I’ve given up on the BBC and its coverage of the World Championships in Osaka. From now on its Eurosport for me. I switched today because on Eurosport they were showing the men’s discus and the women’s pole vault in real time.
On BBC2 they had Sue Barker from the London studio interviewing Jonathan Edwards about his world triple jump record.
Now I know athletics is a sport with many periods when little appears to be going on and it may be necessary to stick people on a sofa and have them repeat the same thing day after day. But there was action in the stadium, it just wasn’t on the track and the BBC, despite Paul Dickenson and Edwards being former field event athletes, does not seem to be able to appreciate field events.
So it was over to Tim Hutchings and Martin Gillingham on Eurosport. They are both ex-elite athletes themselves but they don’t have that BBC arrogrance that can so annoy the viewer, and I say that as someone who once employed Martin Gillingham and still has the bruises to prove it!
Also I thought the BBC were going through a spot of soul searching; they weren’t going to try and con us anymore. So what happened today then please Mark Thompson. On Eurosport I saw Lebedeyva going on a lap of honour; whereas on BBC2 the long jump was still progressing and Jonathan Edwards was commentating as if he didn’t know the result.
Two explanations spring to mind. Either Edwards had commentated as if live and the BBC was showing a record, or Edwards was pretending the action on the screen was live. Either way we, the public, were being mislead. Why can’t the BBC say that the long jump had finished and here was the important action?
I asked them, but of course they never put critical comments on their website.
It always amazes me when I hear or read people in the entertainment industry saying they don’t read reviews. I search for every last one. And I was so long in the newspaper business that I would defend to the death (well, not the death, but you know what I mean) the right of a critic to say what he wants. Occasionally you know that some people write things just for effect but you have to learn to live with those.
Of course the good reviews are the best although you rarely get one long enough to properly sum up a book. But we had one this month that surprised us. It was for “Harry Potts – Margaret’s Story” which we published last September.
We thought it was a great book; Frank Keating in the Guardian thought it was a great book, chiding the William Hill judges for not having it on their short list for 2006, although to be fair it wasn’t published in time. Perhaps it will be on this year’s short list.
But it didn’t sell particularly well and we were reconciled to a good book being unappreciated. Then in the latest edition of “When Saturday Comes”, the thinking person’s football magazine as we now like to consider it, there was a review – 11 months after the books publication.
If you buy the magazine you can read it, or you can get a long version at http://alantomlinson.typepad.com/alan_tomlinson/ which is the website belonging to the reviewer, Alan Tomlinson. He’s Head of Research in the Chelsea School at the University of Brighton and it helps that he’s a Burnley fan.
What a disappointing first day’s coverage of the World Athletics Championships from Osaka in Japan. The camera work was awful, and the only excuse can be that Japan doesn’t often feature world class athletics – just one major meeting a year – and that the last time the world championships were held there was in 1991.
The women’s 10,000 metres summed it up. The director concentrated on the leading two as they ran down the back straight on the final lap while American and British fans wanted to know what was happening to the three runners following. They weren’t far behind. A less rigid director would have forsaken the close shot and panned back to show us what was happening.
But, he or she (although I doubt it was a she) kept with the front two, even switching at one point to show the leader by herself. Very useful! So we didn’t see Goucher break away from Pavey. Then the winner crossed the line, and true to cliché the director followed her before hurrying back to just catch the runner-up finishing. Amateurish. And it wasn’t just the 10,000. All too often we were left with pictures that didn’t tell the story of what was going on.
You can’t blame the BBC for this. I suspect they have their own camera there but it couldn’t cover the whole track. But you can blame the BBC for the drivel that comes out of the mouths of their commentators. Even Steve Cram, who is the best since David Coleman, was affected. “She’s got good finishing speed at the end.” Wouldn’t be too much good at the beginning, would it Steve?
Of course it’s not easy being a commentator. You can’t go back and edit your words so sometimes you are going to make a fool of yourself. But it wouldn’t happen so often if they didn’t feel the need to fill every second with words. Someone at the BBC should remind them that this is TV. We have pictures. We can see what is happening.
Yet Brendan Foster still wants to gush at every opportunity. “She’s a determined runner. She’s a dogged runner.” Buy yourself a thesaurus Mr Foster – you’ll see that determined and dogged mean the same. Still he doesn’t slur his words quite as much as he used to although I do wish he and Cram would drop their chummy act. Why is it that TV commentators feel the need to be so aggressively friendly to each other? At the beginning of the 10,000 Cram made the point that they were running at 35 minute pace – “and we could manage that couldn’t we Bren?”
We don’t need to know that, and besides it’s patently untrue. Anyone who saw Foster handing out some prizes on TV recently can attest he’s piled on the pounds in recent years. Then when Foster had problems with his microphone, Cram said, when it had been fixed: “back with us Bren?”
