SITTING IN MY MEDIA CENTER: NEW HOPE FOR AMERICA

My distinct thanks to Raheem, a security guard at the Tampa Convention Center, which is the Super Bowl media center. When Raheem saw from my credential that I was 'from' the BBC he got all excited, saying 'I get all my news from the BBC!'. We talked for a while and he reminded me, in the mood delineated in my previous post, that there is still some fertile fields in which the seeds of hope can be sown in my native land. Fitzgerald may have said there are no second acts in American lives, but he was wrong about that (Gatsby notwithstanding) and there have been lots of them for America itself.

SITTING IN MY HOTEL: TV TACKLES REGIME CHANGE

There are two Americas out there: the one that's out there, and the one that's out there on TV, and what is frightening is the sense that, little by little, the latter is taking over the consciousness of the former, especially the former of the younger persuasion (though I am prepared to admit that there is an element of the old fogey about that perception). If I were still prepared to think of the Ed Murrow speech about TV's power to educate, if I wanted to come home this week and get overcome with a sense of at least symbolic hope, fuelled by the image of regime change in Washington, well, in the nightmare world of TV news, nothing has changed.

Because it's when you're watching the news that it becomes most scary, and of course the news is what you watch first when you're in a hotel room. I use the word scary, because it is fuelled by fear; is it really as simple as wanting to keep everyone indoors watching their channel? Local news is the final resting place of hairspray, reporters and 'anchors' with the depth of cutouts reading stuff written by people who frame every story as if it were eviction night on Big Brother.

Then you go to the 'serious' news outlets, and it gets even worse. The decrepitude of the Bush regime, and the attendant success of Jon Stewart on Comedy Central persuaded MSNBC there was a little mileage in a leftish funnyman of their own, former sportscaster Keith Olberman (who proves once again that it's much easier for sports guys to move into 'serious' broadcasting than 'serious' broadcasters to move the other way), but their designated 'left' show, hosted by Rachel Maddow, reminds me of a school of minnows inviting sharks to come over for a fish fry. A sense of fairness and balance is a bad thing to have when you're competing with Fox News.

Amazingly, it seems every time I flick past that channel, the pale balloon of Karl Rove's face, evil Piglet to Bush's evil Pooh, pops up, answering puffball questions from yet another smugly screaming Irish-American. They're oblivious to the eight years of destruction they've left behind around the world, and listening to a steady stream of calls for more deregulation simply boggles the mind. In the 1930s, the failure of laissez faire left its proponents relatively impotent to stop FDR's implanting the New Deal, though their media, papers and radio, certainly tried. But imagine that magnified to the nth degree: a steady stream of political KY being spread over an electorate bending over willingly to find the remote control and turn up the volume.

I mentioned Murrow above, because the movie Good Night And Good Luck was on BBC last week, and watching Bill O'Reilly groping for his pitchfork and Sean Hannity inflating like a blow-fish (fugu you, liberals!) I remembered the thought I'd had when we saw the film for the first time, in Sydney in 2005, It struck me, watching David Straithairn's Ed Murrow battle both Joe McCarthy and William Paley's CBS,that fifty years later, in the space of my lifetime, McCarthy has not just triumphed over Murrow, he has replaced him. We Tailgunner Joe alive today, he would never be elected to the Senate from Wisconsin; he'd be broadcasting on Fox News, scheduled between O'Reilly and Hannity, interviewing Karl Rove, being taken seriously by the Beltway mob, and being parodied on Comedy Central for us cognoscenti to laugh about. In my childhood, such figures existed: I remember watching Joe Pyne or Alan Burke, but they were relegated to the lunatic fringes of entertainment, like pro wrestling, horror movies, and roller derby, that 13 year olds of all ages loved. Now Rupert Murdoch pays them millions, and makes millions more off their fear-mongering and hate peddling. Money talks, and in this case, bullshit walks, right along side, talking even louder.

