Page 205 - Sport Culture and the Media

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the claim to television to reflect events and minimising its own active
construction of representations.
(Whannel 1992: 32)

Thus the television camera was thought of as an unseen eye, its ‘sweeping’ of
what was before it from a single, static position simulating the experience of
the spectator watching from a particular vantage point. The key to this form of
television, as in all forms of realism, was to make the infrastructure of com-
munication invisible, turning two-dimensional (and initially monochrome)
perception into three-dimensional (colourful) experience. When single cameras
were supplemented by others, the consequent shifting of perspectives made it
harder to hide the production decisions being made on behalf of the viewer,
sacrificing a degree of ‘reality effect’ for a technologically enhanced view of
the action. A tension quickly emerged between a rather ‘Olympian’ view of the
sports action (watching from a suitable distance in a detached, objective
manner) and a more ‘dramaturgical’ approach reliant on close-up shots that
engaged the viewer much more closely with the personalities of the partici-
pants. To some degree, this was also a struggle between those who took a high-
minded, serious approach to the visual reportage of sports events and those
who saw it merely as one form of popular entertainment, which, like others,
should be presented using all the available, audience-pleasing techniques
(Whannel 1992: 33). The development of such techniques included rapid-
fire editing, which could give to even the most ponderous sports contest the
appearance of a series of lightning strikes.
One way to establish the existence of such shifts from slower to faster
styles of sports television presentation is to quantify for comparative purposes
the length and duration of shots in individual live sports programmes.
The variables measured include any changes that might occur over time and
differences between countries influenced by one or other of the major sports
broadcasting traditions. Fiske’s (1983) case study of televised cricket in
Australia revealed that average shot-length was 6 seconds out of a total average
of 46–9 shots per over. When Whannel (1992: 99) replicated the study in England
in 1991, he found considerable differences – an average shot length of 8 seconds
(one-third longer) with an average of only 32 shots per over (29–30 per cent
fewer). This variation can be explained, as suggested earlier in the mention of
the Packer Cricket ‘Revolution’, by a change of broadcast philosophy (mirror-
ing a wider historical shift as the first colonial power, Britain, was superseded
by the second dominant force of media and cultural imperialism – the USA)
that saw some commercial television stations in Australia depart from the
patented BBC model of broadcasting restraint and embrace the more upbeat
American style (Barnett 1990). In 1998, my own update of these studies revealed