Page 206 - Sport Culture and the Media

SCREENING THE ACTION || 187

some similarities and variations. An October one-day match between the
unobtrusively named Queensland Bulls and the Tasmanian Tigers revealed an
average shot length of less than 6 seconds (5.7), but an average number of shots
per over of only 29. The explanation of this uneven finding is that the average
over length was only 166 seconds, barely half that of those sampled by Fiske
(although some allowance should be made for variation in types of bowling).
The Australian cricketing audience’s assumed attention span, it seems, shrunk
markedly in those fifteen years. A brief comparative study I conducted in the
September of that year of a UK one-day game between Essex and Nottingham
revealed an average shot length of a little under 8 seconds (7.95) and an average
number of shots per over of only 24 (23.66). The English, it seems, have main-
tained their reputation for a more sedate brand of TV cricket. But, with an
average over length of only 188 seconds, the screen action is positively frenetic
by earlier standards.
Goldlust (1987) also carried out a limited empirical study of the different
forms of sports television by performing comparative visual component
and shot analyses of tennis, baseball and football in the USA and cricket in
Australia. Goldlust, like the aforementioned writers, operated with the:
somewhat artificial, but still meaningful, distinction between an emphasis
on commercial entertainment values best represented by the American
networks and journalistic values emphasizing accuracy and ‘objective’
reporting of events that has become the established ethos within the BBC
and a significant element of its institutional self-image.
(Goldlust 1987: 98)

While Goldlust did not perform any quantitative analysis of British sports
television, recording only ‘his impression that the distinction would still hold’
(p. 100) on the basis of viewing British TV soccer for three weeks on both the
public BBC and the commercial channels (and finding that the average shot
length in West German TV coverage of the 1974 soccer World Cup was almost
double that of the BBC), he found general evidence of a move towards ‘a “high
tech” form of “snap, snap” television typified by contemporary American
network coverage of sports’ (p. 100).
Of course, variations in the structure and form of very different sports like
tennis and American football impose constraints on how television will cover
them (for example, the average length of a segment from the Masters tennis
match sampled was over twice that of the Super Bowl), and there are cultural
variations of various kinds – the amount of commentary ‘hype’ tolerated, the
quantity of background information provided, and so on. Gordon and Sibson
(1998) have also shown in their comparative analysis of US and Australian
television coverage of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that there are perceptible