JAMES MC CORD: THE LAST WORD INTERVIEW

My discussion with Matthew Bannister about Watergate burglar James McCord is online at BBC Sounds,
you can link to it here. It starts about 13:30 in, if you want to go straight there. I originally recorded it about a month ago, but given the two years it took for McCord's death to become public knowledge, that's not really a pressing problem. We go through the basics of the Watergate burglary and trial, the Bay of Pigs, and McCord's other CIA work (including covering up the death of Frank Olson, which I mentioned in my post about my Guardian obituary, here) but not included in the broadcast edit is the link with JFK's assassination, or as Richard Nixon put it, 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing'.

REFLECTIONS ON SUPER BOWL 50

I've been away for a week covering the Super Bowl for the BBC and then enjoying three days with friends in sunny and summery San Francisco. I became the first TV commentator to get Noam Chomsky's name into Super Bowl coverage, but I didn't mention that in my wrap-up column for nfluk. I case you missed the coverage, you can read the wrap here: bit.ly/1TeiGsR.

PETER DIMMOCK: AN APPRECIATION

The Guardian obituary of Peter Dimmock, presenter, producer, and executive for the BBC, the man in charge of the broadcast of the Coronation in 1953, and my boss for a time at ABC Sports, is up at the Guardian online now (link to it here); it should be in the paper paper tomorrow. The obit is followed by an appreciation I wrote a few years ago to supplement the piece they already had in stock.

I was looking for a job in the US (I interviewed at the new ESPN and the short-lived Satellite News Channel) but word got out I was job-hunting and after Peter got in touch I wound up moving not back to America, but about four blocks up the street, from ITN on Riding House Street to ABC on Great Portland and Carburton Streets.

Before long I was reporting directly to New York, not to Peter, but he was still in the next (bigger) office to keep an eye on me, and advise me how to deal with broadcasters, event organisers, EBU bureaucrats, and especially my colleagues in Paris and New York. Most especially. As I wrote, it was an education, and I honestly can't recall any awkwardness or arguments between us. Peter knew his way around everything and everyone; the big world was a small circle to him, and I was lucky enough to be tagging along. And I can recall a long list of lunches at the Rugby Club, in Hallam Street, run by Jeff Butterfield, with Peter, and Cliff Morgan, and any number of figures from British sport and broadcasting. It wasn't just an education; it was also the most fun I've ever had working. There are a few stories I won't repeat here, but I'm smiling at them right now. RIP Peter

COMMENTARY AND CHEERLEADING: WINTER OLYMPIC NOTES II

The Winter Olympics is a good way for us to test the quality of commentators, because in both the UK and USA most of the sports are not things television covers regularly, and they are not sports with which the audiences are familiar. Figure skating has a wide appeal; when I worked for ABC and we were programming the Calgary games, we aimed for figure skating and the US hockey team for our prime times every night. The skating would rate about 50% higher—remember hockey is basically a regional thing in the US, while skating has the broad, cross-gender appeal that made gymnastics such a big thing in the post-Korbut, Comaneci era.

Figure skating is basically bowling alley ballet, a sport with the dual drawbacks of first requiring make-up, sequinned costumes, music and choreographers to perform and second being subject to judging, with all its attendant history of corruption and fraud. Yet if anything, skating is more popular now than ever, thanks to 'talent' shows like Dancing On Ice. When you think about it, the Olympic format is almost as close to Ted Mack's Amateur Hour as Dancing, or Strictly, or X Factor. The biggest difference being the figure skating judges are locked into a 1950s aesthetic, and susceptible to bribes, but are not fed clever lines by the producers for the audience's entertainment. If anything though, the 'kiss and cry' area at the Olympics is even more OTT than X Factor.

