7:40am Wednesday 27th August 2008
By Tomasz Johnson
Regular readers of this blog will recall how buses became the ideological battleground for Brave New Barnet during the election campaign for the Mayor of London and London Assembly.
Proponents of routmasters did battle with those of bendy buses - or pragmatism, as they would say - as the fight for City Hall reached fever pitch. It was a striking example of the blandness of the political landscape.
So imagine my surprise, tinged with more than a touch of embarrassment, when a bus cropped up at the London 2012 section of the Beijing Olympic closing ceremony. Not for us an exploration of history and culture, delivered by stunning choreography on a massive scale. No. A flipping bus. With David Beckham on it.
The continued reverence for buses as an icon of London is beyond me. They’re perpetually late, inefficient, slow and it costs £2 to travel 200 yards. As an emblem of our city we’ve chosen a functional machine that doesn’t function very well. But then again, this is a city that has also made an icon out of the black cab, one of the few means of transport that allows you to watch your own descent into insolvency on a ticking display.
And then there was the celebration of the hand-over of the Olympics in central London. Or, as the BBC commentator referred to it with not a hint of sarcasm, "the coolest place in the world."
It may have been "cool" - to a middle aged BBC man - but it didn’t work. The live feed broke in the middle of transmission, leaving hundreds of people standing round with nothing to do but be cool. It’s just as well the square wasn’t filled with Glasgow Rangers fans, a la Manchester during the UEFA cup final last season, or it could have been an even better advert for how we’re going to make a royal hash of running an international event.
One of my gripes is how politicians and people in certain appointed public positions get away with messing things up. If they have an affair or are caught in flagrante in a public toilet they have to resign, but complete and utter incompetence doesn’t attract the same level of seething scorn in our country as sexual misconduct. That is the only explanation for the fact that so many of them escaped scot-free after wasting the best part of £1 billion on the Millenium Dome.
And after that bizarre vanity project follows the London Olympics. No one appears to have paid for the fact that they didn’t add the VAT to their estimates. As far as cock-ups go, this has to be one of the best, but I’m sure the drongos responsible are still counting the digits on their consultancy fees.
As you can probably tell, the prospect of the Olympics taking place in my home town isn’t filling me with a warm glow. It’s nothing to do with encouraging sport, which I’m all for. But, rather, the fact that I have absolutely no confidence in the people who came up with a logo that looks like something the pigeons formerly of Trafalgar square would have produced, and a dance routine that included a bus, spending my money wisely.
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