More radio, Ada Lovelace and less Clarkson (please?!)

Well I hate to say I told you so (I don't, I love it) but three year's ago I wrote an article called "I HATE Jeremy Clarkson", and today 21,000 complainers to the BBC agree with me. I was invited on the BBC Wales phone-in show with Jason Mohammed to discuss it at length (for a whole hour!). It'll be available for 7 days to "listen again" here, I'm on throughout the first hour.

[Celeb gossip aside - when I arrived at the BBC studios there were tons of paparazzi outside, apparently they were hoping to catch both Chris Martin and Jessica Biel who were coming in for interviews. Both came and went while I was on air, so I didn't get to hang out, they could probably see I was busy!]

Another lengthy item for your listening pleasure, finally up online is the show I hosted celebrating women in technology for Ada Lovelace Day. It was recorded by the ace Pod Delusion team who I have given interviews and soundbites to before on other subjects. I am on and off doing bits and bobs as host throughout but you'll also get to hear Maggie Philbin, Gia Milinovich, Helen Arney, Sue Black and Suw Charman-Anderson who are all fascinating.

Finally just now I was on George Galloway's TalkSport show discussing how totally rubbish it is that the Sports Personality of the Year Awards shortlist is 100% male. They don't have a function to replay it but the clips often show up on YouTube, let me know if you find it!! Basic conclusion: Yes it's rubbish. The nominations are chosen by a range of sports editors including those working at "Lad Mags" (i.e. soft porn and misogyny titles like Nuts and Zoo) and even the supposedly mainstream sports editors cover basically no women's sports aside from the Olympics and Wimbledon. Plus there's a lack of funding for grassroots level sports across the board, but especially girls. And with eating disorders and obesity at epidemic levels it needs sorting out. The end.

Oh and footnote on the general internet abuse situation. The response on Twitter to my remarks suggesting Clarkson shouldn't have said the horrid things he said about striking public sector workers:

ChriisMorgan67 Chris Morgan

@

@Cruella1 love to track you down and give a good slap bitch

6 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

And footnote 2: Thanks a gazillion to photographer Charlotte Barnes who took the photo at the top of me leading the march at Reclaim The Night 2011. I love it!!

Instant Karma!

Feel good about yourself right now, in your seat/pyjamas/office (delete as applicable, maybe all three). Mr Cru and I are running a 10k in aid of an ace charity that supports women in war-torn Congo (DRC). And you can sponsor me right here right now on this page! Think how good you'll feel when you've done it! And much much appreciated by me.

Easy Tiger

I was on BBC Five Live on Friday night talking about the wildly over-hyped story of Tiger Woods' public apology. Unfortunately the debate wasn't very interesting - other guests kept talking about "brand Tiger" and the impact on the game of golf. Big who cares!!

There is one point I was desperate to make but didn't get the chance though: Sex addiction. Apparently he's been in rehab now for "sex addiction". I am unconvinced that this is a real condition, and deeply unconvinced that Tiger Woods has ever suffered from it.

An addiction drives you to behave in ways you never would normally. If he was rushing to the bathroom during golf tournaments to frantically masturbate I would be prepared to consider it a psychological problem. Why does his condition only kick in when he meets gorgeous supermodels? Sleeping around when you're in an exclusive relationship is not a medical condition. It means you're a bad partner, a liar and a creep but it's not a diagnosis.

The notion that men "just can't help" having sex is a noxious one. No man has ever died from failure to poke his penis into something. And it's trotted out regularly as an excuse for rape and sexual assault as well as infidelity.

My friend Zoe put it best, so I shall quote: "What a knob. As if being an ignorant, self-serving prick was a disease. I think most of my ex-boyfriends have been infected with it, actually. Maybe I am a carrier!"

