Search: 'Get With The Programme'

Glen Wilson examines at a new online TV venture which looks set to maintain the general trend towards manufactured controversy

We have all received emails that though provoking initial interest, we know to be bad news. We are tuned in enough to realise he is not really a retired Nigerian general, that millions of single women are not actually waiting online specifically for us and that, ultimately, despite the “scientific proof”, it is unlikely to add two inches. In July I received such an email, this time from a “brand new TV sports channel”, and it proved another which promised a lot and delivered only disappointment.

The email came from Sports Tonight Live, an online TV channel set to launch at the start of the Premier League season. “We will broadcast from 7pm-11pm every night and will discuss, debate and deliberate over the big sporting stories of the day.” This sounded promising enough, but things went downhill rapidly. “We are aiming for an opinionated and entertaining discussion show, led by presenters which include Mike Parry.” And kept going. “The new channel is being backed by a group of city investors, including Kelvin Mackenzie.” Some sales pitch.

It landed in my inbox because Sports Tonight were in the process of recruiting fan representatives of each club to appear on the show. “We’re looking for someone who is eloquent, opinionated, informed – controversial but clean cut,” read the email though the appointment of Parry would suggest that two out of five would ultimately suffice.

“Ideally they would also need a bit of banter” – banter of course having become a quantifiable commodity since professional footballers began referring to people as “tweeps” and hanging out with James Corden – “and a thick skin as we aim to be controversial, with Parry at his outspoken best.”

It is often suggested there is too much football on television. Perhaps a better argument is that there is not enough actual football in relation to the coverage which surrounds it. This is an argument that Sports Tonight, having outlined three aims, to be controversial, opinionated and entertaining, only further enforces. Would it pain Sports Tonight that much to strive to be informed, or accurate instead, or perhaps seek a presenter who is lauded for being intelligent rather than outspoken?

But this is the direction in which much football reportage continues to stumble, with the game itself increasingly subsumed beneath opinion masquerading as fact. Coverage of the sport is becoming less about the game on the field and more about what is happening around it, all delivered in basic cliched rhetoric. “Football programming” of this level is akin to going to the local cinema only to find that instead of screening films they are just dishing out copies of Heat magazine. Here you go, flick through that. I know it is the artistry of cinematography you really enjoy, but have you seen George Clooney’s new beard?

Increasingly, and disappointingly, football comes down not to knowledge, but who can shout the loudest. Earlier in the year Sports Tonight recruited staff for its new venture with adverts featuring the line: “You will be ambitious and almost certainly yet to be discovered. Sport will be your drug and you have plenty to say but until now nobody was listening.” Would it not perhaps be wise to examine why no one was listening to these undiscovered twitching football dependents? I mean, there is a bloke who sits a few seats away from me at the Keepmoat Stadium who has plenty to say and nobody is listening, but I (and anyone within ten seats) would sooner see him sectioned than behind an exciting new television channel.

The email also featured a familiar line, one which I see regularly in correspondence I receive: “We will not be able to pay people for appearing on Sports Tonight Live, but… we’ll happily acknowledge and advertise your fanzine.” Football bloggers are being increasingly looked on by those at the top of the media tree as freelancers with an emphasis on the “free”. And yes it may be our hobby, but if Parry is being paid to trot out soundbites and be “at his controversial best” about clubs he knows little about, why should comparative experts be expected to give their time and insight for free?

Speaking to the Guardian in May, McKenzie described the venture as “Sky Sports News meets TalkSport”. I cannot think of anything the game needs less and so, as you have probably guessed, I declined my invitation to be involved with his “exciting new programme”. Besides, the exposure it would have brought my fanzine is nothing compared to the investment I have recently been promised in a much more encouraging email from an exiled Ugandan prince.

From WSC 296 October 2011

Cameron Carter explores how the concept of a Big Four is no longer enough

Consensus is a hard thing to come by. How, for instance, can we begin to arrive at agreement on the true source of the riots around England when the Football Focus team cannot even decide how many teams make up the Big Four? It used to be easier when it was just Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. They were our Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons. There was no ambiguity at this time, no indecision. But the Premier League, like the world outside, has become a more complex place.

