Trophy Attitudes: A World Cup Post-Mortem

Fervent nationalism, raging intolerance, and a herd mentality – many of you take it as red that you see more of this during the World Cup than normal, and you dread it. I dread it too. However, while you attribute this unholy trinity to that ephemeral entity known as “the fans”, my stomach turns with the knowledge that in contrast to their critics, the support is a benign and good natured entity that gently goes about its unpretentious business, draping goodwill over the country like a soft layer of thought woven silk.

Now England have been knocked out of the competition and that goodwill has been torn up, this is a good time for a post-mortem. We can leave the fans out of it, because they’ve done their part. But what did you do?

For the sake of this investigation we’ll just refer to those backing the team as “England fans”. It’s a meaningless term – they’re no more an amorphous mass than fans of Columbo or card players, but if we’re going to talk about hatred, we must first identify an enemy. After all, it wouldn’t do for people who imagine themselves to be high minded to see supporters as anything other than pack animals and simpletons with a narrow conception of life, would it? If we supposed, and please stick with it, because some of this is going to read like the ramblings of a lunatic, that fans are a broad church of individuals drawn from all walks of life who are united behind a common and perfectly honourable purpose – to take pride in one’s country with the team as a proxy, then it would be harder to caricature them. But this is the game played every four years – the one that isn’t televised, amongst those who form their own tribe, and it’s one built on instincts that are entirely contrary to the optimistic and good-natured ones previously espoused.

Football, you might think, is a hard thing to hate. How could anyone form a strong reaction against a harmless ball game which, when played well, can be very exciting and brings a great deal of pleasure to a lot of people? It’s not much of a stretch to realise that those who “hate” football, don’t – rather they hate the type of people they associate with it and the culture that’s built around it. They are excluded from this culture and have been ever since they were tadpoles. They might be the kid who was always the last to be picked for the playtime match. They never quite got over being so terrible at something so simple and worse, something that came easily to kids with less intellectual capability. They may even have been an uneasy sense of inferiority – a runt of the litter complex, whereby the Alphas with their greater fitness and physical dexterity, did their thing while the awkward ganglinoid who doesn’t like to run or do anything particularly assertive, had to stand by and endure the humiliation of being hopeless. Still, they could always make some money doing homework for stronger kids while the footballers easily bonded elsewhere, but they were never as respected as Ben Delap, who could head it home from 15 yards. Ben was an accomplished artist too but there was no sense in thinking too hard about that, else the myth of him and his gang being base might not hold up.

What about the girls you say? They don’t like football, do they? They’re excluded, surely? Well possibly, but unlike their male counterparts that injustice never burrows into their ego. They’re female, so in this sphere, they were never competing and so they lose nothing by not being able to do it. Still, you know that their Dads might love it or maybe their boyfriend and later, husband, and that consequently, that’s their way in. Nothing staked, nothing lost and better yet,  no pressure either way.

I’ll let you into a little secret. Those that feel that sense of exclusion, for whatever reason, resent it and never fully get over it. They bond with the other awkward kids – the ones that couldn’t square the circle of their temperament with the thrill of the crowd, and the rejected band together and convince themselves that they’re superior, despite this inability to form simple social connections. If you run a magazine and it only sells 700 copies a year, no matter, as long as it’s the right 700 people. The 230,000 who read Heat can go fuck themselves, right?

In adulthood this resentment manifests itself as snobbery. Football fans are base and the importance they attach to something the excluded have written off as degenerate and senseless, causes enough eye rolling to transport a man from Edinburgh to Brighton, if only he could get these people to lie on the ground with their heads aligned and position his skates in line with the tops of their faces.

It’s in this atmosphere of loathing that the weedy child who couldn’t make friends easily because he couldn’t participate in the games that bonded the other kids, and who now is a rotund adult who can’t bear the company of anyone who doesn’t resemble himself, drops the veil of tolerance and high-mindedness which they wear all year round, reaching for lazy stereotypes.

