Hanging's Too Good For Him

Men and ladies of this sceptred isle, please join me in lifting a mighty chorus to heaven proclaiming, with vim and vigour and intestinal fortitude, lest there be any doubt, that David Blaine is a cock.

As if swimming in a fish bowl, encasing himself in ice, living in a glass box and standing on top of a big pillar wasn’t enough, he’s now dangling upside-down above an ice rink. Please tell me I’m not the only one who finds watching a man suspended from a crane devoid of entertainment value. If he was simultaneously singing a repertoire of Abba songs, or making balloon animals, then I might just concede his antics could be appealing to slower-witted observers; but as it stands (or indeed hangs), it’s impossible to acknowledge his efforts as remotely entertaining.

The media keep referring to his escapades as “stunts”. I disagree. A stunt is Evil Knievel belting over a bunch of buses and landing like a lump of strawberry jam on the other side, shattering all 206 of his bones and rendering the resulting shards indistinguishable from the twisted metal that was once his bike in the process. What Blaine does isn’t “stunty” at all.

It’s notable that only one of his exploits was undertaken in the UK (the one where he starved himself in a glass box above the Thames). He hasn’t ventured across the pond since, possibly because us Brits aren’t terribly impressed with this sort of egotistical tomfoolery. As I recall, people threw kebabs and drove golf balls at him (there’s your entertainment value).

Wiping a red, white and blue tear from my eye like a advertiser’s drop of multi-hued Macleans, these actions make me proud to be Briitish. We don’t put up with such self-aggrandising shenanigans and see it for what it really is: an unsavoury hybrid of the “look what I can do!” school of exhibitionism usually displayed by small children and the cheesy air of mystique that was the trademark of Vegas-dwelling magicians sometime in the ‘80s.

In these lean financial times where travel plans are scuppered by the demise of holiday firms and rising oil prices puts air travel beyond the grasp of many, perhaps Dickie Branson can be encouraged to lay on a Boeing or two to New York full of jingoistic revellers singing God Save The Queen, kebabs in hand ready to pelt David Blaine en masse. It’s what this country needs to remind us who we are.

The image of him, suspended upside-down and covered from 'toe to head' in kebab meat and bits of salad, chilli sauce dripping from his upended cranium, makes me proud to be British. Alternatively, I’m all for a UK version whereby Paul Daniels could be forcibly suspended from a crane above Hyde Park, perhaps with an adjacent driving range in order to thwack dimpled missiles at him. People would be queueing up.