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About Richard Beard
I figured out the software by translating a very short book by Andre Maurois, now available under the Translation tag above. This means I can move on to whatever else is on my mind. If I run out of ideas, the next pre-computer age blog I plan to translate is another very short book, this one by Henry Miller, also in French, entitled I’m No More of an Idiot Than Anybody Else.
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 - The Real Thing
There’s an old rugby saying: if you’re good enough, you’re big enough. The actor Matt Damon would have to be very good indeed. In Clint Eastwood’s new film Invictus, Damon plays the role of 1995 Rugby World Cup winning captain Francois Pienaar. He is 5 inches shorter and 4 stones lighter – the All Blacks would snap him in half.
At 5’10” Matt Damon is also shorter than Nelson Mandela (6’1”), who in Eastwood’s film is played by Morgan Freeman (6’2”). Winning the World Cup as the shortest man in the room is the kind of exploit that Hollywood loves.
Invictus is based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, which describes Nelson Mandela’s use of rugby to seduce white South Africans to his vision of the Rainbow Nation. ‘Don’t address their brains,’ he said at the time, ‘address their hearts.’ And deep in the Afrikaaner heart is a love of Rugby Union.
For a potential Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster, the obscurity of rugby presents a problem. What, exactly, is this strange-looking game? The bemused film critic of the Tucson Weekly described the Invictus sports action as ‘a bunch of guys groaning a lot,’ while over at the Kansas City Star rugby ‘pretty much looks like a group mugging.’
Over here, though, everything will be different. We know what rugby is supposed to look like.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen Invictus and rugby doesn’t look like this. As with any sporting setback, it’s not fair to place all the blame on the captain. Matt Damon isn’t given much of a team. His stand-in Springboks look like college boys, though not necessarily students of acting, and their emotional range is limited even for rugby players. They sometimes cross their arms to express indignation.
These are pat-a-cake Springboks led by mini-Matt Damon and they will never win the Webb-Ellis Trophy. In that sense, the casting is perfect for the formula – Nelson can lick the boys into shape. If they follow his crazy reconciling ways, then one day, perhaps at a World Cup on home soil, they will ultimately prevail.
 The Anxiety of Influence Eastwood, too, is in the business of addressing hearts and not brains. Mandela is a complicated man in a troublesome country, but as with the rugby it’s easier to keep things simple. The Mandela bio-pic soon becomes a plot-standard sports movie: he’s black, he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, but can kindly ex-con Nelson Mandela inspire a bunch of undersized students to become Rugby Champions of the World?
Maybe he can, if these actor Boks show they know their rugby. I certainly hadn’t written them off in advance, especially as in America Invictus was rated PG 13, for ‘brutal sport action’.
Which is exactly what rugby should provide, when played properly. By ‘properly’, I mean as we’re used to seeing it on TV, most of the weeks of the year. To capture the full dynamism and grace of the game, and also the brutality, TV sticks to the basics. High-spec cameras follow the action.
In Invictus, because the players aren’t a patch on the real thing, the camera does exactly the opposite. It obscures the action. Eastwood keeps cutting away, and no single sporting sequence is allowed to develop.
I can see just enough to make out that Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky is having a bad day with the boot. He can’t punt a rugby ball, and his incompetence is so striking (in a Test Match, Brian!) that I want to see immediate replays of his flawed technique.
That’s my Pavlovian TV-spectator response to unusual sports phenomena, a category that includes all the rugby in this film. I want Eddie Butler to explain why the wingers don’t sprint and the Samoans are weak in defence. Is it the altitude? Have the All Blacks been poisoned? And why has Andrew Mehrtens appeared in a World Cup final wearing an Andrew Mehrtens wig?
Instead of this sense of involvement, I gradually realise I’m watching the one activity on earth that is as far from real life as it’s possible to get: the rugby looks like amateur dramatics.
And in Invictus there’s no escape, because the ‘95 Final is shown at length, almost thirty minutes of ersatz rugby action. The fearsome Jonah Lomu is replaced by a slightly chubby student. He is occasionally jumped on by other students, but before we can assess his contact skills the camera cuts to another unrelated set-up. There are scuffed kick-offs and elementary back-moves, all performed at rehearsal pace so as not to confuse Wisconsin.
Eastwood knows something is wrong. How could entire nations be in thrall to this? He therefore decides that the fervour of rugby is best expressed by sound-effects.
