Gordon in the morning: Topical Olympic observation

To be fair to Tom Meighan, the Spice Girls part of the Olympics closing ceremony was pretty grim, but that was a while ago now:

“We were on tour during the Olympics but I saw some bits on telly. There were some horrifying bits, like The Spice Girls. That really didn’t do the place justice.

“That was the most horrifying bit. It was just horrible.

I think this makes Tom the first person to suggest that the Opening and Closing Ceremonies were somehow one horror after another.

But why is he talking about last summer right now? Oh, Kasabian have a booking:

“We’ll be the first band to play the park, so it’s great.”

There's your Olympic legacy for you. Right there.

Gordon in the morning: Bradley Wiggins keeps it real

Bradley Wiggins is raging that some of his Olympic chums are using their success to build careers. Apparently it's NOT RIGHT:

The cycling legend has not been enjoying the procession of Team GB Olympic heroes basking in the glory of the chat show circuit.

Wiggo said: “I’ve got a good management team who weren’t flogging me to death the moment the Olympics were over.
“So I didn’t go on Jonathan Ross or Chatty Man, because it’s not what it’s ever been about.”

Oddly, I didn't see this attitude in his book, A Man Who Rode A Bike Quickly, which was serialised in The Guardian over what felt like months.

It's also a bit strange that Wiggins complaints about his colleagues getting overexposed on the showbiz circuit appears as, er, the lead story on the showbiz pages of the Sun. How did that happen, eh?

Wiggo made the comments promoting A Year In Yellow — an upcoming Sky documentary screening next week which follows his whirlwind 12 months.

And even Gordon can see that Wiggins might be pushing it a bit:

One gig he did sign up for was hosting duties on BBC2’s Never Mind The Buzzcocks. But the music fanatic had to pull out — after he was knocked off his bike last week.

Yeah - going on Jonathan Ross is somehow not what it's about. But Buzzcocks and a date with Paul Weller? That's exactly what Pheidippides was hoping for.

Gordon in the morning: That's enough Ed

There's a really strange bit leading off Bizarre this morning, built around a letter Nick Mason has written defending the Ed Sheeran Floyd cover at the Olympic Closing Ceremony.

Gordon thinks this is one in the eye for Floyd fans who were unimpressed:

So-called Floyd fans had even turned on Ed’s teenage fans, who thought he was playing a new song at the event.

But all the abuse looks ridiculous now that the man himself has given Ed a pat on the back for his efforts on the prog-rockers’ hit Wish You Were Here. The drummer, who performed the song with Ed, Mike Rutherford from Genesis and Richard Jones of The Feeling, has sent the Suffolk star a life-affirming letter.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/4493570/Pink-Floyds-Nick-Mason-defends-Ed-Sheeran-after-fans-confuse-his-cover-of-Wish-You-Were-Here-as-a-new-song-from-singer.html#ixzz23t9dCb3x

In Gordon's mind, then, there are Pink Floyd fans who thought that Mason playing the song onstage, with Sheeran, wasn't any sign that he was happy for it to happen, but will accept it now there's a signed document.

Smart also has a bemusing reference to Mother Teresa:

IF Mother Teresa had been on Twitter, some halfwit would give her a hard time about having crap sandals.

So he appears to be comparing 'doing a cover song badly' with 'working tirelessly in the slums of Calcutta with the poor'; and, to be honest, I think most people would have been too busy asking the nun why she forced people to convert to Catholicism before helping them rather than worrying about sandals.

Perhaps most befuddling of all, though, is this:

Let's not even bother with the misspelling of "no" - so many people from Wapping are spending so much time with police and solicitors these days it's a miracle there's anyone left around to do any publishing at all - and just try and work out what the headline is supposed to mean. Isn't the point of the story that Mason hopes Sheeran fans will investigate the Floyd back catalogue, which would surely mean that we do need education? Or is ed-ucation meant to be taking a lesson from Ed? The pun would work, but would be meaningless.

It's all rather strange. But I bet Mother Theresa would be able to make sense of it all.