WHY I MISSED RICHARD WIDMARK AT THE INAUGURATION

Those touching scenes of Dick Cheney being wheeled out for the inauguration, trying to look sympathetic (see left) reminded me a bit of Limas Sweed of the Steelers faking an injury Sunday after he dropped a sure touchdown pass that was right in his hands. I mean, moving boxes out of your office puts you in a wheelchair? All he needed was a neck brace and a personal-injury lawyer, and he could've been Zero Mostel in The Hot Rock. What was in those boxes anyway, waterboards and car batteries? What's left of the federal reserve? Seriously, though, my first sympathetic thought upon seeing the now-disabled soon-to-be former Veep was, where's Tommy Udo when you really need him?

QUOTH THE RAVENS 'NEVERMORE': The Legendary Five NFL Highlights Poem Revived For Poe's Bicentennial

Monday January 19th was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, which was probably a lucky break for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who on Sunday defeated the only football team named after a Poe Poem, the Baltimore Ravens, 23-14 to advance to the Super Bowl against another bird-mascotted club, the Arizona Cardinals.

But with the score 15-14 and the Ravens threatening a comeback, I kept looking at my watch and doing the five-hour math, to see if perhaps we were edging toward midnight, at which point the powerful Poe juju might kick in. Note that only in the NFL would the game played in the northeast in January start at 7:30pm local, while the one played under cover in Arizona started at noon.

Anyway, Troy Polamalu, who could've probably found a part in a Poe story (if not a Melville South Seas novel) had he lived 200 years ago, put an end to the Ravens' dreams. But all through the season, I had been commenting about how Baltimore, and their rookie quarterback Joe Flacco, reminded me of the 2000 Ravens, who won Super Bowl 35 in January 2001 over the New York (sic) Giants, using their 'Angie Harmon' strategy (strip Jason Sehorn naked with Brandon Stokeley's fly patterns).

That Ravens team, like this one, had qualified for the playoffs as a wild card, and had endured a streak of five games earlier in the season without scoring a touchdown on offense (they won two of the five).

The fifth game of the streak came against the Steelers that year, as Trent Dilfer took over from Tony Banks as the quarterback, but Pittsburgh managed a 9-6 win. I was scripting the highlights for our Monday Night show on Five, and watching Matt Stover (who's still kicking for them) hit his second field goal, 'nevermore' sprang to mind, and I decided that instead of narrating the highlights I would adapt Poe's poem and make it fit whatever length the edit was in the ten minutes or so I had to write it.

Courtesy of a reprint which appears in the Facebook Mike Carlson Appreciation Society site, here's the script again. Happy birthday EAP, and it's a shame we couldn't do anything with the Ravens' Edgar Jones (he of the bogus roughing the kicker penalty) this year....


Pittsburgh 9 Baltimore 6

Once upon a midnight dreary
As I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious highlight from the day before.

As I nodded, nearly napping,
Suddenly there came a tapping.
Jamal Lewis gently rapping, rapping at the endzone door.

Just a field goal, I muttered.
Only that and nothing more.

Oh how vaguely I remember
It was way back in September
When the stadium scoreboard last put up six points in Baltimore.

And for weeks over and over,
Just the toe of Matthew Stover
Was the story of the offense that, it seemed, would never score.

Quoth the Ravens
‘Nevermore’.

So they called upon Trent Dilfer
But his throws were promptly pilfered
By a Pittsburgh Steeler defense, steel curtained as of yore.

And with Dilfer firing blanks
Just as bad as Tony Banks
They put six points on the scoreboard,
but the Steelers scored three more.

You may question. You may carp.
Get hot quotes from Shannon Sharpe.
But a touchdown’s worth of offense is no closer than before.

And if you wish to know the day
When you’ll hear on the P.A.
That magic incantation “Touchdown Baltimore!”Quoth the Ravens
‘Nevermore’.

DAVID VINE AND THE SKI SUNDAY SECRET

I was saddened by the death of David Vine, who was the longtime host of snooker, popping up when I desperately was looking for something to watch late at night. But I remember him best as the presenter of BBC's Ski Sunday. I used to watch them put the show together at some of the events I would do for ABC Sports in the 1980s, and I always got a kick out of seeing the finished product when I was back home in London.

That was because of David's knowing commentary, always added after the programme had been edited together. Remember, this was in the days before continuous splits on screen, but David would always be able to 'sense' that someone was having a 'fast' run: and that person would inevitably wind up one hundredth of a second faster than the fastest down the hill thus far.