When I covered Lake Placid, there were 35 medal events; in Sochi there are 98. Sports have been expanded, not often for the better (cf: classic vs freestyle cross country skiing; 'team' figure skating) and new sports have been added, including more judged sports, like freestyle skiing and snowboarding. Of course there are also a couple of events that excite me the way roller derby did when I was 11 years old: short track speedskating and snowboard cross, which are basically the same kind of Ben Hur races, one on ice and the other on snow. But with new sports has come a new, younger audience and a problem for commentators, as I've been discovering watching the BBC coverage.

Snowboarding is analogous to surfing, and the lingo seems to have been built on a gnarly surf base. But surfing has never been in danger of reaching the Olympics. Snowboarding is one of the few sports at the Winter Olympics where the competitors don't dress in lycra bondage gear, and the only one where a competitor (in Vancouver) was barred from the games after testing positive for marijuana, which would imply that it is the only sport where pot is a performance enhancing drug. So it's a young, groovy thing, which means BBC commentators appear to be determined to do the verbal equivalent of a 1440 Yolo flip on every routine. This Jonathan Pearce approach might work on radio, and attract a lot of attention, but it doesn't do much to enlighten the audience. On the other hand, I once asked a snowboarder, while I was doing commentary at the 2005 Winter University Games, what 'huge air' meant, and he said, 'well, like, the air, it was huge'. So now we knew.

On the other hand, you'd think curling would be a natural fit, partly because the Scottish (whoops, I mean British) teams are quite good, and partly because it has the same sort of appeal as snooker, lawn bowls, or even darts. Which means the BBC commentators approach each end with a sort of genteel calm, regardless of how tight the competition is, and even in celebration of a British win have all the reserve of Phil Drabble commiserating with the second place finisher at a sheepdog trial. What would be instructive would be to swap the snowboarding and curling commentary teams around, if only for a day.

Meanwhile, Great Britain & Northern Ireland picked up its first gold medal Friday, in skeleton, and I watched Lizzy Yarnold's impressive win to prepare myself for chat on Saturday morning's World Service Weekend programme. Skeleton bob is basically going down a bobsled run on a sled, head first the way you would on your own Flexible Flyer as a kid. It's been in the Olympics before, on the Cresta run in St. Moritz, and it's probably the most accessible and human of the bob run events: the bobsled itself being conducted inside a bumper car, while the luge, in Tony Kornhesier's great phrase, resembling Dracula going downhill in his coffin.

I caught the last of the four skeleton runs, and it was gripping stuff—with the difference of third and fourth places coming down to .04 seconds (four one-hundreths of one second) over the combined FOUR runs. But when it got to Yarnold and the final run, there was little grip left. She had built up a huge (0.78 seconds!) lead over the first three runs: all she really needed to do was get to the bottom without crashing to win.

This was pointed out, hesitantly by Amy Williams, the skeleton expert commentator, which then set Colin Bryce off into a mad effort to rebuild the tension. Fair enough, because the pair had been pretty good in explaining how the event worked, and the way in which Britain, just like East Germany thirty years ago, had identified athletes to draft into the sport and concentrated on sled technology, so despite not having a track of their own to practice on they had achieved remarkable success. They also drifted into those areas that make you wonder what 'experts' are for. Yes, the racers will enjoy the podium, they will be happy, and yes, they'd really like to win. You do not have to have raced at Olympic level to provide such insights. But once the race started, all explanation was off anyway. 'Speed will be crucial here,' said Bryce, which was self-evident enough, but actually wasn't the most crucial thing. Then he pulled out the commentator's greatest enemy, the cliché's cliché, just before the start. 'Lizzie GOES FOR GOLD FOR BRITAIN' he said, a verbal tabloid headline simple enough for any audience to understand.

The rest of the run was basically Amy Williams cheering Lizzy down the course. This raises the interesting point of why you need an expert commentator to cheer. Why not have Lizzie's husband, or grandmother, or next-door-neighbor, or Brian Blessed instead? At one point Bryce interjected 'she's flying now', which was daring in the sense that he didn't have David Vine's Ski Sunday tape delay to prove him hundreths of a second right, but basically anyone going down a bob run on a skeleton is figuratively flying. It is a difficult thing: momentum means some bumps will slow you down less than you might think, and there's no way for the naked eye to calculate how many hundreths of a second may have been gained or lost. Yarnold won by almost a full second (0.96) but remember that's a full second after FOUR runs. And as she celebrated, Amy Williams was 'crying for her, crying for everyone' which maybe Brian Blessed could not have done better, and I appreciated her tears for me.

