“England f…” These were the words that tormented Likely Lads Bob and Terry as they endeavoured to pull off a feat that has thrilled and frustrated so many sports fans.
How could they get through eight nerve-wracking hours without discovering the score of an England football game, so enabling the Geordie duo to embrace the TV highlights in all their untainted drama? That was the premise that gave the nation No Hiding Place, a fabled episode of the iconic sitcom Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads.
In 1970s Newcastle all that Bob and Terry were up against was a pal who had bet them a tenner they wouldn’t make it, some football-loving hairdressers – and the dread headline on a newspaper billboard that began “England f…”, giving rise to an evening of anguished conjecture as to what that “f” foretold.
In 21st-century London, as I discovered last weekend, the sports fan’s quest for ignorance is a whole new ball game. Bob and Terry had it easy. No Twitter, no TV in every pub, no smartphones, no bookies open on the sabbath, no 24/7 information merry-go-round. Out-manoeuvring the fiendish Flint was a doddle in comparison with what faced me on the opening day of the 2015 Cricket World Cup. This is, of course, the world’s third biggest sports tournament, with a TV audience of 2.2 billion (beaten only by the Olympics and the football World Cup), desperate to see if new stars such as South Africa’s AB de Villiers or England’s Jos Buttler can take the place of global galacticos like Sachin Tendulkar or Kevin Pietersen. A crowd of 90,000 in Melbourne for that opening-day clash between Australia and England. And millions more revelling in the saturation coverage online.
I was up against all of them. As I write, I am following England’s second game, against New Zealand, on the Guardian’s over-by-over coverage (lummee, our brave boys 116-8 after 30 overs). But this was a service I nobly eschewed for that first game as I sought to pass an entire day in ignorance of the score.
I had a few points in my favour: the Archers omnibus, for example – a classic Sunday morning time-killer, and not something I can imagine even wily Terry thinking of.
This still left me 12 hours to endure until the TV highlights. Yes, I could just hunker down in the bedroom all day, risking the odd dash to the fridge and the toilet. But I’m not sure what my missus would make of that.
No, to do this properly I had to venture outside and take on the full force of the information society.
Often, while wandering outside with the family, I’ve been rumbled nosing around for, say, the football results, peering at TVs through pub windows, peeking at tablet screens on table-tops. But this was the opposite. I hurried past my local boozers. I shunned cafe conversation, usually irresistible to a habitual eavesdropper like me. I hummed Soul Limbo – the 60s Booker T theme adopted by the BBC’s cricket coverage – to drown out the broadcast voices drifting out of shops and flats.
Leave your phone at home, I thought, and you take out social media at a stroke. But I hadn’t banked on the sheer ubiquity of screens, flashing from every fist. In Victoria station I was almost undone by a Sky-sponsored jumbo screen. As I carelessly looked up, there it was, beaming pictures of frolicking cricket fans from down under. I fled before the nationality of the frolickers became apparent. Back home I was safe, with a woman who is not only radiant and soulful but also Chinese, and therefore really not too fussed by the world’s oldest international sporting rivalry.
So I had made it. After 12 nerve-shredding hours it was my turn to embrace the TV highlights in all their untainted drama. For Bob and Terry, of course, the “F” was a crushing disappointment. Not “England five” or even “England fight back”, but “England flooded out”.
And yes, for me on Sunday night it was very much a case of “England flop”. But the real score was: Mayers 1, World Wide Web 0. That’s what I call a giant-killing.