These spacks, so goes the thinking, these grotesque shuntsacks with their sense of camaraderie, their imbecilic chanting and their repository of pointless knowledge, laud it over everyone else and never seem to shut up. How dare the mindless be so vocal…and visible! Oh the bollocks they talk, droning on about “the beautiful game” and wallowing in their simplistic conception of nationhood, fuelled of course, by RACISM.

In contrast, the cultured individual whose tastes and interests may seem equally ridiculous to others, is a more sophisticated entity. He or she reads a serious newspaper, and although they seldom question what they’re told in it, because they trust the source to be authoritative as it reflects their preoccupations (a little like the assumption they make about the proles and their tabloids but we won’t get into that), they nevertheless consider themselves blessed with a broad and challenging worldview. How different from those monkeys that gather to cheer on Rooney and Lampard.

They’re interested in other cultural artefacts, select to be sure, but that’s healthy because it reinforces the feeling of exclusivity and belonging to a intellectual elite; the myth that powers their worldview. In fact, the fewer people who know about the stuff they like, the better,  after all, wouldn’t an imaginary hoard like the “England fans” just debase what they enjoy with their sheer numbers and their appalling vulgarity?

So to recap the logic goes:

National pride = white working class racism

Interest in football = opium for simpletons

Disproportionate importance placed on the games in the media = capitulation to base stupidity and the herd mentality

Self-exclusion from all of this = elevated understanding.

Ah, you say, but what about the hooligans, Ed? Doesn’t that prove that what you’re saying is just a lot of wishy-washy liberal bollocks? Well, no, because although I’ve sat in a pub with them during Euro 2000, listening to chants of “No surrender to the I.R.A” during an England/Germany game, the more excitable contingent who might lapse into racism and mindless violence are, and have always been, a minority. It suites those with shares in stereotypes to assume otherwise.

Those that are busy caricaturing the English football fan as a slack jawed, chain swinging, beer soaked cretin, aren’t alone. The bad news for the English caricaturist is that they are themselves being caricatured because of their very nationhood. This is where we turn to the other problem afflicting the country’s world cup conversation, bigotry masquerading as intellectualism.

A few weeks ago, it was my misfortune to be stuck on Facebook during a slow afternoon in which I became involved in an extraordinary argument about English national identity. One of my Facebookers, of Scottish origin, was aghast at David Cameron’s decision to hoist the England flag during the competition. Wasn’t this putting a tank with a St. George’s Cross painted on it on to the lawn of ordinary Scots? Did this not set a dangerous precedent which may, if left unchecked, bring about the collapse of the union and represent a final insult to England’s long suffering and subordinated union partners? Well no, I thought, it didn’t. I imagined it to be harmless and failed to see why the entire UK couldn’t just back the only competing home nation. After all, what was the reason not to? I live my life devoid of preoccupations relative to race or nation, so I’m the wrong(?) person to ask. But put that question to any individual who refracts their view of the country through a prism of oppression and victimhood, and you’re inviting a row. There is no benign manifestation of English nationhood, not when certain eyes are watching, and I’d inadvertently pissed into those eyes.

Worst of those that contributed to the conversation, with their prejudices thinly cloaked (and sometimes naked), was an academic whom we’ll call Priyamvada Gopal (Dr if you don’t mind), because that’s her name, whom I later discovered taught at Cambridge. This may inadvertently explain why they’re failing to top Oxford in the league tables. Priyamvada, whose underlying bigotry may shock Guardian readers, who might fallaciously imagine that her inclusion as an occasional contributor marks her out as a tolerant, informed liberal, saw the entire flag incident as another aftershock from England’s imperial past. The English were always confusing England with the UK, she thought, and what an ignorant, hateful bunch we were. Gopal’s Englishmen and women were agog at the suggestion that we may not be as superior as she imagined we thought we were, and naturally, they were as dismissive of the Scottish and the Welsh as is imagined amongst sections of both populations who despise the English, despite their predilection for patiently absorbing all the insecurities and envy projected onto them. You might think that being hated based on nothing but your country of origin and assuming that such bigotry is naturally reciprocated is tantamount to insulting the same group of people twice.

