Page 72 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Televised Sport • 61

players’ details, scores and ticking clocks are all associated with the knowledge

claims of scientific discourse. These features of televised sport, along with other tech-
nological innovations, such as the Hawk-Eye electronic line-calling system used to
track the ball in tennis and cricket, and the subsequent replays that indicate a ball’s tra-
jectory and bounce, can be considered an important aspect of sport’s appeal to clarity.
Commentary and half-time studio discussions during the play inevitably touch on
rules and rule infringement. As a rule-bound activity, sport can itself be understood
as appealing to clarity. Nevertheless, commentators often question the calls of of-

ficials and appear to have limited faith that the rules are being enforced without bias
or errors in judgement. Once again, vision, often in the form of the action replay, is
invoked to reinforce the possibility of certainty, which seems constantly to shift and
slide away. The question of just deserts is a repeated theme, asserting the fairness of
sport despite the inconsistencies of the match. The move to digital, high-defi nition
television may increase the clarity of the action, but it may not silence the debates.

The content of football talk, however, is not its only significant aspect. It is possible
to discern another aspect of masculine style in the form that football talk takes. East-
hope’s second dimension of masculine style, banter, is also a part of televised sport.

Banter in Sport Talk

The regular use of nationalistic cliché and ironic humour in televised football open-
ing sequences (Kennedy 2000) can be thought of as a further aspect of masculine
style. During the build-up to the match between England and Holland in the Euro-
pean Football Championship in 1996, ITV showed a sequence with the title ‘The

Story So Far’ imposed on a fluttering English flag. England team members were then

shown lined up, mouthing the words to the national anthem, but with the soundtrack
replaced by one featuring a deep operatic voice singing the song ‘He Is an English-
man’, from the comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore by Gilbert and Sullivan. The sequence
used all available channels of communication to present an intertextual, humorous
report on the uneven media coverage of the England football team, referencing their
drunken behaviour during a flight, their unexpected draw with Switzerland and their

improved performance against Scotland. Comic newspaper headlines passed across
the screen, over a series of images. The sense in which the visual montage should be
read was conveyed by a selection of pop songs. The lyrics to rock tunes accompany-
ing the images implied that the footballers were ‘crazy horses’ who would do well to
listen to the ‘message in the air’, but were occasionally dynamic and ‘fire like this’. An

abrupt change to yodelling music accompanying a film of Switzerland scoring a goal
presented a hackneyed reference point with clear humorous connotations. There was
humour, too, in the use of rock music and bright orange dancing graphics of the se-
quence that followed—a summary of the qualities of the Dutch side—which made links
with the letters D-U-T-C-H with phrases like ‘U is for Usually beat England.’