Dear The Independent Sports Section

I wonder if you remember on March 23rd this year you carried an opinion piece by the then Sports Minister Andy Burnham bewailing the limited coverage of women's sport in national media in the wake of England Women's victory at the the cricket world cup? I wonder in the light of that whether you shouldn't rename your current supplement Great Male Sporting Moments since aside from a brief appearance by Jane Torville all fourteen of the moments commemorated celebrate men's sport. Should your younger female readers conclude that the only physical excellence to which they should bother aspiring is to have a man swing them round an ice rink in a leotard and miniskirt*? Or will you be bringing out a second series next week of Great Female Sporting Moments with classic scenes of Paula Radcliffe, Dame Kelly Holmes, Dame Ellen MacArthur, Laila Ali, Mia Hamm, Martina Navratilova, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Dame Mary Peters, Rachel Heyhoe-Flint and of course the 2009 England Women's Cricket Team? If so I look forward to reading it.

*Not that this isn't a very difficult thing to train for and do - just that it doesn't really represent the breadth and depth of female sporting ability.

Wimbledon Women

A report yesterday in the Daily Male says Wimbledon officials actually admit they put more attractive female players on centre court and leave the most talented, less attractive female players on outer courts.

Today I was watching the tennis from the sofa largely because I'm something of a fan of the Williams sisters who are much more likely to use the phrase "I'll play any bloke who's brave enough"* than "I'm hoping to move into glamour modeling" and at one point Serena Williams graciously pointed out to the umpire that her opponent had won the point. The (male) BBC commentator (whose name I do not know) commented "One thing that Richard's done - he's made them very good on court. There's no bitching about line calls".

Argh! Excuse me while I bang my head against this handy wall. Firstly Richard Williams did not build his daughters in some sort of lab. Their successes and their graciousness is their own - no one sees Murray win a point and congratulates his coach or his Mum. Secondly if Murray complains about a line call would a commentator say "Oh dear, Murray's bitching about the line call"? One standard for men and a totally different one for women.

*They did this once and lost to a guy ranked about 200th, but not without winning some games on the way there.

Dominic Lawson: Misogynist

Yesterday there was an incident involving The Independent and the World-Cup-winning England Women's Cricket team. They hinted with a cover photo and an article from Andy Burnham that they felt women's sport deserved greater coverage, then in their sports section - and on their website - totally buried the coverage of the women's cricket and had no coverage of any other women's sport. Today they appear to have explained their mixed-up messages with a full-page opinion piece, this time with a full-size front-of-website link, by Dominic Lawson lovingly titled "Well done our women cricketers. Just don't ask me to watch them."

In the piece he explains - or tries to - why no-one on earth actually wants to watch women's sport. His point - as far as I understand it - is that men's sport is the only sport we all want to watch because it represents the pinnacle of human achievement. The fastest runners, the highest jumpers and the longest throwers are all men. And this, he would have us believe, explains why no-one wants to see women's sports, or - for bonus uncool points - the special olympics.

This misses a few big points. Firstly it forgets that more than half of the population is women, maybe women are more interested in the greatest achievements of their own kind. And maybe for someone with a disability it's a little more inspiring to see what someone with a similar disability can achieve, rather than an able-bodied person.

Secondly if we are really only interested in the fastest, highest, furthest then no-one would go to second division football matches. Yet those matches get much better numbers than most women's games at every level. On top of this we would all watch only the wheelchair marathon. They finish way faster than the able-bodied men. Or for that matter - we'd just watch the motor racing, that is loads faster. Or if you want to insist on racing without mechanical intervention then why isn't there an Olympic competition for cheetahs? They can sure move. No matter how hard you train Dominic, the England Women's Cricket team could whoop your ass and the only way you could fail to be impressed by their speed, skill and teamwork is if you had already decided not to be in your miserable closed misogynist mind.

Thirdly you only need to wander along to see your local school sports day to see that our enjoyment of sports has a lot less to do with the pinnacle of human achievement than it does to do with cheering on those we perceive as "our team". The joy experienced by her family, neighbours and friends when little Jessica comes 19th out of 19 in the sack race far exceeds anything Dominic Lawson has felt watching men's cricket. If the media gave greater coverage to women's sport we would all feel more connected to the players and hence more invested in their victory. We'd maybe know that one of them was from our area. We'd have seen them on TV talking about their recent injury and recovery and we'd be rooting for them to be picked for the squad for the final.