Yarnold herself seems completely likeable, a great person for a great story, and I suppose we can expect the Seoul Hockey Syndrome to mean she will appear on a lot more BBC in the future than she has in the past. But I was amused by her nickname, which is 'The Yarnold'. I have written before about the remarkable flatness of British nicknames. If Mean Joe Green had been British, his nickname would have been 'Greeners'. Cool Papa Bell would have been 'Bellsy'. And Broadway Joe Namath would have been lucky to be 'Joe'. Or maybe 'The Namath'.

MY MOMENT OF OLYMPIC FAME

They say that any publicity is good publicity, but whoever made the observation made it long before the age of the internet. My Andy Warhol-predicted 15 minutes came after the men's basketball quarterfinal match between Argentina and Brazil. After the game ended, with Argentina winning to advance to the semifinals, I was closing out our BBC television broadcast with my colour commentator John Amaechi. I was turned to my left to face him, with one eye on the monitor to make sure I could get to the goodbyes over the proper shot.

Meanwhile, down on the court, the Argentines were still celebrating, and one of them (Pablo Prigioni, I'm told) kicked a basketball into the stands, or more precisely, straight into my head, directly into my right headphone. The effect was rather like getting your bell rung by a head slap in American football, when you're wearing a helmet, and after a disconcerting moment I turned to my right, and saw some commentators in the row in front of me playing with the ball, which had rebounded off my skull. I jumped to the conclusion they'd hit me by accident, and launched into an ad lib tirade as a way of explaining why my question to John had been interrupted by my 'Owwww!'

John corrected me, we finished on time, and I laughed it off. About ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was BBC Interactive. Would I mind if they posted the clip on the website? I asked what it was I'd actually said, and they assured me it was nothing too awful, just embarrassing, so of course I said go ahead.

The video went viral, immediately becoming the most watched item on the website, and I even got messages asking if I was OK. Of course I was, we Carlsons being strong of square head. But it was odd, that after twenty years or more of broadcasting, I would finally attract attention on a wider stage for nothing more than turning my head at the wrong time and getting my noggin knocked as a result!

Sadly, the clip is audio over the closing shots from the arena. If anyone had captured it on video I'd probably be a global superstar today! Here's the link to the BBC website; if you're outside the UK and can't fool their ISP detector, you can probably google 'angry commentator gets hit by basketball' and find something.

And I'm still waiting for a signed basketball from the Argentina team by way of apology.

AN IRRESISTIBLE TARGET APOLOGY

The posts have grown few on the ground lately, but there is a very good reason for this: I am doing play by play commentary on Olympic basketball for the BBC, with the British former NBA player John Amaechi, and we are doing three games each day. Between the preparation, the actual time broadcasting, the fighting through the huge crowds channeled through a gigantic mall before they can get into the Olympic Park, and the trying to care for my grated larynx, there hasn't been time to actually clear my head and write.

If you'd like to hear the commentary, the BBC has shown quite a bit of it on BBC2 and BBC3, but every game is available online and usually via red button. Most of the games we do are also taken by the host broadcast feed, and thus are available to countries without their own commentators at the game. We are also being used by Channel 9 Australia for quite a few games live in Australia. And if none of that works, there are always ways in this wonderful age of the interweb.

I have discovered an unpublished article I wrote with some bitchiness about the reaction to winter olympic coverage ten years ago, and I may be able to publish that, and speaking of bitchiness, I would like to do an appreciation of Gore Vidal, when I have time to do him justice.