At the start of Football Focus on August 13 the concept of a “top six” was given its first airing, presumably constructed by BBC imagineers from the previous top four plus Manchester City and Spurs, while later in the same programme Eric Cantona was asked how he thought the “top five might finish”. There was still time before the end for Patrick Vieira to question how Wolves would do this season against the “top four or five”.

This matter had not been cleared up by the following Saturday, when Rafa Benítez considered how Everton would compete with the “top six”. It seems unfair that Everton have to face up to two more top clubs – that is, four more top games – than Wolves this season. One solution, albeit in an already crowded fixture list, is a pre-season mini-league featuring the nominal Big Six, to decide which teams are entitled to be formally named as the Big Four.

Otherwise, the worst case scenario here is that the Big Four expands incrementally, as more overseas investors buy into Premier League Sleeping Giants, until we have a ‘”Big 11″ by the end of the decade. At the point that numbers in the elite pool are greater than those outside it, we should all go down to the sea and wait for the world to be cleansed with fire.
For those of us awaiting the annual glory that is Lineker’s Marvellous Line, there was a credit-crunch, own-brand disappointment this year. Generally, before the theme music of the first Match of the Day of the new season, Gary stands before us in a glossy black shirt and, with dancing eyes, unleashes an adrenalin shot in the form of a carefully sculpted sentence prepared for him by a team of resting novelists.

Barry Davies started the big curtain-raiser soundbite trend with his Rupert Brooke desecration: “Stands the clock at ten-to-three/and is there football still to see?” Since then, twinkly Des Lynam, followed in turn by the lad Lineker, made a point of letting us know that they, like ordinary people everywhere, were simply treading water all summer until a thrilling new football season began.

This time, however, Gary was seated, not standing, and his eyes before he vocalised spoke of a terrible new maturity, learned possibly from accidental exposure to non-sports-based world news on his satellite television. All he said was “It’s been an awfully long summer” before introducing his sidekicks and the games as if it were any old Saturday. The absence of knowingly familiar expectancy-building in this welcome was somehow more disheartening than all the other cuts so far imposed on the UK’s population since the general election. It is surely but a short step from excising unnecessary opening-day vivaciousness in our flagship terrestrial football programme to banning all forms of dance, theatre and social dieting as unpatriotic fripperies.

Dan Walker’s mania for dragging the Football Focus cameras around dressing rooms continues apace. On the opening morning of the season, to demonstrate possession of the Access All Areas wristbands, he swanned into the Brighton dressing room where he was rewarded with the sight of 13 Brighton players seated around the bench studiously reading the match programme. You might think the point of going backstage is to show a fly-on-the-wall slice of life, to give your viewership a rare glimpse of the daily lives of the men they only otherwise get to see on the pitch, on television or, very rarely, in the flesh, flushed with refreshment and demanding that the manager of the country club sets up the karaoke.

But no, Dan stole behind the scenes to discover a carefully stage-managed tableau of young men with heads bowed wonderingly over a difficult text, not dissimilar in composition to Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. It was a lovely image, but surely with Robbie Savage in the same room, there would more naturally be towel-flicking and banter containing sexual swear words? A bit of advice, young Walker – if you are going to barge in on somebody, make sure they are unprepared. 

From WSC 296 October 2011

Neil White describes the unique football relationship between FC Twente and Stranraer

In 1981, Frans Thijssen was just about as good a midfielder as there was in Europe. He won the UEFA Cup with Bobby Robson’s Ipswich Town and was named Player of the Year in England. He remembers the European trophy that is now the totemic achievement of Robson’s team appearing as a mere consolation after late-season injuries exposed a lack of depth, costing Ipswich a First Division championship and a place in the FA Cup final.

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Cameron Carter reviews BBC2’s programmes on the Munich air disaster and questions the use of thematic dramatisation in the build-up to football matches

United (BBC2, April 24) was a dramatisation of the Man Utd story from Bobby Charlton’s breakthrough into the first team to the frantic rebuilding after the Munich air crash.

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Cameron Carter traces the social history of Britain through 25 years of friendly faces presenting football programmes on TV

In 1986 presenters and pundits sat stiffly, in wife-selected jackets, behind desks, because the desk is the key western symbol of wisdom. In 2011 we have lounging gigglers like Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson who do not even wear neckties, or the man-child Jamie Redknapp who is allowed to wear expensive fashion-clothes and constantly interrupt his elders in a career-long attempt to prove his right to be heard. The desk has gone.

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