Day Jar View

Just watching this bilge that is masquerading as a live broadcast of the GB athletes getting off the plane from Beijing.

I think they did a great job, but I’m sure that the last thing they need (or viewers want) is to see a dolly “interviewing” each of them with such bon mots as “how does it feel to be home?”.

Such insight gives ammunition to those who talk of scrapping the licence fee.

In 1992, NASA decided that the old adage of “Better, Faster, Cheaper – pick any two”, would no longer apply to them. With admirable chutzpah, of course underpinned by comfortable funding from Congress, they embarked on a series of missions with predictably mixed results.

For example, the Mars Climate Orbiter mission (cost $125 million) failed because the contractor, Lockheed Martin, failed to convert imperial units to metric units. I’m no engineer, but I think in anyone’s language this can only be descibed as “piss-poor”.

At the peak of the Apollo project, NASA’s budget was around 4% of US GDP. Every piece of hardware was so over-engineered that I seem to remember that out of a million components in the Apollo spacecraft, only a handful failed. Can you imagine if today’s cars were engineered to that degree?

This can hardly have been a surprise to those with an engineering background or, indeed, any experience of managing projects of any size. The fact is that most clichés have at least some basis in fact, and trying to do something better on less money is bound to end in tears.

I was reminded of Better, Faster, Cheaper this morning, when I woke up to blanket coverage of the Olympic Games opening ceremony day, that kicks off the 2008 Games in Beijing.

It has been said that the Chinese have spent around $40bn on the Games, the majority of that on new construction projects, including the famous “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium.

In the course of this massive project, over the past seven years the authorities have displaced thousands of people living in the shadow of the main buildings in shanty towns – ostensibly to clean up the city for all the visitors.

In addition, people have been told how to behave in public, there are stories abound of internet censorship for foreign journalists staying in the city, and a generally over-zealous attitude from the police has been reported.

So it may be Faster, and it may even be Cheaper if the Chinese recoup in revenues and overseas goodwill from the sanitised view of their country that will be presented to us. But is it Better?

Can it be said that the Chinese population will benefit from the Games to even some of the extent that, say, the inhabitant of the East End will surely benefit from the 2012 Games in London? Would any of our lot willingly give up their house for the good of the Games?

The Games is supposed to be about fair play, competition, inclusiveness and the celebration of the coming together of nations from all over the world. But it is hard to ignore the oppressive cloak of smog hanging over the city, that in some way represents the way in which the Chinese have gone about putting on these games, and the subservient way in which leaders of the free world have stepped around the human-rights issues that China has conveniently swept under the carpet for this event.

All that said – I am a big fan of the Olympic Games, despite the problems that invariably arise when the focus is put so sharply on the host country every four years. I can’t wait for the weightlifting, which for me offers the purest form of effort and performance over the 3 weeks – the characters are great, the exaltations when the bar is held aloft inspiring.

On a selfish note, one good thing that may come out of this competition is that it will finally persuade me back into the gym after 6 years of getting steadily softer around my middle. Three weeks of exposure to the finest specimens on earth (women pole vaulters especially), will both titillate, enthral and instil guilt – how many things on TV can you say that about?