Gordon in the morning: Noel Gallagher is kind of a dick

Obviously, we'd all have been a lot happier if Captain Beaky And The Beady Eyes hadn't turned up to do an Oasis cover in the middle of the Olympic Closing Ceremony, but given it was going to happen anyway, Noel Gallagher was kind of a dick about the whole thing. Gordon's copied down the story from Danny Wallace's XFM show:

The former Oasis star only gave his blessing for a re-worked version of Wonderwall to be included at 10pm on the Friday night before the big London gig on Sunday.
[...]
[Noel said] “I took it to Friday night at 10pm before I said yes and they were s******* it. Not Beady Eye but the organisers.”

Ha ha, that will have shown Liam, erm, something, right? Never mind it's dicking round the hundreds of people trying to pull together the show. Do they give hollow gold medals for pyrrhic victories?

We are now, by the way, firmly in the bit where Noel is desperately trying to stress that he was asked, you know, but turned it down:

Noel said: “I asked who else is playing and they said, ‘I can’t tell you. You’ve got to sign a confidentiality agreement’. It’s like it’s the Iran nuclear programme or something.

Noel struggling with the concept of surprise a little, there.

The latest reason for not bothering is they wanted him to mime, apparently:

“But if you’re in a stadium with 80,000 people and you’re pretending... I said I could play live and one of the organisers said, ‘It’s a big gig’ and I was like, ‘Really? I do this for a living’.

Most of the millions who watched the event will never hear Noel's wheezy "yeah, they wanted me to do it, but I didn't" pleading, you know.

George Michael: Olympic song was a treat

You know when George Michael went on the Closing Ceremony and did that dirgey new thing that's supposed to be his new single, when even Liam Gallagher swallowed it and just did the hits?

It turns out playing a song that is so anonymous is could actually be hacking the US Justice Department website right now was some sort of generous gesture.

E! has the explanation:

"Had a GREAT time at the closing! I hope you are not bothered by the press reports of my scandalous 'promotion' !!!" he tweeted.

Michael later added, "Please join me in telling them to f--k off! It was my one chance on tv to thank you all for your loyalty and prayers, and I took it. And I don't regret it."

It's nice that Michael wanted to thank people for their loyalty, although if he really wanted to thank his fans, he could have played a song that they wanted to hear. Okay, the chances of him doing Wham! Rap as a thank you might have been slim - that'd be the sort of thanks appropriate if someone had donated you a kidney or something - but, c'mon, how about Everything She Wants?

There's something a bit self-aware, I suppose, at Michael thinking he might not find himself on TV again any time soon. Doesn't really balance out the belief that there's a subset of The Largest TV Audience For Years that is People Who Are Loyal To George Michael to make that the right platform, mind.

Hope they save the kittens from dying before I get old

As the Olympic closing ceremony limped on, NBC got bored and shoved on a comedy about sick and injured animals instead:

Now NBC is trying to explain its actions. An NBC spokesperson announced today that “As we previously announced, a special commercial free preview of ‘Animal Practice’ was scheduled towards the end of last night’s broadcast of the Olympics Closing Ceremony. Prior to the break, viewers were informed that the final act and wrap up of the Closing Ceremony would follow later that evening. “

To be fair, I suspect there must have been a few people at the BBC wondering if they should have just lobbed out Live At The Apollo in the slot it had been scheduled for...

The closing ceremony: London Pride has been force-fed down to us

I keep thinking 'bits of that weren't so bad, were they?'. And then I remember Russell Brand bellowing The Beatles through a megaphone.

The most successful bit was the Slim-J-Tempah sequence, which bubbled with energy, and was stuffed with shots of athletes bouncing about and singing along. Maybe it was a bit T4 On The Beach, but better that than the large swathes of a 1984 Radio One Roadshow beamed from a sleet-skittered Grimsby that made much of the rest of the event. It felt like the party the thing was supposed to be.

But what of the rest? Muse finally disappearing behind the self-pardoy horizon was only to be expected; the Kaiser Chiefs turning up in 2012 was a bit of a surprise. If the deal was George Michael had to do the new single to be persuaded to turn up, he should have been asked to stay at home.

