went to Kate Bush (10) - my lowest to the Brotherhood of Man (2).

Yun Ok-Hee here is modelling a PINK bow, and a cartoon panda chest guard!

I think I might take up archery!

Christmas is a time for the kiddies, but I can’t say Boney M made much impression on this five-year-old: “Mary’s Boy Child” was never quite a first-division carol for me, and as for Frank Farian’s unique contribution to the mythology of Christmas, “Oh My Lord” just didn’t register.

Much though I’d love to be writing a hearty defence of Boney M here, this second No.1 shows them at their worst: self-editing doesn’t seem to be a Farian skill and at almost six minutes this is cripplingly long. It’s a frothy bubblebath at first - the girls’ creamy vocals and the rippling steel drums ushering you into a grotto festooned with Christmas tack - but by the end the water’s getting cold and your toes are looking horribly crinkly. The problem is that the group do the entire of “Mary’s Boy Child” - not in itself a short song - and then go into the “oh my lord” routine. Everyone seems to be on autopilot, and the vim which makes their good songs good is mostly absent (Poor old Bobby Farrell looks unimaginably bored in the video). Go back and listen to “Rasputin” instead.

LARGEST FEMALE ON EARTH: “Across Europe, there has only ever been that Siebold sample. It is a female plant (the largest female on Earth, some argue) that has never had a mate and has spread by its underground stems – rhizomes – alone.”

But complacency should not kick in because Day 5, another day of almost complete avoidance, was also notable for being a day of travel for me - I spent much of the day in Gatwick Airport, in whoms duty free shops there was no Olympics. So all I really got was a bizarre twenty second blast on the TV of more swimming (WETTEST OLYMPICS EVER - and yes I did see the forecast). And whoever the male commenator was on this mystery final said the following:

“Its one, two and four China, and you know what, I want it to be one, two, three as this great nation who has shown us this magnificent games deserve no less.”

No chance of a BBC commentator getting beaten up by the security services then!

-It’s a threequel. Threequels are nearly always rubbish, especially when the first sequel was rubbish, which was certainly the case with The Mummy Returns. Therefore the critic can use phrases like “Uncalled for second sequel” and “Law of diminishing returns”, and if they are really keen bemoan the state of Hollywood for making unwanted sequels.

-It is at best a thematic sequel with all the same characters getting messed up with a completely different undead scenario. It convenient drops some of the more complex mythology of the second film, in particular that Evie O’Connell is the reincarnation of Nefertiti. This allows critics to again bemoan the point that it is a cobbled together sequel to try and recapture the (barely existent magic) of the original. Which unfortunately leads to…

-The recasting of Evie O’Connell from Rachel Weisz to Maria Bello. Not only does this allow the critic to bash the film AGAIN for clearly not being up to Weisz’s high standard, they can diss the chemistry between Brendan Fraser and Bello. Even better for critics Bello looks significantly different to Weisz. And to cap it all, Bello is an American so critics can slag off her British accent. And extra, extra Bello usually turns up in arthouse movies so critics can say she is slumming it (and equally she can do interviews saying that she loves action movies). They can also waste a few lines saying how nice Rachel Weisz is.

-Oh, talking of Rachel Weisz, the apocryphal story goes that she did not want to do the film because she would be playing the mother of a 20-year old child. This is a decent segue into the issue of the twenty year old child being rubbish. The ten year old child in The Mummy Returns was rubbish. They retained the rubbish bit, hence more rubbish. Easy paragraph there especially when you consider that…

-The Mummy leant strongly on Indiana Jones. We had an Indiana Jones sequel this year where the hero turned out to have a son. Critic can happily bemoan that there are no original ideas left in Hollywood, perhaps wonder where this paternal desire of heroes are coming from (think Bush Snr and Bush Jnr if you want to stretch your political metaphor).

-Speaking of political metaphors, the film is set in China. Not only are the Olympics in China, but there is a great opportunity for film reviewers to make some half arsed political commentary about China’s political and economic strength as reflected in a film about an army of terracotta warriors coming to life.

