How BS Saved Our Olympics
My regressive sporting gene has caused me to succumb to the Olympic bug. Although we are, in an Olympic city (Hong Kong is hosting the Equestrian events) the local television coverage is mostly rubbish. Too many breaks, too many talking heads and too many cuts away from events at critical junctures. To say nothing of […]
My regressive sporting gene has caused me to succumb to the Olympic bug. Although we are, in an Olympic city (Hong Kong is hosting the Equestrian events) the local television coverage is mostly rubbish. Too many breaks, too many talking heads and too many cuts away from events at critical junctures. To say nothing of the eye-wateringly incoherent and ill-informed English (Australian) commentary (a letter to the SCMP editor suggested the local channel employ American commentators – I’ll let that pass, for now).
Our salvation has been the Japanese channel, BS1. OK, the commentary is in Japanese and there is a skew towards events where Japan is competing (so, lots of Judo!). But, the coverage is solid, lots of events are covered and you can trust that the director will not succumb to ADD and show you five different sports in ten minutes while missing the critical action in each one.
In a perfect world (or my perfect world), you would just get feeds with no commentary. Great commentators add to sporting events, but the other 93.7% detract. As for talking heads in a studio – why bother?