Emeli Sande has been rather over-promoted: she can carry a tune, but not an entire ceremony. That Kate Bush was only on tape was a bit of a disappointment.

And The Spice Girls getting together for what felt like the first time in a couple of weeks wasn't the treat it was meant to be - the slow trundling of taxis for their entry seemed to last longer than the two half-songs they trotted out.

The London theme was quite weak - a couple of cars made out of newspaper, a Michael Caine voiceover and a bit of Only Fools And Horses. Why that one TV series? Why not, say, Barbara Windsor ringing a bell crying 'that's yer lot, ain't you got 'omes to go to?'; or Cumberbutch-as-Sherlock; or Grace Brothers; or Howman and Davidson finally doing a Babes In The Wood/Up The Elephant And Round The Castle crossover. Maybe not the last one.

Hang about, I've just remembered Churchill popping out of the Big Ben bell tower like a grumpy jack-in-the-box. Oh, god.

On Twitter, there were some voices going 'why are people being cynical? Can't we be like we've been for the last fortnight?'

But that's the point. If there's a point to the Olympics, it's about celebrating the extraordinary and superlative. If you applaud Mo Farah's triumph in the same way you applaud whoever went 'we could get some supermodels in and - hey, didn't Derek Bowie do a song about Fashion?', then you're really just watering down praise for Farah.

Not everyone at the Olympics gets a gold medal; in fact, that's the kind of point. Doing a closing ceremony is always going to be a thankless task - who wants to be the guy ushering in the hangover? - and coming in the wake of the opening extravanganza set the bar at a pole-vault height for a high-jump event. But nobody made anyone start a parade of plodding would-be secular hymns. No event will thrive when it drags on the film of Lennon doing Imagine, the national anthem of the Independent State Of Hypocrisy.

There were bits that were pretty good - the phoenix; the all-too-brief visit of The Pet Shop Boys. There was an exciting one hour event struggling to fight out of a three hour one.

But Russell Brand came on, singing through a megaphone.

Gordon in the morning: Making the Opening Ceremony worse after the event

Here's a surprise: Gordon Smart had Kasabian on his XFM show yesterday. Yes, whoever would have thought, eh?

And Kasabian are upset they weren't part of the Olympic opening ceremony:

Speaking on my Xfm show, Serge said: “Danny, what were you thinking? We’ve got a song called Fire and there’s a massive cauldron being set alight – it would have been perfect. I’ve enjoyed every second of the Olympics though, even the archery."

Given how... shall we say inclusive?... the closing ceremony was, I guess the surprise is that they didn't join the massive plodathon there.

Cameron shouldn't have been on Chris Evans

Apparently, David Cameron was down the Olympic Park on Thursday. Of course he was; he hasn't done a hand's turn for the last fortnight, instead choosing to try and photobomb the Olympics in a scratchy Team GB vest, clutching a Wenlock.

This time, though, he spent twenty minutes chuntering on on the Chris Evans show.

We know how much the Tories hate any hint of the bias at the BBC, and yet they seem surprisingly relaxed about this, despite it being a breach of guidelines. MediaGuardian explains:

The BBC has strict guidelines governing the appearance of politicians on non-news programmes, which require senior executive approval, as well as topical issues that are the subject of public debate.

Such is the level of sensitivity over the interview that the BBC is believed to have discussed internally whether to remove it from the iPlayer. It remained available at the time of publication.

"Nobody knew anything until it was too late to do anything about it. It was a huge cock-up," said one BBC insider.

Cameron was so desperate to please he even started to act like he was part of Steve Wright's posse:

Cameron read out a number of text messages from listeners in the "listener breaking news" section of the show, which included "I let my new chickens out this morning" and "On my way to pick up my new Mini".

The prime minister commented: "That's buying British, I approve of that."

Mini is a German company, Prime Minister. Remember, Thatcher flogged off most of our car industry to the private sector, Dave?

Perhaps it wouldn't have been such a disaster if Chris Evans had been anything other than a fawning patsy:

Evans, who introduced Cameron as the "prime minister of Great Britain, the ultimate Team GB", read out the newspaper headlines and asked Cameron: "They've not been bad headlines over the last 13 days, have they prime minister?"

