A cure for insomnia? An app explaining the rules of cricket
There is an app, as there is for everything, to help you sleep. It is called “Calm”. My wife swears by it. Calm also helps you meditate, has life “masterclasses” that seek to help users manage their anger, live without fear and be more creative.
Calm is for every Springbok rugby fan who stayed awake last Saturday night.
Calm helps users nod off through “sleep stories”, narrated by the likes of Stephen Fry. Essentially, bedtime stories for grownups and other big kids.
Calm is also for cricket fans, as my wife alerted me this week. Or, rather, for those who aren’t fans. This month Calm added a story called: “A cure for insomnia? Cricket explained.”
It is narrated by Henry Blofeld, the recently retired English commentator, the quintessential voice of English cricket. It is described as a “sleepy yet amusing introduction to the world’s most leisurely sport”.
Calm’s co-founder Michael Acton Smith told the Press Association that the “San Francisco-based company thought cricket was the perfect subject for one of the sleep aid stories because of its confusing nature and wide range of vocabulary”.
“Before there was mindfulness, you might say, there was cricket,” he said.
“And before there were sleeping pills, there were Test matches. Many things baffle Americans about cricket. They include the complex rules, the exceeding slowness and the fact that a cricket match can last five days and still end in a draw.”
It takes as its starting point the quote by US comedian Groucho Marx, who was a guest at a Test at Lord’s in the 1950s and described it as: “What a wonderful cure for insomnia. If you can’t sleep here, you really need an analyst.”
I spent R190 for a monthly Calm subscription just to listen to Blofeld, the dear old thing, who begins by talking about himself and Test Match Special for five of the 20 minutes and 29 seconds of the story. He takes the insomniac through a day at the cricket, sitting with a glass of something special, explaining the sport in a “Cricket for Dummies” manner.
It does go on. But that, you suspect, is the point. As I write, England have taken the field in the fourth Test at the Rose Bowl. Oh, wait, Keaton Jennings has just gone out for a duck. And then Joe Root follows quicker than you can sing (apologies to John Lennon) “Ishant Sharma’s gonna get you”. A wake-up call.
Calm is a moneyspinner. It is valued at $250m, was named by Apple as its app of the year in 2017 with a turnover of $40m. The co-founders believe they have the election of Donald Trump to thank for raising stress levels and creating a need for their product. Perhaps Trump will use that as proof he has stimulated the US economy.
This week, Amazon may have pushed subscriptions to Calm up a few dollars. Its online broadcast of the US Open on Amazon Prime has been so badly panned by viewers that it has felt forced to stop fans from posting bad reviews by suspending comments.
Amazon paid $40m for a five-year deal to broadcast the Open to the UK, taking it away from Sky. The Guardian reported that more than 90% of the 650 reviews put the boot into its coverage, which is fronted by a team that includes Jim Courier, Greg Rusedski and Annabel Croft. It invested in a studio at Flushing Meadows. It got royally flushed.
“There is no replay option, no ability to record [and] the picture quality is very poor,” read one review. “It’s like going back in time 25 years.”
The march of Big Tech into sport is seen as the future of broadcasting. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter have all moved to take games onto their platforms, with varying and unimpressive degrees of success.
Facebook’s first attempt at streaming a baseball match was described as “amateurish and tedious” by veteran US sports broadcaster Keith Olbermann.
“Content is king” is the mantra of our digital world, but that content has to excite and capture the audience, holding on to them. If not, they will become another cure for insomnia, with fans nodding off before the end.