A swan won’t take your eye out, says Rod Liddle. So why the health and safety paranoia?
Never mind hung parliaments and the ending of the two-party dominance of British politics (a notion I seem to remember being mooted in about 1982) — here’s the important question of the week: was the BBC right to provoke that swan?
It’s a story you may have missed while worrying yourself stupid over who to vote for, or the fact that the Greeks are skint again, or Icelandic ash sending planes spiralling to earth like sycamore keys in an autumn gale. On a programme called The One Show, which neither you nor I have ever seen, or will ever see, because it is for people with the IQs of the invasive and dangerous American signal crayfish, a reporter went in pursuit of a swan on the River Cam which had, apparently, been terrorising rowers. On one occasion its violent behaviour led to a skuller becoming capsized. The president of the Cambridgeshire Rowing Association, a man called Bill Key, has asked the Queen for special dispensation to sort out the creature, possibly by strangling it, or putting it before a firing squad. And here’s the first reason I think that this story is interesting: health and safety.
Mr Key described the swan as ‘demented’ and said it represented a ‘serious’ health and safety threat to rowers, by pecking at them and flapping its wings. This is a swan we’re talking about, remember, not a gryphon or a basilisk or a tiger. There is not a single documented case of anyone ever having their leg or arm broken by a swan, despite popular mythology — and even if there were such a case, the lesson should be stay away from swans, not shoot them. The truth is they hiss a lot and they may attempt a spot of buffeting, but they are not really a health and safety threat unless you are another swan.
What would have happened, once upon a time, is that the Cambridgeshire Rowing Association would have asked its members to avoid the swan, or merely be slightly wary of it, rather than writing to the Queen in an attempt to have it killed. But even entirely imagined dangers, these days, are enough to invoke the cry of ‘health and safety!’ Chestnut trees which young boys might climb up and if they did climb up might fall down from; playgrounds within which they trip over; tiny stepladders which employees are not allowed to climb up unless they have been trained and filled in the proper forms. Hypothetical dangers thought up by the grey ranks of the undead who work in our health and safety industries. The worst this swan did was get someone a bit wet. ‘It could easily poke someone’s eye out,’ Mr Key said. Could it? It hasn’t. There has never, ever been a recorded case of someone’s eye being poked out by a swan. Get a grip, Mr Key, you big Jessie.
The swan on the River Cam has been nicknamed ‘Asbo’ on account of its errant behaviour, incidentally. I thought I’d mention that fact here.
Then the BBC got involved. The One Show, as I mentioned before, is a television news programme for mentally retarded people. Do you remember Nationwide, the BBC’s early evening news magazine presented by the avuncular Frank Bough, who we later discovered enjoyed coke-fuelled S&M sessions in Soho dungeons? The One Show is a bit like Nationwide in the same way as Andrew Lloyd Webber is a bit like Mahler; a Reithian concept, super-serving morons. Anyway The One Show sent some air-headed bint of a reporter to check out the Asbo swan, sent her down the river on a boat to annoy the swan, but the swan remained entirely placid. So they chased it up and down the river and urged other boaters to do the same — and this is the thing with television. You have to bend to its will. It does not matter about the truth, everything must fit in with its view of the world.
I recently spent four tortuous days filming Election Night Come Dine With Me (for the most whoreish of reasons) and witnessed the production team trying to make the homosexual former policeman and failed Liberal Democrat politician Brian Paddick seem interesting and intelligent. ‘Christ, he’s thick and boring,’ one of them said to me. Yes, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with that unless you make it so. A lot of people are thick and boring, it’s how life really is. But TV is a confection and it will not be gainsaid; on The One Show they wanted an angry swan and would not be satisfied until they got one.
The swan was not angry, though, because it was not its season to be angry. The BBC researchers had not given a moment’s thought to the story other than ‘this will look good on TV’. In other words, they are as thick as their viewers, pretty much. The swan was a cob and the reason it took offence at all those rowers is because it was mating season and it thought these weird humans in their boats might try to shag its mate. In the case of Bill Key, it was quite possibly correct in its presumption. I notice Mr Key has not denied attempting to have sex with the cob’s chosen partner, an elegant pen not yet named by the press — perhaps he should make the matter clear right now. But it was a sexually fuelled fury, as evidenced by the fact that when rowers approached it always attacked the cox. Ha ha, geddit, etc. Whatever the case, by the time the BBC bint arrived the swan’s sexual fury had been assuaged: it had already pulled.
At which point, the RSPCA got involved. They might charge the BBC for having harassed the swan. Is there any organisation in Britain which has more lost sight of its original reason for existence than the RSPCA? Well, OK, sure, maybe the BBC. They belong together. Why do we have The One Show? Why can’t you harass a swan anymore? Surely one of the pleasures of being alive is that one can harass swans from time to time — they don’t mind, hugely, in the end. The RSPCA these days sees itself as a branch of the social services, and a no less inept branch than that which deals with children. You have to convince it you are a fit and proper person to own a pet; meanwhile the charity spends an ever greater proportion of its fortune, raised through the wills of well meaning but deluded people, on political campaigning and its own headquarters.
The Asbo swan of Cambridge; a fable for our time, as Thurber might have put it.
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