Labour, to its credit, has kept quiet on the matter.

Rather than close the Olympics, it looks like they're planning to stun it with a carjack, drag it out to the marshes and finish it off

The Spice Girls singing on top of what-will-by-law-be-described-as-iconic-black-taxis?

You've got to hope this is a piece of misdirection.

I suppose if the Opening Ceremony was designed to convince the world and the nation that we can do surprising and amazing events without falling back on lazy cliche and the obvious, well-worn, and clapped out, the Closing Ceremony is intended to unwind that belief and return us to the sort of chumps who stick Mel B on the top of a Hackney Carriage and think it's a show. While they're dismantling the pop-up Water Polo venue, they're going to take down the temporary sense of national pride, then.

Morrissey: LOCOG has its revenge

After Morrissey's Sixth Form grumbling about the Olympics - "they made it so the Queen came on TV, the Nazis" - how would LOCOG respond?

good news: Stop Me by The Smiths playing loudly at the olympic park last night. Bad news: They're paying Moz his PRS in Wenlocks.

— Grace Dent (@gracedent) August 7, 2012

Well played, Olympics. Your response was faster, higher and stronger.

Morrissey on the Olympics

Oh, does anyone much care what Morrissey has to say about the Olympics?

I am unable to watch the Olympics due to the blustering jingoism that drenches the event. Has England ever been quite so foul with patriotism? The "dazzling royals" have, quite naturally, hi-jacked the Olympics for their own empirical needs, and no oppositional voice is allowed in the free press.

It is lethal to witness. As London is suddenly promoted as a super-wealth brand, the England outside London shivers beneath cutbacks, tight circumstances and economic disasters. Meanwhile the British media present 24-hour coverage of the "dazzling royals", laughing as they lavishly spend, as if such coverage is certain to make British society feel fully whole. In 2012, the British public is evidently assumed to be undersized pigmies, scarcely able to formulate thought.

As I recently drove through Greece I noticed repeated graffiti seemingly everywhere on every available wall. In large blue letters it said WAKE UP WAKE UP. It could almost have been written with the British public in mind, because although the spirit of 1939 Germany now pervades throughout media-brand Britain, the 2013 grotesque inevitability of Lord and Lady Beckham (with Sir Jamie Horrible close at heel) is, believe me, a fate worse than life. WAKE UP WAKE UP.

Do you see? Morrissey isn't the Nazi, it's US who are the Nazis because of the Olympics.

I'm no fan of the Olympics - just imagine how many missions we could have had to Mars with nine billion quid - but most of today's newspapers have got massive front-page splashes of a Jamaican on the front. Blustering jingoism?

Down in the Olympic Park, orange-haired crowds of partying Dutch rub shoulders with Australian water poloists; Ukranian coaches try to not be glum and Moroccan athletes wander about, winding in and out dozens of different accents.

There's a coherent argument that can be made against the Olympics, but jingoism misses the national mood by a mile, while the "24 hours of royals" just seems like a random misapprehension perhaps grabbed by watching a few minutes of the wrong sport.

Maybe Beckham might land a knighthood, but does Morrissey really think he's going to be elevated to the Lords in the next year?

There was a time when we'd listen to Morrissey, and thought he had something worth hearing. But now he's just the Michael McIntyre of indie outrage; working up a routine floating on faux outrage. He knows he shouldn't like the Olympics, but can't work out why, so he whips up something half-heated, empty-hearted about Nazis and The Spice Girls and Princess Anne.

On the high wire, dressed in a leotard...

We all enjoyed the sight this week of the world's worst piñata, as Boris Johnson dangled from a zip wire in Victoria Park:

But why was Boris in the park in the first place?

His remarks, once he was on the ground, give a clue:

"I brilliantly decided to come to a juddering halt in the middle of the zip-wire in order to promote our wonderful live site at Victoria Park.

"Get on down to Victoria Park, folks. Free entertainment, hog roast, you name it. It turned out I was the Yuri Gagarin of the zip-wire. I was testing it."