MY WRESTLING OBSERVER.COM INTERVIEW

Here's a change of pace, for all you pencil-neck geeks out there! I was interviewed yesterday on the Dr Keith Presents programme at WrestlingObserver.com, discussing the upcoming Super Bowl, which I will be presenting on BBC1 this Sunday at 10:55pm, and my own background in wrestling. Although we never got to my brief, one-season, eight-programme career as a heel commentator on Meridian/ITV2's Transatlantic Wrestling Challenge, which I still think is some of the best work I've done. You can link to the interview here, and it should be available without charge for the week.

TALKING BOXING NOVELS WITH THE BBC TOMORROW

I'll be on BBC Radio 4's Open Book tomorrow at 1600 BST (Sunday, 30/5) discussing boxing fiction. I've no idea what I'll say, because my contribution was taped a couple of weeks ago, some 45 minutes worth, and will likely be shortened somewhat, given that it's a half-hour programme with a lead item on Bill Bryson, and I'm part of a feature prompted by Thomas Hauser's new novel, Waiting For Carver Boyd, which I will review here later. If you're not in range of BBC Radio, you can listen at the BBC web site's IPlayer...that's 11 am DST for those of you in Montreal, Boston, New York, Miami, Freedom NH, Southport or Easton, CT...Let's hope they left in some of my reading from WC Heinz's The Professional, still the best boxing novel out there (OK, I'll concede Fat City as well).

IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS AT THE SUPER BOWL

Don't forget, for those of you in the UK of GB + NI, or who can see BBC 1, I'll be commenting on the Super Bowl tonight, live, at 2255, alongside host Jake Humphrey and Alex Smith of the San Francisco 49ers...the game, for those of you who don't know, is Indianapolis against New Orleans, and ought to be good (see my nfluk.com preview here). The halftime show is 25 minutes of The Who, or who's left of them. It's funny to think that after all these years, Ed Sullivan still books the Super Bowl halftime shows.

Plus there's a crime-writing connection. I've already had an email from that expatriate Cajun Robert Crais saying 'geaux Saints'. I wonder if Michael Z Lewin (creator of Albert Sampson) will be rooting for the Indianapolis Colts?

IN MEMORIAM: BILL MCLAREN

In the thirty-something years I've lived in Britain, no sportscaster has come close to matching Bill McLaren, who has just died aged 86. He was simply the best at what he did in this country for most of the time I've followed British sport. It was one of the rituals of my first winter living with my then in-laws down in Sussex 1977, and it lasted and grew--for many years I'd tromp across London to watch rugby at the Prince George in Hackney, and McLaren's voice made it easy to enjoy any match, just as some of the other commentators made it difficult to enjoy even a good one. He was more accessible than John Arlott, more serious than Henry Blofeld, more expressive than Dan Maskell (not a difficult task, that last). If it weren't for McLaren, I'd probably not know that Hawick is pronounced Hoik.

Like many announcers, good or bad, he became something of a caricature of himself toward the end of his 50 year career, but unlike many, it wasn't that much of a detriment, because he never put himself to the fore, the game always came first, and he never seemed to struggle for descriptions of it. Although they served different roles, I'd compare his later career to John Madden's, who, as he grew older and veered into self-parody, was lucky enough to be re-energiezed, by the move to Fox, by the move to ABC with Al Michaels, and finally by the joint move with Michaels to NBC. It allowed him to re-examine and up his game, but the BBC doesn't work that way. In fact, it's Michaels who may be the closest American equivalent to McLaren's talent, although he is, or was, a generalist, whereas McLaren was a rugby specialist.

McLaren also suffered somewhat as the game changed; he was, and his style remained, the epitome of when the game was still relatively amateur, when the players looked like real people, not action figures, and before our passion for telestrators and computerized statistics took over. It may seem old-fashioned now, his voice and the game of rugby I came to love in the late 70s, but they were part and parcel of a different attitude toward sport. That McLaren continued to teach PE in a Hawick school for years while doing commentary on the weekends impressed me to; those of us who are lucky enough to have to do other things for a living besides talk about sport benefit from it, just as I benefitted from listening to Bill McLaren.

