Brian Viner: Sparing the haka does us all a favour

The trademarking of the Maori ritual sets me thinking about other dances

The Haka, the flamboyant, ritualistic dance famously deployed as pre-match intimidation by the New Zealand rugby union team, has this week been officially returned by the New Zealand government to a Maori tribe, Ngati Toa, whose elders have been more than a little peeved down the years to see the dance being ripped off by advertising agencies around the world. As Melton Mowbray pork pies must now come only from Melton Mowbray, so must the haka wear a trademark.

Actually, there are lots of hakas, but the one over which Ngati Toa have been granted intellectual property rights is the traditional Ka Mate, composed by their celebrated 18th-century warrior king Te Rauparaha. It can no longer be used without financial compensation even by gingerbread men, as was apparently the case in New Zealand's 2007 bakery of the year awards. However, New Zealand's rugby players, unlike the gingerbread men, will be permitted to go on rolling their eyes and sticking their tongues out, as perhaps befits a tradition that goes back to 1905, when the first All-Blacks put on a terrific song and dance before beating Wales in Cardiff.

Now while nobody has benefited from this week's ruling more than Ngati Toa, for whom it was part of a handsome financial settlement for grievances dating back 150 years, it seems to me that the New Zealand government has unwittingly done us all a favour. The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham had a point when he asserted that we should all try everything at least once except folk-dancing and incest, and it would be marvellous if the haka legislation could henceforth be cited as a precedent to stop all folk dances being attempted by anyone not entitled by birth to do so.

Only then would florid middle-aged members of golf clubs in the Home Counties, and their equally florid wives, be legally prevented from murdering Strip The Willow and the Dashing White Sergeant on Burns Night, while wearing tartan cummerbunds. Only then would the tango be banned from church halls in the West Midlands, and the salsa from community centres in Greater Manchester. Let purity be restored, let line-dancing be confined to the Bible Belt, the Charleston to Charleston, and let there be no more grainy black-and-white clips of Wilson, Keppel and bloody Betty performing their sand dance, which always makes me inclined to give thanks that the golden age of variety unfolded without me in it.

But if any grotesque modern dance could be trademarked out of existence, my vote would go to the studiedly wacky goal celebration in football. It all started with Roger Milla, the ebullient Cameroonian who in the 1990 World Cup, at the grand old age of 38, marked each of his goals by gyrating round the corner flag. And a highly entertaining spectacle it was too, but of course it gave birth to a regrettable new art form, heartily embraced in particular by footballers who think that with a choreographed baby-cradling or machine gun-firing routine we will assume them to have big personalities, rather than small brains. Give Milla intellectual property rights over the daft goal celebration, I say, and let England's rugby players put the fear of god into the All-Blacks, next time they play them, with a proper, jingling morris dance.

b.viner@independent.co.uk