A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes, Mark Twain.
Last weekend the Tour de France came to Yorkshire and I was in the insanely privileged position of reporting on it for BBC Leeds.
Our coverage – of which I am justifiably proud – was uninterrupted. Unlike the British television coverage for ITV4, which I later discovered was suspended for an advert break as the riders entered Keighley – and reappeared when they left.
Qu’est ce qui se passe?
Keighley folk wanted to know, what happened? Why had our town been edited from TdF history!?
Oh yeah, the genteel Ilkley got their moment. The picturesque Yorkshire Dales didn’t miss out. Yet when it came to Keighley, quelle surprise, we were ignored.
A friend had, the previous day, described my home town as the ‘unruly child’ of Yorkshire and wondered if we might spoil the two day long, thus far, perfect party, with ASBO worthy behaviour.
Well, the minute the peloton passed and Keighley had never made it to camera and it appeared that we had been roundly ignored, the rumour mill cranked into action.
The reason it cut away from Keighley was because someone had painted a rude word on the road. Apparently.
That was the rumour that spread round town like an STD round The Rat Trap (one for the Keighley folk there).
Now.
Look at the Mark Twain quote at the top of this page again. Right? Good.
There follow two options.
1: It’s true. Someone wrote a four letter epithet on the road. And the cars, motorbikes and helicopters, all carrying cameras, some hundreds of feet in the air, to relay the event around the globe, found it impossible to film from an angle that wouldn’t show the rude word as the cyclists charged through the middle of Keighley at 50 kilometres per hour. And even though the commercial channel ITV has to take advert breaks on a regularly scheduled basis it was much more than a coincidence that they took one when the tour was passing through Keighley, even though the fact is every time a commercial break came up the riders were passing through somewhere and that’s the way the cookie crumbles as they say…or
2: Someone’s making stuff up about a rude word being scrawled on the road.
In a way, I sort of want it to be true (it might be for all I know, that isn’t the point). If it is true, then it goes to prove something that I’ve started to believe just recently.
I became a journalist and a cynic at the end of 1998. The journalism bit, I always loved, still do. But the cynic bit never came naturally. Don’t get me wrong, I am as far from a happy clappy, San Franciscan ain’t-everything-fabulous-type.
I’ve even been called a grumpy / angry little man, thanks to my occasional rants at useless PRs on Twitter.
But looking at the world through an ironic sneer just isn’t me. It’s why I enjoy the radio presenting I’ve been doing for the past year, cynicism doesn’t really work on the airwaves, I reckon. Positivity on the other hand is a fairly useful thing to bring to your ‘sound’.
So if some people did scrawl a rude word on the road in Keighley and scuppered the chance of our town being seen by billions around the world, leave them to it.
Why am I not angry at someone who may have done that?
It doesn’t matter. We don’t need to be angry because we, the positive, still win.
I stood for four hours on Sunday on the roundabout at the end of a bypass, waiting for the moment the peloton arrived when the Tour de France came through Keighley. I was joined by thousands who lined the road and we can say we were there, we brought something wildly positive to the streets of our little town and no-one can take that away from us.
We, the positive, were the winners.
nickahad 