The opium of the people: TV sport

ONCE again I am grateful to Damien Love for expressing what so many people are feeling yet almost afraid to say out loud: “Now is our wintry discontent made yet more dolorous by this summer of sport” (The best of this week’s TV, Sunday Herald Life, August 7).

It’s all about money, isn’t it? Television companies have paid a fortune to be allowed to broadcast the football/tennis/golf/Olympics so they’re going to recoup their money by forcing us to watch because there will be nothing else on except repeats and/or repeats of what’s shown on Sky.

During the World Cup, more than once, the same match was broadcast on both BBC and ITV at the same time. Why? The television companies didn’t take into account that many matches would run into extra time, so other programmes, including the news, had to wait until the match and its mind-numbingly boring analysis of it, was over.

In this time of unprecedented political and financial change, a barbaric campaign of violence against its own subjects in Syria and the war that Isis is waging, television companies should be keeping us abreast of events. Instead, they’re bombarding us with sport.

An example of their comparative oversight is the cursory coverage of the recent death of a young woman in Brussels. Before the “summer of sport” it would have received indepth analysis and gravitas but it was skimmed over in a couple of minutes in favour of wall-to-wall coverage of the Olympics opening ceremony.

Is it an attempt at a modern day “bread and circuses” approach to current affairs or, perhaps, has sport now become the opium of the people? Can those of us who are completely cheesed off with sport on TV get a refund on our licences?