NO BREAD, ALL FIVE-RING CIRCUS

I have been digging out some of the primary instruments that shaped the BBC and its remit to provide a service of news. The founding charter of 1926 charged the Corporation “to collect news of and information relating to current events in any part of the world and in any manner that may be thought fit”. There speaks the authentic voice of John Reith, consciously knowing best for all.

Nine years later, on the occasion of the first renewal of the charter, the Ullswater Report on the Control of Broadcast Content declared that “we think it right that the Corporation should refrain, as in the past, from broadcasting its own opinions by way of editorial comment upon current affairs … It is … of the utmost importance that the news distributed by the BBC should be a fair selection of items impartially presented”.

The then 80 year-old Viscount Ullswater would be astonished at the television news service that the BBC has been providing over the past ten days. Born 92 years after the noble peer, I am astonished by it too. For the bulletins are wholly partial and dominated by a single topic that may only by means of a liberal interpretation of the notion be deemed to be either news or current events.

London Olympics icon

Naturally enough, the fact of London hosting the Games of the XXX Olympiad provides a matter of legitimate public interest and broadcast attention. But the Olympics is not the sole event in the entire world this August. This sports festival is not even the only planned event of national, let alone international, significance. To tune into the BBC’s television news bulletins, you could be forgiven for wondering what meaning, if any, the BBC’s editors now attach to the term “news”.

I write as an incorrigible news junkie. If I am home – and at my age I usually am – I endeavour to listen to The World at One on Radio 4 and to watch the BBC1 bulletins at 6:00pm and 10:00pm. Unlike the great majority of my engagé friends, I do not tune in to the Today programme. Breakfast is for reading The Guardian and anyway I dislike hectoring interviewers (for the same reason I rarely watch Newsnight).

These unprepossessing things are evidently Olympic mascots

I have many bones to pick with the editorial policies of broadcast news, some of them no larger than the caudal skeleton of a minnow, some nearer the dimensions of the jaw-bone of a blue whale. These on-going protestations will have to await another occasion. But the wholesale surrender of the BBC’s news-gathering operation to the promotion of the Games is unprecedented in extent and in degeneracy.

Five days before the official opening of the Games, the BBC’s television news operation moved bag and baggage to the new Olympic park in Stratford East. The newsreader is perched for the duration in front of a panoramic view in a glass studio on the 22nd floor of Lund Point, a block owned by Newham Council, which plans to demolish the tower when it has completed evicting the tenants and leaseholders. In its first days, the temporary studio suffered from intrusive external noise and a malfunction of air-conditioning. Moreover, the weather forecasters, gratuitously obliged to stand on an adjacent exposed balcony, have perforce endured whatever the forecast weather has to throw at them.

Tower Bridge promotional

The bulletins at 6:00 and 10:00 are given over predominantly to updates on the events at the Olympics. No, that is not accurate – far from accurate. The bulletins are given over predominantly to updates on the progress of the home competitors, known for short as Team GB. There is no pretence to show any concern for the wider Games. Of course, there are reports about the organisation and husbandry of the extravaganza. But with rare exceptions – such as when someone as world-famous as Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps has been expected to achieve some new pinnacle of speed – the general drift of the updates is that a home competitor winning a bronze at shove-ha’penny is of greater import than some foreigner winning gold in a new record at a traditional, recognisable, track, field, water or road contest. The BBC is completely biased in favour of home progress, however obscure or peripheral.

Let’s shovel all the shit about cynicism, grumpiness and party-pooping out of the way. Working oneself up into an over-excited state about sport is not mandatory. The thing that you are doing is not somehow better or more worthwhile than any other thing just because you are doing it. For myself, I have never been drawn to watching grown women and men running or cycling round and round a track or firing at targets or steering boats between buoys or trying to knock a ball over a net. These things may well be more exhilarating to do than to watch, but I have never been attracted to doing them either.

I cannot be and should not be expected to manufacture enthusiasm where none exists, just because thousands of strivers from all over the world have come to contest these things in London. No doubt many people who have never bothered about javelin or parallel bars or synchronised swimming before have convinced themselves that these things are of sudden consequence, but the proportion of those new enthusiasts who will be following these arcane pursuits twelve months hence will be small, you can bet the house on it. Similarly, many people whose lives stop for Wimbledon every July have never watched five minutes of the French, American or Australian tennis majors. Being a kind of fair-weather fan – a home-event fan – is not really fandom at all. If you’re truly interested in, say, judo, you will want to see it at an elevated level whenever possible and – a crucial point, surely – you will want to see that cream of the sport whatever the nationality of the champions.

