Peter Rhodes on Blue Lights, running cheats and a slavery dilemma for Manchester
A Scottish long-distance runner has been caught out and shamed by a running app’s tracking data which revealed she travelled 2.5 miles of a 50-mile race by car.
I am reminded of slogging around a fun run through Birmingham in the 1980s when some runners were flagrantly being dropped off or picked up at checkpoints by friends in cars. Shameless.
Now it has been proved that the Guardian was founded on profits from the slave trade, the newspaper is naturally fishing around for co-defendants – the old “we were all at it” defence.
A breast-beating article in the Guardian points out that the official badge of the city of Manchester, not to mention Manchester United and Manchester City, is a vessel which might represent a slaving ship.
Is it not time, the Guardian pleads, for the ship logo to be replaced with, for the sake of argument, the hard-working bee?
And how exactly would that improve things? Most bees are no more than slaves, working their furry little socks off to feed and nourish a gross, idle and entirely unelected queen. Is that a social structure we want to celebrate?
If Mancunians really want a suitable new emblem, how about a quart of Gordon’s?
The connection is a gag dating from the urban squalor and abject misery during the days of the Industrial Revolution: What’s the quickest way out of Manchester? A bottle of gin.
As for either of Manchester’s football teams scrapping the ship and adopting the bee, forget it. Bees are black and gold and, as I understand it, those colours are already taken.
The excellent Blue Lights (BBC1) gives us a new twist on policing, being set in Northern Ireland, but protects and promotes one old cliché.
It is an unwritten rule of such dramas that the hero cop must make the villains’ job easy by living in a house with no curtains and with all the lights blazing. (The same rule also applies to MI5 “safe houses.”
Sure enough, rookie cop Grace (Sian Brooke) arrives at her home and the bad guys (who may yet prove to be good guys) photograph her in her own helpfully-floodlit lounge. It’s a dangerous lifestyle. Sometimes an absence of curtains means, er, curtains.
