02 March 2017
The Occasional Shaw Sheet Cock-up Awards
And the winner of this week’s international Ossca is…
By Neil Tidmarsh
Hello and welcome to the Occasional Shaw Sheet Cock-up Awards – the event which absolutely nobody has been waiting for, or even knew existed. Without pausing to comment on the complete dearth of show-biz sparkle and glamour (yes, we are blessed with a total absence of untouchable celebrities, gushing stars, outrageous comedians and deft accountants), let’s go straight to the nominations for this week’s one and only category – the international award.
From France, let’s hear it for the police marksman who managed to accidentally shoot himself and a waiter and a railway worker in the legs during a speech by President Hollande in Villognon, south-west France. The officer – a member of the gendarmerie’s elite Specialised Protection Unit – was posted on a rooftop, on anti-terrorist look-out, while below him the president made a speech to open a new high-speed rail link between Paris and Bordeaux. Apparently his gun went off unintentionally as he scrambled over the slates, or as the regional police-chief explained somewhat more officially (I imagine it loses something in translation) he “made an error of manipulation whilst changing position”. I’m pleased to add that none of the injuries were critical.
The officer’s nomination for this award faced stiff competition from within his own country, as is to be expected in the land of those genius farceurs Georges Feydeau, Eugène Labiche and Victorien Sardou. The president himself was considered (no, not for life-time achievement, cheeky!); this week his programme to de-radicalise militant Islamists was described by a Republican senator as “a complete fiasco” after a cross-party parliamentary report judged it to be a total and expensive failure. But his admirable sang-froid when that shot rang out in Villognon puts him out of the running (he simply paused mid-speech, asked calmly “I hope it’s nothing serious?”, then carried on – and for that we sincerely congratulate and salute him).
That new Paris to Bordeaux rail link was itself considered – the chairman of the executive board of SNCF says that it will probably make a loss of €200 million a year. But at least they got the thing built, which is more than we can say for HS2. The Louvre was considered; this week it was widely accused of cock-up and condemned as incompetent because its systems collapsed when 9000 people turned up for the opening of a Vermeer exhibition in a gallery which can hold only 200 people, an exhibition which is part of a campaign to bring back tourists who might have been frightened away from Paris by the recent terrorist outrages. But surely that’s a success story, not a failure? And who has not fretted over timed entries to block-buster exhibitions here in London, and struggled in vain to see past the crowds milling around in front of the exhibits?
Francois Fillon was considered – this week prosecutors actually opened a criminal inquiry against him over those allegations that his family were paid by the state for non-existent jobs. Marine le Pen was considered – this week her National Front chief of staff was charged with illegally using European parliamentary funds to pay party staff in France, and she herself is facing criminal investigations about the matter (this week she refused to obey a judge’s summons for questioning). But the competition from that policeman’s “error of manipulation” was just too strong.
The next nomination is from India. Customers trying to withdraw cash from a cash machine in Delhi this week found themselves being issued with fake notes all bearing the serial number 000000 and printed by the “Children’s Bank of India”. Apparently the owner of the cash delivery company had filled the machine up with notes brought from a toy shop.
This is the latest chapter in the country’s currency crisis. The scrapping of the two biggest denomination notes – the 1000 rupee note and the 500 rupee note – last year was a clever and audacious strike against bribery, corruption, tax cheating and counterfeiting; but ready cash is still in very short supply in some parts of the country. In spite of promises that the crisis would be over by the end of 2016, and in spite of India’s four mints working non-stop, it’s likely to be weeks if not months before all those 23 billion withdrawn notes have been replaced. Further cock-ups haven’t helped. The new notes are a different size to the old ones, so don’t fit in any of the ATMs. The new 2000 rupee notes are being printed first – so it’s proving difficult to spend them without the new 500 rupee note being available for change. And unfamiliarity with the new notes is apparently encouraging counterfeiting on a huge scale, the very thing which the measure was intended to discourage in the first place.
The third and final nomination is from the USA – inevitably, it’s the ‘Best Picture’ cock-up from last Sunday night’s Oscars. The competition and confusion for this award could be seen as a symbol of the political and cultural divisions and doubts which are currently wracking that country. The traditional, conservative and reactionary up against the liberal, progressive and inclusive, if you like; a love story about a white heterosexual couple told in a traditional, old-fashioned if not actually obsolete genre (the musical) up against a story about a gay person of colour growing up in difficult circumstances. I suggest this symbolism only tentatively. I haven’t yet seen Moonlight. And as for La La Land – I took my full baggage of cynicism and scepticism into the cinema but lost it almost immediately. I loved every moment of it – a movie with universal appeal which will inevitably be acknowledged as a timeless classic. Nevertheless, this nomination had some competition from elsewhere in the States; it was suggested that the President’s puzzling comments about Sweden should be considered, but then actual events in Sweden soon afterwards did much to undermine that suggestion.
And so… now… at last… the moment which I at least have been waiting for (so I can get back to editing the more edifying and erudite articles which make up Shaw Sheet’s 94th issue)… the moment has come to announce the winner of this week’s international Ossca…
And the winner is… the French policeman! No, stop, wait, that’s wrong, the winner is the Children’s Bank of India! No, no, no, it’s the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar! No, hang on a moment… What does it say in your envelope..? Are you sure..?
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