The Boat Race? - You're Having a Giraffe!

Sorry, but there's more to come........ This afternoon I witnessed one of the most farcical sporting and televisual events it has ever been my misfortune to endure. The annual University Boat Race!
I am the most conservative - with a SMALL "c" - person you will ever come across and so tradition and heritage are very important to me but this has become the biggest boatload of bollocks afloat - or on dry land!
Where do I start? How about a rundown of the teams? Well, when I was alive the boats used to be packed with stripey-blazored, classic, English, chinless wonders who sipped champagne en-route and couldn't really give a shit who won as long as it was all done in the jolly best of sporting traditions. What have we got now? Both boats were virtually crammed full of steroid-fuelled Yanks and Krauts who you just knew would kick off and start invading places again if they didn't win!! Even the co-commentator was one of our colonial cousins!!
The crews then introduced themselves on screen and that's when we really started to veer off into the world of Python. The woman cox of Cambridge told us she was studying "Anglo Saxon Economics"! Seriously!! How fucking useful is that? I mean, should the Angles and the Saxons ever decide to team up again, invade and then form a limited company over here then I imagine she will be much in demand but, be honest, what are the chances?
Then there was the television coverage. The advent of Sky TV and Murdoch's stranglehold on the world of mass communication have left the BBC and ITV grovelling around in the broadcast dirt for something to screen. The BBC is pretty fucking bad these days when it comes to hyping up things like the European Leaning On Things Championships but give the Boat Race to ITV and you are really asking for trouble. It's the verbal equivalent of handing a three-year-old a loaded Kalashnikov in McDonalds. You would have thought the commentator was talking about a video screening of the actual birth of Christ or the battle of Rorke's Drift. Hyperbole just doesn't even come close to covering it. "Frictionless as an Augusta green" - what the fuck is that all about?
The light blues of Cambridge won this 153rd race, for those who are interested. They somehow managed to beat off the challenge of the dark blues of Oxford and the pair of them were seemingly out of sight of Teeside Polytechnic, East Anglia School for the Interbred, the Wolverhampton College of Street Shooting and all the other establishments which are not allowed to enter this "race".
"The Cambridge president can choose to frame this moment and stick it on the mantelpiece of his life - 2007 is the year Cambridge bit back!" said the commentator. "Elation is nowhere grander served than here." He later followed those gems with the immortal (check re-runs if you don't believe me): "They now have the traditional act to do which is to toss their cox into the River Thames." Seriously!! Please believe me! I stayed tuned, thinking I was going to see some sort of intellectual, watery wankfest but all that happened was a bunch of Americo-Germanic Arian types chucked some hapless bird in the river!
Maybe it's just me but...............this isn't Hitler versus the Allies. It's not the Spartans versus the Persians at Thermopylae. It's not the 100 metres at the Olympics. Come to think of it, it's not even Accrington Stanley versus Walsall!!
Part of me wants to keep this aquatic farce, because of my love of tradition, the absurd and the laughable, but I'm afraid it is just too stupid for the 21st Century. What next? "And now we go over live to the Snoozstadio, Dortmund, for the International Sleeping Cup"? Maybe: "Hello, and welcome to Ludicrousberg, Norway, where we bring you exclusive coverage of day one of the Anglo-Scandinavian Herring Frightening Tournament"? Sorry, but the Boat Race can go to Grantham.