The Sky News ‘Hijack Live” box was disappointingly immobile. As Rupert Murdoch fed the informational equivalent of white sugar to England’s lowest common denominator on his news channel, the picture-in-a-window resolutely refused to show anything resembling what broadcasters were calling ‘drama”.
After 10 minutes a policeman had walked past, and the rolling billboard behind the bus on the dim Athenian street had changed 10 times. The camera had wobbled for a moment, caressed by some Olympian zephyr, but of drama there was no sign. Somewhere in dark mahogany offices Sky executives wrestled with the difficult question of what to show should a massacre ensue. After all, how fair to their viewers would it be to keep their Live-Cam pointed at the bus once the shooting started? No doubt this prospect was unanimously rejected. No, the good stuff would have to be filmed close up, preferably with sound, with an artistic emphasis on exit wounds and tear-streaked cheeks. Leave the stodgy fuzzy telephoto rubbish to the dorks at the BBC.
But still nothing happened and Splatter-Cam remained dormant. And so, perhaps fearing that the natives were becoming restless and might switch over to something more informative (like, say, Eastenders), the channel proceeded to run a short film starring George Bush’s dog, scripted and edited by somebody lured out of rehab with state-funded crack. The Republican cur was supposedly searching for the new White House puppy: it trotted this way and that, was lectured by an appallingly wooden president about bein’ a gurd dowg and not poopin’ on the Oval Office desk or humpin’ Dick Cheney’s leg and suchlike, before finally tracking down a beatific Laura Bush clutching the new arrival. Goebbels would have been proud.
‘Hijack Live” disappeared along with the cathode ray tube as a brick was flung at the television, and so the hijack’s merciful anticlimax — and the inevitable studio debriefing — went unseen. One assumes the anchorman walked us through surrender with a large piece of Fuzzyfelt and some magic markers, before Sky’s political analysts put the whole affair in context: the two Albanians on the bus were disguised Tory MPs, funded by Euro-poofs and Al-Qaeda zillionaires, trying to get fox-hunting reintroduced in Britain.
But as usual the truth is far simpler. That the hijackers demanded a flight to Russia is coincidental — it could have been anywhere. They had simply, belatedly, been confronted by the realities of the Athenian traffic system, and realised that they could either die by police sniper, or of old age on a congested overpass.
Greek police claimed the bloodless conclusion as a triumph of training over, it was implied, the traditional trigger-happiness and penchant for overkill of anti-terrorism forces east of Rome. Indeed, had the Olympics not shunted Greece from the 17th to the 19th century in terms of crowd control, the Albanians and their captives could well have found themselves up against the sort of logic once used by the medieval Abbot of Citeaux: kill them all, God will know His own.
When it comes to soccer crowds, God searches in vain, a fact that is certain to be driven home at the end of the tyre-iron at some stage during the 2010 World Cup. In fact, one hopes our own security forces are hard at work bayoneting sandbags and skipping through orange cones, or whatever it is that police and paramilitaries do when preparing to rough people up.
Why so kragdadig? Why worry when the rugby and cricket equivalents went off so well; when the only hooliganism seen at either came from hotel waitresses and advocates moonlighting as cricket administrators?
Simple. Those were entirely different ballgames. Besides, in 1995 white people were too afraid to misbehave lest Madiba change his mind and start a one-way ferry service to Robben Island: one peep from you lot, and the only thing Francois Pienaar’s going to be lifting over his head is a pick-axe. Likewise, the prospect of cricket fans running amok is more endearing than alarming, rather like the elderly wife of a rural Anglican minister trying to beat a cockroach to death with a large ball of yarn.
No, something wicked this way comes, and it will be fascinating to watch liberal politicians and reformed security forces fight the urge to turn back the clock 20 years, to send out phalanxes of slit-eyed blond men with bristling moustaches. But old habits die hard.
Right, you bladdy boggers, come yere with your moffie haircut and your Soutie communist kak, and let’s find out who’s hard and who isn’t —