Chariots of Fire was on the “drop everything and watch” list my ex-wife and I compiled. A cry would go up when one of us spotted it on the telly, and we would settle down for a pleasant couple of hours cocooned in that cosy hymn to clean-limbed British manhood. Shot partly in a place she had spent time and partly in the sort of institution I had spent time, it offered both of us a rosy-tinged return to late adolescence.
Not an entirely accurate record of the events (Liddell’s refusal to run on a Sunday was not a surprise to the authorities, but had actually been dealt with several months before the games) nor an uncritical portrait of the time (it makes the antisemitism of the Cambridge authorities clear), it nevertheless manages to suggest that there was something admirable about the ethos of the day, whether (the partly fictionalised) Aubrey Montague’s uncomplicated friendship or (the entirely fictionalised) Lord Lindsay’s “it’s all a bit of a jape, isn’t it chaps?” approach to competitive sport.
What, I therefore found myself wondering last week, would Eric Liddell have made of the admission by England’s goalie, Hannah Hampton, that, having seen that her opposite number had written notes on her water bottle, she threw it into the crowd to nobble her ahead of the climactic penalty shoot-out? Not very much, probably. He would, no doubt, have pursed his lips and quoted scripture. If he could get his head around playing football on the Lord’s Day.
Liddell was, at least in the film, prone to priggishness, but would Abrahams have been any different? He certainly went to the edge of legality (and beyond the limits of propriety) to develop himself, but he never attempted to interfere with his opponents. His response to being beaten by his Scottish rival was to train harder and smarter, not steal his spikes.
The times, they have changed. Not only did Hampton confess (if we can use that word for an admission with no hint of shame) publicly, but she was wildly praised for her action. Writing her notes on her arm was, according to the reaction, just the latest example of a cunning Brit getting one over on Johnny (Jenny?) Foreigner. Gamesmanship has replaced sportsmanship. Eric Liddell become Terry Thomas.
The Corinthian spirit is not, however, completely dead. For it is an uncomfortable truth that while Britain invented most of the world’s sports, France invented its greatest and while we focussed on a plastic ball being chased around a pitch for 120 minutes, a bunch of blokes were on their annual three-week odyssey of pain and glory riding around our old rival.
Cycling has relatively few rules, certainly compared to football (start here, first guy to get there wins, don’t do drugs are about the sum – the latter not always observed, to be fair), but it has a highly developed etiquette. One thing that is never done is seeking to profit if the race leader suffers some act of God, a mechanical issue or puncture, that sort of thing.
In one of the early stages of this year’s Tour, one of the riders had a “coming together” with another, ending up on the ground, with a bike that could best be described as bent. He wasn’t leading the race, nor was it clear that he wasn’t at fault, having suffered a momentary lapse of concentration. Under a strict reading of the code, the other riders could have told him to suck it up and gained valuable time.
But they didn’t. When they found out, they slowed down, allowing their competitor to dust himself off, get a new bike and catch up. Eric Liddell looked down and smiled, Terry Thomas looked up and called them a “shower”.
This was, however, a temporary and, given the make-up of the peloton, decidedly international respite. For, modern Britain allows that archetypal bounder plenty of pleasing distractions from his regimen of pitchforks and pokers.
To fill the gap in the schedule left by the football, the BBC decided to unleash on an unsuspecting nation Destination X – a bunch of people who want to be on television are placed on a blacked-out bus and driven around Europe. At the end of each episode, they have to guess where they are and the one furthest from the answer is left at the side of the road. To make it slightly easier, clues are provided and, during the programme, players are given the opportunity to win further clues.
The people who go on reality TV are the sort of people who watch reality TV, so they know how the game is played. From about five minutes into the first episode, they were sizing each other up, looking for allies, and looking to get one over on their competitors. One agonised over whether to deceive the others from the beginning, or to appear trustworthy and then deceive them in a subsequent episode (not deceiving anyone during the whole game appeared not to cross her mind). Another group, eyes perhaps more firmly on the prize, just lied.
Destination X has not been wildly popular, but its ethos is. Millions tune in to watch The Traitors, a programme in which the whole point is to lie to other players. Channel 4 is touting its new show The Inheritance as “a game of wit, willpower, persuasion, and betrayal, where it’s not about who deserves the money, but who’s willing to outplay, out-charm, and out-scheme the competition to claim it.”
“Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…but for Wales?” says Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, a film which, unlike Chariots of Fire but similar to the entire output of Martin Scorsese, I find easy to admire but impossible to love. The contestants in these shows do get a prize if they win – up to £120,000 in The Traitors, £100,000 in Destination X – nice to have, but not, in that great City phrase, “F-off money”. Not the sort of prize that will allow the winner to escape their life and live in luxurious seclusion for the rest of their days. Not “buying your own island” money. And for that, millions will have seen them to be venal and untrustworthy. Everyone you see in the supermarket will know they’re a bit of a “sh*t. The losers don’t even get that, just their fifteen minutes of fame and a lifetime of infamy. Is that worth it?
Perhaps it is.
For while Chariots of Fire is undoubtedly romanticised, it is also specific to a particular time. Britain’s obsession with playing by the rules developed in the Public Schools of the Victorian period. Previously, we were the bad boys of Europe, perfectly happy to believe that what belonged to the French, Spanish or Portuguese actually belonged to us, and willing to enforce it at the point of a cannon or musket. Two naval captains were rewarded for seizing a Spanish treasure ship with a sum estimated at between £10bn and £100bn each in today’s money (having had their proposals to a pair of sisters turned down before the voyage, they found their second, post pay-day, attempts rather more successful…).
Britain changed when the world changed, when the Industrial Revolution sparked, for the first time in human history, a sustained period of economic growth. The pie started growing and it didn’t stop. Playing by the rules was possible because people no longer needed to chase every tiny advantage, the system itself would make them richer. Displaying that you would not win at all costs was a way of showing you did not need to win at all costs. There was enough to go around, there would be even more tomorrow and noblesse oblige allowed one to display one’s noblesse.
Those days have, it appears, gone. The economy has been stagnant since the crash; the pie has ceased to grow. If you want more, you have to take more and specifically, you have to take it from someone else (as politicians seem to recognise, offering, across the spectrum, nothing more than goodies for their in-group funded by their out-group). All is fair in love, war and a flat-lining economy. Football and reality TV are not cultural outliers, they are just the embodiment of the dog-eat-dog world we live in, Norwich in the coal mine as it were… The way success is achieved has had to change, so the route to success we applaud has changed.
Terry Thomas usually lost in his films. In modern Britain, he would be on the cover of Hello.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
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Of modern bounders I would prefer a Terry Thomas to a Keir Starmer.