Screen Break
A smacked bottom and a plate of Bourbon biscuits - just the job for Max Mosley
By Martin "Pass the fig rolls and the gimp mask" Kelner on Jul 17, 2008 - 7:16:55 PM
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Having never had much of an interest in motor car racing, the leisure time pursuits of Max Mosley have largely passed me by. However, over the past week or so, reports from the High Court, as well as numerous background articles – notably the fine piece by Richard Williams in this paper on Saturday – have given me a new insight into the life and times of the boss of Formula One.
The salient factor is that, alongside his liking for fast cars, Mr Mosley sustains a similar penchant for slow women. At least, I am assuming the Misses A,B,C,D, and E, progressed at a fairly stately pace in Mosley’s rented Chelsea flat, because when you enter into the kind of commercial transaction currently under discussion in the High Court what you are mostly paying for – apart obviously from the head lice inspections, the whips, and the fancy dress - is time. Quicker and cheaper solutions for Mr Mosley, according to my Rough Trade Guide To London, would have been readily available a couple of miles to the north east, but without the incidentals and the rich and varied dramatis personae.
It appears, therefore, that while one group of Mr Mosley’s contract freelances is rewarded for proceeding as slowly as possible, in order to prolong the agony, another has its weekly envelope stuffed according to how fast it can go – to the same effect, in my case. How richly ironic.
Clearly, there is nothing to be gained by rehearsing the particulars of the case, the minutest detail of which can be pored over on the newspaper website of your choice. I intend to follow the lead of BBC News, which, at family viewing times at least, has skirted round the more recherché aspects of Mosley’s hobby, to avoid upsetting its younger audience, leaving time free for less disturbing aspects of modern life like stabbings, economic collapse, and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
One piece of evidence I could have done with more details of, though, was given by Miss D, who said that at the end of what she described as a “session,” everybody would sit down – those that still could, I expect - for a cup of tea and “discuss what had taken place.” I have been wondering about these post-bondage afternoon teas. Were there biscuits? Was it all included in the fee?
How, I wonder, did the conversation go? “I enjoyed that thing where you dripped the hot wax on my....mmm, tell you what, these custard creams are delicious. I don’t suppose you could give me a Viennese whirl? No, don’t get changed, it’s a kind of biscuit.”
According to Mosley, “expensive jackets” were bought from Marks and Spencer for the evening wear section of his parties, and I daresay any biscuits may have been acquired on the same trip. We sometimes have Marks’s variety tin of chocolate covered treats at Christmas time and they really are exceptionally good. Maybe there was a slice or two of Battenberg on offer in Chelsea in keeping with the Teutonic theme outlined in the court.
Miss D also laughed at the suggestion that she suffered “excruciating” pain in Mr Mosley’s company. “I would rather do corporal punishment a long way over going to the dentist,” she said, bringing to mind an old joke, the punch line of which goes: “Well, make your mind up, I’ll have to adjust the chair.”
Anyway, all this has taken my mind off the similarly overpriced international pantomime, starting in Beijing next month, the Olympic Games. Transworld Sport, on Sky Sports - and on Channel Four, where it has been scheduled in progressively earlier timeslots and currently broadcasts exclusively to an audience of insomniacs and postmen - has been building up to the games for weeks in its trademark uncritical, unfailingly celebratory style.
Which I love, incidentally. Having grown up with Pathe News and Look At Life, which I ingested as a small child together with Charlie Chaplin shorts at the Manchester News Theatre, I enjoy Transworld Sport as the sole surviving inheritor of the tradition of accepting everything, utterly without cynicism, at face value. Take its report from Libya this week on a new fancy, schmancy academy in Tripoli to further the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’s Olympic ambitions.
Instead of trying to include everyone in sport, the narrator reported admiringly, the new academy is concentrating on “selecting and nurturing elite athletes.” There were the obligatory scenes of white-coated doctors/sports scientists, some talk of ground breaking work being done in the field of anthropometry, and an interview with one of the athletes being hothoused, Ezzedine Salem, a 26-year-old African champion in Tae Kwan Do.
Ezzedine took part in the last Olympics but was forced to withdraw through injury, after being kicked in the teeth by a chap from Chinese Taipei. Now he has learnt “how to look after himself,” said academy head Hafid Grity, and is Libya’s big hope for an Olympic medal, something the country has never achieved in 44 years’ participation. “To be the first Libyan would be for all Libyans, all Arabs,” said Ezzedine.
A similar report from India saw 27-year-old archer Dola Banerjee cloistered in a training camp, also carrying the weight of her nation’s expectations on her young shoulders. I am sure I am not alone in finding the naked nationalism of the games as far from the original Olympic spirit as Max Mosley’s private life is from love’s young dream.
