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这是卫报体育编辑Michael Henderson的：

All the world's a stage and we send Becks
To wheel out David Beckham, a symbol of underachievement, was an insult to those Olympians who achieved so much
Michael HendersonAugust 26, 2008 12:01 AM
One may as well start with Shakespeare, if only because everybody else does. The greatest of Englishmen is also the writer of writers, as everybody beyond this sceptr'd isle is happy to acknowledge. The French, Germans and Russians, to name only the most obvious literary cultures, have all laid claim to him. Being a fair-minded people, we are happy to share our good fortune with the rest of the world.

He is, it goes without saying, our greatest gift to humanity - he, and the language that he helped to shape. Only the other day, one of those excitable, identical Olympic cheerleaders was quoting him, though she may not have known it: "Out of thin air", she said. Yehudi Menuhin, speaking of another colossus, thought Beethoven's music represented "the conscience of mankind". One could say the same of the man from Warwickshire.

Though we may start with Shakespeare, we don't have to end there. The flowering of Elizabethan and Jacobean England also brought us Webster, Jonson and Marlowe, and the new Elizabethan tide has swept in Pinter, Stoppard and Bennett, among many others. On the page and on the stage we have conquered the world.

Yet the dramatists are only part of the national story. Our Olympians, bless their cotton socks, brought home 19 gold medals from Beijing, but how many golds have our poets won down the centuries, from Chaucer to Geoffrey Hill? Donne, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Vaughan, Dryden, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Clare, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne. There are 20 golden boys for starters.

Or, should you prefer, consider the middle and long-distance runners: Sterne, Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, Trollope, a brace of Brontes, Austen, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Lawrence, Bennett, Galsworthy, Maugham, Forster, Waugh, Greene, through to Penelope Fitzgerald. There are 20 more, standing on the podium, though I grant that Polish-born Conrad was a "double international".

There must also be room for Dr Johnson, who was a culture in himself, and Bacon, Hazlitt, Carlyle and Mill. And how about Kipling, Orwell and Chesterton, who yoked their horses to so many ploughs? Gibbon and Macauley, Darwin and Russell, Pinky and Perky.

After the Act of Union roused our northerly cousins from their long provincial slumber, the Scottish Enlightenment swelled the numbers of writers, scientists and inventors. If we think long enough we might even come up with some names of significance from west of Offa's Dyke. When everything is taken into account the British contribution to mankind, in so many ways, is impossible to exaggerate. In Olympic terms probably only the French and the Germans have won as many golds.

So how did the land of Cromwell and Nelson, Wellington and Churchill accept the Olympic baton on Sunday? When we wanted to make people think of London, of Britain, how did we remind them? By making, as the centrepiece of the eight-minute taster, the usual job-lot of young people trying to look busy, and a man whose life on the international (as opposed to domestic) stage has been one of undiluted failure!

By all means dispatch Sir James Page atop a red bus to blast out some vintage Zep (though it would have been just as nice to see Ian Anderson hopping about on one leg), but, really, is David Brandname anybody's idea of the best of British? To wheel out this symbol of underachievement was an insult to those athletes who have achieved so much.

You don't have to go along with the compulsory celebrations to realise the past fortnight has been wonderful for British sport. So we send along a man whose record at the highest level, in three World Cups, brought dismissal, an infamous missed tackle, and finally, evaporation in a pool of tears. But then who needs a true hero, like Sir Bobby Charlton, when self-pity and self-obsession can fool so many?

One trusts they will order the opening ceremony four years hence with more dignity. Maybe it's too much to hope for 10 minutes of Ken Dodd to greet the world (the old boy will be 84) but they could call on a well-known minstrel from Muswell Hill to offer an affectionate, self-mocking welcome. And remember, you can't have the mockery without the affection.

"We are the draught beer preservation society. God save Mrs Mop, and good old Mother Riley. We are the custard pie appreciation consortium. God save the George Cross, and all those who were awarded them."

Davies, his name is. It's in the book.

[ 本帖最后由 realzeus 于 2008-8-27 09:00 编辑 ]