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Televised Sport • 55

complex operations of meaning in television. Williams (1974) argued that watching
television diverged from more traditional cultural forms because the typical experi-

ence was one of flow. Williams (1974) criticised television reviewers for focusing on
individual programme items, as if they could be separated from the experience of an
evening’s viewing:

It is not only that many particular items—given our ordinary organisation of re-
sponse, memory and persistence of attitude and mood—are affected by those pre-
ceding and those following them . . . it is also that though useful things may be said
about all the separable items . . . hardly anything is ever said about the character-

istic experience of the flow itself. (p. 96)
Live sport broadcasts are preceded, followed and interspersed with an array of short
items—prerecorded sequences detailing a team’s campaign, live pundits’ specula-
tions, competitions, advertisement breaks—all of which help frame the event for the
viewer. This flow of multiple, simultaneously occurring channels of communication

creates a complex structure of intertextuality, accumulating a web of associations.
The full significance of images, words, music, sounds and narratives in televised

sport can only be understood in relation to other, previous instances that they evoke.
The analysis of televised sport involves consideration of how meanings occur within
and across the five channels of communication and in relation to a host of intertextual

references. Following Seiter, then, it is possible to think about how each channel of
communication might figure in the signifying process, and how each contributes to

the experience of televised sport.

Image

Metz (1974) argued that it was not possible to discern the smallest unit of meaning
in cinema, suggesting that film should instead be analysed at the level of shot, its

largest minimum segment. Television can also be considered in this way. However,
while the concept of the shot may take account of the interrelationship of sound and
image, it is still very reliant on its visual dimension. Berger (1992: 27) developed a
‘grammar of television’ to cover the ways camera shots and editing techniques oper-
ate (see Figure 3.1).
Berger’s (1992) suggestions for ways of decoding the connotations of shots can
be thought of as a starting point for analysing aspects of image construction in tele-
vised sport. Nevertheless, the television image is complex, with potentially limitless
combinations of signs that are not reducible to the predictability of a ‘grammar’.
Shot type, camerawork and editing techniques are all part of the make-up of the
image of television sport. So, too, are lighting, colour, clothing, composition and re-
plays (show motion or otherwise). All these factors need to be considered as imagery
in sport television.