A London gold medal

What the BBC is furnishing and doing everything in its power to whip up is brutal, banal jingoism of the crudest, most indiscriminate kind. Whether such blanket emotion is truly finding an echo in the populace is difficult to judge. There’s no trick to scaring up vox pops of over-hyped Games visitors who anyway will be even more out of control about suddenly being invited onto the nation’s telly than they already might be about beach volleyball. And the constant repetition of the mantra “all eyes are on …” does not by itself raise the watching figures to 100 percent of the population.

I cheerfully admit to having viewed the opening ceremony, some of it anyway (it fell to me, during the central portion, to take the dogs round the field). There are two explanations: we had houseguests, and my partner and I are suckers for camp spectacle and indeed admirers of the previous works of Danny Boyle. The opening ceremony anyway only really has a glancing relationship with sport, until the various national teams start their endless parade. But even this unprecedented national celebration, shrewdly crafted and deftly executed as it certainly was, was only viewed by 27 million in Britain. The rest – a nearly two-to-one majority – had better or different things to do. They had lives to get on with. So don’t let the BBC’s propaganda that “the whole nation” is glued day and night to the broadcast get any traction. It’s a lie.

Of course, the BBC wants its Olympics coverage to be seen as a great corporate triumph. After all, it paid £60m for the exclusive home rights. And I am perfectly content for it to give over the entirety of both BBC1 and BBC3 – along with a host of on-line extras – to the coverage. I cannot even frame more than a token complaint at its dropping of the BBC Parliament channel for the duration. After all, the Palace of Westminster is presently deserted.

But to turn the news primarily into a potted version of what has already been broadcast to the devotees is not to be endured. A brief rundown of the major medals at the end of each bulletin, irrespective of the national origin of the winners, would be quite sufficient. Instead of that, we have the shaming spectacle of precious news time being consumed by pat-ball interviews with the parents of competitors, for crying out loud. That such family are proud and excited and will be celebrating when they get home is light years away from anything resembling news. And what I can promise is that, next February, Sophie Raworth will not be patronising the parents of British winners of Academy Awards, because of course the arts are not as important to the BBC as sports.

Raworth atop Lund Point

As it happens, tonight’s 6:00 bulletin was the most sensible since the Games began, though Nick Robinson couldn’t resist what I took to be a sport reference that I didn’t understand and George Alagiah had the nerve to refer to Olympic “hype” with a straight face. But important stories about the collapse of the coalition government’s Lords reform and the defection of Syria’s prime minister relegated Olympic tittle-tattle to eleven minutes into the bulletin.

Doubtless the Games will retake its place as the lead story before long. And the BBC should be ashamed of itself for cynically tearing up its historic undertaking to provide a fair selection of items impartially presented. Indeed. the politicians should be considering seriously whether the BBC deserves to have its charter renewed in 2016. Except of course that no one jostles to bask in the imaginary reflected glory of the Olympics as keenly as politicians.

To the TOWER with THEM

For anyone asked to speak about popular culture who then launches into a diatribe about something that he calls “Man You”, the Crown Jewels would not be likely – as I understand it – to refer to the treasures kept on semi-public display in the Tower of London and pressed into service for that rare event, a coronation. No, sir. What that dunderhead pictures when he hears the phrase “the Crown Jewels” is a menu of sporting events. Hard to credit, I know. But that is the barrel-bottom-scraping state of our culture.

My devotees will be aware that sport is not one of my subjects; though I am surprised to note how often the words “sport” and “football” and the names of sportspeople appear in the link list on the right of this page. In the narrow and self-regarding world of sport, the phrase “Crown Jewels” apparently has come to refer to a list of events that are considered in some sense “nation-uniting” – like the coronation itself, perhaps – and therefore worthy to be kept available for viewing on free-to-air television rather than being subject to acquisition for exclusive transmission by fee-charging broadcasters (i.e. the non-UK-tax-payer Rupert Murdoch). I couldn’t give a tuppenny damn whether people watch, say, some rugby match on BBC1 or on Sky Sports, always providing that programmes that I want to watch are not delayed, displaced, postponed or cancelled. The most imperilled fixture in the schedules at those times when sports events march all over them is the main evening news bulletin. God help the broadcasters if there is extra time being played in a “vitally important” game of tiddlywinks when news is breaking of the passing of the sovereign (or – worse – Madonna). Some sports producer will certainly be in an agony of indecision as to whether to hold out till the end of the game,

I am only interested in this matter because I am interested in – or, to be more accurate, I used to be interested in – broadcasting policy. Nowadays, British television by and large bores me to tears when it is not appalling me by its vulgarity and speciousness. One of the factors that has destroyed television is its own developing treatment of sport which, in its turn, has destroyed those qualities of sporting prowess and achievement that once could credibly be called honourable.