Boris isn't the only one who was hanging in the wind of Victoria Park hoping people would turn up - so too are LiveNation, who had annexed the vast swathe of the park for the event.

They'd been expecting 1.2million visitors across the Olympic and Paralympic weeks, but
Trail By Jeory finally got LiveNation to admit they're a little off the pace:

I asked Live Nation. Spokeswoman number one said 20,000 on the opening night and an average of 8,000 a day thereafter. Again, I asked for the daily breakdown. “That’s the only number we have,” she said. So when I said that an average can only be worked out by having the daily breakdowns, her boss, a very senior dude within Live Nation, called me.
He eventually read them out:
July 27 – 18,814
July 28 – 14,759
July 29 – 8,039
July 30 – 8,169
July 31 – 7,031
Aug 1 – 8,235
Aug 2 – 10,462
Note, these are total daily attendance figures, not the peak crowds at any one time. As you can see, they are a little more than 10 per cent of what the council and Live Nation were expecting.

There was, you'll note, a small uptick in attendance the day after Boris hung against the clear blue sky, so maybe it was worth his effort.

But why are things so grim that Mayor McCheese is having to try and bark up a crowd?

Trial By Jeory thinks that the removal of packed lunches on the way in has killed word of mouth:

I then pressed the senior guy from Live Nation on the question of food confiscation: quite categorically he told me that that was beyond their control, that they had to adhere to Locog’s rules (Locog run the Olympic Games). That’s funny, I said, because I’ve been going into the Olympic Park every day with sandwiches and packets of crisps and not once have they been taken, even by the G4S guards. So he went away and came back a few minutes later and said their rules have now been relaxed, that families can now take in–wait for this–Mars bars, crisps and sweets!
What about sandwiches and other picnic items, I asked? No can do, he said, Locog rules…yeah, right.

It's true that LOCOG have frowned on picnic hampers going into the Olympic Venues, but the only general restriction for Olympic venues is "excessive amounts of food" and the general paranoia about liquids. LOCOG, categorically, do not forbid you from taking in a couple of picnic eggs and a round of egg mayonnaise sandwiches, and so if the security at the LiveNation site is stealing people's food on the way in, that's down to LiveNation.

Boris might enjoy his hog roast, but if you're a family struggling to make ends meet, having to pay closed-event prices for four hungry mouths isn't much of a great draw.

The other major problem with the event is the ticketing.

Now, supposedly, most of the events in the park are free. But the website suggests you buy tickets to get guaranteed entry.

So you've already got a confused message: you can either just walk up and get in, or else, to be sure to get in, you need a ticket. "Shall we go to the park on the off-chance that we might be able to queue for a bit?" is something of a passion killer.

The wise family will book in advance, to make sure their plans come off. Here's where the "free event" becomes a little less free, as there's a booking fee.

Yep, just when you think you've heard every argument against ticket fees, here's a new one - LiveNation's ticketing arm, Ticketmaster (of course) will charge you £3.50 for "ticket fees". For this, you get, erm, an email which you print out. I cannot for the life of me fathom how Ticketmaster feel they do £3.50 worth of work here.

In fact, all it can do is add an extra disincentive to go. Who wouldn't feel ripped off being told they can go to a free event in their park, only to discover that they're being shaken down for cash in order to get access.

Sure, three quid fifty isn't much, and given that it's a totally made-up sum of more-or-less pure profit, I suppose you could raise a festive Union Jack hat to Ticketmaster for not charging £40, or £3.50 per ticket rather than per order. But if you're on a tight budget, it's a hurdle. I suspect it's also a fairly clear signal that the "free" fun is going to be rather less free than advertised - a bad taste in the mouth that no Boris-endorsed hog roast will wash away.

(You could see the Ticketmaster shake-down effect at the BT River Of Music event before the games - brilliant line-ups, great weather, nice venues, but - certainly in Battersea - quite poorly attended because, again, the free event in the park required a payment to Ticketmaster.)