The top skiers always go down the hill first, usually the first 15. So you knew that, if the BBC were showing someone who started 26th, or 39th, or 55th, there was a reason. Sort of like when I do the football highlights, and we show a kickoff, you know there's either a great return or a turnover. Except those are acknowledged as highlights.

If, when the coverage jumped from skier 15 to skier 26, and David said 'so and so hasn't had a great season thus far, but I have the feeling he's got a fast race in him today' you knew he would fly down the slope and wind up in (or near) the top three. Then when it jumped from number 26 to number 55, and David said, 'he's had a lot of trouble with this hill in practice' you called in the family to watch the inevitable crash.

Those were the glory days of TV sport, when mainstream channels chased the best events in all kinds of sports, all over the world, rather than throwing all their money at the biggest domestic ones, and relegating the rest to niche channels and occasional Olympics. There were great broadcasters with the knack for translating these sports to general audiences, and David was one of them. Even if the delay to Sundays gave him some help! He'll be missed.

LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE: HOLIDAY FUN FROM THE UK IN ENGLAND

One thing I forgot to do over Christmas was add another incident to my catalogue of what makes living in Britain so great. In the run-up to the holiday, of course, the queues at the Post Office grow to mosntrous sizes, which makes them even more attractive to the English to join in, just for the fun of it. I can't believe that everyone in the queue ahead me is someone who has never posted a letter before, but sometimes it seems that way. For example, this year I got into a 14 person queue, with two clerks at their windows. About 15 minutes later I was first in the queue, with a woman filling out a form, and needing help line by line, at one window, and a gentleman with a bag of Christmas cards at the other.

He pulled one small stack from his bag, took the top one off, and said 'France, please'. The stamp came, he stuck it on, took the next card: 'South Africa, please'. Then 'Australia', 'Holland', ooh another 'France', 'Ireland'...to which the clerk asked 'northern or southern Ireland...'ooh another France' and so on. At no point did it occur to the clerk, much less to him, to actually sort the cards and ask for the necessary stamps all at once. The idea that France and Holland might require the same postage might have blown either of their minds.

It's like it the old days before all the bar staff was foreign, when you were waiting at the crowded bar in a pub, or even worse, during the interval at the theatre. The person ahead of you asks for 'two pints of lager'. The English barman or maid returns with the two pints, asks, will there be anything else, and the person says,'a pint of bitter'. The process repeats, with the person asking for six more drinks, one by one before ending with a large vodka and orange juice with ice and lemon please'. The English barman would come back with the screwdriver, then say, 'anything else' go fetch the crisps, peanuts or whatever, and then try desperately to reconstitute the order in his/her head to ask for money. Finally, after waiting through all this, and somehow maintaining your status as next-to-be-served in the face of haughty elbows and waving twenty-pound notes, bar person approaches you.

Thinking you are being kinder to them, as well as saving time, you say 'two pints of bitter, a pint of lager, half a shandy, a large whiskey, and a pint of Guiness please'. The bar person draws the two pints of bitter, comes back, puts them down and says, 'what was the rest?' You repeat the order, he/she comes back with the shandy and says 'was that a bitter or a lager?' The lager arrives, then 'was there anything else?' And only after fetching the whiskey, which has to be poured through a British automatic measuring system, twice, to ensure no one gets a drop more than the legal minimum, does he/she start the Guiness, which of course takes three times as long as anything else to pour.

Now at this point there are two paths we can take, depending on how English the server actually is. The purist will simply hover lovingly over the Guiness, not serving any of the other people frantically trying to get attention (not to mention drinks), nor taking your payment, but just gazing admiringly at the slowness with which the dark liquid eases its way into the glass. But the slightly more active, or more xenophobic, Englisher will see this as an opportunity to leave you, and the Guiness, hanging, while serving other people. Eventually,having stopped the tap to let the Guiness settle, coming back to top it off, then going away again before delivering it, and taking your money, then finishing off the next customer before returning with your change.

You could try saying 'I'm in a hurry, I've got Christmas cards to post' but it wouldn't have done any good.