Page 191 - Sport Culture and the Media

172 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

not only are substantial numbers of women enthusiastic sports participants
and viewers, but television also makes available sports texts to men and women
alike who do not count themselves among this established fraternity and
growing sorority (as noted in Chapter 3, for example, men only shaded women
by 51 to 49 per cent in the TV viewership of the 2002 Korea/Japan World Cup).
Given that the logic of all television is to secure and expand an audience, it is
necessary to analyse the textual strategies adopted by TV producers to win over
uncommitted viewers to the joys of sport on television. While it should be
recognized that the many decisions taken and tasks performed in producing live
sport may not ‘hang together’ in terms of a single determining logic (Stoddart
1994b; Silk et al. 2000), strong attempts are made to give such broadcasts
a coherent identity that can be easily interpreted. As was noted in Chapter 3,
this might require them to be faked a little; that is, to be ‘plausibly live’ (Farred
2001; Rivenburgh 2003) in convenient time slots. As one leading commercial
media sports executive has said of the Olympic Games on television, ‘“The
Americans want their stories ‘chewed and digested’ from 7 or 7.30 till
midnight”’ (Alex Gilady quoted in Bernstein 2003: 125).
‘Action-dependent’ sports television does not simply rely on an appeal to
the senses through the immediate stimulation of sight and sound. Viewers
would quickly tire of a TV sport that consisted of much sound and fury which
signified nothing (as has tended to be the fate of fabricated, pseudo-sports
TV competitions like Gladiators) and so must be made to feel that what is
happening on screen actually matters. By inducing (or reinforcing) the identifi-
cation of viewers with sportspeople and teams – for example, as local or
national representatives – sports TV producers tap into the affective power of
territoriality as it applies to sectors of cities, whole urban areas, regions,
nations, even entire continents and hemispheres (de Moragas Spà et al. 1995). In
this way, the unfolding TV sports event – an important component of news, as
we saw in Chapter 2 – is also a narrativized construction, with twists and turns
in the plot, heroes and villains, and, in the traditions of Greek and Elizabethan
drama, a serious purpose of confronting the great public and private moral
dilemmas of the day. In its grandest manifestation as global mega-media event,
sport, according to Dayan and Katz’s (1992: 25) typology of the ‘story forms,
or “scripts”’ that create narrative opportunities, can be read principally as
‘Contest’, although there are also openings for ‘Conquest’ (such as breaking
world records) or ‘Coronation’ (like epic opening ceremonies) encodings.
In the case of fictional film and drama, where the starting point is narrative,
character and dramatic tension, sport is used as a means of attracting those
already interested in sport and as a dramatic vehicle for those who are not.
Fictionalized sports texts, therefore, tend to be highly charged moral tales or
allegories in which the state of the nation or the gender and racial/ethnic orders