Fourthly watching sport is something that people do for fun. Whether live or on TV it is the experience as a whole that is enjoyable. I've been to the Oval a couple of years ago to watch a (men's) match and I can report with some conviction that most people spent most of the time either eating or drinking. The fun of watching these sports is greatly enhanced by a bigger crowd, which means more atmosphere, more sense of being part of a community of fans and a better range of food and drink facilities. Again more media coverage would have a big impact.

Finally we might accept that Lawson is some sort of weird freaky intellectual anomaly for whom watching sport is a purely scientific intellectual activity where he derives pleasure purely from calibrating in his own mind the limits of the male able-bodied human condition. But then he says this...

"It was with the greatest difficulty that the world's strongest woman chess player, the Hungarian Judit Polgar, was able to persuade the sport's authorities that she should compete only against the men, rather than other women. Yet none of her fellow women players have followed her example, presumably judging that they have a better chance of becoming a "world champion" if they limit the competition to members of their own sex."

The fact that other women have not moved into men's chess might also be because when Judit Polgar did so it was, by your own admission idiot-boy, "with the greatest difficulty".

The world of sport is notoriously sexist, even women looking to become managers or officials or coaches fight a continuous uphill battle to be taken seriously in men's sport while men wanting to take those roles on in the women's game are welcomed with open arms. Those women who do prove themselves as talented as their male counterparts are routinely denied admission to men's teams, even when they could make substantially more money joining the men's team. Funding for women's sports at every level is woefully inadequate. While top-level male athletes earn thousands every week the women in the equivalent teams are likely to be working full time to make ends meet and trying to fit their training around that.

Lest we fear that Lawson's remarks should show him up as prejudiced against those with special needs (clearly it's a-OK if we think he's misogynist) he pulls this winner out of the bag "I too have a child with Down syndrome". Seriously. In next week's column "My hairdresser's gay, so I can't be a homophobe...". Anyway his point is that his daughter's school sports day (by inference an event of similar national importance to England's women winning the World Cup) shouldn't be given extensive media airing.

Given the level of misogyny holding women back at every level of every sport out there, I'm inclined to think - nor should Lawson's noxious remarks.

How Not To Be A Minister

Today's Independent carries on the cover a picture of England's Women's Cricket team who have just won the world cup. Now I am in general not a fan of over-sponsored, over-hyped professional sports. But then again the women on this team are not full-time professional sportspeople - they're students, shop workers, management consultants and charity workers. And that's largely because the government continues to allow sports funding from tax-free corporate sponsorship to be allocated more or less exclusively to men's sport.

Below the one-page feature on page 11 which explains who the team members are (one sentence each around a photograph) is a piece by Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Andy Burnham in which he argues that women's sport deserves more coverage and that young women would be encouraged to participate in sport if they saw more role models in the media. He doesn't seem to have twigged that young women would also be encouraged to participate in sport if there was decent funding for it! And I should know - I pretty much gave up paying women's football a few years back because the lack of facilities and the lack of funding for the league meant there was a shortage of teams and far too many players at each one for most players to be getting a regular game. So I was splashing out a lot of money to train at inconvenient times in the middle of nowhere knowing I still wouldn't get a game at the end of it.

However despite being the one and only person in government with a direct remit to do so Burnham doesn't commit at any point in his piece to actually doing anything about the status of women's sport. Instead he suggests it is predominantly up to the media to sort it out. What is the point of being in government if you can see what the problem is but respond by leaving it up to the media to sort it out? Why not just vote Rupert Murdoch into power and be done with it?

And the media Burnham is urging into action? Well, while the main section of the Independent front-pages the victory and bewails the poor coverage elsewhere, no-one appears to have bothered to mention this to the rest of the paper...

The sports section has a front cover about men's football, with sidebars about men's rugby, men's cricket and men's motor racing. The world cup win for the women is on page 14 and consists of a single brief match report at the bottom of the page filling around a sixth of the total page area and squashed beside and below articles about men's cricket matches. There are no other articles in the 20-page supplement about women's sports.

