The Judge RANTS!
Date: 19/05/10
Two Drips In Search Of A Role
No, not Cameron and Clegg, nor yet the Milliband Brothers.
What do you get if you cross avant-garde rockers The Residents...
...with the cute and scary Teletubbies...
...and hand over the results to one of those black holes of real creativity, a 'design studio'?
Answer: you get these:
These are the mascots for that extravaganza of cheating, corruption and corporate bingeing called 'The Olympic Games', coming to a London near you in two years' time.
They're called Hemlock and Mandelson...erm, no sorry, mistake there. They're called Fetlock and Mandibles...no, that's not right either. Wedlock and Mandelbrot? Hmm, no.
Ah yes! Wenlock and Mandeville. One named after an obscure town, the other after a refuge for cripples. Seems about right to me.
The hype, however, seeks to portray these oddities as representing droplets of the steel used to build the impending white elephant of the Olympic Stadium. In which case, given the general standard of construction of public projects in this country, both of them should have turned brown and crumbled into dust by the summer of '12.
The organising committee for this hyperextended version of the three-legged race, which now seems to rejoice (if that's the word, which it isn't) in the acronym LOCOG, has been a bit coy as to exactly how much this has cost. They remember only too well the nearly half a million knicker the games' logo cost three years ago. £400 000 for something which was memorably described as looking like Lisa Simpson giving someone oral relief.
There has been the usual marketing Bollocksese (making free use of words such as 'interactivity' and 'flexibility'), from 'Lord' Coe, one-time athlete and now permanent ambassador for Coca-Cola, Nike and McDonalds. But, I think these could catch on. After all, strangely-dressed and rather creepy baggy figures (one of which appears to have pissed itself) wearing CCTV cameras on their heads is quite emblematic of British society in the early twenty-first century, isn't it? It's something you can see around you every day in this happy land, and so is probably a winner.
For Coca-Cola, Nike, McDonalds, importers of knock-off models made by slaves in Shanghai...
File under: Sport