Even if you don’t, I do.

Dr Gopal, who’d studied under Benedict Anderson and had read his book on Imagined Communities some one million times, got in a frightful tizz, as she wilfully and erroneously conflated English pride with symptoms of schizophrenia within the national psyche. As the conversation got uglier, so too did her propensity to use stereotypes as a crutch, as well as what appeared to be her pet obsessions relating to identity politics and ethnicity. “You’re quite a mild-mannered jolly old chap at the end of the day. I love how the English think that criticism of their superiority amounts to ‘racism’. Yes, we all know white men are the new oppressed minority” she wrote, confusing me with a character from a P.G Wodehouse novel, and responding to the suggestion that caricaturing the English as a nation of arrogant racists, attributes you may have attached to the humble England fan, constituted bigotry. The eagle eyed amongst you will notice an unquestioned assumption in her assertion that the English see themselves as superior, as well the projection of her feeling that she represents a repressed minority onto me (though with some sarcasm). You, dear reader, can take whatever you like from this. What I took from it was the suggestion that as a white Englishman, I couldn’t legitimately cry “racist” even if I was on the receiving end of it. Prejudice, though delicately dressed in the finest language, is still prejudice.

Having noted a colonial obsession running through three Facebook comments, it was no surprise to discover that Dr Gopal taught colonial and post-colonial studies. Depressed, I imagined her to be the type of academic who’d been fully institutionalised, having never ventured out into the world of full-blooded human interaction. You’ll know that the academic fraternity is broadly divided into two groups, those recruited from without; professionals attached to vocational courses for example, and those grown within, and they’re usually an awkward and slightly eccentric bunch with an enfeebled grip on reality. They’ve spent far too much time with their peers and too little with the rest of us. When your world is a series of theoretical abstractions and seminars in which you discuss abstractions, a sober assessment of the world based on interactions with a wide range of people is the casualty. Gopal needed to go back to school on the England of 2010, but I felt that her eyes and ears wouldn’t be enough, she’d need a textbook on the subject. Priyamvada if you’re reading, please go away, but also don’t worry, I’m writing that book on the weekends and you’re top of my list for a free copy.

So the World Cup has been quite illuminating and for reasons which have nothing to do with football. As an event it has an extraordinary capability, the social equivalent of one of those airport body scanners, to lay bare the dark underside of those who have no part to play in the ensuing celebratory atmosphere. Bigotry, ignorance, the joining of individuals who share a base mentality; all of this occurs, and while it does so the football fans who’ve gathered to enjoy the kick-about get together at the pub or in front of the living room T.V and get on with enjoying the game, blissfully unaware.

Paradoxica: An open letter to Steven Moffat

Dear Steven,

This wasn’t an easy letter to write. First and foremost you need to understand that it should be impossible for me to be communicating with you now.

One hour ago I was settling down for the evening, having just enjoyed the final episode of your very fine Doctor Who series. I felt like a drink, but have a fear of large measures, so I’m forced to pour ginger wine into a series of six thimbles and consume it that way; the precision in pouring as well as the journey to Charlton’s Makro superstore to purchase the thimbles, relaxes me. I can never drink from the same one twice. So there I was, sipping my sips and chatting to a neighbour who was kindly injecting heroin into the large vein that threads through my Whitfield, when we were disturbed by a rat-a-tat-tat on the ol’ wooden wedge. Mary K, which I imagine to be her name, though I care a lot less than she thinks, answered the knock and a group of men entered the room. They ordered Mary K to leave, which she did, and then put a sack over my head. I felt myself manipulated with fingers and my limbs bound with something soft; it might have been underwear. I was then lifted into the air, carried some distance, two, maybe three minutes, and then thrown into some kind of chamber with poor acoustics.

