From the Vaults: my wrap up of The Big Hong Kong Story, the reason many of us upped stumps and decamped for Hong Kong, the big 'H' ... the Handover. Upon rereading this, I see right at the end the scatological infatuation that gave this blog its name was already rearing its head.
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PRETTY VACANT: THOUSAND YARD STARES
FROM FAT PANDA AND THE CLOWN PRINCE |
THIS WAS supposed to be a story about how they botched the handover. A searing, fang-bared expose of greed, disaster and incompetence on a truly grand scale; a harsh spotlight trained upon Hong Kong's pratfall on the world stage. Oh, the scope for disaster was enormous. Looming typhoons. Feuding sovereigns. Last-minute decisions. Missed deadlines. Recalcitrant tradesmen. Profiteering fly-by-nighters. Goose-stepping soldiers swarming over the border. Hot-headed demonstrators itching to be the martyr du jour. Very Important Egos to be stroked and coddled. A diplomatic chamber of horrors and a terrorist's fun-fair, jam-packed into the big top of a genuine three-ring media circus.
The only problem is, it was all right on the night. Against incalculable odds, Britain managed to hand back the last glittering jewel in its tarnished colonial crown with nary a major mishap. Somehow - and who knows how? - Hong Kong pulled it off. Thousands of blood-hungry, battle-hardened scribes were left scratching their heads and wandering the cavernous press centre, glassy-eyed with boredom and bemusement. It all seemed to go so smoothly that it's hard to believe it happened at all.
But under the bonnet of the shiny, purring handover machine, there was no little grinding of gears. Somewhere beneath the seamless facade of pomp and circumstance, of stirring speeches, coruscating pyrotechnics and perfectly timed telegenic tears lurks a litany of glitches, hitches, bloopers and blunders. More 'Hong Kong's Funniest Handover Videos' than sombre Dan Rather fodder; not so much a dignified dissembling of the three-legged stool as the stuff of the Three Stooges. So let us take a trawl through the lighter side of the handover - the scenes you didn't see on CNN.
THE ONE factor out of anyone's control during Hong Kong's big week was the weather and, as the territory's sodden populace knows, there was the odd spot of precipitation during the handover period. The heavens opened to dump half the average yearly rainfall in just over a week - and most of that seemed to be during the British farewell ceremony at East Tamar.
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| FLAG FALL: OLD CHINA HANDOVER |
It might have been a sign that even God is sick of the British Royal Family. The best thing about the rain was that no one could hear a word of what Prince Charles had to say. Between the pounding of the deluge on the canopy of umbrellas and the fact that water had shorted out the Prince's microphone, he might as well have been mute, or could have been holding forth on Camilla and his tampon fantasies for all the audience knew. Of course, no one at home watching on television would have noticed, because they probably would have killed the volume the minute His Royal Dampness stood up to speak. The other advantage of the downpour was that you couldn't tell if Chris Patten was still crying. After trotting around from one goodbye to the next, his tear-ducts were working overtime and he was beginning to look like a graduate from the Bob Hawke Academy of Public Weeping.
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