-Oh, that means you can talk about terracotta warriors, and the inappropriateness of using this real life art as essentially the undead, unstoppable bad guys in this
movie, thus divorcing the art from reality in the same way the EVIL CHINESE EMPEROR is divorced from any real historical character.

-And voila, you’ve got to the end of the review without even mentioning throwing away Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, irrevelvance of John Hannah, Tibet, Shangri-la…

-Though you probably have to mention the American football playing Yeti’s (everyone does).

There you have a review of the Mummy sequel. Not only that but you can spend all your paragraphs slagging it off and still give it two stars out of five because it shows gusto, or was fun, or all the things that your not really supposed to put in a review. God forbid you enjoyed this tripe.

HAHAHA “Do ya think I’m sexy?” heh heh well the answer to that Rod is…..

NO!

AHAHAHAHAHA!

It’s the gag no pop show talking head can resist, but the title line doesn’t actually show up in this admittedly odd record, and Rod isn’t singing about himself. This is a character piece, a study of disco pick-ups and their awkwardness. In fact Rod lays the awkwardness on very thick indeed - it’s a wonder the pair of shy mumblers he describes ever get down to it - and the song doesn’t quite convince because Rod obviously is, well, not sexy exactly maybe but sexually confident, and what’s he doing here anyhow? In the video the girl seems to be being chatted up by a TV with Rod’s face on it, and then has sex with a Rod lookalike while being watched by TV Rod: it’s an unintentionally fine illustration of how weirdly intrusive Rod’s shaggy presence in his own song feels.

The awkwardness isn’t confined to the narrative, of course: Rod is one of a number of big 70s figures gritting their teeth and ‘going disco’, and at least the song’s nightlife setting gives him an excuse. The results are musically mixed: that keyboard riff is imperious in its swagger, but the groove is woefully lumpy and the song has chugged into inertia well before it reaches the morning after. It’s a game try at a rock-disco crossover, and deserves more than a cheap laugh - but not much more.

Daniel Clowes gained fame when Ghost World was made into the best comic book movie ever. His work generally focusses on odd outsider characters, alienated and often kind of grotesque, written and drawn with a cool clarity, with a huge enthusiasm for pop culture. I find his work compelling and often shocking (he edges towards horror at times), with genuinely memorable characters. As well as Ghost World, any of his collections (mostly previously serialised in his Eightball comic) are worth reading - I’d particularly recommend David Boring and Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron.

Peter Bagge is an exceptionally funny cartoonist, drawing exaggerated figures and expressions in a bouncy, vicious style. His characters tend to centre on middle-class slacker youth into punk and grunge and the like. The Buddy Bradley stories seems to be almost autobiographical: a young man with no great purpose in life, no hopes, and with rubbish friends. His territory isn’t so far from that of Clowes, but his style is very different. Any of the Buddy Bradley collections are worth having, as is just about anything else, though I’ve not liked his more recent work so much.

Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library comic book is expensive, though beautifully made. The main storyline was collected as Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth, one of the most praised comics ever, and understandably so. Its formal qualities are particularly thrilling, exploiting countless possibilities of the medium that have hardly been seen before, and never handled and combined as well. The story, of a timid middle-aged man, is also rather moving, though working out what is real and what isn’t is not easy.

I suppose I should declare bias when mentioning Eddie Campbell, in that he did a series of stories for my comics years ago. He made a name, in a small way, with his autobiographical Alec stories. His art is rather scratchy, realistic and deceptively sophisticated, largely from a grasp of some very old illustrators and cartoonists. His writing is exceptional, full of insight and gentle humour, and moved on from Alec to stories of the Greek god of wine, Bacchus, in the modern world. He also illustrated From Hell, a Jack The Ripper tale written by Alan Moore, made into a pretty dull movie.

Everything I have mentioned here should be available in comic shops, and you are very likely to find Jimmy Corrigan and Ghost World, maybe more if you’re lucky, in libraries.

“Rat Trap” is billed - in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less - as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it - my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I approached “Rat Trap” cold but with a frisson of definite expectation. Geldof tore up a picture of John’n'Liv on Top Of The Pops, didn’t he? So “Rat Trap” - great title, Sir B - was surely something tight and angry, a sliver of nimble menace in the shadows of 1978’s poptopian monsterhits.