 Springbok Back Line In Invictus, the major injury risk to the players is earache. Every tackle boofs like a blunt object thumped into stuffed leather, and out comes the stuffing as grunts and oomphs. This is the aural equivalent of the Batman biff and boom.
Just when the rugby can’t get any worse, the match goes slow-mo. On television, slow-motion exists to repeat the interesting bits. In feature films, it means the emotional heft is so weighty that time stands still. Or feels like it does.
As the action slows, so does the sound. Ellis Park fills with whale-song, as the groans wallow deeply from one amateur tackle to the next. The Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky, who isn’t Stransky and who has forgotten his kicking boots, is calling for the ball in slow-audio, an unintelligible last word direct from a Hollywood battlefield, possibly Iwo Jima, and I expect him at any moment to receive (tragically) a solitary bullet between the eyes.
Instead he pops over a drop goal.
Clint gives rugby the fatal Hollywood treatment. In doing so, he undermines his film about Nelson Mandela, the nature of leadership, and the new South Africa.
In the best Hollywood sports films, usually about baseball or boxing, the protagonists are allowed to be grown men. Their lives depend upon their sport. The 1995 Springboks were also men, much closer to the flawed and grizzled heroes of Eastwood’s earlier work than they are to the college-boys of Invictus. They were playing for their old life and their new life, and also for themselves.
It does the truth of the story a disservice to insist, less than fifteen years after the event, that Mandela and the Boks can be simplified to serve the narrative conventions of this film. The rugby is central to this weakness. It becomes apparent long before the end that the epiphany of Invictus depends on the Springboks winning the Cup.
South Africa win. The film ends, and as choral arrangements squeeze the last sentimental tear from any dry eye, the credits roll against a montage of still photographs from the final. The real one.
There is a photograph of Nelson Mandela, the great man himself, at Ellis Park before kick-off. He is famously wearing the No.6 Springbok jersey, in green-and-gold, and he looks tiny against the blonde Afrikaaner bulk of Pienaar, the man he called ‘captain of rugby’. Anyone genuinely inspired by Nelson Mandela, and indeed by the game of rugby itself, will know that the triumph would have been as great if South Africa had lost.
 I could live in this forever First, it must snow. It must snow a great deal.
Then you will need three small children. Close their school for the day, and find an expanse of snow-covered ground. Be the first there, because that makes it more fun.
Okay, I can’t do the instruction thing any longer, because it hurts. But this works best if you don’t have dogs – with dogs, you can never quite scoop up snow with abandon. However, you can be sure that some of your whites will go yellow. I recommend, before building an igloo, that you put down the dog. Igloos are a significant challenge. Respect the igloo.
As with all building projects, appoint a foreman. For best results select a woman, because it cuts out the arguing. Preferably a strong energetic woman from a country where the knowledge of how to build igloos is passed from generation to generation. Iceland and Greenland would be first choice, followed by the Scandinavian countries, though Switzerland will do at a pinch, and also possibly Southern Germany, the French Alps, and some regions of Italy and Austria.
Listen carefully to your foreman, then do what she says. Send the small children to collect huge amounts of snow. They will understand, especially if you can find a whelbarrow with a flat tire and an old broken bucket. One of the secrets is to think ‘cone’ and not ‘dome’, at least in the early stages. Another secret is to pack the snow in hard. This is an edifice, not a toy.
 Hearth and Home I can’t tell you any other secrets, because then I’d owe my soul to Smilla, Inuit Goddess of Feeling. However, I feel able to reveal that a wood-saw helps with the final stages, and also a frisbee or similar instrument.
Ah, now that’s a way to spend the day. School’s out again tomorrow. We’re going to build an ice hotel.
 not enough information I had an email from Dru that wasn’t from Dru. It was her daughter, ambushing Dru’s email account like a policeman at the door – Dru had spent the night at A & E, she was being kept in hospital, she had to have an operation.
This news came across like smoke signals from the young: the smoke was bad but the signals were cheery. The message ended:
P.s dru’s mobile is out of charge so don’t try to ring it L
What were the Indians trying to say? How bad is L?
I wouldn’t say I panicked, but I googled Bristol Hospitals and started with the Royal Infirmary, thinking I could work down from there. Right first time. They did indeed have a Drusilla Marland on the wards, and yes, I could speak to her on the old-fashioned telephone.
