Ah, Sport magazine. Free every Friday morning from a smiley lady outside the station.
For a few years during the nineties there was a great general sport magazine called Total Sport (edited by Danny Kelly, apparently once married to Hazel O'Connor! I didn't know that) which covered a variety of sports in an in-depth, interesting and informative way. It failed because British magazine buyers apparently can't focus on more than one sport at a time, or at least won't part with money to do so. When Sport came along late last year I thought that we might have a successor to that late lamented mag. And free! My favourite price, as that attractive older woman in the Somerfield advert used to say.
How wrong I was. It's just an excuse to sell advertising like all the rest. Articles are short and facile and most are flogging something either implicitly or explicitly ("Preview Sport - brought to you by L'Oreal Paris Men Expert", "Mazda and The London Triathlon").
Best of all is the regular feature on the wife or girlfriend of a sports star - this week, Bec Cartwright, wife of Lleyton Hewitt and apparently ex-Home And Away (I wouldn't know, I'm a Neighbours man myself). I couldn't work out whether this was a sop to the ladies or an excuse to show a pretty lady in a bikini, and then I read the closing line of the first para:
"A nubile young thing with a tenuous link to sport who looks good in their pants? Bingo! Woof!! Etc!!!"
I think that should be the new name for the feature, actually - "A nubile young thing with a tenuous link to sport who looks good in their pants - brought to you by Flashermac Raincoats".
But perhaps the ultimate giveaway about the whole farrago is that the magazine took a one month summer break. Not enough sport in summer for them to cover? No, not enough commuters for them to inflict their advertising on during the traditional holiday season.
Back after the Bank Holiday with some carefree posts about kittens and fluffy things to counterbalance this week's heaviosity.
On the discman today: AM - Wire Chairs Missing PM - Wire 154
3 comments:
I hope you will be doing more themed weeks occasionally - this one has been fascinating, albeit very sad...
Am with you on this one brother - I'm sure that reading those rags bring on brain death by a thousand celebrity articles. It's psychological warfare! These new papers actually make the Metro ('Breakfast for your brain'!?) look like a decent paper (did you know Metro is National?).
I look forward to the pictures of kittens next week, preferably with a soundtrack of Wire and This Heat!
Will - thanks for your comments, and I'll think about it - perhaps on a more positive topic next time though!
Martin - yes, it struck me too that Metro is actually pretty inoffensive next to the evening rags, but it's still killed off "proper" paper sales at CP station and thus MUST BE DESTROYED.
A chap at work gave me his cast-off(!) copies of the This Heat and Wire box sets on Monday, hence my immersion in their oeuvres. Somehow I'd totally missed both of the bands' stuff before, other than a couple of cracking cover versions of "Outdoor Miner" (by Lush and Flying Saucer Attack). I probably could have lived without encountering Wire in such depth but I'm an enthusiastic convert to This Heat. The two studio albums and The Peel Sessions are fantastic.
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