Don’t worry. This is not another column fretting about the politics of our soccer team’s post-match singsong. Nobody here will be asking the women’s team to flay themselves with sharpened poppies from now until Remembrance Sunday. But the story does remind us how rapidly any perceived offence can now get halfway around the world. We have technology to blame. We have ourselves to blame. One yearns to describe the current craze for self-surveillance as “Orwellian”, but that author never imagined anything so unlikely. We have become our own Big Brother.
In the unlikely case you need to be reminded, the squad found themselves in hot water when, following their heroic defeat of Scotland, footage emerged of them bellowing the words “Oo, ah Up the ‘Ra!” in their dressingroom. The apostrophe in the last quoted word stands in for an “I”. Vera Pauw, the team’s manager, emerged almost immediately to issue an apparently sincere apology. Fair enough.
[ Up the ‘Ra: The chant that does not seem to go awayOpens in new window ]
Much as I’d like to live down to expectations, little more needs to be said about the politics of the celebration itself. Nor, alas, am I allowed to waffle much about how few now recognise the chant’s origins in a 1979 song by The Gap Band. There was much chatter last week about its appearance in the Wolfe Tones’ Celtic Symphony, but little acknowledgment was put the way of the immortal Oops Upside Your Head. (“Oops upside your head. I said: oops upside your head.” Get it?) Only those musicologists who trace nursery rhymes back to the Black Death now seem to care.
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The case does, however, remind us how difficult it is for anyone in the public eye – and many not so exposed – to get away with even the smallest misjudgement. Without making too many rash assumptions about places we haven’t been, we can reasonably assume that all kinds of frightful things were said and done in men’s changing rooms down through the decades. The odd racist jibe may have dropped from professional footballers’ otherwise blameless lips. The songs about opposing teams may sometimes have moved beyond playful disagreement. Nobody was there to broadcast it.
Video and audio recording are now ubiquitous. Actors are often advised to assume, when in the presence of journalists, that anything they say – whatever assurances are given – is “on the record”. They and other celebrities now move through a world in which everyone is a potential journalist, none of whom works under an editor with a forgiving spike.
The recent experiences of Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin offer a case in point. Footage of her doing nothing more appalling than dancing at a party caused a still baffling kerfuffle after landing on social media. Some of us wondered why video footage of bald, middle-aged presidents and prime ministers playing stupid golf didn’t trigger the same outrage, but no sane person pretends we are living in a just world. Ms Marin, absurdly, felt obliged to take a drug test. She passed and got back to the job of running the country. She could be forgiven for believing she was doing nothing more controversial than taking out the bins, chopping up a carrot or, well, playing golf.
Indeed, Ms Marin’s actions seem to suggest she was consciously posing for the camera. To further move away from Orwell’s eponymous adjective, many such embarrassments spring not from surreptitious surveillance, but from the subject willingly participating in the recording. This should come as no surprise. There are millions of people documenting their every move on Instagram and TikTok. It is not unheard of for users of the latter to talk themselves into sudden, cancellable controversy. Say something vaguely racist – or something that could be spun to seem racist – and, within hours, the mob can drive you back to a life lived in the real world.
[ Sanna Marin: 'I am a human'Opens in new window ]
The combination of ubiquitous cameras and readily available social media is a continuing nightmare for anyone capable of making forgivable mistakes (that’s all of us). It is a nightmare for anyone acting in perfectly reasonable ways that allow bad-faith observers to misrepresent them as having made such mistakes (that’s also all of us). Every young person runs the risk of being turned into a laughing stock at their school overnight. Every celebrity knows they could – with little provocation – be shamed before millions.
This is no way of living a life. And it is hard to see the risk dissipating anytime soon. Humans are, perhaps, still living in a transitional state between a world closed off from immediate broadcast and the current arrangement that allows any semi-private foible to rapidly become internationally ridiculed. In a decade’s time, we will perhaps have learned to guard our every word, action and gesture. Now, doesn’t that sound like something worth looking forward to?
