Foreign Games and Royal Antics
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Foreign Games The overseas news coverage of most London tabloids is governed by the principle "Abroad is unutterably bloody." Normally they give it little space, but in...
...Suddenly, though, editors began remembering that the phrase fair play had once been part of their craft's code, and a more positive attitude prevailed...
...Fergie's bodyguard, an officer of the Metropolitan Police trained to see a fly on Big Ben, somehow failing to notice an industrious paparazzo...
...The truth is that Catalan food is among the best in Europe, more varied and less "fatty" than UK food—one reason why Catalan women live eight years longer, on average, than their British sisters...
...In reality, over 90 per cent of Catalans are bilingual—Catalan plus French or Spanish—and in my 20 years of travel in Catalonia I have never met anyone unwilling to switch to French or Spanish after hearing me ill-treat Catalan irregular verbs...
...After the closing ceremony, the Sun grumbled inanely that the Barcelona Olympics had been "terribly plain...
...And few moralists fret when Charles or Anne holes up with a sexual playmate...
...A smarmy London tabloid said she was tired because her Barcelona schedule was so hectic (in fact, she did nothing of any significance there...
...Begirining with 24 lines on a defecating dog, it stressed the "enormous difficulty" of communicating with Catalans because of their linguistic ignorance and insistence on speaking their language...
...It tickles them to have royal entertainers, and they make allowances for odd showbiz excesses...
...That theme is now insistent...
...An interesting man, cute Texas accent...
...Fahrenheit" (sic), was "too much" for the men, and Catalan food was not only "fatty" but "not nice"—and "washed down" (an ugly caste-mark to find in the FT) by "gallons of lager and wine...
...but they think the act could be cleaned up a little...
...Flustered British spokesmen rushed out contradictory statements: Anne had timed her children's arrival in Barcelona for just before the opening (which suggested she is so incompetent an organizer she should not be on the IOC...
...Once a model that ignorant or hypocritical preachers urged their congregations to emulate, the royal family's record is now a how-not-to-do-it case history...
...When they champion morality, the very heavens tremble...
...Normally they give it little space, but in summer they wallow in the HELLS and HORRORS endured by stoic Brits on vacation in darkest Europe...
...but she and her husband, like her appalling grandfather King George V, neglected their children's general and moral education...
...More robustly, Today reported that Barcelona was "in the grip of a tuberculosis epidemic...
...That might persuade the public that the other royals are trying to raise standards...
...A year ago, someone close to the court told me:" Of course, Fergie is all wrong...
...A Mediterranean decor, tinted with soap-opera concupiscence...
...or by Andrew's affaire with Koo Stark, a porn actress who often slept in Buckingham Palace...
...When, in late August, the Sun published the text of an affectionate telephone conversation, supposedly between a Palace equerry and Diana (Prince Charles' wife, whom he finds boring), many Brits sympathized with Diana...
...The obvious candidate is Fergie—reckless and stubborn enough to neglect her defenses...
...there had been a baggage mixup...
...Commoners can never really adapt and fit in...
...The Star warned Brits in Barcelona to take care lest "Spam's sneaky senors'' (sic) rob them, and thought cyclist Chris Boardman would take his bike to bed with him to prevent villainous Italian rivals from stealing it...
...When she did turn up she flaunted her boredom and snapped at an usher who offered to guide her to the royal box: "Wherever I sit is a royal box...
...So why the disproportionate opprobrium when Fergie plays the Buckingham game...
...Oddly, officialdom and the media commentators who have condemned Fergie seemed more shocked now than they were by the photos, circulated two years ago, of the Queen's sister Margaret frolicking with a naked man on a beach...
...While nominally representing the UK on the International Olympics Committee (IOC), she stayed away from the opening ceremony and publicly forbade her son to watch it on television...
...Not that morality was conspicuous before 1950 in the entourage of King Edward VII...
...anyway, she was interested mainly in horsy events...
...Trust the London tabloids to do the rest...
...Her lack of civilized manners offended her hosts and angered UK lobbyists who were trying to get the 2000 games for Manchester...
...TB is on the increase in Spain?at about the same rate as in the UK...
...Since "the bug is passed on even when sufferers are just speaking to other people in the street," athletes and spectators were feared to be at risk...
