Page 204 - Sport Culture and the Media

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perpetually challenged, like 24, X Files, NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Boomtown,
The Sopranos, Prime Suspect, Rebus and Cracker) than that discussed by Rose
and Friedman (which is closer to daytime and evening ‘soaps’ and dramas like
Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, Passions, Neighbours, Home
and Away, Melrose Place, Dawson’s Creek, Chicago Hope and ER). This
specific point – which, while valid, requires a more detailed analysis of the
concept of melodrama (see Brooks 1976) than is possible here – does not rebut
the more general proposition that live television sport moves well beyond the
territory of describing action on the field and into the space of narrativizing
and mythologizing its subject. In fact, it plainly draws on both the action and
‘feeling’ oriented sub-genres of melodrama to construct a media text that we
could typify as combining the spectacular physical, often violent elements of
action drama with the detailed characterization, emotional concentration and
relational emphasis of ‘human’ drama. The outcome can properly be described
as inter-textual and multi-genre in nature, not always satisfying individual
viewers but ceaselessly working to link what is on the screen in a meaningful
and attractive way to other media texts and life experiences.
Because television sport is a moving spectacle of varying pace (golf, for
example, is positively pedestrian when compared with ice or field hockey), it
relies on capitalizing on the visual drama of movement when it is readily access-
ible and producing a sense of rapid momentum when it is not. Even sports that
already seem frenetic are sped up by television in pursuit of the uncommitted
viewing eye, yet this constant acceleration of the rhythm of the sports TV
text is to some degree in tension with the impulse to slow it all down and see
it more clearly from numerous angles and in minute detail. By making the
spectacle of sports television louder and more frenetic in a drive to interpellate,
in Althusser’s terms, potential viewers (‘Oy! Look!’), and then distract (in
Kracauer’s sense), even transfix them (‘Don’t Look Away For A Moment!’),
programmers are attempting to occupy the exterior and interior spaces of
homes and minds. This urgent mode of address is also associated with a
traditional split between British and American styles of sports broadcasting.
It is useful to trace some of the major changes in the way that images of sport
are presented on the small screen. To do so, we need to know something of the
history of the principles governing the capturing of ‘reality’ for television
and, in particular, of recording and transmitting sports events. As Whannel
points out, in the earlier part of the twentieth century, when protocols for the
reflection of the world by television were being developed:

television merely took over a lot of standard realist conventions from film-
making – the 180-degree rule, the principle of complementary angles,
and so on . . . These conventions aimed at transparency, strengthening