Life without television sport
and the engineered publicity
that promoted nonentities
as if they were future stars,
or had done something useful,
might seem like The End of the World to many.
But the time of the virus
is is not the end of anything
it is merely a pleasing hiatus
from the false frivolity
of light entertainment.
There was a time before television
when watching a sport and playing it
were interchangeably engaging activities
-both happened in the same stadia.
Back then there were few professional bodies
and sportsmen (it was usually men, but not always*)
that organised sport did not rely on the oxymoron
of the cross promotion of sport on television
via advertisers whose main aim was to sell sugary drinks
and fatty foods to ready glazed and rotting couch potatoes.
*Women in England played football on the same terms
as men did up to 1921, when men banned women
from playing on the same pitches that men used.
and the engineered publicity
that promoted nonentities
as if they were future stars,
or had done something useful,
might seem like The End of the World to many.
But the time of the virus
is is not the end of anything
it is merely a pleasing hiatus
from the false frivolity
of light entertainment.
There was a time before television
when watching a sport and playing it
were interchangeably engaging activities
-both happened in the same stadia.
Back then there were few professional bodies
and sportsmen (it was usually men, but not always*)
that organised sport did not rely on the oxymoron
of the cross promotion of sport on television
via advertisers whose main aim was to sell sugary drinks
and fatty foods to ready glazed and rotting couch potatoes.
*Women in England played football on the same terms
as men did up to 1921, when men banned women
from playing on the same pitches that men used.
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