So there we have it: an event that has taken over a large swathe of a public park, pinched sandwiches from the audience and looks to be costing more money than it'll make. Was Boris Johnson being dropped from the sky to try and salvage the event from a terrible hangover?

[I heartily recommend the Trial By Jeory post for the full, murky backstory of the LiveNation event]

Gordon in the morning: You are old

Tony Hadley, out of the past, is convinced that Danny Boyle got the Olympics opening ceremony wrong:

He told Absolute Radio: “If I’m honest I would have liked a really young band to have closed it.

“If you’ve got Sir Steve Redgrave handing over the torch to the youngsters, it would have been nice to have had One Direction. They’re our biggest export at the moment, pure pop.

“One Direction with the Royal Philharmonic, with about 100 singers in a choir, behind them.

“To me that would have been the new generation kind of thing.”

Hadley's acute nose for putting on a great show explains why his former arch-rivals Duran Duran spent the evening of the launch playing a massive date in Hyde Park as part of the Cultural events surrounding the games, and Hadley was sitting at home tutting.

It sounds like Hadley was desperately hoping for a rerun of that awful moment when Leona Lewis popped up out of a double decker bus at the Beijing closing ceremony. Has he heard One Direction? Seriously?

Gordon in the morning: Shooting his bolt

Gordon has Olympic-stroke-Royal news this morning:

USAIN BOLT isn’t just hoping for a gold medal from London 2012 – he also wants a tear-up with Prince Harry.

Really? A "tear-up", you say, Gordon? He's going to jump in a taxi, head up West with Harry and drink until he can cry out his own liver, then?

Usain said: “Harry is fantastic. I will invite him to my Olympic after party.”

Offering Harry the chance to pop round to a post-Olympic gathering isn't quite the same thing as plotting a "tear-up", is it?

Olympics: So does that make the Arctic Monkeys the biggest band in the world for the next few days?

I'm assuming that Danny Boyle was handed the job with some bits filled in - there had to be the speeches, there had to be the flame, McCartney would turn up and not quite hit all the notes on Hey Jude, but beyond that, it's all up for grabs.

Anything that upsets The Modern Review's Toby Young has to be a good thing, surely, and it's perfectly possible to harbour doubts about the large sums of cash being spunked away on an event, while allowing that at least there's something to show for the money.

There were problems at either end, of course the historical nonsense of Industrial Revolutions and the favouring of Cristabel over Sylvia Pankhurst at the start; the soundtrack going "Match Of The Day goals package" during the procession of athletes. And two countdowns seemed to be over-egging it a little.

But from the bit where the Lloyd-Webber variation Paginini kicked in as the camera flew past The London Studios, you could taste a bit of wit and a big wink coming through. It's hard to argue with an event where the Queen gets to hear Fuck Buttons.

(The NME, by the way, has a rather useful playlist of all the music from the main part of the ceremony.)

Enola Gay sticks out like a sore thumb, doesn't it? After the ill-judgement of a song about one attending nation dropping a nuclear weapon on another, it was a relief to have The Jam kicking in with a song about being mugged in an Underground station to welcome visitors to our capital.

I can't help wondering, though, if every sporting opening ceremony actually makes as much sense to the home audience - if, while the rest of the world four years ago was going 'bouncing dancing boxes? what?', in China people were bouncing up and down on their seats going "look! they've included a bit from The Grumpy Cubes Next Door!"

It shouldn't overshadow the disgusting treatment of Critical Mass last night, although it has; it hasn't magicked away the Zil Lanes, or the involvement of Dow Chemical, or the large sums of money given to G4S simply to stand aside and let the troops in. But if you take it on its own, for what it was - a massive bit of theatre which included a celebration of socialised healthcare - it was pretty damn good.

Gordon in the morning: Listening to Paul McCartney

With people from News International being charged with illegal interception of Paul McCartney's telephone messages yesterday, how amusing that Gordon Smart has nabbed a front page with details of a conversation between Macca and someone else.

This time, though, the discussion has been lifted from Shortlist. (Yes, the UK's biggest-selling paid-for newspaper is offering its readers a lead story today copied from a giveaway magazine; unless the FT has copied its front page direct from the MK Citizen, I can't think of a worse bargain.)

