A commentator who was magnificently on the ball
Let’s face it, the vast majority of sports commentary is instantly forgettable. Your spine shivers at the sporting memory itself. Just occasionally, though, a commentator will find a way to bookmark an event in the collective consciousness. Maradona redeeming himself after the hand of God: “You have to say that’s magnificent.”. Les mots justes.
Very often that commentator has been the octogenarian institution
celebrated in Barry Davies: The Man,
The Voice, The Legend (BBC Two). He was the blazered Rotarian to John Motson’s demotic nerd in a carcoat. If they were midfielders, Davies was the one with time on the ball, while Motson ran around puffing. In their rivalry of opposites, this was the final act: a valediction to Davies, who is retiring after Wimbledon, to match the recent one about Motson, who was one of the talking heads.
Motson was full of praise from which he couldn’t quite extract a note of purring triumph. It may be just me but I can’t remember a single pearly phrase of Motty’s. So why did he get the bigger games? We weren’t told. But how lovely that Davies’s son, Mark, tearful at the memory, perched on dad’s shoulder for his first Wembley final.
Plenty of the usual faces said the same admiring things in roughly the same slightly bland words. If only they’d interviewed Robbie Williams, who invited Davies to commentate on the She’s the One ice-skating video. Or better still, Graham Linehan, cocreator of the sketch show Big Train. Davies’s priceless commentary in the World Stare-out Championships fondly sent up his gift for animating sports about which he (and we) knew next to nothing.
This affectionate tribute worked best on those for whom the name Franny Lee is not perfectly meaningless. He was a tubby blond Seventies striker whose searing top-corner screamer on a midwinter mudpatch inspired Davies to holler the immortal words: “Interesting. Very interesting!” Repetition is the key, reckoned Davies, modestly. But let’s also hear it for wild enthusiasm. The voice had a refined Home Counties restraint, but was prone to sudden detonations that were so loud they sound like distortion. I’m already missing him like mad.
You know what you’re getting from Rich Hall’s comedy: sour ornery humour in a hat, world-weary sarcasm without a smile. He has doubled as a sardonic interpreter of American psychogeography in a string of feature-length BBC documentaries.
The latest was Rich Hall’s Working
for the American Dream (BBC Four), which, even in the canon of his 90-minute thinkpieces, was something else: a screed delivered by a stand-up who has thought deeply and widely about social history.
His myth-busting subject was the working class’s bum deal in America’s land of opportunity, from the moment the Plymouth Brethren hopped off the boat and one half started exploiting the other. He ploughed his knowledgeable way through farming, religion and the factory floor and fetched up at the end of President Trump’s yellow brick road. Along the way, there were insights into quality rocking chairs, quality guitars and quality cars: Hall is a sermonising believer in the consolations of craft – in another life he could have been a grouchy preacher hurling truths from a pulpit.
His narrative style fell between Ken Burns and Michael Moore, those antithetical bookends among America’s documentarians. Alongside a thunderous soundtrack, there were lavish archival illustrations and very serious talking heads – it felt distinctly odd watching Hall modestly listen to them. Weirdest of all was the prospect of Hall standing before Grant Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic, unpacking it like a buckaroo Andrew Graham-dixon.
Information was spikily dispensed, while the jokes flowed like chopped lumber bumping down a crowded torrent, as if Hall was slightly ashamed of having done quite so much thinking. Sometimes the theories were packaged a little too reductively. Hall on cotton: “A huge chunk of America’s problems – every dumbass redneck cracker barrel shred of racism that exists in America – is the indirect result of a fabric. God, if only northerners had been happy wearing wool or hemp or muskrat pelt.”
Hall’s secret to working happiness is to “love the thing you do. It’s that simple, folks.” He’d never admit it, but he seems to have cracked it. This rambunctious essay was a great fillip.
Barry Davies: The Man, The Voice, The Legend
Rich Hall’s Working for the American Dream