At precisely that point there was a major collision in the race. They should have been concentrating on that, not what was wrong with Foster’s equipment although I did suffer a pang of regret that the microphone had not failed completely.
While on the subject of commentators – I did so hope this wouldn’t be a rant, but it is – will someone, perhaps my old colleague Vic Wakeling, head of Sky Sports, take the Sky Sports cricket commentators into a small room and get them to come up with a consistent line on hawkeye and lbw decisions.
At the moment when an umpire turns down an appeal when Hawkeye says the ball was going to clip the leg stump you get David Lloyd attesting that it was a good decision because there was a benefit of doubt. But then during the second one-dayer between England and India Michael Atherton said that the batsman was out and the umpire should have given leg before even though Hawkeye was showing the ball to have, yes you’ve guessed it, clipped the top of leg stump! Which is it?
Also if the umpire gives a “good” decision when not giving a batsman out when the ball is just clipping the leg stump why is it not a bad decision when he does give it out. Instead you hear “oh look at that. What a great decision, Hawkeye says it was hitting leg stump.”
Still at least Sky haven’t employed Mark Nicholas. He makes Brendan Foster seem taciturn.
In my day Olympic officials talked in code. You had to read between the lines and journalists like John Rodda, then of the Guardian, were experts at decyphering it.
But, no need to examine the runes these days. Not if you read what Simon Clegg had to tell the BBC.
A European Parliament vice-president, Edward McMillan-Scott, had urged a boycott of the 2008 Olympics because of persecution and “even genocide” in China.
A reasonable position to take, if you believe that viewpoint. Giving the Games to Beijing was controversial to say the least and that old cobblers about the Games belonging to the host city, and the host city becoming Olympia for the few weeks they last doesn’t wash anymore. Is there any chance of the Chinese not using the Games as a massive PR tool? Of course there isn’t. Any more than Britain will not big itself up when London plays host in 2012.
But, British Olympic Association chief executive Simon Clegg was nothing if not blunt: “I think it’s absolutely extraordinary,” he told BBC Radio 5live. “…whilst he’s free to express his views in the way that he has, they will not be taken any notice of.”
I’d like the people who run my Olympic Association, and it is mine just as it’s yours if you live in this country – they have it on proxy – to be a little more rounded. Is Simon Clegg to be believed that no notice will be taken of McMillan-Scott’s views?
Have they not debated this within the BOA? Are there no worries about China and its human rights record?
The Olympics are big in our office at the moment and, to be honest, we are thinking of China as well. But, we are hoping to sell the Chinese copies of “Stan Greenberg’s Olympic Almanack” and Bob Phillips’ “The 948 Olympics: how London rescued the Games.”
The Almanack is due out next month with Bob Phillips’ book following shortly afterwards. London, of course, were given the Games in 1948. They were suspended during the second world war although the IOC did consider switching the 1940 Games which had been awarded to Tokyo to Finland. Wishful thinking.
There was no expensive bidding process for London in 1948. The acting president of the IOC, J Sigfrid Edström, made the choice and war-torn London was it. Would the Games have survived if London had not accepted them; who knows?
I’m sorry this blog had not been functioning properly recently. We had to move to Solihull for a week because there was no water coming out of the taps in Cheltenham and I didn’t know how to get into the blog from my laptop.
However, that will not stop me offering myself and accepting a bonus just like Baroness Young of Old Scone (her choice of title, nothing to do with me) the chief executive of the environment agency. After all, her quango met their targets apparently so why shouldn’t she as head trouser an extra £24,000? Never mind that the citizens of Upton on Severn didn’t get their flood defences on time because they were stored miles away and the transport was held up in the chaos caused by the floods. Doesn’t sound to me that she met that target.
If she gets money because the people under her do their jobs shouldn’t she lose some if they don’t? And as floods cause chaos what was her department doing storing the flood defences well away from the area for which they were intended? And she was very quick to tell us that our water bills would increase.
Haven’t heard much from Offwat since the floods. Didn’t hear anything from Severn Trent Water either until Tuesday although the water had been off for nine days. We weren’t told where to go for bottled water and when the water came back on we wouldn’t have known it was not safe to drink unless we read the papers or watched the TV news. It’s been a total shambles.
Of course I shall switch from Severn Trent as soon as possible. After all I’m old enough to remember the late Nicholas Ridley sneering that the Tories weren’t privatising water merely the production of it. That’s all right then. Privatisation means competition, doesn’t it? That was Margaret Thatcher’s mantra. So if it’s just the production I should be able to switch.
But of course I can’t. The privitisation of a public utility like water (and gas and electricity) is basically immoral, just a way of the Tories and their pals to gobble up money at the expense of ordinary people. I googled Severn Trent and came up with “Severn Trent Water denies £75 million fraud …” Why was I not surprised?