The Independent website has more than 100 links on it's main page of which only one relates to the win. Demonstrating their deep belief in Burnham's claim that it is up to the media to encourage young women to participate in sport, they have put this one link in the scrolling, not-always visible "Editor's Choice" bar next to such heavyweight pieces as "The Ten Best Luxury Face Creams" and "Floral Patterns Are Back In Season"! Burnham's own piece is not linked from the front page...

Seriously Mr Burnham you are one of the few people in the country who can change things if you want to. But not by writing articles which even the paper you publish them in goes on to ignore. If you mean a word of what you say - get your finger out and pass a law on the subject. Because that's the point of your job...

Feeling Bloated?

This horrible sexist advert for coverage of the latest rugby tournament on the BBC should have you vomiting up your lunch in no time. Feel free to complain to the BBC in all the usual ways.

A Sad Day For English History

Last night as the England football team made their early departure for contention for the European Cup next year Alan Hanson said "This is a sad day for English history". Well I like watching football so I was sorry to see the team go out but I hardly think it registers on the scale of historical events. I mean when I'm 103 am I going to be sat in a rocking chair telling my grandchildren "I remember 2007, we went and murdered thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, and then we lost to Croatia"? No.

I have no problem with people playing sports, I think that's great, I think more people should be encouraged to play sports. I have a big problem though with corporate sponsorship and huge-scale government funding for facilities and events that only a tiny elite will ever get to be involved with. And I have a problem with the sport = good mentality that sits behind our Olympic ambitions and behind the way that some city councils help pay for sports stadiums in their cities.

My problem is with the idea that it's some sort of societal good for lots of people to watch sports. I don't see any evidence that watching sports encourages the watchers to play sport themselves. More like it encourages them to eat pies and sit on the sofa with a beer in one hand and the remote control in the other.

Professional sports are also profoundly discriminatory. Women's events are often paid less and relegated to obscure TV stations. A relatively tiny number of women make a living as sportspeople, compared to thousands of men. Last night in front of the match - which I watched with a Scottish friend and Mr Cru - who is American - I was being teased somewhat about Englands performance and flippantly remarked "It's not my team, I support England Women". But the more I thought about how much Scotland, Germany or Argentina's players and fans might hate England, it occurred to me - surely no-one hates England Men's Team like England Women's Team do? The women on the England team have no hope of earning a professional wage from their sport in their own country. They get little or no glory, they're not paid to do adverts, commentate or coach major international teams when they retire. Yet they know full well the men doing the same job as them typically have 20 cars each, huge mansions, earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a week and are featured with their glamourous wives in the likes of Hello and OK magazine in sumptuous surroundings. If I played for England Women I would be bitterly laughing my socks off at the men right now.

The other thing about watching sports is that it often leads to big groups of men meeting up and developing a rather tribal mentality. We have a long and less-than-proud history in this country of football crowds getting out of hand. And there's a reason some pubs don't let people in in team shirts - because it can create an intimidating atmosphere. As if to confirm that for me my attention was drawn to a rather disturbing post over at Shakesville.

...and yes the photo is me, in my platinum blonde years playing for (and captaining) Onnabelievable LFC, Tokyo.

War of the Words

Mark Steel's Independent column is always worth a read. He focuses this week on politeness. He points out that the "war" on rude and anti-social behaviour always seems to focus on poor people, when in fact rich people are much, much worse.

When I started out in comedy it was pretty common for new acts to be asked to go out and hand out flyers in the street promoting shows in return for a 5 minute spot on the bill. It's not the world's most enjoyable job but it's interesting because you see the world from a very new perspective - the bottom. Sometimes it was just funny - like the students who bought me a litre of apple juice out of the blue - that's the time you think "I really need to buy new clothes and get a haircut". And not quite so funny - like people offering me jobs as a tequila girl and a "masseuse" ("I don't know how to do massage", "That doesn't matter") but then there are times when it really gets pretty nasty, usually alcohol is involved. Rough drunk blokes will shout "Alright darling, give us a smile then", but the ones that grab your arse or "hilariously" start humping your leg as their mates look on and cheer are always the posh ones. I remember kneeing a particularly horrid one in the nuts as he tried that kind of stunt to which he responded by spitting at me and calling me a lesbian. When they had finally fucked off I was stood in Leicester Square with a sense of disgust and disbelief and then the Polish waiter from the Italian restaurant opposite where I was standing came over with a cup of tea "is ok, on ze house". I cried.