Permit me to explain. Not so very long ago – in my lifetime, at any rate – much of sport at national and even international level was played by amateurs. The last bastion of amateur sport, the Olympic Games, only fell to the inevitable as recently as the beginning of the 1990s and Olympic boxing is still restricted to non-professionals. In golf, tennis and boxing, “turning pro” remains something that competitors do only after becoming regulars in international competition and the major tournaments in the first two sports continue to reserve a limited entry for non-professionals who are on the verge of crossing over. When I was young, the Wimbledon champion often did not return to defend his or her title because he or she had turned pro during the interim. In 1968, the championships were finally declared open and prize money allowed for the first time. Professionals not seen there for some years promptly returned to the fray.

The professionalizing of sport coincided with its growth in importance to television schedulers. After years of the indefensible duplication of, most notably, the FA Cup Final simultaneously live on BBC and ITV, competition for exclusive coverage rights took hold in earnest. The administrators of the various sports saw that there was a lucrative market here and encouraged competitive bidding. But the innovations and refinements introduced by the broadcasters to make their coverage more exciting and therefore more attractive both to potential audiences and to the owners of the rights had a significant downside.

Action replays, repeated highlights and so-called analysis of incidents and decisions by referees and umpires distorted the natural arc and the internal rhythms of each game, not to say the very nature of the respective sports. What’s more, it undermined deeply the authority of those charged with controlling the players.

And advertisers saw an easy way of reaching huge captive audiences. Gradually, merchandising has swamped all sports, so that leagues and tournaments have to be identified by a brand name, players enter the arena festooned with logos, arenas pulsate with animated advertising and greenswards are painted with logos only readable from camera positions, all specifically designed to draw the eye from the sport itself.

And of course the television and marketing money has raised the salaries and fees that sports stars can command to stratospheric heights. Sport now outbids movie and rock music fame as a means by which working class boys and, to a lesser extent, girls can climb into major wealth. Not surprisingly, then, every sport – there are now no exceptions as far as I am aware – is subject to cheating and financial corruption, some of it on an industrial scale.

The whole culture of sport has been transformed in a couple of generations. Now Sky Sports dictates the day and time when events will take place, in order to maximise its own options for coverage. Never mind if the local fans are inconvenienced or the clubs find fixtures bunching or clashing with other plans. Meanwhile, in many sports, playing for your country is now considered more of a nuisance than an honour. Football managers in particular would rather not risk the limbs of their phenomenally expensive star players in international duty. Indeed, football managers lead the way in systematically undermining the authority of referees. That’ll be the day when Sir Alex Ferguson concedes that the opposing team got an unlucky break.

Predictably enough, the recommendations of the panel – charged to re-examine the Crown Jewels and chaired by former BBC sports journalist and Football Association executive David Davies – have been condemned on all sides. Giles Clarke, chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, told The World at One yesterday that cricket would be reduced to “extreme poverty” if the Ashes Tests played in England were obliged to be shown free-to-air. Before Mr Clarke uses such a foolish phrase again, I suggest he make a trip to sub-Saharan Africa. The people there have to eat their cricket bats.

On the other hand, administrators of events like the Derby – which, Davies recommends, should not be considered a “Crown Jewel” – are equally outraged by a sense that they have been downgraded. The fat-arsed executives who sit in offices and count the money brought in by their respective sports want it both ways: they want broadcasters to cough up so much for the rights that every other area of broadcasting is impoverished, but they also want the big audiences that only free-to-air transmission can deliver: evidently 2.4 million watched the 2005 Ashes on Channel 4 but only a bit over half a million paid to see this year’s live coverage on Sky.

How the FAE’s rationalise their two-pronged complaint is that their respective sports “at grass roots” will be the component that is impoverished if Murdoch’s riches are denied them; as if they mention the grass roots at any other juncture. I have a proposal for the seeding of the grass roots in any sport, that could be taken up whatever the outcome of the Crown Jewels proposals. Let every participant in any sporting field, whether player or administrator, who makes more than, say, £75,000 per year from the sport and its associated endorsements pay a levy of, say, 50 percent of earnings into a fund for the sport’s grass roots. I think that’s fair. How many helicopters does Michael Owen need, for Pete’s sake?

