Cultural Olympiad

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but there are things going on this summer other than sport. Now I know some of you are really caught up in a bunch of guys kicking around an inflated pig’s bladder in Eastern Europe, and I know that the Olympic archery and pentathlon finals are all marked on our calendars. I mean if you base your opinion on the media coverage we are all going nuts for the Olympics. But in truth some of us aren’t.

Disappointingly, while the BBC has been covering every painstaking mile of the Olympic Torch Relay – which isn’t actually a relay as there are multiple torches and not just one – it hasn’t made a big thing out of the London 2012 Festival. The Festival is the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad which (running since 2008) has been attempting to inspire creativity especially in young people.

The festival is made up of over 12,000 events revolving around art, dance, theatre, food and every other form of creative endeavour you can imagine. These events are scattered around the country and quite a lot of them are free. You’d think a bigger thing would be being made of this, but no.

Now I know that hosting the Olympics is a big thing. We’ve been working on it for seven years, spent a lot of money on it and we want it to go well. And of course I understand that it’s something to be proud of. The last time the Olympics were held in London was in 1948 and I know that I will probably never see it here again in my life time. It is impressive. But it doesn’t change the fact that I just don’t care about sport.

What I do care about is cultural stuff. I love museums and castles and visiting an art gallery is for me a nice way to spend an afternoon. In the UK we are lucky enough to have a lot of cultural things to visit and nice things to look at. It’s why you can’t walk across Parliament Square without getting caught in a throng of tourists, and why getting a seat on the underground is nigh on impossible. People want to come and see buildings that are older than the whole of the United States. They want to pay to see them.

The government must realise this. They must realise that it would be a perfect way to get back some of the money – which we don’t have – which we have spent to build the Olympic Stadium. There will be plenty of time in between the various sporting events in which visitors to the UK can potter off to Windsor or Stratford-Upon-Avon or some other cultural centre . And with the summer kicking in, so can lots of native British people as well, if the government and or the media actually start suggesting that it might be a good idea.

Granted that would cut into amount of time where we can be informed that the Olympic Torch is now somewhere between Leeds and Sheffield. But I really don’t think many people would actually mind that.