I was frightened Steven, really scared. My Uncle Culver threatened to buy me a copy of Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, and that turned my blood to tar, but this upset was a different order of magnitude. “Please let me go,” I said. “I’m probably more interesting than you and on balance I’m bound to make a fuller and more worthwhile contribution to society, think about your civic duty,” but all they’d say was “quiet you cunt” and “say another word which we can’t understand and I’ll fucking kill you.” This went on for the equivalent of three paragraphs which I’ve cut for space.

Suddenly I heard a commotion, shouting, shoving, I was kicked in the knees, and then thuds all around my face. The sack was pulled off my head. A man whom I’d never seen, wearing one of those novelty “There’s always time for Tea” T-shirts, stood there. My kidnappers were dead. He’d mashed their heads with half a brick in a stocking. I asked him how he’d found me and do you know what he said? He told me that I’d told him where I’d be. A version of me, apparently from the future, had visited him the previous evening and revealed the details of the kidnap, including the location of the van in which I now sat, the number of kidnappers and their allergies to ceramics and silk. How, I asked, did I originally escape from my captivity in order to impart this information to him? He didn’t know. I have to confess, I couldn’t fathom it. I’d need to have escaped without help, or without this young man’s help in order to travel back in time in the first place, surely? It was then he said, and I stress this was him and not me,

“Hey, this is just like tonight’s Doctor Who (My italics), did you see it? I don’t know how The Doctor got out of that one either.”

So that’s why I’m writing to you, Steven, because I want to know. I should say that I’ve enjoyed this series very much. I mean, you’re a talented writer and in the 11^th Doctor and Amy, you’ve created two wonderful characters, two and a third if you count Rory. It wasn’t perfect, anyone could have hired Richard Curtis, I mean, we’ve all done it and it would have been nice to have had some story time between episodes, because that’s the bread and butter of the fan fiction community, but overall, you made good, camp free choices. I enjoyed the wit you’ve reintroduced to the series, the more sober characterisation and the merciful cull of pop culture references. Having The Doctor ignorant of the British zeitgeist and preoccupations of the younger audience, rather than plugged into them, was a welcome side effect of his regeneration.

Any fool, even me, could note and appreciate the degree of planning that went into the Pandorica story. It certainly felt as though it had more weight than Mr Davis’ Bad Wolf arc or his season long Torchwood promotion. You crafted a fine fairytale Steven, and because it’s a fairytale, one can appreciate magical abstractions used as save-the-day devices, like reincarnating The Doctor using the power of a little girl’s memory for example. But the Doctor’s escape from the Pandorica bothered me. My kidnap is a difficult memory, I mean, it’s only an hour old, but this is nearly 4 hours old and I still haven’t got over it.

Attempting to explain the paradox in diagrammatic form was a waste of time

I have no grounding in the Sciences, Steven, not a morsel. Until last Wednesday I thought a test tube was a receptacle for holding substances to ensure they weren’t too heavy and liable to cause cracking, y’know, before the real glassware was taken out. I consulted wikipedia about time paradoxes, because I understand that wikipedia pages are edited by scholars and self-certified geniuses. Unfortunately my three minutes of research brought me no closer to an understanding of how The Doctor could escape from the Pandorica without first escaping from the Pandorica.

In your version of events, which I’ve played in my mind many times, The Doctor’s future self appears and gives RoboRory his sonic screwdriver with instructions to use it in order to open the box and allow his younger self to escape. But how could The Doctor be free to do this, unless he had, first, been released without temporal intervention? I was confused by this, so I asked some experts, namely my friend Scott who is a Doctor Who geek, the cast of Twitter and Terry, the man who rescued me from my kidnappers. Terry had no idea, Twitter told me to go fuck myself and Scott, who doesn’t like to think badly of you, because you create something he loves, did his best, referring to every “moment in time occurring at once” and being possible to manipulate. The Doctor was “a higher being” and could “bend reality to his will”. Yes, I said, but surely, even if time wasn’t linear as we humans supposed and event can proceed cause, which we all accept, because we love the show, it did at least proceed in a linear fashion for The Doctor. If I jump around in time, my own sequence of events occurs one after the other, surely? Ah, Scott said, but what about alternate timelines? I liked this idea but then I felt I had to say that we could only go with what we saw on screen or clues you gave us, and there was no suggestion that The Doctor had appeared from an alternate universe to help himself. Did you cut that bit out for time? Pun intended.