Or to offer another example. Gerrard Finneran, the super-rich financier who was told he wouldn't be getting any more alcohol on his First Class flight. The highlight for me is section 6: "A male flight attendant then entered the first class section and saw FINNERAN with his pants and underwear down defecating on a service cart used by the flight crew. FINNERAN then used linen napkins as toilet paper and wiped his hands on various service counters and service implements used by the crew. FINNERAN also tracked feces throughout the aircraft". Some days you'd be glad you didn't get offered an upgrade.

And then there's the corporate rudeness. Varying from "Your call is important to us and will be answered by the first available operator", and then six hours of muzak to the ones I seem to get every day now "Hello Mrs Smur-i-ta-waite, I'm calling to ask you about your electricity bill", "Is this a sales call?", "No, no, no, I'm trying to save you money", "By getting me to buy your product?", "I'm just calling to let you know", "So you're just an information service, if I want to sign up for your service, you can't help me? ", "You would like to sign up? Certainly, do you wish to pay by direct debit...". Personally I find that pretty rude, not on the part of the guy in India making the call, but on the part of the mega-corporate who are paying him a wage he needs to earn to ring me up and lie to me.

Finally Steel goes on to praise volunteers, who do good in our communities without expecting anything in return. Personally I would advocate a national policy of a 2% tax cut for people who do at least four hours a week of voluntary work in approved schemes: mentoring, fostering, community projects. Suddenly the well-educated high earners would have an incentive to get involved in sharing their skills, and encouraging them to see how the other half lives might just bring them down a peg or two. Plus of course it would boost the voluntary sector to unfeasible highs and give kids across the country access to extra tuition, after-school clubs and mentoring, there'd be shopping services for older people and coffee mornings being organised, and a bunch less kids in care which would in fact save money...! When do I get to be prime minister?

The Unspeakably Obvious

Turns out Cru-blog is not the only place that thinks public funding for major sporting events may not actually help encourage sports at grass roots level. The question of course now is why doesn't someone pay me a small fortune to sit on the sports council.

The Sporting Post

Ok, this is going to be a big one. There are things in life that we take for granted, things we've always known to be true and don't usually feel the need to question. And then sometimes for one reason or another we end up questioning them and sometimes they hold up to that questioning and sometimes they don't. Now I'm going to say something controversial:

Professional sports are a waste of money and resources.

I guess what made me really start thinking about all this was the death of Bob Woolmer. It's still not clear what happened but the general consensus that seems to be forming is that someone cared more about protecting their own match fixing racket than about Bob Woolmer's life. Even if we found out that Bob died of natural causes, the fact that we all assumed there was enough incentive for murder there should be cause enough for concern.

Then a couple of days ago I got a letter from my energy supplier - EDF. They were proud to announce they would be sponsoring the forthcoming rugby world cup. So proud in fact they felt the need to write and let me know specially. All I could think was that this was an excuse by the management to use company money to get themselves ringside seats. Personally I will not benefit at all from their sponsorship. I would benefit much more if they instead reduced my bill by an amount equivalent to my share of the sponsorship. A bit like I would benefit much more from the London Olympics if they just reduced my council tax in line with my share.

Today I read an article from the BBC about the impact of sports on fans. The research showed that winning fans were in fact more aggressive than losing fans. They also found these fans were more aggressive than they had been before the game. Losing reduced happiness, but winning did not increase happiness. It's not the biggest study or the most impressive but it doesn't seem to have found any positive side effects to guys watching sports. And of course we've all seen horror footage of fans rioting after football matches. And I think most of us have been out socialising and had our evening disrupted by the arrival of a big crowd of noisy drunk guys huggging each other and singing something about "One-nil". And many of us have felt intimidated or actually been hurt, deliberately or accidentally by these guys.