THE INITIAL QUESTION ABOUT BBC DRAMA: INTO THE STORM

I can't believe that TV has dumbed down to this level, but watching the credits for Into The Storm, the HBO/BBC sequel to The Gathering Storm, I noticed that Len Cariou was listed as playing 'Franklin J Roosevelt'. I was so stunned I wasn't sure I'd got it right, but I've since checked it on BBC Iplayer, and I'm still stunned; this seems the kind of mistake that would have been caught when the film played on HBO, unless the BBC made their own credits for their transmission and no one bothered to check (in the programme itself, Churchill et al do get Roosevelt's name is correct, albeit pronounced De-LAHN-oh, in the British fashion, rather than DELL-an-oh, and Roos-e-velt rather than Rose-uh-velt, as Americans do).

The film itself was rather like a made-for-TV version of a movie, rather than a sequel, but The Gathering Storm really was first-rate. In this one, Brendan Gleeson lacks the bombast of Albert Finney, but is most impressive as Churchill as he tires, and declines. Janet McTeer is rather too nuturing as Clementine; scripter Thaddeus O'Sullivan gives her a moment to assert herself, but it's far too late, and seems to be merely an attempt to recapture some of Vanessa Redgrave's more equal footing.

But the bigger problem is that the details of the story are more well known, and the script must touch all the bases, though sometimes in such an offhand way that, for example, Bomber Harris becomes a figure of some fun, and moral doubts about him are erased with a too-superficial ease. In such a situation, speeding through the set-pieces of history, the flashback structure (the Churchills vacationing in France while awaiting the results of the general election that rejected him in favour of Labour and Atlee) is a hindrance. Some of the set-pieces are quite moving, especially when they show the hidden side of Churchill, as when he presents an airman with the Victoria Cross, or in his touching 'friendship' with King George VI (a nice performance by Iain Glen), while others are, well, set pieces, particularly when Stalin (Aleksi Petrenko in a bad moustache) is involved (oddly, Stalin is used to provide comic relief). I'm also a little wary of the ending, which, in best show-business fashion, seems to imply getting an ovation in a theatre is the greatest accolade a man could hope for, though again, it is based on a real event.

Bill Patterson makes a good Clement Atlee, Patrick Malahide a suitably insufferable Monty, and Donald Sumter has a remarkably intense couple of scenes as Lord Halifax--the establishment's alternative to Churchill and the Tory most willing to make a deal with Hitler. Cariou probably falls somewhere in the middle of screen FDR's, but it's very hard to get a handle on what his character is, as the script uses him much like it does Stalin, with his wheelchair serving as the moustache, first as comedy and second to reflect the greater man's glory. But then, I suppose that's what you'd expect from the BBC and FJR.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD: 'Terrorism' In Britain

It is instructive that British police can assault innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson, a homeless alcoholic working as a paper-seller, leading to his death by heart attack moments later, and immediately begin releasing a series of lies aimed at covering up their culpability, but no one is held to any immediate account. While it is cause for immediate resignation when Bob Quick, the head of the anti-terrorist squad, decides to play Bozo the clown and expose his unit's top-secret plans to public cameras.

The fact that another policeman, John Dougal, was convicted yesterday of causing the death through dangerous driving of a teenager whom he hit in his police car chasing a car moving at 94mph, driving without lights or siren (so not to give away anything to the car he was pursuing) all of this while his night shift after working a full day as an electrician, merely made this a telling trifecta, marking the path of the transformation of Britain into a police state: a state where the citizens exist by the grace and favour of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, the sort of thing that C Wright Mills said made 'reflective citizenship' impossible.

The Tomlinson assault and its immediate cover-up is reminiscent of the case of Jean-Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician murdered at Stockwell tube while on his way to work, and raises a few similar questions, and some of a different nature. Incompetance, of course, was also a major factor in the Menezes killing: the surveillance officer missed IDing him because he'd left his post to pee, communications between different units didn't function, operational 'go' words were misundertood. There was also the institutional concept, as articulated first by Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur in The Front Page, of 'production for use'. The officers had their guns, and had to use them. The traffic officer had his high speed car and had to use it. The riot police have their batons and dogs and horses and have to use them.

