Why do shows about sport have to be so annoyingly competitive?
It’s difficult to escape the F-word in our house at the moment. As we approach the business end of the season, as pundits would have it, there appears to be football on the telly 24-hours a day, seven days a week.
I had contemplated indulging in the lightweight toga-fest that is Queen Cleopatra, currently being universally panned after making its Netflix debut.
Less weighty historical drama and more Mills and
Boon, it is described by The Telegraph’s Anita Singh as “too soapy for serious history fans, and not enough of a soap for viewers who like juicy historical dramas”.
Sounds right up my street… however, although it’s on
Netflix I dislike squinting at programmes on the iPad or, worse still, my phone. So I just thought I’d watch it on the telly like a normal person.
Unfortunately, and not for the first time this week, football was already on and I lost the battle for the remote 2-1.
This is what happens when you live with a sports journalist and a football-mad teenager I guess. One day I will have my revenge and force them to watch hours of dressage on Horse and Country – first person to call them dancing horses gets a flick behind the girth with the schooling whip.
Anyhow, as play-off games go, it was probably quite an entertaining one – Sheffield Wednesday overturning the
4-0 pasting handed out by Peterborough the previous week and going on to win on penalties.
(Anyone else notice the more-than-passing resemblance of Posh manager Darren Ferguson to that guy in League of Gentleman?
Kept expecting him to tell the linesman it was a local ground for local people...)
What I couldn’t get past was the commentary. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t scream obscenities-at-the-telly awful like Martin Tyler; it was just a bit bizarre. And once you noticed, you can’t un-hear it…
Every time Owls captain Barry Bannan got the ball, they called him by his full name. Every. Single. Time. Everyone else was simply Smith, Windass, Palmer… but not Bazza. He was ‘Barry Bannan’ on the ball, ‘Barry Bannan’ when making a tackle, ‘Barry Bannan’ when he stepped up to take his penalty.
It’s almost as though one of their mates had dared them to only refer to him as Barry Bannon for the entire 90 minutes – something which backfired somewhat after it went to extra time and penalties, adding on another 45 minutes or so of alliterative mickey-taking.
It was reminiscent of when the England 1998 World Cup squad expended more
“I thought Bjorn Borg was in Abba,” Tom Allen informs host Jimmy Carr ruefully
energy getting song titles into interviews than they did on the pitch.
Current England boss Gareth Southgate complaining about the French weather – “It’s hardly Club Tropicana, Bob” – and Alan Shearer (folically challenged even then) getting in on the act, insisting the lads were “not exactly dancing on the ceiling”.
It’s a clip that appeared on the Big Fat Quiz of Sport the other day. Now this is my kind of sports programme. Let’s get some comedians together who know little or nothing about sport and ask them lots of questions about sport.
Better still, let’s make sure one of them is Tom Allen and that he offers some truly momentous insights. “I thought Bjorn Borg was in Abba,” he informs host Jimmy Carr ruefully.
He’s exactly the kind of person I’d like to sit next to at a football match, less interested in the offside trap than the players’ haircuts or endless tattoos, snaking around their upper torsos to make them look as though they’ve been glued to the floor while a two-year-old ran amok with a Sharpie.
He was up against stiff opposition in the form of the hilarious Judi Love, convinced the Olympic rings were actually Hula Hoops, Roisin Conaty, Joel Dommett, Dane Baptiste and Kerry Godliman.
The only question they all seemed to know the answer to was why Paula Radcliffe had to apologise to the nation.
It’s a far cry from the irritatingly competitive Question of Sport. Even the installation of the ubiquitous Paddy McGuinness as host has done little to alleviate the combative edge as captains Sam Quek and Ugo Monye battle it out for top honours.
How tempting it must be for McGuinness to revert to a previous catchphrase when introducing the teams – no likey, no lighty. Sorry Paddy,
I’d have switched off before the theme tune faded.