The paper flashes this as an 'exclusive', by the way. If you see Gordon trying to shove every copy of Shortlist down his trousers to try and justify that claim of exclusivity, you'll know why.

McCartney has a beef that David Beckham isn't going to be playing for Team GB in the Olympics:

Macca, 70, who will top the showbiz bill at the curtain-raiser, told Shortlist magazine: “It would’ve been great for him to lead out our British football team.

"But some person somewhere said, ‘So-and-so’s playing better.’ Like it matters.”

I'm not a football fan, but isn't 'someone being better at playing the game' quite important?

That might explain how Ringo managed to stay the drummer in The Beatles:
- 'ey, Paul, d'you think we should get the best possible drummer?'
- 'No, let's not'

Given that this is just an old man moaning to a different magazine, and he clearly admits that choosing Beckham would make the team worse, Gordon Smart and story co-author Nick Parker wouldn't embarrass themselves, and us, and McCartney, and Beckham by actually suggesting to Team GB that Macca should be picking the team, would they?

Last night a Team GB source said former England hero Pearce would NOT be moved — and that Macca should Let It Be.

It looks like they did.

Gordon in the morning: May the Olympics never end

No, seriously, I want the Olympic games to run forever. Without a finish; without the need to have a closing ceremony.

Because Beady sodding Eye have been booked to do an Oasis cover just before the mayor of Rio gets the big flag.

Seb Coe and chums wants musicians to work for free

Apparently there's to be a sport contest, The Olympics, in London next month. I think some of the newspapers might have mentioned it.

Anyway, it's not just about sponsors logos and running. The organisers, LOCOG, thought it would be nice to have some bands playing music to lift the audience's spirits during the dull bits (which would presumably be the sporting bits.)

Trouble is, they don't really want to pay. Music Week reports:

Horace Trubridge, MU Assistant General Secretary said: “LOCOG is saying this is ok because the bands are going to be amateur musicians, but that is simply not true. If it was school bands then it might be a different thing but unsigned bands are not amateurs - in many cases they expect, and get, paid for performing live and LOCOG is exploiting them under the guise of an unsigned band competition.

“LOCOG has repeatedly told us that all professional musicians will be paid, and this is yet another example of them breaking their word. If they want musicians to entertain thousands of people then they should pay for it. It is difficult enough to earn a decent living as a professional musician these days – where does this idea come from that musicians should be happy to work for free? Who else would be?

“This competition aside, the MU has been gathering countless recent examples of LOCOG directly approaching professional musicians to play for free. We are asking the Government and the Mayor of London to condemn LOCOG’s actions and we are also calling on musicians who have been asked to work for free at the Olympics to refuse to play.”

Ah, but we're all supposed to work for free for the Olympics, aren't we? Despite there being supposedly half a billion to spare, according to fundamentally-flawed Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, there's a grim determination for the event to not pay for staff if it can possibly get away with it.

As far as I can tell, though, McDonalds haven't been invited by LOCOG to give their burgers away for free. Funny that.

The Four Nations

The grim attempts to force us to have fun connected to the Olympics grind on. (I've checked, by the way, it really is the Olympics we're hosting and, sadly, not the Laffalympics - the hope that we might get to see Yogi Bear and Muttley racing each other to climb to the top of Big Ben was the one piece of hope to which I was clinging.)

So, as part of the kick-off, there's going to be big concert with a band representing each of the home nations. The line-up has just been announced:

The gig will feature acts from all four nations of the UK, with Duran Duran representing England and Snow Patrol appearing for Northern Ireland.

Stereophonics will represent Wales and Paolo Nutini will play for Scotland.

Holy plodding ponies; if Damian Green's two-hour waits at Heathrow don't put people off coming to the UK, this is going to.

Three of the grimmest acts ever to find their way into the back of a Transit Van and Duran, who are great but hardly a shining example of 21st Century English music.

Let's hope the sportspeople aren't being picked on the same basis, otherwise Team GB is going to consistent solely of badminton players and Daley Thompson.