Inverdale is the perfect TV host... he almost certainly moisturises!
Get ready for cameras showing an 18-stone forward charging towards you
ITV expects a worldwide audience of around four billion for its pictures from the Rugby World Cup, which means, by my estimation, a worldwide audience of just under four billion asking, after the first penalty in the first match, ‘What was that for?’
Few things i n life are more inscrutable than the rules round offside and scrummaging in rugby union — quantum physics maybe, and why the studio audience is laughing so hard at Mrs Brown’s Boys — but ITV Sport clearly hopes its army of cameras and impressive line-up of former internationals on the punditry sofa will give viewers an even chance of working out what’s going on, even during the game’s more arcane moments.
There will be ref cams, specialist line-out cameras and, for the first time, tracking cameras behind the posts giving a perspective of oncoming play — a unique opportunity to enjoy the sensation of 18 stone of rugby forward charging towards you, without putting down your tortilla chips.
The tournament is hugely important to ITV, which hasn’t exactly been awash with ratings winners of late and has lost live Champions League football, a guaranteed crowd-puller, to BT Sport.
In the current overheated sports rights market the £60million it paid for this World Cup, and the previous tournament, looks a bargain.
Even in 2011, with matches from New Zealand shown in the morning, audiences hit six million, while the dramatic final day of the Six Nations on the BBC this year drew more than nine million viewers.
And unsurprisingly, that audience is skewed towards the male, upmarket viewer much prized by advertisers. Watch out for the ads for premium l agers and male moisturiser. But because the tournament is being played on home soil, it becomes what marketing expert Steve Martin described to me as ‘a mega national moment’ (like the 2012 Olympics or the UK legs of the Tour de France) likely to attract viewers beyond the traditional rugby audience.
‘There are two big TV formats; shows like X Factor, and live sport, where you are looking at audiences of tens of millions rather than one or two million,’ said Martin, chief executive of M and C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment.
‘What sport has is live moments, drama and excitement you can’t replicate outside the moment.
‘With the whole landscape of TV viewing having changed, through Netflix and catch-up and so on, it’s often difficult for advertisers to pinpoint an audience.
‘They don’t know how and when people are watching, but with live sport they do.’
It’s a message ITV seems to have absorbed, having also signed a six- year deal from 2016 to share Six Nations coverage with the BBC, bagging exclusive rights to England home matches.
World Cup coverage will be sponsored by Land Rover and the power company SSE, who are also bankrolling a World Cup app, which, among other features, enables the hyperactive viewer to kick virtual goals and vote on key decisions in real time.
ITV’s pitch to the world of performance vehicles and high-priced training shoes talks of ‘a highly engaged audience eager to interact with second screen, offering great opportunities for advertisers’.
Obviously the attraction of the World Cup to the more casual viewer is tied to the progress of the home nations, but ITV provides echoes of the 15-million-viewer moment when Jonny Wilkinson’s drop goal won the 2003 contest for England, with three members of the victorious team — Wilkinson himself, Lawrence Dallaglio and Jason Robinson — along with coach Sir Clive Woodward, on its analysis team.
But its smartest move may have been to sign up John Inverdale, below, to present. He is currently riding a wave of popularity by default, having been replaced on the BBC’s Wimbledon highlights programme by the disastrous Clare Balding-fronted Wimbledon 2Day. ‘I have never been so popular,’ was his wry comment on the furore over his replacement show. Presentation of previous tournaments on ITV has felt a little unconvincing, whereas Inverdale’s history presenting Six Nations rugby for the BBC makes him undeniably the face of the sport.
He’s played the game, too, for Esher, while his father, a Royal Navy dental surgeon, represented Devonport Services at rugby union.
Inverdale is not to everyone’s taste — columnist Matthew Norman wrote of ‘this vulpine broadcaster’s self-delight’, and I don’t think he meant in a good way — but crucially for advertisers and sponsors, Inverdale looks like the sort of chap who might drive a Land Rover, and he almost certainly moisturises.