Historical Failings

Of course, one of the great problems with Stonehenge, as it was initially envisaged, was that – at that point in history – the out of town shopping centre was somewhat ahead of its time. Although, for miles around, Stonehenge was regarded as the fashionable place to get your flints napped, the lack of a suitable transport system meant that the shopping centre never got the number of customers it needed for it to become sustainable.

The same fate befell the Viking airport at York, where the lack of a runway long enough to launch the Viking long airships, meant that far too many of them crashed into the departure lounges before getting airborne.

However, the Roman football league was a remarkable success, at least initially, but the Roman propensity to keep tinkering with the offside rule meant that soon the matches became tedious low-scoring games, with most ending in no score draws, up to and including the Roman Empire Cup Final where Gaul Rovers held the Londinium Centurions to a nil-nil score line even after extra time. Consequently, it came as no surprise to future generations of Roman sports commentators that soon the half-time shows – especially that perennial favourite the long-running sit-com Christians versus the Lions – proved to be more popular than the football games themselves.

Also in sport it was discovered that Elizabethan bowling greens were of such bad quality that the Elizabethan bowls players would prefer to go into battle against a massively outnumbering foreign Armada than risk another game of bowls and the constant danger of losing another jack over the edge of the cliff.

It was not all doom and gloom though, the Greeks always thought it was a great idea of theirs to lumber other countries with the Olympic games with their ever-spiralling costs, over-complexity and dubious new 'sports' and - eventually – history, once again, proved them right.