As June and July rear their sunburnt heads once again, it’s time to brace for a barrage of summer sporting events and endure heaps of surrounding TV coverage. The French Open finished yesterday, and although the matchup between a Spanish girl with a left arm so strong you’d think she’d entered one too many masterbate-athons and Raef from ‘The Apprentice’ proved somewhat exciting, the BBC’s coverage managed to inject some infuriation into the proceedings. Andrew Castle, a man who was hired for the role of lead commentator due to accidentally buying a tin of tennis balls in 1986 and therefore being Britain’s number 4 player at the time, managed to coat the match in an aggravating layer of impressionable presumption. “Never say never, but you have to think that Nadal is closing in”, Castle said, shortly before Federer won the third set; “looking at the stats it seems coming back from here is almost an impossibility”, Castle also stated: a line that wins the award for the longest ever way of saying something is a possibility.
It’s not just the BBC that detract from the spectacle though, as the French editorial department also felt the need to attempt some kind of artistic portrayal of the match, and regularly utilised a fade in-fade out effect while the players served. Unfortunately by having Federer’s sweaty, translucent face behind an angled shot of Nadal finally serving (after 17 minutes of wiping his face with a suspiciously branded BNP Paribas cloth), it actually became extremely difficult to work out what the hell was going on, and the whole thing felt like a homage to an early version of windows movie maker rather than a stylish representation of the game.
Thankfully however, BBC’s Sam Smith, a woman who was awarded the role of colour commentator due to accidently watching Andrew Castle buy a tin of Tennis balls in 1986, wasn’t invited to commentate on the final. This was lucky, because Sam’s commentating technique consists mainly of reeling off a series of irrelevant facts about the players like an old age pensioner who’s new to the internet and wants to show everyone how amazing Wikipedia is. In fact when commentating with Andrew Castle, the two combine together to form a being so lacking in insight that it slowly reduces viewers’ understanding of a sport as it speaks.
Arguably, the BBC’s F1 coverage is an improvement over that of the Tennis, especially since Jonathan Legard, an aggressive pointer dog that was let into the commentary box during races to bark each time a car went past during 2010, was replaced by a clay sculpture from the planet cube in the form of David Coulthard. But the ingredients of weak coverage are still somewhat present, and the pre-race build up often consists of 7ft 9 year old Jake Humphrey attempting to run after Michael Schumacher on the way to take a piss to ask him what he’s doing, or Eddie Jordan- the largest single piece of evidence against the theory of natural selection- embarking on a non-intelligible 11 minute description of the glitz and glam of Monaco.
Even with these faults, the F1 coverage is generally rather good, and considering it provides probably 12 hours of material for just 4 hours or so of sport, embarrassing filler is to be expected. Likewise, although the BBC’s coverage of multiple sports often seems to fall into the category of dire, compared to the 4 hour phone advert interspersed with occasional snippets of sport that makes up the ITV’s coverage, it fairs relatively well. All we really need now is for the red button to provide a commentary free option during sporting events, so then only viewers who need Andrew Castle to inform them that “the wet conditions could make things trickier for both players” have to endure him telling them.
