Helen’s all dressed up, nowhere to go
FORMER Blue Peter presenter Helen Skelton has been axed from the swimming commentary team for next month’s Commonwealth Games, supposedly for wearing skimpy dresses while presenting the Rio Olympics.
What? Poolside in Australia, what was she meant to wear? An Amish pinafore?
I always thought she looked lovely. Yes, she did seem dressed for a cocktail party rather than a sports coverage gig, but so what? Helen’s real crime was
behaving like she was at a cocktail party, which is different altogether.
All her screaming and laughing with competitors and copresenters Rebecca Adlington and Mark Foster? Honestly, I couldn’t face that again, no matter how pretty her frocks might be.
Sports commentary is not a popularity contest. It is about lucid, fluent expertise — or rather it was.
‘Two girls in the final. Gotta be good, right?’ said Helen in Rio, sounding as though she was back on Blue Peter.
While she might be missing, guess which ubiquitous presenter, who has just finished the Winter Olympics in South Korea, will yet again be at the forefront of the Beeb’s coverage of this fiesta of sport?
Is it Clare Balding, C. Balding or Balding, Clare? I think we know the answer.
NEWS just in. My unreconstructed darling has just phoned to comment on the Helen Skelton story.
‘Surely they are not sacking that lovely young girl for being lovely?’ he wonders.
This from the man who always shouts hopefully from the kitchen ‘Has Emily got her boots on tonight?’ when Newsnight is on. No, I don’t know what to do with him either.