...More to the point, one suspects, were the reports that she was angry because her ex, Mark Phillips, was in Barcelona...
...she had other engagements (a Palace spokesman let slip that this was untrue...
...A Telegraph writer, conceding that Spain is more than manana and "bumbling Manuel" (a stupid waiter in a racist British TV series), declared that the games were "extraordinarily well organized...
...or by a photo of Andrew, cavorting in the nude, splashed across the Sun...
...She left Barcelona on a special flight five hours before the closing ceremony...
...They come from a different world...
...Adding to her self-inflirted indignity, a leaked report by German detectives on the probity of the IOC's 92 members concluded that only seven of them could not be bought by money or flattery: Understandably, Anne was not among the seven...
...He was advising Spanish horsefolk and upstaging her by getting himself photographed with pretty girls...
...Apparently unaware that Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, and that its Mayor and his staff all support Catalan regional government and speak Catalan, the Express said he was "horrified" by the machinations of these "ethnic groups" who speak "a language few Spaniards understand...
...The Express saluted "the brilliantly imaginative and efficient Spanish hosts...
...To swill out the royal stables, to revive something like pre-1950 British Protestant morality in the Saxe-Coburg-Bat-tenberg (aka Windsor-Mountbatten) family and its entourage, would be impossible...
...Queen Elizabeth is a decent woman, kind to animals and head of the Anglican Church...
...The Financial Times, once renowned for its coverage of Spain, suddenly went mad and published a piece on Catalonia that read like a reject from a junior-school magazine...
...or in the Mountbatten menage...
...It also frontpaged a report that the organizers were in a state of "pan-ic" because of fears of torrential rain that threatened to "soak most of the 65,000 crowd at the Olympic stadium...
...Catalan is spoken in six Spanish provinces, Andorra and Roussillon, yet it was news to the hacks...
...The leading fishwrappers have "holiday hotlines" on which British tourists complain about everything from expensive junk food to marital problems ("Most couples aren't used to spending a whole day together," explains a pop psychiatrist...
...They are attached to what they consider common-sense moral values...
...This year, though, as the Olympic games approached, many UK papers, not mere-ly the tabloids, opted for a new sport: Barcelona bashing...
...Even the Daily Telegraph proclaimed Barcelona a city of hype and drivel where the games would enter "a new sphere: trashletics...
...The vicious pressures of unearned wealth, immense privilege and sickening flattery did the rest...
...Photographs of the Duchess of York (aka Fergie, wife of the Queen's son Andrew) in congress with her financial adviser, a Texas millionaire named John Bryan, delighted millions of voyeurs, many of whom said (as voyeurs tend to) that they were shocked and angry—mainly with the Daily Mirror for publishing the pictures: There is still a certain nostalgia for the feudal tradition of chastising the bearer of bad tidings...
...Most British people are not churchgoers...
...Royal affairs (mainly affaires) vied with bad weather to dominate the rest of the British summer...
...officials were said to be "desperately" seeking about 1,000 "Catalan separatists" who had infiltrated the Olympics organization...
...The Sunday Express beat that sissy stuff easily by announcing a "massive security scare" and "security chaos" in Barcelona...
...So how about throwing someone to the wolves...
...Other nitpickers complained that they were too lavish...
...For good measure, the Express declared the Barcelona Olympics "more vulgar and more tarnished than any other...
...Buckingham Dallas doesn't have to have a ratings war with Aaron Spelling...
...Despite Catalonia's urbane lifestyle and good standards in education, architecture and technology, the Financial Times piece presented it as one of Europe's "untamed corners"—inhabited perhaps by Eskimos, since the temperature, "above 30...
...or in the conduct of the debauched pro-Nazi Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII...
...Fergie, feeling free...
...The London Times, which had covered the Olympics, Barcelona and Catalonia admirably from the start, paid tribute to everyone?from King Juan Carlos to the anonymous army of Catalan volunteers"—who had helped make these "the happiest, most successful Games ever staged...
...Royal Antics British officials at the games were appalled by the spoiled-brat attitude of Queen Elizabeth's dismal daughter Anne...
...The Telegraph called it a "local dialect," and the Financial Times thought only "locals" could understand it...
Vol. 75 • September 1992 • No. 12
