The locked-down Crowd (still) Goes Wild
The pandemic hasn’t stopped the team that enjoys looking at the lighter side of sport from having fun. Andrew Voerman reports.
How do you make a sports news show when there’s no longer any sport? The crew at The Crowd Goes Wild have persevered through the Covid-19 lockdown, putting out two shows a week on Prime and Sky Sports – a reduced schedule that is down to logistics, rather than a lack of content.
Executive producer Ric Salizzo was worried it might be a challenge finding enough material with the sports world gone dark, but while speaking to the Sunday Star-Times he revealed they’ve actually had too much.
‘‘Everyone’s at home coming up with ideas, and doing interviews, and re-enacting things, so it’s like, how do we fit all that in?
‘‘It’s funny, you’d think with little sports news we’d struggle for material, but it’s been the opposite.’’
There was a strong desire to keep going among the 11-strong crew at Crowd, as Salizzo calls it, even though the lockdown has kept them from accessing the studio and the equipment they would normally use to put the show together.
Presenter Andrew Mulligan has been hosting from his baby’s bedroom (it’s where the acoustics are best), with a cot to his right and a rotating cast of playing shirts hanging on the wall behind him, while James McOnie has been sat in front of a shelf carrying a copy of Steven Adam’s autobiography and other sporting objects.
You get a good sense of the stories they’ve been telling once you know that one lockdown show began with a riff about Brazilian football star Neymar, whose mum, Nadine, is in a relationship with a gamer who is a big fan of him – as well as being six years younger.
Another segment that night involved reporter (and Silver Fern) Storm Purvis interviewing Black Cap Jimmy Neesham, who was working his way through a large supply of dumplings, amongst other things, while fellow reporter (and Olympian) Anna Willcox completed the challenge of sitting down and standing up again with a can of Red Bull on her forehead while on a call with skier Nico Porteous.
As it normally does, the show has continued to provide a humorous and irreverent look at the sports world at a time when funny (and normality) is in short supply, which is a big reason why it is still going to air.
‘‘When we got locked down, we got on a call and just started talking and we said it would be great for us to keep going – as tough as it it us to make the show remotely, let’s have a crack at it,’’ Salizzo said.
‘‘We did one as a test and it was pretty good, but it takes a bit longer to do the show this way, so we said let’s do them on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
‘‘We feel a pretty strong connection with our audience.’’
The task of putting a show together begins the day before, when as much as two-thirds of it is produced, and carries on until early in the afternoon the day it airs, with the final product running for 22 minutes and taking up 12GB of computer storage.
As a result, it takes a little over an hour for it to be uploaded to Sky for broadcast, and a second copy is sent via a live camera unit in case there are any hiccups.
The task of bringing everyone’s content together and turning it into a complete package falls to editor Sean Crossan, who Salizzo hailed as a ‘‘unsung hero’’.
‘‘The editor is someone who doesn’t always get that much credit, but he is the guy that has actually pulled pulled everything together and turned it into a show.
‘‘Our loose ideas and bits of stuff shot on our phones and news clips, all these bits, he just turns it into a show, and it’s been
really cool to see that guy become the star of the show, even though he’s not on the show.’’
The Crowd crew are in regular contact during the week, bouncing ideas off each other as they would normally do, and helping to create a sense of normality. As Salizzo puts it: ‘‘It’s surprising to think that a group of people that are a little bit crazy can make you feel sane’’.
‘‘We have a WhatsApp group which we use all the time anyway and most of the time it’s not actually an overly productive use of time,’’ he added.
‘‘It’s more of a humorous use of time, and there’s lots of banter and stuff that goes on there, and pretty much the same happens when we try to get a Zoom together.
‘‘We’ve always had the philosophy that the more fun we
have making the show, the more fun it will be to watch, and we’ve tried to keep true to that.’’
In adapting to the lockdown, the brains behind Crowd have introduced a new segment, where they’ve called on viewers to help fill the sporting void.
‘‘Back in the early days of SportsCafe, around 1997, one of the first things we did was run this competition, and it was probably one of the first ever viewer video competitions of this nature, and we called it Legends of the Lounge,’’ Salizzo said.
‘‘I thought it would be quite fun to relive some of that, so we’ve brought that competition back and now it’s called Legends of the Lockdown and basically it is people recreating great sporting moments in their lounge or their backyard.
‘‘Some of them have been brilliant. One thing I’ve learnt from SportsCafe and Crowd is you should never get too carried away with yourself if you’re on TV, because quite often the people who are watching the show are more creative than you are.’’