Christmas? Fun? Pull the other one, writes Donald Clarke
There are, among the more trivial diversions of life, few items as depressing as the trinkets found within the average Christmas cracker. You have that awful paper hat which, despite its pathetic efforts to ape a coronet, bestows only very limited majesty on the wearer. There's the horrible little novelty - screwdriver, pencil sharpener, compass - destined to lodge in the dog's trachea. And then, dear help us, we encounter the medieval joke or Bronze Age riddle. My dog's got no nose. What's black and white and red all over? Laugh? I nearly disembowelled myself with the electric carving knife.
It is at this point in the Christmas dinner that we discover which of the assembled party can be described as good sports. Such jovial folk will don the flimsy crown with glee, announce themselves delighted with their new plastic hair clip and clutch their sides when it is revealed that the lady who went to the West Indies did so of her own accord. They're boundlessly enthusiastic. They're never cynical. They see the best in every situation. I hate their stupid guts.
Good sports are everywhere at Christmas. You see them wearing jumpers featuring bumpy representations of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. They are the people who don't mind when their bosses make all the staff wear red hats with bobbles. When some bright spark suggests playing charades after dinner, the sports, rather than flinging the vermin and his baggage out into the snow, leap up and begin arranging the family into teams.
Come to think of it, the most famous of all Christmas stories details the sinister indoctrination of a cautious, reasonable man by a fanatical family of good sports. Initially the personification of dignity, he eventually loses his soul and metamorphoses into the sort of grinning ninny who, if running a marathon, would feel the need to dress up as Charlie Chaplin. Charles Dickens may, admittedly, not have described A Christmas Carolthus, but he must surely have met readers who preferred the sober Scrooge to the game-show host he becomes.
Speaking of television, has anybody noticed how entire channels now seem to be set aside for sports to demonstrate their innate goodness? It's a Knockout, a popular British show from the 1970s in which lunatics disguised as giant mushrooms raced one another along greased planks, was instrumental in starting the craze. You might argue that the key incident in postwar good-sport history came at the press conference after the edition of the show featuring the British royal family. Prince Edward, the bald vacuum responsible for the debacle, railed at the press for daring to find Princess Anne dressed as a beefeater less than hilarious. The implication was clear. The cynical hacks had failed in their patriotic duty to be good sports.
Twenty years later we find the British media running to a timetable dictated by events in which the public is asked to sort the good sports from the bad. Before Christmas we ask ourselves if that middle-aged newsreader is exhibiting sufficient good spirits while bobbing for kangaroo testicles. As the new year beckons, a new gang of nonentities is transported to the Big Brother house, where their tolerance for bad food and worse company will be strained to - and, the networks hope, beyond - breaking point.
Britain, the natural home of the good sport, now harbours a legion of grim pseudo-celebrities, many created by the shows referenced above, whose only talent is an ability to grin like hyenas when placed in circumstances that would cause others to place their heads in the nearest oven. Consider Neil and Christine Hamilton. Neil, a former Conservative MP, first attracted attention when the Guardianrevealed him to have been involved in corruption so profoundly serious it might, if indulged in by a TD, actually warrant a paragraph in the Evening Herald(a short one, anyway). The Hamilton memsahib quickly handbagged her own way into the zeitgeist by bellowing shrilly at Martin Bell, the journalist who defeated Hamilton in the 1997 UK general election, during an ill-tempered confrontation on the local village green.
In the years that followed, the Hamiltons, bankrupted after an unsuccessful action against Mohamed Al Fayed, made themselves available to every light-entertainment producer with a gunk tank and a chequebook. They have been fired out of cannons, have rammed piranhas down their underwear and have danced naked across Regent Street. (I've made most of this up, but you get the drift.) The result? A nation happily vaults to the conclusion that, although the Hamiltons may be smug, insufferable and creepy, they are undeniably good sports. If Hitler could have found it in himself to dress up as Mr Blobby after invading Poland, the British may well have left him alone.
But what of low-level good sports? Surely nothing is seriously wrong with wearing a comical tie to work or failing to stab a screwdriver into the eye of anybody who produces a guitar at a dinner party. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The more the world fills up with people who find entertaining anything that purports to be so - karaoke, riddles in crackers, Give My Head Peace- the less we need genuinely delightful songs, films, books, sitcoms, plays and poems. Why bother writing Lucky Jimor composing the Enigma Variationswhen so much of your potential audience is perfectly satisfied with a cheap paper hat, a whistle made in Taiwan and a joke known to the ancient Babylonians? Make a stand this Christmas. Fold your arms, scowl and refuse to pull that cracker. Be a bad sport.