Page 190 - Sport Culture and the Media

6 SCREENING THE AC TION:

THE MOVING SPORTS IMAGE

In an ideal world, a competitive television environment would strike the
perfect balance: gradually introducing non-enthusiasts to the intricacies
and pleasures of new and diverse sports, using all the sophisticated
wizardry of new technology while remaining faithful to the innate spirit
of the game. All the evidence suggests that, while a visual spectacle is
enhanced by innovative camerawork, both commentary and contextual
artifice is increasingly exploited to entice the uncommitted. In the end,
the overwhelming considerations are those which transcend any concern
for honest reproduction.
(Steven Barnett 1990: 170)

Introduction: action, drama and narrative

If the still sports photograph seems to lodge in the mind, its neatly defined and
structured image easily conjured up in fine-grained detail, the moving sports
image often seems to fill up any spare cerebral and perceptual space, crowding
out other subject matter with its movement, colour, noise and melodrama.
Much critical attention is given (for reasons outlined in Chapter 1) to television,
but sport is also the subject of many films (Bergan 1982) and even some theatre
(Fotheringham 1992). Programmers have devised myriad ways of presenting
sports television – live and delayed broadcasts with multiple-camera locations
and sophisticated studio technology, sports ‘magazine’ programmes, quiz
shows, dramas, studio comedies and variety ‘turns’ that appear in different
parts of TV schedules. Most sports TV formats are heavily dependent on the
recorded live action which, once placed in the vaults of television companies, is
permanently (when correctly stored and preserved) available for repackaging as
highlights, memories, ‘what happened next’ questions and funny moments. The
core audience for TV sport is traditionally regarded as the male ‘sports nut’. Yet