Paul Lewis: Spare us mascot indignity

A plea to the 2011 Rugby World Cup organisers and the All Blacks - please, whatever you do, don't invent a mascot.

The London Olympics 2012 have just unveiled their mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville. These ... things ... appear to be two one-eyed parking meters with a suspicious bulge in their pants and a rather scary look on what passes for faces.

Lord Sebastian Coe, the head of the 2012 Olympics and one of the greatest athletes to grace the planet, attempted to explain Wenlock and Mandeville by saying that they were created for children. Pardon? Children?

Olympic mascots spring from that most un-Olympic of motivations: money. If you have a cute and cuddly Olympic mascot that makes us all go "Awwww", you have a merchandising success that can help to pay for the vast expense of the modern Olympic games. There have been several good examples in the past.

Then there's Wenlock and Mandeville. But ... what do I know? Maybe they will appeal to kids and thus drive the merchandising success of the 2012 Games. That's even shoving aside the unkind thought that Lord Coe's rationale for these horrors is the only way he could think of to explain why they appeared so ghastly to adults.

There are few people in this world who know what kids want. Children are still one of the great imponderables and adults are often the worst judges of what appeals to them - how else do you explain Crocs?

One of my daughters, when very young, went into a paroxysm of fear before literally climbing up to my head and then down the other side. The cause of such rampant fright: Santa Claus - and he's a damned sight more cuddly than Hemlock and Vaudeville or whatever the hell their names are.

The same daughter once communed happily with lions in a safari park but went into a screaming frenzy when menaced by (cue: Jaws music ... ) bantam chickens. She performed another head-climbing exercise and is still teased today about The Attack Of The Killer Bantams ...

People who say they know what children want should be regarded with extreme suspicion. You don't actually have to search their satchel for a camera or investigate the hard drive on their PC ... but still.

The creative context for Headlock and Manswill is that they are formed from leftover steel from the stadium. Great idea. Steel! There you go, kids, cuddle some steel, you spoiled little brats.

Not only that, but Padlock and Mixedgrill's lone eyes regard you rather hungrily. They have squat little legs, ominously full tums or possibly priapic shorts; it's difficult to tell. They look like someone's mobile phone has been inhabited by evil spirits. If one was beamed into a kid's bedroom late at night, the parents would be up for a therapy bill of Olympic proportions.

It's always a shame when sport gets subsumed by commercial matters like this. Sport is sport and, while there must realistically be some invasion by the nakedly commercial, you just hope it's done with some commonsense and dignity. Letting creative directors loose with this stuff is asking for trouble.

In another life, I headed a consultancy that was beaten out of some business for the Hong Kong government. To our chagrin, the firm that beat us was then hired to come up with a new logo for them. They let their best brains loose on it and, at the end of an exhaustive process, unveiled ... wait for it ... a red dragon. The cost for this staggering piece of originality was US$1 million.

Strange things happen when normally hard-nosed and savvy businesspeople get into clinches with creative directors. Some ad agencies and others in this line of work are practised in the art of sophistry. When they have left the CEO staring in wonder at the creation which is his, all his, they then go down the pub, laughing all the while that anyone would pay so much for such tat.

"The message we were getting," said Lord Coe, "was that children didn't want fluffy toys, they didn't want them to be human but they did want them rooted in an interesting story. By linking young people to the values of sport, Wenlock and Mandeville will help inspire kids to strive to be the best they can be."

It's hard to think of many more ludicrous statements and even harder to decide just who is being rooted here.

The London Olympics has already had a bit of a disaster with its logo, derided internationally with one critic claiming it looked like Lisa Simpson performing a sex act. A bit unfair and, it has to be said, a lot of that was just journalists being smart-arses.

The logo cost £400,000 (about $850,000) but, other than the comment "just a few thousand pounds", the organisers have refused to put a figure on the cost for W&M. If they were so cheap, how come they ain't saying so?

Mascots are daft, no matter the sport. The only time they are worth a glimpse is when the people inside the suits lose the plot at and beat the stuffing out of each other.

So, please, RWC 2011 and the NZRU - don't give us a mascot.