#olympics;

       A good week into the Olympic games, we move on today from bicycles and diving boards to a veritable feast of pugilism. Graeco-Roman wrestling comes this afternoon to North Arena 2, and the sad news here for Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell is this: the feast just isn’t bloody enough. His ghoulish piece on our ‘neutered’ version of the original sport seems to have made quite a considerable circulation online, and latches its outrage onto comparison with the Pankration – the ancient Greek precursor to what is actually, in this thoroughly modern era, termed ‘MMA’ (mixed martial arts). The same day, an article was published in Vice, entitled ‘MMA is too brutal for the Olympics, and that’s why we love it.’ Apparently, the ‘soul’ of the bloody and terrifying sport (adjectives considered selling points) would be compromised by admission into the mainstream. The Graeco-Roman or ‘Freestyle’ wrestling event, then, might be construed as the London 2012-friendly incarnation of the ancient practice. And apparently it’s not good enough. Both Sewell and Rosenblatt, journalist for Vice, extol the virile purity the of Pankration and MMA respectively, lauding the ‘kicking, strangling, butting and biting’ of the Greeks and dismissing such legitimate Olympic sports as Judo by assimilation to ‘the combat version of a tea ceremony.’ Of modern freestyle wrestling, asks Sewell – ‘Where’s the fun?’ Haunting sentiments, methinks, not just for their sadistic violence, but also, frustratingly, for their misinformation.

         While Danny Boyle was overseeing the final tweakings to his portrait of ‘Britain’s cultural landscape’, ARTE France, French leg of the European cultural broadcasting group and self-professed ‘amoureux du spectacle’ was asking its followers what they understood of ‘la Britishness.’  A series of TV programs screened in France in July answered the question in terms of such cheerful evocations as ‘rock anglais’, the ‘famille royale’ and ‘fish and chips’. If Boyle ever felt the burden of defending and celebrating a nation with a bad press, this was not the series to impress it. That would be the blog. For those who read French, voilà: http://www.arte.tv/sites/fr/britishness/. For the rest, of the ten writers published by ARTE France on the subject, I summarize the grizzly impressions of Britain as follows:

Article on ‘National Pride’: A left wing cowering from the word ‘patriotism’, hereditary superiority complex associated as it is with the BNP.

On British art: An Olympics so heavily commercialised that we are forced to look elsewhere for a genuine ‘snapshot of the era.’

On imperialism and decolonisation: A need to accept Britain’s colonial history, so as to conceive of a future neither orphaned from its roots nor naïve to its place in the world.

On multiculturalism: Failed attempts at achieving it harmoniously.

On student life: A nation with 43% of its chip-pan fires caused by inebriated students with no vocational direction.

On foreign languages: A youth predominantly showing no grasp of or interest in any language other than English.

On sex: Prudes, whose self-deprecating humour can be seen woefully reflected in attitudes to their own bodies and to all matters sexual.

On Scotland: Ongoing tension with the English.

On ‘cool’: A nation engrossed in appearance, whose obsession with masking reality in ‘marketing’ seems directed primarily at foreign investors and tourists.

On the homeland of football: Football.