Same old, same old …
Sunday 4th December 2016: Aviva Premiership Round 10: Newcastle Falcons v Harlequins at Kingston Park, kick-off 1500 hours: Result – Newcastle Falcons 38 Harlequins 32: Newcastle Falcons 5 league points – Harlequins 2 league points.
In sixty-something years I have visited the city of Newcastle but twice in my life and, to be frank, going there this past weekend was never upon my radar of possibilities. I’m happy to confess that I’m at least a couple of decades past the era when, at the drop of a hat, I might have travelled to watch my team play anywhere they were sent just for the sake of it.
Thus it was that yesterday, with not a little difficulty, I managed to tune to the live coverage of the match being broadcast by BBC Radio Newcastle on my computer, cranked it up to ‘40’ (out of 100) on the volume control and then take up my post-lunch position in my favourite armchair to watch Sky Sport’s coverage of Bournemouth’s extraordinary 4-3 victory over Liverpool and then Everton’s last-gasp 1-1 draw with Manchester United on my television (with the volume on ‘mute’).
Sometimes the above is the best a die-hard fan can do to keep in touch with the fortunes of his team. Sadly, yesterday it became a distinctly frustrating experience for two reasons.
The first was that, after an apparently bright opening, Harlequins eventually shipped six tries (whilst scoring four of their own) in going down to their fifth consecutive away defeat of the season. Never mind the popular myth that French teams, irrespective of the sport, ‘don’t travel’ – nor do Quins!
The second was that – having already had my problems locating the BBC Newcastle radio live coverage in the first place – subsequently, presumably in common with my fellow listeners up and down the land, I had to suffer the experience of it ‘dropping out’ (for unknown and unexplained technical reasons) regularly throughout the match. When I say ‘regularly’, let me hazard the estimate that it occurred in total between fifteen and twenty times during the roughly 100 minutes of the entire broadcast.
Upon each occasion it happened there was a period of silent ‘dead’ airtime, followed by what I took to be a pre-recorded BBC Newcastle jingle extolling the virtues of a forthcoming lady presenter’s ‘music and phone-in chat’ programme coming up later in the evening … then another period of silence … and then finally a return to the commentary on the rugby match. The last of these was accompanied each time by the Geordie-accented main commentator welcoming his listeners back and apologising for the ‘break’ in transmission whilst simultaneously trying not to give vent to his annoyance at the near-continual interruptions to his natural flow.
I don’t suppose it says much either for your reporter or the Harlequins that – given the hapless mayhem (as far as the visitors were concerned, in any event) that the presenter was describing whenever we could hear him – that my enjoyment of the BBC Newcastle coverage, such as it was, came as much from anticipatory excitement at the prospect of hearing his struggle to refrain from resorting to blue language (every time the coverage returned after going ‘down’) as it did from the rugby he was describing in fits and starts. In saying this I may not be doing it full justice but his sense of unspoken exasperation was wonderful in its non-release.
[And what an amazing last thirty minutes of an English Premier League match the Bournemouth victory over Liverpool gave its viewers watching ‘live’, even with the sound turned down!] …
