Television
Sports coverage
Peter Levi
Turning aside from worthier program- mes, I have viewed sport. At Christ Church in the good old days there used to be a vast and gloomy television room where the more gentlemanly dons used to watch racing in the afternoons, just like my father in old age. I could never understand how you could pick your horses just by seeing them like that. He said you got a better view than you ever do at the races. There is something in it. The few races I have been seeing on television, with colour and a big screen, were entertainment in a simple-minded way, even without betting.
Most sport on television is interesting, or really more obsessive than interesting, but only if you care about the result. I came to football like a man from Mars, though with curiosity much sharpened by the murder- ous events in Belgium. I found it almost impossible to follow the action, because you could never see the whole field, and the cameras jumped around. Why not use stationary balloons? But they tell me you are supposed to know the names and form of all the players before you start, which raises the same problem as televised races. I was amazed to hear the commentators referring frequently and quite calmly to fouls. The other day a professional snooker player got fined £6,000 for bringing his game into disrepute. Why does this not happen more often to football players? Still, I thought the game I saw between England and Mexico a graceful though a dull event. Beating Germany was better.
In catching the boxing between McGuigan and Pedroza I was lucky, and all the luckier for being misled by the Times about the likely result. You could not really see the finer points, or how hard
someone was hit, or how accurately. It just showed up as a test of stamina, strength and courage, which they both displayed abundantly. My uncertainty about the re- sult, and the open possibility of a knockout by either of them at any moment, made the match thrilling. Pedroza's grim concentra- tion and the Irishman's occasional smile and the formidable skill of them both made it heroic. Flyweights are best. The audi- ence sang songs now and then, but other- wise they were well behaved.
There is not as much sport on television as one thinks: not when one goes looking for it. Golf was unbearable for lack of a bird's eye view, just as real golf is. And the audience have to keep so quiet they look lethally bored. But the golfing lessons in
Play Golf! (BBC2) are another matter altogether. The instructors wear a single glove, like a killer cowboy, and have a language of their own. They aim to cure faults called slicing, hooking, carving. shanking, pulling, socketing, blocking, topping, slaffing and flaffing. They say, 'You're a secret grip-switcher' and, 'the ball squirts out of the heel of the club ooh, horrible'. It was much better than Lord Elton in the House of Lords, with a robed bishop wandering off to tea at an intricate point in the argument. Why do bishops robe when no one else does? Why should a golf glove be sky blue?
Tennis makes me dizzy, and cricket is too exciting to watch, and I used to like snooker only for a kind of lowness it seems to have shaken off. But I do think pro- ducers should give more thought to tech- nical improvements for port. Trooping the Colour is much better organised as televi- sion than football matches are. Weekends are best on television, they show the true pulse of the nation. BBCI showed four programmes of Birdwatch, all on Sunday, and Praise Be! included tea with retired Salvation Army officers. Asian Magazine on the same day, same channel, dealt with
Shri Chanan, who makes portraits of famous persons, using individual grains of rice and sand and single human hairs. They were so minute they had to be presented with a microscope. This seems well within British tradition.
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