Page 67 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

56 • Sport, Media and Society

Figure 3.1 Berger’s (1992: 26–7) ‘grammar of television’.

Characteristics of the imagined spectator of televised sport can also be detected
in a programme’s choice of shot type. Whannel (1992) found that in the 1950s, Brit-
ish sport producers were concerned about broadening TV sports’ appeal beyond the
expert to the less committed majority. Conventions adopted during this period, which
have remained with televised sport—the magazine format, long shot–close-up pat-
terns, commentary styles—were intended to liven up a broadcast to appeal to a fl oat-
ing audience of novices or occasional viewers. Whannel (1992: 30–1) concluded
that one distinctive feature of the assumed audience model during the 1950s was that
‘two oppositions—expert/novice and male/female became condensed together’ so
that the ‘implicit assumption becomes one of male expertise and female ignorance’.
The features used to attract novices, therefore, could also be seen as an attempted
address to a female viewer. For example, the Guidelines for Cricket Production,
1952 state, ‘During the day, particularly on a weekday, our audience must, generally
speaking, be of the female sex, and I feel they would prefer more commentary than
the average male viewer’ (cited in Whannel 1992: 31).
The use of close-ups was very much part of the attempt to add colour to sport
broadcasts. For example, Whannel (1992) traced a 1956 memo from the then con-
troller of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Television, who, having compared
BBC and ITV’s coverage of Wimbledon on two sets placed side by side, commented
that he felt ITV’s coverage was better because they gave many more close-ups
and showed the face more often. Interestingly, Modleski (1984: 99) suggested that
the close-up is characteristic of ‘popular feminine visual art’ like the soap opera.
It is easy to forget, she said, that in soap opera, ‘characters even have bodies, so