How many medals do you suppose the Great Britain team will win in Beijing? UK Sport, the funding body for our athletes, has apparently demanded “between 10 and 12” gold medals (ie, 11, I suppose), but that is rather like me demanding an evening with Jessica Alba: it might happen - hell, you never know - but it is dependent upon factors entirely extraneous to myself.

The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, meanwhile, has effected the swiftest nationalisation on record by taking ownership of our medal tally before even the first plastic beakers have been circulated for urine samples. Here’s what he said: “Other countries and old rivals like Australia now look to us as a country that got serious about sport and are now saying they are in danger of falling behind Great Britain in the medal table. Gordon Brown’s decision in 2006 to give more money to elite sport as we get ready for 2012 has made this possible.” There was an immediate response from his Australian counterpart, which consisted largely of badly muffled cackling.

I assume if we win very few medals there will be an equally swift privatisation of Team GB and no mention of Gordon’s generosity from Mr Burnham. Last time (and the time before), Australia finished fourth in the medal table and we finished 10th. Overall, mind, since the first modern Games in Athens in 1896, we lie in third place for the total number of golds, behind the USA and the Soviet Union.

Do we want to be a country that “got serious” about sport, though? Can’t we leave that to the Australians, who are serious about little else? Sport can be fun and even thrilling, but it is surely not a remotely serious matter. Providing drugs for cancer patients is a serious matter. I will cheer each British contestant and feel vaguely uplifted if they win, but it won’t make Britain a better place in which to live, in any meaningful sense.

Am I supposed to feel pride that we capture a couple more medals this time around because we’ve spent public money training the athletes? And it is precisely the industrialisation of sport that makes modern contests - the Premier League, the Olympic Games - extremely boring: the rich win everything, and there is little room for heroics, for the astonishing individual triumph against all the odds.

When we watch sport, it is the heroic we yearn for and remember: I bet you all recall Eric “the Eel” Moussambani almost drowning at the Sydney Olympics - but I also bet you can’t remember who won gold in his race. The Olympic organisers recognise this yearning with a system of wildcard opportunities for competitors from countries that have never had the money to “get serious” about sport. That’s how Eric the Eel ended up in Sydney.

History suggests that there are two sorts of country that get terribly gung-ho and serious about sporting contests - the politically desperate and the unequivocally wicked.

The old Soviet Union considered all sport an arena in which to demonstrate to the world that its political system could at least achieve some tangible success, even if it couldn’t stretch to freedom, passports, consumer durables and food for its 250m benighted citizens. Hitler, grimacing from his seat as Jesse Owens took the gold medal in Berlin in 1936, thought similarly. Both regimes “got serious” about sport, and neither, mercifully, exists any longer.

Let us give Mr Burnham the benefit of the doubt and put him and Gordon in the former category, the category of the politically desperate. Maybe that’s how we might win a few more medals in Beijing - by whispering in the ear of our competitor as he limbers up for the softball tournament or the synchronised drug-taking: “Come on, win this medal for Andy.”

Might as well, because it looks as though Andy and Gordon will be hovering over the podium, beaming with appropriated pride, if they do win gold.

+ The credit crunch certainly has its upside. The Halifax bank has decided to axe Howard Brown from its supremely irritating advertisements because the moon-faced Brummie counter clerk looks “too cheerful” for these hard times. Howard, you will remember, dances around with a grin on his face singing pop songs about how you should take out a mortgage you can’t afford. Nobody is doing that any more.

It is not known if Howard will return to his old job, if it’s still there, or pursue a career in show business. These are good times for debt collection agencies and the repo boys, so there may be some openings in advertisements for that sort of thing and Howard can dance around looking happy once again.

As for the Halifax, one is tempted to point it in the direction of Carol Vorderman. She has a bit of time on her hands, possesses experience of working for a certain sort of loan company and right now is feeling extremely hacked off, given that she was offered her old job at Countdown at a 90% pay cut. Or what about the magnificently sulky Naomi Campbell? “Take a loan out with us or don’t take a loan out with us. I couldn’t give a f***, you pigs.”

A whiter shade of pale
The cosmetics firm L’Oréal has been accused of lightening the skin tones in one of its photographs of the singer Beyoncé Knowles so that she looks white - perhaps, as a black girl, she wasn’t quite “worth it”? What an odd thing to do. There are plenty of pretty white girls around; before L’Oréal held auditions it could have made it absolutely clear by putting “No blacks, please” in the job advert. As it happens, Beyoncé looks as good white as she did when she was black, but this scarcely diminishes the rudeness of L'Oréal’s alleged behaviour. It is a racist slur to black people to make black people look white and, paradoxically, a racist slur to black people to make white people look black.

Taliban Tebbit bashes infidel
My favourite prediction of the week comes from Lord Tebbit, who suggests that because of Rowan Williams’s privately expressed indulgence towards sodomites, droves of Anglican worshippers will leave the church and convert to Islam. There has always been a whiff of the Taliban about Norman - perhaps he has converted already and will reemerge one day soon with a bushy beard, smiting buggerers right, left and centre. There was an article by Arthur Scargill last week, too, insisting that coal is better for the environment than nuclear power (especially, one supposes, if Arthur is leading the miners, in which case none of it will get dug out of the ground). It was both disturbing and comforting to hear them, like watching a film from the 1950s about rickets: once we suffered, but no more.

The German government is to ban the famous Kinder Surprise egg because it worries that the little toy inside the chocolate might be eaten by a stupid child who mistook it for a sweetie. Of course, there is not a single case of this ever having happened. The Germans are also banning toys from cereal packets. And so, across northern Europe and the US, the process continues: of sucking every last remnant of joy from childhood in the wholly spurious cause of health and safety. In the case of the Kinder eggs, the ban will probably be supported by a vast array of nutritionists, who think chocolate’s a bad thing anyway, as well as antipaedophile action groups, who fear they could be used as a lure. Great streaks of misery.

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