The great tradition of Boat Race swearing

Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It listed an unusual character in the credits, a swearing consultant. And no wonder, for he must have been one of the busiest people on set. Lively on-screen swearing has been largely absent recently — until mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday, that is. Commentators Andrew Cotter and Dan Topolski were amiably rhubarbing away on the radio about this year’s Boat Race being a masterpiece of unbelievable tension (though anyone could see, even on the radio, that only a torpedo attack would prevent an Oxford victory) when Oxford’s diminutive cox, the Colombian Oskar Zorrilla, made his pitch for immortality.

A shrieked order, ‘Don’t fucking sit’, came crystal clear over the airwaves. Cotter and Topolski battled on as if nothing had happened. Then, with the same adjective, ‘Be tenacious’ and ‘That’s the stuff’. And finally, not surprisingly I guess, there was ‘Fuck yeah!’ as Zorrilla steered his boat over the winning line.