Less is more in the world of televised sport
by Brendan Coffey
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YOU’LL have heard of the term media. It varies from place to place, like in Meath they call them the meeja but elsewhere they refer to them as various types of shower; b******s, c****s, f*****s etc.
Officially at least the media is just a collective term for newspapers, radio stations, television, reporters, anchors, writers, journalists, photographers, editors and any other of the terms by which you refer to the people of the fourth estate.
You might not have heard of the term ‘mediated’, which is the title of a book on the way the modern world has been shaped by the media, but in particular television. There are so many things on television and so many people who own some form of video recording device – no mobile phone or digital camera comes complete without one – that in effect we are the CCTV generation, the mediated world where everybody is permanently on display.
The more we gratify ourselves with visual records the less human we become. What this mediated world has achieved is the outpouring of grief we saw when Princess Diana died in a car crash a decade ago. Millions of people went to her funeral, millions more watched on television and the funeral of a famous person became not a sad day but one of the biggest events of the 90s. How much of it was to do with television?
What the mediated world creates is a society of performers, not people. When you watch a soccer match now you might as well be watching a Hollywood movie. You have to remember that there is a big difference between playing in front of people and playing in front of a televised audience.
Just because you get used to playing live in front of the cameras doesn’t mean that your behaviour normalises. It just means that you’re comfortable being a television actor, a performer who knows the audience matters and that things look different on television than they do in the flesh.
Snooker players are different on television than they are in person. Anyone who went to watch Jimmy White play Alex Higgins in a snooker exhibition at the Carlton Abbey Hotel in Athy last week will know that. Higgins’ behaviour was disgraceful, he was argumentative, irritable, drunk and probably more than a little mad. He wouldn’t be allowed on television in such a state and even if he was the cameras would quickly cut away to something less offensive.
You see television makes a huge difference to sport but not in the ways that we always think it does.
At first the GAA feared the glare of television cameras, so much so in fact that only the All-Ireland series, which consisted of two semi-finals and a final, were televised live. Now that barrier has been broken and is floating away in the Atlantic west of Galway as TG4 continues their inexorable rise to prominence in Irish households – and not just the ones that count Irish as a language rather than an alien idea.
There is a big difference between playing club football and inter-county football, that we agree on, but who ever thinks that playing on television might make life a lot harder?
You don’t get away with any on television because everything can be replayed, highlighted and the zoom can show just exactly what the intent was behind a stray elbow. It’s a dangerous mix for the GAA because club culture – the one where cavemen philosophies of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth still prevail – quite obviously can’t prevail on television.
Hence the increasing number of controversies on the Sunday Game each week as the players honed from a different culture are tested by those from another culture – the mediated society.
Television requires performers, artists, actors. When Princess Diana died the general public became part of an extended funeral cortege, each one a mourner at the funeral of someone they never knew. They were playing a role that television required of them.
The scourge of diving, feigning injury and chicanery that plagues soccer is the result of two worlds colliding. The referee has the same tools the caveman had – his eyes and his ears. Everybody else has Andy Gray and a computerised analysis kit
RTE and by extension, TG4, will grow by copying and imitating their cousins abroad. We have more coverage each year, we will eventually have more intensive coverage. Even clubs film their own games for analysis. Television exposes us to things we would never see otherwise but the problem, as clubs will all attest, whether they’re soccer, rugby or GAA clubs, is that the more people watch the less people play.
And that’s when sport begins to wane and clubs start to wither. Less is more.