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Another broadcasting matter currently exercising commentators is that of the kind of so-called joke that gives great offence to certain sectors of the audience. As someone brought up on the traditions of wit, humour, drollery and wordplay, I cannot but find these sorts of “jokes” pretty poor at best. But then I am considerably more radical than those self-proclaimed “edgy” comedians who believe they are … erm … pushing the envelope. After all, I can be offensive without even having to use the dodgy excuse that I am being funny. Unlike that cunt Jimmy Carr.

TOO MUCH of a MURRAY

I knew for certain sure that The Guardian would not run the letter I emailed on Saturday. It went: “73 years of hurt” (front page July 4). Are you serious?

I quite often write to the paper about its sports coverage, which I find both meretricious and ubiquitous. Last summer I complained about the frequency with which both the main illustration on the front page of the paper and the cover-feature of the G2 supplement are sports-related. After all, there’s a dedicated sports section every day, 10 or 12 pages all week and 16 on Mondays. Today it’s the same: the front page has Roger Federer kissing the Wimbledon trophy and some yob of a cricketer is the cover star of G2 and interviewed inside. What do sportspeople ever have to say that can be of interest even to fanatics? “Yeah, I thought I played really well”. Oh, how bloody fascinating …

But clearly The Guardian considers sport a significant part of its appeal and suppresses criticism of either the amount or the tenor of its coverage. Although I regularly point out that the photographs of sportsmen that the paper favours almost never depict them doing the actual sport but instead roaring out aggression or pouring out emotion, nothing changes. Today’s edition carries five shots of Federer but in only one is he playing a stroke.

The “73 years of hurt” line referred to Andy Murray’s defeat in the Wimbledon semi-finals and the fact that Fred Perry won the men’s title as far back as 1936. “N years of hurt” has become sport’s banal way of referring to a period without trophies. Perhaps “N years of uninspired players who make so much money that their appetite for winning is dulled” would be more appropriate.

Why does it matter so much whether Murray wins the title? It’s not as if he’s an Englishman. The Wimbledon venue is formally called The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Membership is limited: 375 enjoy the benefit of full participation. Past singles champions and “distinguished servants of the game” (which presumably refers to the game of croquet as well as that of tennis) are invited to join and a further hundred places are reserved for active members elected on an annual basis. The patron of the club, HM the Queen, has not attended the championships since her Silver Jubilee in 1977 when Virginia Wade won the ladies’ singles title, the last singles winner who was English.

As a Scot, Murray must count as a foreigner in the eyes of some of the crustier AELTC members. But really his nationality is irrelevant. He is not playing for his country but as a freelance individual, just like golfers in the Masters or the Open. If he were playing in the Davis Cup or the Ryder Cup or the upcoming Ashes cricket series, one could perhaps better understand some of the nationalistic nonsense that attaches to his progress through the championship. This nonsense is promulgated by the media, both press and broadcasting. Last Monday, Murray’s match under the new Centre Court roof dragged on until 10.45 at night. BBC1 carried it and later crowed about a 12 million audience. I am here to say that not all that audience was watching the tennis. Some of us were waiting with increasing outrage for the 10.00 o'clock News, the start of which was delayed until the match ended, despite the fact that, from 10.00 until 10.30, BBC2 was showing an old episode of Have I Got News for You?, a programme neither significant nor date-tied. It beggars belief that the tennis was not switched to disrupt the BBC2 rather than the BBC1 schedule.

The BBC gives blanket coverage to Wimbledon but has never shown much interest in the other three grand slam tournaments, even before live transmission rights were snapped up by satellite stations. This year just the finals of the French Open were covered on BBC2. By contrast, the Corporation gives a decent showing to those of the golf grand slam events to which it can get the rights – the Open and the Masters – and raises very little fuss about the respective nationalities of the participants. Of course it makes a difference that dozens of players are on the course simultaneously and that golf’s longueurs (walking between shots) do not lend themselves to the continuous following of one or two players. In golf coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, there is a disproportionate amount of interest in Tiger Woods because he is disproportionately gifted compared to the other players: still ranked world number one, even after being out of the game for eight months with an injury. Perhaps it is a relief, though, that he is not a British golfer.

At Wimbledon, one of the women players who went out in the first round was asked at the post-match press conference if she hadn’t “let the country down”. She burst into tears. It’s a pity she didn’t instead tell the stupid journalist to fuck off. As I say, “the country” doesn’t have any stake in what happens at Wimbledon. The supposedly serious media ought to take a more objective approach to sport, including its relative importance in the scheme of things.