Five minutes later my expectation had turned to shock and laughter. Whatever I’d anticipated it wasn’t this: five woeful minutes of scraggy street-rock pastiche, Born To Run with the melted-down Crystals records replaced by stolen chip fat. Far from the first punk No.1, this risible track sounded like an early warning of one of indie’s less palatable side-effects: a deadly combination of overreach and the feeling of virtuous entitlement that being (relatively) outside the mainstream would lend to mediocre bands.

But once I’d lived with “Rat Trap” a bit, my initial scorn softened - starting with that scouring horn riff, the truest bit of E Street channeling here. After all, I really like “Born To Run” and prime Boss, so why should I care about someone biting it? And honestly, there’s more going on than I thought: Springsteen’s possibilities of escape closed off - the rat trap doesn’t open up again, even when Billy meets Judy. And come to think of it Judy’s dreams aren’t of getting out of town, they revolve around independence via work in the local factory. Yes, “Rat Trap” is laying it on thick, when even the crossing signals are holding The Kids down, but ridicule is a reasonable trade-off for one of the song’s most exciting peaks, the “BILLY TAKE A WALK!” chant.

I still think “Rat Trap” is a mess, overlong and a victim of its own ambition, Geldof trying to cram in every pop trick he’s ever heard of. 4 in 5 times when it comes on I get frustrated with it before I’ve hit halfway: the fifth it catches me in the right mood, and I love its preposterous kitchen sink epic feel - “Hand in her pocket! SHE FINDS FIFTY PEE!!”. It’s still a mile away from my idea of punk, but it’s hard not to feel charitable towards such an eager record.

Of course if Tanya was here she would also be praising the Russians, though I imagine on the spurious grounds that this international incident was sparkeds by the fact that the B-52’s and R.E.M. all hail from Georgia. Her grasp of geo-politics was always shaky.

OLYMPIC MINUTES SO FAR: FIVE

“Summer Nights” brings into focus the differences between pop on stage and pop on single: its structure, building and building and getting more cacophonous and then peaking into a languid fade, is a really unusual one for a pop single, but immediately recognisable as a musical ensemble number. That’s what it was bought as, anyhow - another massive Grease hit, from the other end of the story, and this one a survivor of the original stage version. As such it’s trying to channel the 50s more directly than “You’re The One That I Want”, nodding especially to the call-and-response minidramas of classic Shangri-La’s.

The comparison doesn’t really help “Summer Nights” - the gender comedy here (guys be exaggeratin’!) is pretty crude compared to the wit and spark of, say, ”Give Him A Great Big Kiss”: there’s a whole world of heat implicit in that song’s “close…very, very close”  which Danny and Sandy’s knockabout contrasts can’t get near. But it’s not like 90% of the songs we’ll meet are in that league, and if “Summer Nights” doesn’t really get beyond sexual panto, it delivers that with real aplomb. It’s not just the constant build-up that’s odd for a pop single: the structure is cleverer than most, two separate conflicting narrators making for a curious duet-that-isn’t. (This structure was borrowed last year for Teenagers’ “Homecoming”, which manages to make “Summer Nights” seem as delicate and finely observed as Jane Austen.)

So why a documentary? Well the protagonists are nuts in a particualrly French way, and are extemely entertaining: finding actors this guilelessly charsmatic would be hard. And a biopic version would have to answer questions like “why do it”, which a Gallic shrug answers perfectly well in the film. Elsewhere the film has been described as a heist movie, and it doe sshare some similarities (intricate plot which goes wrong etc). But if it had been film if how it happened, it would be one of the worst heist movies in history - bearing in mind that David Mamet’s Heist already has that sewn up. Because what the film understands is that someone telling you how scary and hard it was to hide under a tarpaulin for two hours is much more interesting than watching someone hide under a tarp for two hours. This is a storytellers film, and only the occasional still photo really takes it beyond the spoken word. But what a story, told well. And, as you see above, occasionally what a photo.