Old rivals
FRANK KEATING In need of a positive spin from anywhere, ITV can at least console itself with the plaudits for its exclusive live coverage of rugby's recent World Cup. The oddity (probably unnoticed by most viewers) was that the channel's senior commentary team and many of its studio sages had been rented for the tournament from its deadly rivals at Sky; rather, I suppose, like old Hollywood times when the likes of Bogart, Grable and Gable were hired out to a competitor for lots of lolly when their own contract studio couldn't find them a part or, as they used to say, 'a vehicle'.
I don't know how much ITV paid for Sky's star performers, but it has to be said that the main top-of-the-bill double-act of unfussy narrative straight-man Miles Harrison and the articulately outspoken, savvy pontificator Stuart Barnes was worth every penny. Together they illuminated, embellished even, every match they described — at the same time giving, I suspect, every other broadcast channel's sports department food for serious thought. Especially the BBC.
The climax of the rugby coincided with blanket television coverage of football's almost completed 2008 European championship qualifiers. Sky and its excellent chief commentator Martin Tyler (standard-setter for such as Harrison) gets more than enough practice with its round-the-clock relays, thank you very much — but not the BBC which, for its England matches, sticks with the shameless flag-waving jingo-jangle of oldie John Motson and his schoolboy stats, accompanied at present by quippy Scouse-Irishman Mark (You're right there, John') Lawrenson, and backed up by a sniggering platitude of zootsuited studio 'pundits' offering little in the way of analysis or sharp insights. Motty is television's square peg because he was born to be an enthusiastically vivid radio commentator, as he graphically illustrates every time he's given an outing on steam. On television, he has been putting in his squawking air miles since football's primeval days of 1972.
The television rival Motty took longest to see off was the smoother all-rounder Barry Davies who, terminally cheesed-off, declined to renew his BBC contract a couple of years ago. Overkeen media scholars will find a rewarding Christmas stocking-filler in Davies's new memoir in which — rather too gentlemanly to be really spicy, I'm afraid — he reprises the Motty vs Barry cat-and-dog soap opera of a quarter of a century which ended at the last European championships 'when the fact I was not invited to commentate on a single one of England's matches, not even recorded, made my position absolutely clear'.
Davies wanted to call his book Frankly, Who Cares? (which, mind you, Barry patently did), but was persuaded to stick with Interesting Vety Interesting (Headline, £20), another familiar phrase from one of his commentaries, apparently, but one which offers even more of a hostage to fortune. Sort of Reasonably Interesting would be nearer the mark. Unlike recent rugby and cricket first-person authors, the good ol' boy has allowed his nice-chap diplomatic gentilities to dilute the bile and you have to read forensically between the lines to realise what double-crossing backstairs backstabbers run the BBC. Fun is what its sports department is meant to purvey; to work for it is anything but. Now that Barry's ego has had time to settle into calm retirement, I fancy he's mighty glad to be shot of it all. I liked his defining line when, one half-time, he chided his inter-round summariser, the laboriously plonking Trevor Brooking, with the tart tip: 'Trevor, say half as much, and you'll inform twice as much.'
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