One of Andy Murray's lovely ground strokes (from The Guardian website)

ENGLAND OVER-EXPECTS

Hold the front page! There was no picture of Andy Murray on the front page of The Guardian today. Not since Monday has the gangly, scowling, air-fisting Scottish youth with the devoted mum, the modest tennis-playing ability and a curious fixation on his own (very average) bicep, been off the supposedly intelligent paper’s cover.

You might reasonably wonder if anyone else has been playing in the annual fortnight of overpriced and flavourless strawberries and sport that is Wimbledon. Indeed, there have been photographs of and reports about other players. But the word ‘disproportionate’ does rather spring to mind. I counted the pictures of male competitors printed in the paper from the first day, Monday of last week (yes, you’re right, I do have more important things to do, but there are many forms of displacement activity and this happens to be the one I chose today). Including today’s edition, The Guardian has carried 88 shots of male tennis players who were in the draw on Day One. Of those 88 pictures, 27 (including a totally gratuitous one today) have been of Murray, nearly a third. There were 128 players in the Men’s Singles draw and Murray was seeded twelfth. Roger Federer, the top seed and expected to win his sixth title in succession on Sunday, has been depicted in 14 photographs, just over half as many as Murray; Rafael Nadal, the second seed who defeated Murray easily in the quarter finals, has appeared 11 times as an image.

What’s more, Murray has appeared four times on the front page of the paper’s sports section and four times on the front of the main body of the paper. All other male players combined have appeared four times on sports front and just three times on the cover of the paper proper. Even Jamie Murray, Andy’s elder brother and a doubles specialist, has had his face in the paper six times, including once on sports front, and I’m not counting his picture on the column he ‘writes’ for the sports section (I put ‘writes’ in quotes because such columns are frequently ghost-written by an office hack and published over the name of an agreeable ‘celeb’ who likes getting paid for doing nothing). Oh, and there were two pictures of Chris Eaton. Remember him? You probably don’t; he was a very lowly – but British – competitor who survived to the second round as, by definition, did half of all the entrants.

It is a nakedly jingoistic impulse that drives this coverage. Tickets were changing hands for Murray and Nadal’s Centre Court match for £2,000, not because the buyers had suddenly discovered that they were fans of tennis but because they wanted to see a British victory. Had they known anything about tennis, they would have known that the hope was vain. But the press encourages this stupid jingoism, not just with its pictorial bias but also with the kind of stories it chooses to run. “Murray: I’m fit enough to win Wimbledon” was the headline on a sports front story this Monday. No he isn’t. Nadal is far fitter and has a far more mature game, though he’s barely any older than Murray. The Scot, like the Tinman whom he succeeds as Britain’s Vain Hope at Wimbledon, is an also-ran and – face it – he always will be.

Later this year, one of the most jingoistic of the world’s sports events takes place in Ireland, the biennial Ryder Cup, in which a European and an American team compete in match-play golf. A few tournaments ago, on the most recent occasion that the Americans won, there were disgraceful scenes when the winners began celebrating before the last European player had holed out at the 18th, thereby certainly influencing the putt. All nations are jingoistic about sport but none more than the States, where there is no television audience for any sporting event that holds no immediate prospect of an American victory. (Men’s tennis is in historic decline in the USA and so there will have been few takers there for Wimbledon coverage this or any recent year).

Football bores me to tears but I suppose we should take some heart from the interest shown here in the recent Euro tournament, despite the absence of all the British nations’ teams. This speaks of a degree of genuine interest in the game for its own sake, despite the attempts of the press, notably The Guardian, to talk up some alternative nation whose fortunes British viewers might “follow”.

Meanwhile, the closed season transfer market has been characterised as ever by footballers being bought and sold for eye-watering sums by the wealthiest clubs across Europe, regardless of their own national origins. Two or three years back, Arsenal played against a Spanish side in a cup match, where there were only two British players on the pitch and neither was playing for Arsenal. In what sense, then, is Arsenal an English football team? It and its vast new stadium are owned by arabs, its long-serving manager is French and its playing strength speaks in dozens of different languages. What kind of idiot gets ‘patriotic’ about this team’s results? There is barely a team in the premier league of English football that is owned by anybody or any organisation that is British. Liverpool FC no more represents Merseyside than does Paris Hilton. It just spends more time in the area than she does.

From time immemorial, the fan has equated a team’s or a sportsperson’s talent and prospects with its/their nationality, even while – here in Britain, at least – we ruefully subscribe to the notion that we are “good losers”. I’m not very interested in sport but, if I were, I hope I would value it for its beauty and grace at the highest level, irrespective of national boundaries. Nobody objective could really have wanted Andy Murray to beat Rafael Nadal. Apart from any considerations of tennis talent, the Spaniard is so much sexier.