Except Dru wasn’t exactly on the wards, she was somewhere north of Planet Nebula. She was on the wrong side of most of Bristol’s Royal painkillers, but at least they’d done their job. Those gallstones were sending out pain that was no longer reaching the brain. Dru tells me (because she is still in there) that an operation is imminent.
She came back to earth just once, to report that the Trav was parked outside and had a ticket on it.
I did what everyone does with health problems and looked gallstones up on the Internet. They are very painful, the internet says, and the condition is twice as likely to be suffered by women as men. The operation is usually successful.
At Schloss Marland, I’m glad to say, normal transmission should shortly be resumed.
 waste of space Dru tells me, with all due respect, that I haven’t yet developed my blogger’s voice. She means that I write like I always write. I haven’t managed that intimate but off-beat tone that she does so well herself. But then Dru has unfair advantages as a blogger. She does loads of stuff. She’s been having an adventure-a-day, against doctor’s orders, since before blogs were first used as solid fuel. Take a look. This is how it should be done.
Instead of adventures, I make a habit of sitting at my desk doing nothing much, though I do have an idea for an art installation that will be a speeded-up film of my day at work. The lucky audience will get to see exactly how often I drop my head into my hands. It will be fascinating.
Meanwhile, and in the absence of shipwrecks and poetry readings, there’s Dru on a walk through Leigh Woods stumbling across ‘a stone. It’s Welsh slate, carved with the words AND STONES MOVED SILENTLY ACROSS THE WORLD. It was put there by Alyson Hallet.’
This stone serves the perfect function of public art, in that it’s not very noticeable or thoughtful. Public art needs to be inconspicuous. It gets installed in public places. If the passing-by audience become animated in any meaningful way then the council fears a traffic hazard or an incitement to vandalism. Public art is therefore chosen for being whatever art isn’t -passers-by must pass it by.
Fountains are the second-lowest point for public art - they often get turned off, as if they were never there. The highest contempt, however, should be reserved for public sculptures of human figures on town-centre benches. They’re rubbish art. But they’re also taking up a space on a public bench. What good to the public is that?
 'there are no winners' As a sportsman, I am a member of the ‘ -y’ family. I’m related to Straussy and Backy. In our small sub-species, Homo Olympiens, there are three primary families. We are joined by the ‘-o’ family (Wilko, Johnno) and the ‘-ers’ family (Aggers, Athers).
We get along famously, because these sporting nicknames are names stripped down. They are names in the dressing room in their jockstraps. They’re no respecters of names. On the team-sheet nobody escapes – the system is automatic and egalitarian, and amid the mud and studs everyone is quickly allocated to one of the families.
The same does not happen in individual sports. One of the horrors of golf coverage on the TV is the smarmy use of first names – ‘Tiger’, ‘Lee’ – as if everyone was on first name terms. You’re not fooling anybody.
I’m thinking about this because I was surprised to be referred to on the net as Beardy. Over on his excellent blog designed for auto-didact, spliffy, anti-establishment ranting polymaths (who like trains), Ian Marchant reminded me (and all those in his wide constituency) that I’d offered to take the Physical Education Classes at the Free University of Radnorshire.
(This will be free like the National Gallery and not like Westminster Abbey, which is free except if you don’t pay you can’t go in. At the National Gallery there’s no bullying, and you’d have to have a heart of socialist stone not to bung a few coins in the tin or pay a couple of quid for some overpriced postcards).
But Ian is right. I have put myself forward as the Professor of PE at FUR. He was therefore correct to give me my active sporting name, and you know what, Marchers? That’s going to be the first class we take, before preparing for the more philosophical Race With No Finish Line (practical).
What are team nicknames all about? They announce an intimacy. They also infantilise, which makes them true. Those of us who like games and rolling about on grass are in touch with our inner child. A baby name is the best we deserve, and there is no room for airs and graces.
I was reminded of this once in the letter pages of the Times. A show-off Dad proudly wrote in to say that his eight-month old son was a keen fan of BBC’s Test Match Special. Not only did he like to listen to every ball of a Test match, at the age of eight months, but only the day before he’d uttered his first words: ‘Aggers.’
The next day another reader replied that his son, too, was eight months old and listened to every ball of the Test match. His first words were ‘Christoper Martin-Jenkins.’
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and recently took up the post as Director of the National Academy of Writing. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed aboved. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below right. I'll get back to you.
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