Professional sports do nothing for gender equality. The three top sports in the UK: football, rugby and cricket are barely played by women, when they are the matches are almost never televised or promoted and sponsorship is negligible. No women play these sports professionally in the UK. Other minority sports face a continuous uphill struggle to get funding and recognition for the women's side of the game. How can we tell young people that they live in a society where we value equal opportunities, then say "boys you can work as professional sportpeople, sorry girls you can't"?

And finally look at all the other things that professional sports fans are encouraged to do: drink too much, smoke, eat unhealthy pies and chips and waste money gambling. They also are likely to hang around in big groups of guys leaving their wives unsupported and their children feeling unloved. If children are brought along they are dressed up in team colours they are too young to understand, taught how to shout abuse at other fans and exposed to drunken rowdy behaviour.

By now you are probably thinking "bah humbug"and you probably have a few questions racing round your head. A few points about the benfits of sports that have been drummed into us all from birth and are going to take a bit of dislodging...

What about encouraging children to take up sports? Surely we need sports funding more than ever now to combat rising child obesity?

I am all in favour of sport in schools. And indeed my EDF letter assures me that they'll be funding a major school rugby program alongside the rugby world cup. I can't get hold of the numbers but what percentage of the money they're spending is going to schools? I suspect very little. Lots more good could be done if management didn't need to keep their executive boxes.

When I was at school we all played sport twice a week. Well most kids did. We were told in every subject from music to maths that we shouldn't be competitive, it was about doing the best WE could. Except sport. Then is was about winning. And I wasn't good enough at it to win. So I wrote excuse notes, faked illness, went AWOL, etc. And I was wildly depressed about it - all the subjects I was good at I had to shut up about and the one thing I wasn't so good at I was paraded infront of the rest of the school and made to look like an idiot. Parents were not invited in for geography day - no, they came in for sports day and laughed at me.

Funding school sports equipment is the excuse for everything these days. You can even get free school sports equipment vouchers with chocolate eggs. Equipment doesn't make kids fit, bright enthusiastic dedicated teachers and parents who encourage kids to participate without belittling them make kids fit. Chocolate bars and a nation obsessed with sitting on the sofa watching others do sport don't help either. The number of children who will go on to play professional sport is tiny. The number who aspire to do so and see their dreams end in disappointment is much higher. And the number who know from the outset that they'll never be able to live up to that standard and are quickly taught that sport for them is something to watch, is the highest of all.

What about encouraging sports at grass-roots level for adults?

Years after I left school I discovered I enjoyed playing sport. I tried to join a team and when I couldn't find a team I started my own. Over the three years I ran that team (in Tokyo), I spent a fortune out of my own pocket paying for practice courts, balls, bibs, kit, spare shin-pads, socks, adverts to find new players, laundering kit, competition entry fees, website upkeep, hiring refs and linesmen, league subscription fees and internal administration money. Not to mention all the time I put in. Of course I was pretty careful about saving money where I could. We got our shirts from a local mens team who were throwing them out to get new ones, etc. Despite eventually winning the all-Japan women's five-a-side tournament, I was never able to get any sponsorship money from local businesses or government programs.

When I came back to the UK I joined a local FA-registered side. I paid £50 FA registration fee, I paid to train every week, we all chipped in to pay for coaching, I paid for a transfer when I wasn't getting a game and we payed for matches we played and covered our own transport to and from games.

As far as I can see there is NO FUNDING at grassroots level for adult sport in the UK or overseas. Or if there is it isn't coming into the women's games at all. I no longer play group sport, the effort and cost isn't worth it.

Don't men need sports to somehow use up all that testosterone?

