‘Pauca sed bona’, only a few but of good quality. Perhaps someone should have scribbled this on a post-it note to the BBC as they prepared for this year’s Olympic Games. Why? Their coverage has, thus far, been the antithesis of that epigram.
One cannot fault them for trying. Their 27 TV channels and innumerable other forms of online coverage and analysis are a testament to Lord Coe’s plea to embrace the Games.
However, the quality of that coverage, and more so the commentary that accompanies it, does an injustice to the athletes who have sacrificed so much to compete here in London.
Jonathan Liew’s frank confession in a recent Telegraph article puts into words the problem: ‘The writing business is forgiving enough to allow entire careers to be sustained on an ability to produce five synonyms for the word “win”. On television, there is no such hiding place.’
Although the BBC have turned to a number of previous Olympians to add credibility to the otherwise lacklustre commentary, the blunders of their colleagues overshadows any gems of athletic insight that they may produce.
Mark Foster, the former Swimming World Champion and Team GB’s flag-bearer in Beijing 2008 often struggles to get a word in edgeways next to the bullish Clare Balding who, for all the hand gestures and decibels in the world, still struggles to outline a single race without repeating herself or mentioning the pressure that the athletes are under.
The awkward conversations in the BBC main pod are almost as painful as the dissonance of the commentary teams.
Amir Khan’s discussion of his Olympic experience, 8 years ago in Athens, sounded forced and resembled little more than an exercise in self-aggrandisement for a man who many were saying should retire after the beatings he took from Lamont Peterson and Danny Garcia.
Meanwhile, Ian Thorpe’s frustration was tangible as Gary Lineker descended into cheap quips, after the multiple Olympic champion had seen his country’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ self-destruct with a disappointing 4th place in the 4x100m freestyle relay.
Even the usually tolerable Sue Barker and Jake Humphrey made me wish the BBC did ad-breaks, with their cringe-worthy ‘I hope you’ve got a bike and helmet’ – ‘I don’t go up hills’ exchange.
BBC top-brass clearly thought that the mystery of less well-known sports could be solved by familiar voices from other sports, with Golf’s Andrew Cotter covering Canoeing and Rugby’s Eddie Butler assigned to Archery.
As Jonathan Liew put it, ‘these men are risking accusations of dilettantism at best, and outright ridicule at worst, by gamely pitching their flags on foreign ground … but without an instinctive feel for the rhythms and patter of a sport, it is impossible to avoid sounding like an outsider.’
With Bradley Wiggins’ recent success in the Tour de France, Cycling has had an ‘hors catégorie’ rise to prominence, but the coverage of the two Olympic Cycling Road Races has undoubtedly been the stand-out failure for the BBC so far.
The men’s race, if Team GB’s disappointment was not enough, was soured further by the lack of information about time gaps between the groups and a number of mistakes by the commentary team, at one point claiming that those who finished outside the top 30 were in fact battling for the bronze medal.
The inadequacy of the post-race analysis only added salt to the wound as John McEnroe and Kelly Holmes blathered on without any real understanding of what they were meant to be talking about. Ignorance, in this case, was far from bliss.
Furthermore, Lizzie Armitstead’s tremendous silver medal was dampened by journalists’ inability to spell her surname and the references to her ‘feeding’ which made her sound more like a prize budgie than the closest Team GB had hitherto got to a gold medal.
Matt Baker’s painful pronunciation of Fabian Cancellara, one of the most famous cyclists in the Olympic peloton, as I write, evinces the over-reaching of BBC commentary teams across the channels as they try to come to grips with the challenge of covering what is likely to be the most watched Olympic Games in history.
With the Athletics beginning on Friday, I can only hope that John Inverdale justifies his Olympic selection with a personal best after disappointing performances at the Crystal Palace Grand Prix and the Aviva UK Trials, and that the BBC learn from their mistakes.
You know what they say about ‘Jacks-of-all-trades’…
