Television
Sporting mania
Simon Hoggart
Thank goodness the athletics is under- way. The first week of an Olympics is devoted to the sports nobody enjoys except the participants. (Polo is the archetypal example: it's obviously huge fun to play, but dreary beyond belief to watch. If we now have beach volleyball in the Olympics, how have we escaped polo?)
However, because it is the Olympics, the BBC assumes that we are suddenly inter- ested in rifle shooting, hockey, weightlifting and a host of other sports we have man- aged to ignore for the previous three years and 49 weeks. These are the games you expect to find on Sky Sports 2, or Eurosport, or on the BBC in a few years' time after Rupert Murdoch has bought everything interesting and is trying to cre- ate a World Badminton Super League.
Expert commentators are wheeled out to tell us what is happening, and quite right too. In the past, the Corporation employed inexpert commentators, such as the late Alan Weekes, whose animadversions: `Ooh, that is quite superb! Isn't that simply marvellous!' told us nothing much but embarrassed us a lot.
The BBC hovered between that approach — Weekes sounded as if he was sitting at home, trying to jolly a bored teenager — and the Man Who Knew Too Much. This was the late Ron Pickering, who had a lethal combination of ency- clopaedic knowledge and verbal logor- rhoea. 'So here is Steve Nudge, already at 400 metres on course for the best run by a Thames Harrier this season, and, if he keeps this up, he could be in contention for the Commonwealth record set by Kenya's Mkesi Mkulu in Edinburgh two years ago, although there is still some argument about whether that was wind-assisted, and oh no! Oh No! Nudge has just bicycle-kicked a spectator. Well! That won't help his chances. Something very similar last hap- pened in Brisbane in 1979...' The excite- ment of the race disappeared into a blur of tedious facts and insignificant statistics.
For the experts this is the one chance they have to share their knowledge with us. If you know everything there is to know about weightlifting, you have a few pre- cious hours to extrude the lot, golden moments in which your audience is forced to show an interest in Yoto Yotov of Bul- garia. (`That'll be added to his best clean- and-jerk — and it might not be enough!') 'Succumb here often?' You get to say things like: 'If Yoto does it — a new personal best' in the same som- bre voice that John Motson might use to tell an expectant nation that if Gareth Southgate misses this penalty ...
Meanwhile, the photography is superb (`that hole in the floor is where the camera is; that's where we're getting all these exciting views from') and the variety of dif- ferent shots allows us to see how the spec- tators' benches are pretty well empty. If there are only a few hundred fans in Atlanta, you ask, why should millions of Brits be missing Murder One?
There's something almost touching about the way the commentators cram the information. During the hockey: `... and here's Johnson, trying to get it upfield, from Leicester'. If you know that Johnson comes from Leicester, what exquisite agony it would be not to let us know too. Four years of Hockey Monthly, World of Weightlifting Rowers & Rowing (one com- mentator, downloading the facts at a rate of around 1200 Baud, talked about the Men's cockless four'); so little time to share it all with us.
Rowing is narcoleptically dull, except when there are British medallists to cheer, or Pimms-drinking idiots in blazers to scoff at. The gymnastics, however, was magnificent: breathtaking skill and effort used to produce something utterly delight- ful to the eye. All those flat-chested 17- year-old girls, doomed to go straight from pre-pubescence to saggy adulthood with no intervening period, literally; those unnaturally bulky yet ethereally graceful men. Even here the commentary tends to miss both the drama and the beauty. 'A final tumble, absolutely nailed!' said one of them about a little girl on the mat, and he meant it as a compliment. Or, after one display which I would have thought physi- cally impossible: 'And that's it. Troubles in the turning and the tumbling. Half a mark deduction for sitting down,' less emotional than the cattle prices on Farming Today, as another tiny creature was led away sob- bing.
We are more familiar with the athletics, and have higher expectations which — at the time of writing — have mostly been dashed. The commentators have devised gentle ways of warning us not to expect too much: 'He's one of the big figures out at Birchfield' (but not in Atlanta); 'he was running close to his personal best in the heats' (will come last in the final); 'he's not had it totally his own way this season' (keeps losing).
It's kind of them. But the king remains Desmond Lynam, who gets the balance exactly right. He's keen but not obsessed, well-informed but unwilling to bore with all he knows, always prepared to risk turn- ing into self parody. And I've noticed something else. If you stand away from the screen, to one side, you'll see that Des's eyes follow you round the room.
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