Page 138 - Sport Culture and the Media

TAKING US THROUGH IT || 119

and moves that is almost guaranteed to infuriate the aficionado), then it is
hardly surprising that they are so often subject to hostile commentary them-
selves. Live sports commentators are in any case especially easy targets because,
however much they ‘bone up’ on sports statistics and player profiles, and
irrespective of the degree to which they rehearse their patter, if their com-
mentary is going to air at the same time as the broadcast, then they have little
opportunity to correct errors and avoid asinine remarks. In this sense, live
television sports commentators resemble the athletes and officials whose per-
formances they are describing and assessing. Just as association footballers have
found, to their deep sadness, that own goals and sending-offs cannot be re-shot
for live TV, the inanities and infelicities of live commentators are for ever. This
is a rare working condition in the contemporary mass media, where scripting,
pre- and re-recording, drafting, editing, spell-checking, and so on limit the error
count of the final textual product. It is this performance element that in live
television commentary invites critical assessment by laying bare the organized
chaos that lies hidden behind much television production. Of course, such
commentary (as noted earlier) is also a staple of radio sport, but it is a little
less subject to vigorous criticism, perhaps because the listener does not usually
have the ‘corroborative’ evidence of their own eyes possessed by their viewing
counterparts. One technique developed in the 1990s by US networks like
NBC has helped spare the blushes of live sports commentators. During multi-
sport events like the Olympic Games or when telecasts have been delayed by
such exigencies as time zone differences, ‘plausibly live’ broadcasts are
shown to viewers. These are cleaned up in advance of the broadcasts and
made to appear more seamless, consistently exciting and error-free than they
would otherwise have been if shown live (Silk et al. 2000). This is an ethically
questionably practice, but a godsend to inept producers, camera operators and
commentators.
One former TV sports commentator (whose most famous words are dis-
cussed later) argues that, in British soccer at least, the art of commentating is
in long-term decline, giving way to the ‘age of the summarizer’, a ‘craze’ now
‘rampant throughout the game’ (Wolstenholme 1998: 184). His diagnosis is that
commentary has been infected by non-professionals since the early 1970s:

Managers, players, former players were brought in to pontificate on the
box and trot out their favourite clichés, such meaningless gems as ‘they’ve
got it all to do’ or ‘they’ll be desperate to get a result’. Television commen-
tators picked up such remarks and before you could say, ‘They must keep it
tight at the back’, you had television newspeak long before the days of ‘do
I not like that’. Viewers were given tactical lessons, they had opinions
thrust at them – and not all the comments were accurate.