In light of that, we need to ask what is the basis for the police assumption that anyone on the streets is a protestor, and worse, that any protestor is a violent terorrist? Did no one remember the effects of penning the crowd in Oxford Circus in 2001? The workers penned in for six to eight hours while trying to get back to their jobs after lunch? The tourists trapped on their way to the tube, unable to exit despite displaying their air tickets and passports to the police? The effects of dehydration and heat prostration on that summertime crowd? Tomlinson's killing, and the tactics of corralling which caused it, did not exist in a vacuum.

But the more telling effect of 'kettling' may well be on the police themselves. Like a rugby team in the locker room before a match, or football supporters in the pub for four hours before the match, they are psyching themselves up for conflict, and after six hours on containment, there is aggro bursting to get out.

Given that, why are the police allowed to disguise their identities? In man who hit and shoved Tomlinson wore a balaclava, no warrant card or other ID number was visible on his clothing, and that appears to be the case with the other officers present. This goes back at least to the days of the miners' strike, although then the police were also trying to disguise the fact they were using soldiers to beef up their ranks.

The case has now been referred to the 'Independent' Police Clearance, oh sorry, Complaints Commission, which means no officials need speak about it while it is under 'investigation'. But rest assured, had not spectator footage been available, showing Tomlinson (who may have been struck previously, if the time sequence with the eventually-released Channel 4 footage is right) meandering away, trying to get home, leaning on a bollard, with his back to advancing police dog handlers. One cop, to his right, gives him a slight push as a dog runs into his back. At this, another comes up from his left, whacks him with his truncheon, and shoves him face first to the pavement. He lies on the ground, apparently remonstrating, then gets up and groggily continues, trying to get back to his shelter.

When deMenezes was gunned down, the police immediately spun the story for the gullible press: he had jumped the ticket gates, he was wearing a heavy coat which might have concealed a bomb, he had run from police, the police had identified themselves before firing; all of which were quickly shown to be lies.

When the current 'I' PCC investigation comes out, will the media remember to ask where the police's own CCTV footage from Cornhill is, and check to see how it's edited. It is interesting that we now live in a society where our every move is monitored, yet when that surveillance might work against those in the 'justice' system, it miraculously disappears. Remember, in the Menezes case, all the CCTV cameras in and around Stockwell tube just happened to have 'malfunctioned' simultaneously. By strange coincidence, the judge, 'Sir' Stephen Richards, who handled the Menezes family's case against the police, was himself accused of twice exposing himself to a woman on a commuter train. He elected to have his case heard before a judge, not a jury, and where that judge admitted he was taking his colleague's word over the member of the public, in what boiled down to 'she said, he said', he at least had the grace to say it was only because he laacked 'corroborative evidence'. That evidence, of course, might have been found on the CCTV tapes from Waterloo, except when the police finally got around to checking those cameras, delayed because of their 'heavu case load', they 'discovered' the tapes had been erased, as scheduled, the day before.

Finally, why was the BBC 'not interested' in the spectator footage when the Guardian offered it to them? And why is the story now being buried underneath Quick's resignation. One hopes the raid on the 'possibly aligned to Al Queda cell' produces more results than the one on the Plymouth 'bomb factory' where a family was planning to unleash 'terror' during the G20'; all of them have been released, without charge, to a chorus of silence from the media. They were too busy checking the video to see what Bob Quick's papers said.

I'LL BE TALKING SPORT ON THE RADIO TODAY

BBC Radio Five, Simon Mayo show around 3:15 pm. My old NFL partner Colin Murray's sitting in for Simon (hold the Mayo, anyone?) and we'll be talking about the efforts of US sports to establish themselves over here. And likely a few other things too...

It ought to available online for a week afterwards, at bbc.co.uk