Well, as the Cardiff University researchers have established, watching sport in fact generates more testosterone and increases the likelihood that guys will become aggressive. If guys wanted to use up excess testosterone, they could try playing sport. Mr Cru likes boxing - he used to participate but now he just watches it on TV. I'm not a fan but in the interests of domestic harmony I tolerated it when he first moved in. A little over a year later I've started deliberately leaving the room when it's on. If I watch it late at night I don't sleep so well and I have more violent and upsetting dreams. Even as cynical and defensive towards it as I am, I am still well aware that I am affected by it. I thought boxing was the extreme end of sports but I increasingly see similarly agressive behaviour being accepted as the norm in rugby and even in supposedly non-contact football. And of course our screens and stadiums are now welcoming the even more violent option of "ulitmate fighting" where kicking, strangling and breaking arms and legs are also allowed. Occassionally Mr Cru will watch this too to my horror and every time I see it, there is actual blood spilt.

But what if I like watching sport?

So do I. But wouldn't it be nicer to go and see a game where the stakes were a great deal lower, where the games were genuinely played for honour? The prize money came from the ticket sales and thus accurately reflected the entertainment value of the sport? So playing good quality skillful sport became as important as winning and diving and then screaming for a penalty was a thing of the past? I think a happy medium would be that ticket sales could go to pay players wages, sponsorship money could only be given to school sports campaigns and merchandising profits should as a sign of good will be given to charity. Government money should of course be barred from going into sports, other than where needed in schools. I think the fun to be had watching sport under that arrangement would be much greater. And you could genuinely feel that you were doing something positive by going to a game.

But what about our international reputation for being good at sport?

We could trade that in for an international reputation for having the good sense not to waste resources encouraging drunken violent sexist aggression, cheating and in some cases even murder. We could use the money we save to build a new reputation as the country which prioritises improving the human condition across the globe rather than spending all our money on having half a dozen guys who can kick really hard and run really fast...

Love All

Mark Lawson has been chosen by the powers that be at the Guardian to respond to the news that women will finally be paid the same in prize money as men are at Wimbledon. Why they don't ask a female or at least feminist writer is beyond me. He makes a right mess of things. Firstly he goes into the oft-repeated-seldom-thought-through arguement that the women's game is short, three sets rather than five. The stupidity of this line of reasoning is illustrated by asking any female tennis player on the planet whether she'd rather play five sets for full money or three sets for less. The answer will not vary much.

He other key points include: "The truth is that - however assiduously women's football, cricket and rugby are encouraged - it is unlikely that millions of viewers will ever tune in to see a Paula Gascoigne or Andrea Flintoff in the finals of their tournaments." Which you can go tell to the American women whose sport is considerably more popular with both viewers and players than the male equivalent.

And "The sports that involve physical contact or some risk of death - major ball games and motor racing - simply seem more susceptible to testosterone." When did cricket become a sport with physical contact? And how many football players are subject to a risk of death? And if he's in the mood to tell Laila Ali about how her hormones are all wrong for participating in dangerous sports, he may not live to regret it.

I can't help thinking that if, as he claims, women are naturally less drawn to sports than men, since we all need exercise to stay healthy, we should respond by putting more money into womens sport to encourage greater participation.

The real issue here is equal opportunities. If women are not allowed to compete in the men's game, then the prize money must be the same - otherwise the opportunity to earn is different. Wimbledon's move is outrageously overdue and still only solves a tiny fraction of the problem but at least it is a move in the right direction. Inviting Mark Lawson to comment on women's issues clearly isn't.

Awards for effort?

There is a general fuss being made about Zara Philips winning sports personality of the year. People are complaining that she has had an easy route to the top. Well easier than many, sure, but it's not like Paula Radcliffe has to milk the family goat and cook chapattis on an open fire before she goes running. If the award is for the person who has worked the hardest then we'd have to start looking at people who put in hours and hours of time but then never made it due to injury or just not being naturally gifted enough. If Kelly Holmes had broken an ankle before the finals and come home without a medal would we have voted for her for trying ever so hard? No - the award is for winning stuff and frankly on that basis Zara is about the best we've got at the moment, unless you count Matt Dawson getting into the last three on Strictly Come Dancing...