Poor Tom Daley. The cherubic diver, who dazzled as a 14-year-old at the Peking Olympics, turning the heads of Chinese girls like spinning jennies, seems to have banged his head on the board once too often. He won friends everywhere with his easy manner and Colgate smile. The boy next door, people thought, who ran errands for neighbours and lit candles on feast days. But it gets them all in the end, celebrity. He’s gone bonkers.
Daley is now 31 and based in California, where he claims to have found a contentment which eluded him in his sporting endeavours, despite grabbing a gold medal at Tokyo five years ago. The pup from Devon has become a transatlantic crasher. He was on our screens recently in Celebrity Traitors, rolling a jaundiced eye to belittle a rival, and will no doubt roll a few more in the weeks ahead, when he presents Game of Wool on Channel 4.
Game of Wool, it takes some believing, is a knitting contest in a ‘Yarn Barn’. Just the thing to cheer us all up on Sunday evenings after evensong: needles clacking, knees knocking, hearts pounding, tears flowing. We’ve come a long way from all those third-division comics and pub singers at the London Palladium. This is what the ageing starlet told the Radio Times: ‘It’s amazing what you can achieve in such a short time with just two needles or a crochet hook, and the benefits you get from knitting and crochet are just unparalleled.’
Hark at him! ‘Unparalleled benefits’! Clearly climbing a mountain, sailing a boat and learning an instrument – pursuits that stretch bodies and minds – are for lesser folk.
He’s quite a visionary, Tom. ‘It’s the thing that allows me to get away from everything and be creative.’ A knitter, he believes, is always ‘in the moment’, and this has led him on – however did you guess? – ‘a knitting journey’, all the way from Dartmoor to Bel Air.
Even by the standards of the Radio Times, a central pillar of the BBC’s re-education temple, this is gold. To underline their support for this gay icon there’s an extraordinary photograph of him posing in a two-piece outfit that resembles a cross between David Bowie in 1973 and a flowering cherry tree. Daley, looking misty-eyed, like Voltaire at Ferney, grips the hem of his garment like a fast bowler about to release an outswinger.
When you have been ordained as a sleb, courtiers will perform more contortions than a diver leaping from the top board. Take the Traitors schemozzle, when he responded to Kate Garraway’s innocent use of ‘flabbergasted’ by inviting viewers to mock the lady. The gesture did him few favours, because viewers know it is a useful word. For those of a certain age it brings to mind an outraged Frankie Howerd and ‘never has my flabber been so gasted’. Maybe, being half-American, with a husband who works in movies, he’s forgotten how we talk.
When it comes to current affairs, it might be wiser if Daley didn’t talk at all. ‘It’s certainly a scary time for minorities in the US. It does feel as if there’s a regression in people’s opinions and thoughts.’ This is the approved, progressive view, which is why his phizzog is plastered all over the front of the Radio Times.
When it comes to current affairs, it might be wiser if Daley didn’t talk at all
In another tame interview, with Zoe Williams, one of the Guardian’s privately educated performing fleas, he gives this ball another kick. He and husband Dustin might not live in the United States for ever. ‘We’ll see what happens with democracy.’
Should they ever decide to leave California, where nobody has yet been shoved off a roof for being homosexual, or publicly flogged for committing certain acts in private, they may find a refuge in many lands that honour same-sex couples. Queers for Palestine, those enthusiastic marchers, would be only too willing to assist their relocation. Owen Jones might pocket a finder’s fee.
Daley is of course an athlete so there’s plenty of talk about empowerment and wake-up calls. Do these people, one wonders again, travel anywhere without an alarm clock chiming the hours? Whether you live in Wiveliscombe or Venice Beach, it’s boilerplate stuff passed off as the wisdom of sages.
‘Every time you unravel your knitting, you’re not starting from scratch, you’re starting from experience.’ Another chap, long ago, wrote some songs about innocence and experience. If the fool would persist in his folly, he wrote, he would become wise. So there’s plenty of time for Daley, the man-child, to find out. Meanwhile he has wool in his hands, and wool in his brain.
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