Not Singing Along.

It’s FA Cup Final day today at Wembley Stadium, the spiritual home of English football. (Is it appropriate to use the word ‘spiritual’ in connection with football? I don’t know, but journalists do, so at least I’m in bad company for once.) Anyway, the point of the post is this:

I was flicking through the TV channels at lunchtime when there, among the tedious array of game shows, cookery shows, lifestyle shows, American am dram comedies, and – heaven preserve us – shopping channels, there was some film of a remarkably unprepossessing young man apparently singing into a microphone. (I say ‘apparently’ because I decline to have the sound switched on in such circumstances.) He was standing at the edge of what I assumed to be the pitch at Wembley Stadium, and it seems his name was Lewis Capaldi. (I only gained this knowledge because there was a big board in front of him which said LEWIS CAPALDI.) And there was another, almost equally unprepossessing young man fingering a keyboard who I assumed to be his accompanist. Mr Capaldi appeared to be taking his activity very seriously, as evidenced by the fact he was contorting his face into a fascinating range of ridiculous expressions. The accompanist looked as though he was just concentrating hard on keeping up.

But what was really odd about all this was the fact that the stadium was empty. So what on earth was that all about?

There was a time, you know, when they didn’t have rock and pop stars singing at the cup final, but only an opera singer singing the national anthem (or was it Abide with Me? It’s hard to tell one dirge from another.) But times change and I don’t know which is worse.

(But I do know what takes the biscuit. It's seeing twenty three fully grown, hard-bitten rugby players, fist on heart, singing the national anthem with apparent enthusiasm. Now that's really freaky.)