Then, out of the blue, Scott said this; “once a living being leaves their designated place in time they are essentially elevated to an alternative plane of existence. That’s how The Doctor can appear in two places at once and facilitate his own escape”. Now I like this, even if I don’t understand it. But I hope you can see what you’ve done here. You’ve reduced poor Scott to making some pretty wild assumptions about the story’s “meta-narrative”, whatever that may be, in order to plug the gaps in your script’s internal logic. When viewers have to speculate about entire lines of action which they cannot see and which have no basis in the detail contained within the transmitted episode, then something has gone wrong…Christopher Eccleston wrong.

I suppose what irritates me Steven, if I can call you Steven, is that this is one of those get outs, of the deus ex machina variety, that may inadvertently accelerate Mr Pratchett’s mental deterioration. I’m annoyed with you because I imagined, when you were at home watching your predecessor’s Who parodies being ejaculated across the Saturday night schedule, that you’d be rolling your eyes with the rest of us with each back of a stamp contrivance. Am I to now infer that you were applauding?

I’m not an expert on writing for the screen you understand, I wrote a screenplay called Gore Whores for fuck’s sake, but I couldn’t escape the conclusion that this was a one scene fix opportunity. Do you remember that bit in Superman II where Lex puts down the green crystal, rather than replacing it, so later when the fortress of solitude is destroyed, the green shard is not, and Clarke has a means to restore his power later on? Or how about that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy looks at that old book and sees the Hebrews shielding their eyes from the power emanating from the Ark, so later, when the Nazis open the thing and look into it, he knows not to and saves his life. If you take those scenes out, you’ve got a situation where Clarke Kent can reverse his human transformation using force of will alone and Indy just happens to have a brainwave which is correct, despite having no logical basis on which to base his judgement.

I suggest that the scene you wanted was one in which The Doctor and his sonic screwdriver became separated, possibly in an earlier tussle. Confiscated by a Roman perhaps? That would have allowed Rory to get his hands on it, and he’d have good reason to want to free The Doctor would he not? After all he’d just been forced to kill his girlfriend. My girlfriend. The nation’s girlfriend. That would be it. As it stands you’ve got a situation where The Doctor could have no warning of his imprisonment because he didn’t believe in the Pandorica, he thought it was a work of fiction. It was designed to exclude him from everything – time, space, any external force – the prison of prisons. So fudging his escape and allowing him to get out of it in just 5 minutes undermines that build up a touch, makes a mockery of the Axis of Alien’s plan and means that the resolution for the entire series is based on an inciting incident which, and forgive me for this Steven because I love you, looks a mite contrived.

Terry’s left now, so he’s out of it but Scott, because he wants to believe you didn’t write yourself into a corner, has suggested that The Doctor can read the universe. But if that were true, and you and I Steven, you and I know it isn’t, then he’d always know what was coming wouldn’t he? They’d be no jeopardy, no challenge, and the beauty of your story was that for the first time in a long time The Doctor wasn’t a know it all; he didn’t know what to expect.

We’ll leave it at that I think. Just to say that I’m looking forward to your Christmas episode, even if it is the Cleopatra on the space Orient Express thing you mentioned at the end of tonight’s show. I hope it contains some further explanations about the events in The Big Bang – a scene where The Doctor explains how he circumvented what appears to be a paradox. It’d be good for Rory and Amy to find out I think, and we could listen in.

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed