The pros of yesteryear
MICHAEL HENDERSON
What can be done about the BBC's coverage of live sport? It has lost another bauble, the Boat Race, to ITV, and while that is not in itself a grievous loss, it was careless. Once again Peter Salmon, the head of sport, took his eye off the ball, enabling a hungrier opponent to pounce on it like a robber's dog, and boot it joyfully into the goal, while leaving the Corporation's press officers with the task of cobbling together some excuses to put a gloss on the story.
It still has the rugby, and deserves two cheers for that. But ITV has got the Saturday-night football highlights, and if Channel 4 decides not to renew its contract to cover Test cricket later this year, it is by no means certain that the BBC will try to take the summer game back to its natural home. It seems to be betwixt and between, happy to be reminded of its wonderful heritage but unsure of its place in the new dispensation.
Laugh if you want to at the cosy charm of Frank Bough, who used to preside over Grandstand like a kindly prep-school master, but beyond the drinking dens where trendy metropolitan plots are hatched few will join in. The likes of Bough and Des Lynam in front of the camera, and David Coleman, Bill McLaren, Ron Pickering and a dozen other well-informed pros behind the microphone, brought class to the BBC's sports coverage. Now we are obliged to watch Gary Lineker and Sue Barker titter and stumble through the Sports Personality of the Year pageant, a shocker that appalled even White City insiders.
It was on that dreadful programme that a character from EastEnders presented a review of the year in golf! Yes, you read that right. If in doubt (not that there's any reason why there should be, golf doesn't require any flummery) send for the mummers! And if you care to inspect the BBC sport website, you will find the drivellings of another EastEnder who offers her barely intelligible opinions on the Six Nations Rugby Championship in a script so wretched that it can only have been prepared by that merciless parodist Craig Brown. Sorted! Why this obsession with 'celebrities'? Because, one supposes, the producers feel this is the surest way to grab the attention of bored teenagers. This is what the BBC has been reduced to: a never-ending urge to pander to the mediocre. The people who gave John Arlott and Peter Jones to the world are now happy to promote secondrate presenters, third-rate interviewers and fourth-rate studio 'experts' like the serial word-assaulter, Ian Wright. By all means let us see black faces on our screens but, please, Mr Salmon, make sure your chaps pick the right ones. In this case, Wright is wrong.
As for the wireless, is there anything left to say? Only this: every reporter, presenter and producer on Five Live should be forced (at gun-point, if necessary) to listen to Christopher Martin-Jenkins doing a 20minute slot on Test Match Special. Alas, clarity of voice, precise articulation and tone colour count for nothing in these glottal-stopping, prolier-than-thou days. Who needs C.M.-J. when you can tune in to that execrable end-of-pier double act, Jonathan Pearce and Susan Bookbinder? 'Did I mention that I support Manchester City?' Only about a thousand times, love. Oh, for a shepherd's crook.
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