TELEVISION
Seeing double
BILL GRUNDY
Driving along one day, I needed to brake suddenly. Unfortunately I found my foot going right down to the floor-boards without the car slowing down in the slightest. During the next second or so I could see the advan- tages of having, as the Rolls-Royce does, a braking system in triplicate.
As an enthusiastic, if ageing, soccer player, I never go into a tackle without being thank- ful that a colleague is covering me. If I have breath enough, I always try and do the same service for him. The second line of defence, confusingly called safety first, appeals to me more and more the older I get.
But despite all that, I still think there are occasions when doubling up is a waste of time, and mention of soccer brings one to mind immediately. Even the least sporting of you cannot have failed to gain the impres- sion that sometime soon, somewhere, some- thing called the World Cup is going to be played. To put you out of your ignorance, let me tell you the place is Mexico and the dates are from 31 May to 21 June.
Now whether you like it or not, I suspect, you are going to see quite a lot of this com- petition, because it'll be televised from be- ginning to end. In other words, it'll be rather like Wimbledon fortnight, only half as long again, and about five times as sweaty. Since England is involved in the final rounds of this contest, and since soccer is by far the most popular spectator sport in the country, I suppose it's only right and proper that there should be extensive television coverage of the occasion. Which there most certainly is going to be. The only question, which brings us back to where we started, is whether or not it's going to be too extensive. If you've got one very good braking system, do you need another?
For the World Cup is going to be covered by both sac and n-v. Not so long ago, that would have meant that both outfits would have bid against each other, pushing up the price, and probably ended up doing the same thing, simultaneously as like as not. Which would doubtless have been very nice for sports enthusiasts but perhaps not nearly so exciting for those who believe that the muddied and the flannelled really are the oafs and fools that Kipling called them long ago.
Today things have improved a little. At least we are going to be spared simultaneity, except on one or two occasions. But the fact
remains that the whole immensely com- plicated and expensive business of getting pictures back from Mexico by satellite is going to be duplicated, at something like twice the cost and nothing like twice the satisfaction. Nobody knows what the total amount is going to be, but when you consider that use of the satellite costs £2,000 for every ten minutes or thereabouts, you can see that it isn't going to be peanuts. One estimate, from an extremely reliable source, is that the Iry companies will pay out around f300,000, and the BBC will have to find somewhere not far short of half a million.
The BBC, of course, always spend more than the Iry companies on any occasion where they are working side by side. This is because, despite the financial difficulties we hear so much about, the numbers of people involved are always so much larger. For example, at the initial planning meeting on the coverage of a party political conference, you'll generally find a couple of fellows from rry and about ten times as many from the Corp. I'm assured that the same sort of thing will happen in Mexico. And there are other ways the money goes. The sac are going to build a studio in the Hilton Hotel, Guadalajara, and fly out their experts (prob- ably Joe Mercer and Don Revie, managers of Manchester City and Leeds United, re- spectively), while fly seem content with sit- ting their experts (Malcolm Allison for one) in front of a television set in London, thus saving a couple of thousand pounds to start with, without any particularly discernible loss in the quality of expert comment.
The cost—say three quarters of a million or more—seems ridiculously out of propor- tion when you think about the time of-night when the matches will be shown here. In midweek, live transmissions will start around 11 pm, our time, finishing about 12.45 am. There will then be a transmission of another game, recorded earlier that night; this trans- mission will start about 1 am and finish just before 3 am. It prompts the thought that if England are doing well there'll be many a bleary eye in workshop and office throughout the period of the competition. On the other hand, if England do badly, who the hell will be sitting up watching until that time?
Either way, it does seem ridiculous, when you consider the total cost and the financial straits both Bac and fry say they are in. Is
it really impossible that they get together in an adult way and decide that one should do such-and-such an event one year, the other do it next time? The money saved would be tremendous, and the relief afforded to the non-sporting part of the viewing audience would be just as great.
It isn't a pipe dream. It's going to happen during the home international soccer com- petition in a few weeks' time. Each side will have two games exclusively and each will take turns in putting out the remaining two games a day late. So it can be done. In fact, the question 'should sport be shared?' was discussed on the BBC programme Talkback about a year ago. The audience voted some- thing like seventy-five/twenty-five for the idea of sharing, but Mr Paul Fox seemed reluctant to agree with them. It's as though he believes that as the sac started sports broadcasting, it now has a divine right to go on broadcasting it. Charles t once had a similar sort of idea about being king, but Parliament, representing those who were pay- ing, thought otherwise. I'm not suggesting that we should go quite as far as Cromwell's lads did in 1649, but at a time when the BBC is asking us, who pay the licence fees, for more money, a quick re-read of the history books might not go amiss. And think of the joy we'd get from the knowledge that we're not only saving money, but have actually got something else to look at on the other channel, just in case we happen to be one of the millions who simply can't stomach the sight of any more sport on the box.
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