At the last meeting of G7 leaders, in 2019,
the UK’s Prime Minister swam
out into the Atlantic and around a rocky outcrop in some sort of bizarre
Brexit analogy. Whether he’ll repeat the gesture during this week’s summit
which he is hosting in another Atlantic shoreline town, this time in Cornwall, has
not yet been announced, but given his predilection for contorted stunts, it
must surely be at least a possibility. Perhaps this time he’ll look for a Covid
analogy. He has said,
after all, that he wanted to be remembered as the mayor who kept the beaches
open. Although, in the version of Jaws that I watched, I was sure that the
mayor was the villain, not the hero – not the most obvious choice of role for a
known narcissist.
By way of handy coincidence, there was a report
less than two months ago that a great white shark called Nukumi was crossing
the Atlantic and, according to CornwallLive, could even be making a
beeline for Cornwall. There have never been any fully authenticated reports, as
far as I am aware, of great whites off the shores of Cornwall, but it’s not an
impossibility according to the experts and this has the potential to be a
screenwriter’s dream come true. The outcome of the battle between BoJo and
Nukumi would be tense, but inevitable; not even Disney could write a script in
which the PM could defeat a 253 stone 17foot long shark. The mayor who kept the
beaches open finds himself in an epic battle with the beast about which the
hero of the piece had been warning him for months – that’s certainly a good
Covid analogy – and is ultimately consumed by his very own Nemesis
Nukumi. Only after the PM’s empty beanie hat is pictured floating tragically on
the surface of the sea do the scientists come along and deal with Nukumi in the
way that they had always said would be needed, so that the beaches can once
again become safe.
It’s a fantasy, of course, but with just
that necessary element of credibility. To whom should I offer the script?
No comments:
Post a Comment