The great tradition of Boat Race swearing

[Ratickle]

I'm thinking this may be the problem with offshore racing versus competitive sculling, no swearing consultant to make sure we are doing it correctly.

Maybe then we could get 7 million viewers and 200,000 watching live!!

Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It listed an unusual character in the credits, a swearing consultant. And no wonder, for he must have been one of the busiest people on set. Lively on-screen swearing has been largely absent recently — until mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday, that is.

Commentators Andrew Cotter and Dan Topolski were amiably rhubarbing away on the radio about this year’s Boat Race being a masterpiece of unbelievable tension (though anyone could see, even on the radio, that only a torpedo attack would prevent an Oxford victory) when Oxford’s diminutive cox, the Colombian Oskar Zorrilla, made his pitch for immortality.

A shrieked order, ‘Don’t f u c king sit’, came crystal clear over the airwaves. Cotter and Topolski battled on as if nothing had happened. Then, with the same adjective, ‘Be tenacious’ and ‘That’s the stuff’. And finally, not surprisingly I guess, there was ‘F u c k yeah!’ as Zorrilla steered his boat over the winning line.

I had always thought the cox simply had to steer, and shout ‘in-out’ at the right time. Not a bit of it. An acquaintance at Cambridge was the Light Blues cox for three years. On an old tape of the race (they always record the cox’s advice), the closing exhortation featured the F word four times. A few years back, television picked up a cox saying, ‘It’s time to f u c king attack them.’ My colleague Patrick Kidd observed at the time, ‘Viewers were shocked. Fancy someone with all that education using a split infinitive.’ The best-loved of all Boat Race eye-raisers came in the 1950s, I think, when John Snagge said: ‘Isn’t that nice, the wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew.’

For many people the Boat Race might register about as much as a selling plate on a rainy September night on the dirt at Wolverhampton. But more fool them: this was red in tooth and claw and blue in language and, in truth, captivating. Ignore those tired old criticisms that the Boat Race is irrelevant (viewing figures were 7.3 million, with another 200,000 or so watching on the Thames), elitist (well only in terms of pure sporting excellence — 15 rowers in the London Olympics were Blues), or pointless (it’s the last great amateur event: seven months of pain for no prize money). I hope the BBC has the guts to stay with it, and keep the quality of its microphones up to speed too.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/life/spec...race-swearing/

[Ratickle]

The swearing was the only interesting bit of the Boat Race

Come on, people. It's time we acknowledged a fundamental truth: the Boat Race is fantastically boring.

It really is. It makes Formula 1 look exciting. Two boats go along a river quite slowly, while John Inverdale bellows WHAT A BATTLE OH THIS IS JUST TOO MUCH as though he's on the edge of sexual climax. Then one of the boats gets to a designated bit of the river a few seconds before the other boat, and all the people in that boat look happy while the ones in the other look sad. Then the people in the winning boat throw a small person in the river. It's searingly dull.

Which is why, every year, they introduce some controversial element, to add a tiny layer of fake excitement to the bland events. Sometimes it's a dappy Australian communist hurling himself into the boats' path; sometimes it's that one boat or other simply sinks. This year, clearly out of ideas, they decided to have one of the small people say a lot of swears, so that a few Middle England families would get a momentary thrill of outrage, and the the BBC could apologise, which the BBC loves to do.

Seriously. Are we really surprised that someone involved in top-level sport swore while competing? It might be boring, but presumably it matters to the people on the boats. It would have been more surprising if the cox, one Oskar Zorrilla, was yelling "Come on chaps! Jolly good show! Let's give those rotters what for!"

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/to...the-boat-race/

[Ratickle]

So, who do we know who could be our official swearing consultant? Do we start a poll?