Television
Motty, our pal
Simon Hoggart
Iwatched two big football matches last Sunday. The first was Chelsea versus Liver- pool. At half-time, Liverpool were winning 2-0, but Chelsea went on to score four times. Here were John Motson's reactions: It's all happening here at Chelsea!'; 'It's 3- 2. Can you believe this?'; 'Extraordinaryr; `They'll be talking about this at Stamford Bridge for years!'
Motty's trick is to tell you what you
`You're your own worst enemy'
already know, but in a very excited voice. Last season, I took my seven-year-old son to his first Premier League match. Like all male persons, he has an urgent biological need to be an instant expert on every sport, so that, although the most skilful players he had previously seen were in our local park, he felt able to shout, 'Great kick!', or 'Bril- liant save!' and bury his face in his hands at the right moments. If we dropped into a game of pelota, or a curling match, he'd be shouting, 'Get your eyes tested, ref!' within ten seconds.
In the same way, Motty is your pal on the terraces. You sense that at half-time you'd be sharing a hot Bovril and a bag of crisps. He's very keen for you to know that he knows who the players are. 'This is Minto ... this is Collymore, for Liverpool.' Strate- gy and tactics are strangers to Motty, except where they're obvious already (`Chelsea are throwing everyone up front now'). I don't want to be harsh, because he is a decent man. This is evident on every page of his book (Motty's Diary, Virgin, £12.99); the royalties are going to a children's chari- ty. He's also a sensitive man; in one entry he's badly hurt by a reader's letter in the Nottingham Evening Post, which seems a lit- tle too thin-skinned. He does go to immense lengths to get the players' names right, and there are touching entries which see poor Motty hanging around the lobby of team hotels for days, trying to sort out his Asinovic from his Ebolo.
But the fact is that the book resembles his commentary, being always enthusiastic but never analytic. Players 'deserve all credit', have `unique ability', or 'do all that could have been asked of them'. Matches are `absorbing' or 'dramatic'. In April he turned television critic himself, finding Dennis Potter's Karaoke 'absorbing ... real life brought to the screen, which, when you cut out all the turgid analysis that a series like this invokes, is surely what television drama is supposed to be about'. So no turgid analysis for Motty. Admit- tedly, even if he had any to offer, soccer makes it difficult. Professional football is much like school playground football, only bigger and faster. Stop to examine one inci- dent and you're missing another. Managers brief him about their tactics, but he doesn't tell us in advance, since it might help the opposition. This is football commentary on lobby terms. (Though we political hacks could take up Motty's style. 'Oh, I say, what a great speech . . . some lovely little touches there . ..') American football is entirely different, since it takes around three hours to play the nominal 60 minutes on the clock. As someone said, it's a paradigm of American life, being random violence interrupted by committee meetings. Channel 4 were at this year's wonderful Superbowl in New Orleans; Sky made do with expert analysis from a tiny member of the 'Scottish Clay- mores' team, which is the equivalent of having the Cup Final described by a pub team goalkeeper from Hendon. Yet he was much the best in either studio. So the stop-start structure of the game allows plenty of helpful analysis, and the running match commentary, by Pat Sum- merall and John Madden, was superb. Madden, a former coach, knows, loves and Understands the game. A few seconds 'play' can be the equivalent of five simultaneous chess moves, and by scrawling in white on the replay footage, Madden can explain in detail exactly what you have just seen. Sometimes an amateur like me is lost Ole will go to a three-man line, play a soft zone, so you won't get to a pass rush') but mostly he is illuminating, and, yes, very analytical. I think I would rather go to a match with Motty, but I wish we had some- one like Madden telling us about our game.
`She doesn't just smoke between courses; she smokes between mouthfuls,' said a friend of mine after an unnerving dinner with Princess Margaret. It sounds disgust- ing and terribly sad at the same time. So was Secret Lives: Princess Margaret (Chan- nel 4). A disappointment at birth because she was a girl, unable and unwilling to break out of the Royals' gilded prison, making pathetic attempts to be a bohemi- an, and now the 'weekend guest from hell' Whose domineering presence is dreaded in country houses across the land — it was Impossible not to feel sorry for her. Yet she began the Windsors' terrible and apparent- ly endless slide in public esteem. Why are they utterly incapable of producing func- tional people with functional relationships? Dearbhla Molloy's gentle, understated Commentary made this a television first: a stately hatchet job, a ceremonial turning-
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