Television money has come to dominate mainstream sport, so much so that they can now dictate schedules and even formats. There is no doubt that the choice and quality of coverage these days is beyond what we could dream of growing up but at what cost to the true values of sport?
10 – VIDEO KILLED THE SPORTING STAR
“The atmosphere is so tense, if Elvis walked in with a portion of chips, you could hear the vinegar sizzle on them.”
Sid Waddell
We are now a nation of sport watchers over participants and top level sport is awash with television cash. If sport is a reflection of society, those feasting at the top tables have done well, whilst beneath we battle on regardless.
There has never been as much money floating around sport but it is not always put to best use. Take this from when I first penned this piece.
An article in 2011 concerned the cost of modifying the transport system in and around the London Olympics to ensure the smooth arrival of VIPs; the initial cost was put at £12m. How much better to use horse and carts whilst spending the £12m on school sport?
Television Rules
School sport has but disappeared during the same period the amount of sport available to watch – if you can afford to – has exploded. Rather than experience the joy of participation, kids are now treated to sport as if a television game show.
Most sports have bowed to the demands of television, under pressure to introduce fast food versions. Cricket’s The Hundred is the latest woeful initiative but woe betide you criticise this, at least till the few have filled their boots. Even golf is tinkering with a shorter format.
Only football seems oblivious to change seeking more of the same with end of season play-offs and penalty shoot outs rendering the previous ten months efforts almost worthless.
The Pundit
Perhaps the biggest growth area in recent years is that of the pundit. Every game seems to have at least three in the studio to back up a presenter, two commentators and a touchline analyst who is generally female and rather fetching. They call it diversity.
Most are utterly useless, spouting inanities with as much clarity as you would get at the local pub come closing time. Many rely on their status as former players but, even though you may have been a genius with a bat or a ball, articulating how you did it is a lot harder.
Both codes of rugby have not escaped and the standards set by the great Bill McLaren and Eddie Waring are a mere distant memory.
Consider this from Private Eye (August 2012).
“What we realise we have missed, after all these years watching Sky Sports, is the quiet professionalism of these old school commentators. These men and women do not tell you what you can see for yourself. They tell you other things, things you don’t know already.
This should always be the defining quality of the TV commentator, but Sky assumes a smaller IQ on the part of the viewer, dodgy eyesight and possibly an enormous amount of lager consumed before the TV was switched on.
For years we have been told…that Sky has livened up sports coverage. Technologically that’s true, but the channel’s youthful brashness long since matured into a sort of institutionalised yobbery.”
Soon after came the premature death of legendary darts commentator Sid Waddell, who combined intelligence, wit, perception and warmth, He gave darts a standing way above its tap room roots and offered commentaries a world apart from more mainstream sports proving the skills sets required are worlds apart.
Pile It High
The demands of the television paymasters to fill ever-expanding schedules inevitably means the standard of fare on offer is woefully poor on and off the pitch. Too much football, too much cricket, too much of everything; games come thick and fast.
As a nation we need to get back to playing rather than watching; we are the fattest nation in Europe – fact! And yet it looks like the television money will continue to dominate. It is rumoured that the rugby Six Nations will disappear to Sky at the next renewal.
Back to the Private Eye piece for a final telling paragraph or two, comforting to note they shared the sentiments I had expressed a few years previously – A Critics’ Corner – with regard to sports’ addiction to the Murdoch chequebook.
“The Olympics have suggested another way forward. If the BBC can find 24 digital channels for sport now, why not just one for the rest of the year? The corporation has been consistently outbid for everything Sky wanted and obviously does not want to lose face by having nothing to show other than international tiddlywinks from Trondheim.
But Sky’s sporting hegemony has done irreparable damage to some of the sports it has bought. Rugby league and cricket are but two whose souls have been chewed up and spat out again.
A sport whose administrators could see beyond the warm glow of short-term cash might realise that free-to-air coverage, for a smaller fee, might actually be more effective in the longer term than wholesale surrender to Sky. A dedicated BBC sporting channel, branded and marketed as such, would therefore be the very definition of public service television.
It would also be a very much bolder thing to do than the BBC seems capable of at the moment. It would give us thousands of boring reasons why it wasn’t possible or desirable. So would Sky, and all its jolly friends in the papers – which is the best reason of all for doing it.”
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