Eastwood and Westwood, Ne'er the Twain Shall Meet

Sorry about the terrible title of today's blog but the East/West thing came to me last night and I can't resist using it. Not sure Rudyard would be terribly impressed. All will become clear.

Couch Potato Dave had a change of heart and persona yesterday afternoon. He became Running Man Dave again. The bottle of rioja did get drunk (as I suppose did I) but only after I had run in atrocious weather. This change of mind can be traced back to the moment when Paul Casey missed his birdie putt on the first green of his final round in  the Open. At this point I knew he would not win and my interest waned. In fact Casey stayed nominally in contention until he played the 12th like a right handed version of me but somehow I had known this was coming. Noone else was close enough to challenge the superb and surprising Louis Oosthuizen who duly cantered to victory. You could almost see the adrenaline seep out of Casey after the pig's ear he made of the 12th and he subsided to a share of third place. The Westwood of our title inherited second place but he was never in with a shout of winning. Pleased to say that both Casey and Westwood gave sane and generous interviews afterwards. There is a rather deflating tendency for Englishmen not to win major titles but for now I am giving Casey the benefit of the doubt and will bet on him to win soon. Those looking for sane betting advice may wish to look elsewhere.

What is any rational analyst to make of Oosthuizen's brilliant win? He had never previously made the cut in a major championship. He had won a fairly minor European title earlier this year but has spent the last couple of months finishing down the field or missing cuts. His win is not so left field as, say, Ben Curtis's but the fact is that he was ranked outside the world's top fifty until yesterday and was (not over-generously I would have said) priced at 200/1 before the tournament. If you had told me last week a young South African would win the Open I would have nodded sagely and gone out and backed Charl Schwartzel.

Anyway, like I said I stayed off the bottle until the evening and went out for a run when the golf was over. I made a couple of rookie mistakes. I wanted to replicate the feeling of righteousness from last week's long run so I retraced the route - round to St David's Park and back via the coastal path. I measure my running by the time I spend on my feet not by the distance covered. If, as yesterday, you run the course more quickly you of course run for less time. So I stopped the watch in the tipping rain and felt an irrational disappointment that I had taken a full five minutes less than last week! My more serious error was to ignore the message of Friday's slight calf strain in my right leg. The message is rest you pratt. This is not what rugby players ever want to hear so off I went. The right leg was fine but I must have been favouring it because I have now re-injured the left calf which gave me so much annoyance last year when refereeing. Just as I am really back into this running lark I find myself lame. Don't anyone dare tell me this is symptomatic of advancing age.

Soaked and sore I showered and luxuriated in an evening of television, cheese on toast, crisps (Walkers naturally) and red wine. This will bring us eventually to Eastwood I promise. But first public service broadcasting. No, first of all free-to-air digital television. Now that the wondrous £17.99 box is working properly I can most definitely say that I am a fan. There is even a positive side to the absence of the vastness of the Sky menu - it means I am persuaded to watch something other than the sports. Last night I was driven into the arms of  BBC4 for a couple of hours and most edifying it was. Inside John Lewis was the acceptable face of the fly-on-the-wall documentary. The John Lewis business model is an unusual one and it is a matter of proper interest how such an organisation is reacting to the recession. This was followed by another documentary, Who Killed Caravaggio? Now old Caravaggio was apparently a bit of a lad and the speculation on how he met his death reminded me of nothing so much as the tales of Christopher Marlowe's killing at much the same time. Both of these programmes struck me as proper contributions to public service broadcasting and a good use of the licence fee. Certainly far better than the small fortune expended on retaining Jonathon Ross and better than whatever they pay Jeremy Paxman to be gratuitously ill-mannered to people.

And finally to Eastwood, Clint. Feeling a bit over-cultured after Caravaggio I turned to ITV4 and watched Dirty Harry. Eastwood is so routinely viewed as iconic these days that it can be hard to recall that at the time of his early popularity he was a divisive figure. Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times was a notable early champion.

I'm not quite sure what to say about the film but I think we can assert without controversy that Eastwood is compelling. Like all the proper movie stars he fills the screen and makes you watch him. He can be good in bad films - See for example Any Which Way But Loose (which I did on a transatlantic flight in 1981) a distinctly awful product. What of Dirty Harry then? It is one of those 70s cop shows but on cinematic steroids, violent and uncompromising. It makes heavy handed but relevant comments about the Miranda laws on admissibility of evidence. It ends with the crude symbolism of Harry throwing his police badge into a river, an act from which the character presumably resiles in the two sequels which became commercially inevitable. It is not a film with even a tad of optimism but it has its uses as a signifier of the cynical pessimism of an America still mired in Vietnam. And to think the shock of Watergate was still to come.