Each day this month, Pop Lifer has given out an award from behind an imaginary window on an imaginary advent calendar. We have covered TV, Film, a little bit of politics and a lot of pop music. Naturally, the Olympics has cropped up as well. We have also covered football, an integral part of our popular culture which provides as many  heroes, villains and dramas as all the soap operas combined.

Football hasn’t always been quite so acceptable. There was a time, for most of the 70s and 80s, when it was considered grubby, seedy and violent – a once noble civic tradition lost to hooliganism and a chauvinistic and often racist culture.

The catalyst for change was also its darkest day – April 15th 1989, the Hillsborough disaster –  a tragedy and an injustice. 96 people lost their lives. Stadiums could never be the same again. Football could never be the same again. Football needed to modernise its environment and someone needed to pay for it. A fledgling, flailing experiment in satellite television realised the potential in our dormant national game and a mutually beneficial arrangement soon worked for both. 

As most of football drank with gauche and giddy delight from Murdoch’s fountain, something was neglected – Hillsborough’s victims. A city, a group of campaigners and writers such as Jimmy McGovern,  fought to right a wrong and remove the cloud that not only hangs over football but British culture.

Today, we acknowledge this campaign and the welcome developments in 2012, including today’s significant judgement, that have finally brought us the truth and moved us closer to justice.

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Welcome to Day 16 of our pop culture advent calendar. Every day we’ve been handing out a little treat in the shape of a mini-blog on something or someone we’ve admired or thought worth noting in 2012. Yesterday we’re we took a new tack and made a prediction that rock’n’roll wasn’t about to die. Today we return to lobbing awards at random moments from 2012 and behind door 16 there’s one all about national identity….

Consider your reaction whenever you see a photo of yourself. For example, you and your bezzie mate are flicking through images on the morning after a night before. A part of you cringes, you visibly wince, and you mutter in a crushed tone as you are confronted by a shot from below, your eyelids half closed, mid-slur.

‘Do I really look like that?’ you pathetically offer.

And your closest buddy and confidante, in one merciless act of nonchalance, dismissively replies ‘but that’s how you look’. This heartless response is made of course because this friend is too busy concentrating on containing their own horror at the gurning self-image they see before them.

Scale that up by 60 odd million people and you get a feel for the pointless attempts occasionally made to establish a national identity. For a start who is this ‘national identity’ for exactly? If it’s for ourselves, we’ll rarely, if ever, be satisfied. And if it’s for the rest of the world, they really couldn’t care less anyway. And why? Well, because as we cringe at the idea that the world thinks we’re a toff led dour bunch of whingers that drink too much, Brazilian’s plead with the world not to think instantly of carnival and favelas, Americans cross their fingers that we all don’t think they are bible belt crazies, and Australians shudder at the thought of the damage wreaked on their burgeoning cultural flowering by Mick Dundee.

However, this summer, the UK did finally take that ever so prized profile pic and it proudly uploaded it to its timeline. And for once, you know what, the world actually did take notice.

This award is named after Danish detective Sarah Lund from The Killing who has turned Denmark into the most morally complex and fascinating country on the planet after being previously known for salted butter, bacon, and red-nosed goalkeepers. Oh, ok, and maybe some kids stories. The Sarah Lund Award for National Renewal goes to….

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