The art of keeping up
Regular readers will be aware that from time to time the Rust has taken to featuring pieces on long-running issues, arguments or campaigns in which it is interested, many of them concerned with the world of sport.
My opinion piece today is another.
It is a fact of life that – in common with every other area of human activity, pastime or route to making a living – those who run every sport on Earth have to remain aware of (if not vigilant about) ongoing developments in science, technology and climate change (to name but three of a limitless number) … inasmuch as any and/or all of them affect the way that human society operates.
Arguably the biggest and most far-reaching ‘jump forwards’ ever in human history have been those in the field of human communication. I’m deliberately dealing in bucket chemistry and generalisations here, but let me list a few by way of example:
Ancient Greeks and Romans using the sun to convey signals or commands via mirror.
Indigenous people in North America – in my day it used to be okay to use the description ‘Red Indians’ but probably no longer – sending smoke signals.
The 17th Century British Royal Navy signalling by flags – remember Nelson’s famous ‘England expects …’ rallying call before the Battle of Trafalgar?
The Pony Express.
Morse Code.
The invention of the telegraph, telegrams, telephone, radio, television and computers.
And – of course – the invention and development of the worldwide web or internet.
I next wish to leap to give a nod to the world of social media – these days, via computers and smartphones, it seems that both in theory and practice any one of us can gain instant access to everything in the world at the click of a mouse or touch of a screen.
I cannot keep up with such things myself, but a few years ago Facebook and Twitter seemed to hold particular sway, yet today enabling apps and/or software like Skype, What’s App?, eBay, YouTube, Amazon … and hundreds of other examples vying to be ‘the latest fashionable thing’ (and thereby one day hopefully global corporate players) … can facilitate people to buy houses, go dating, research nuclear weapons or do literally anything else they please in a matter of milliseconds.
The trouble with all the above is that – human nature being what it is – instinctively we all tend to operate as if we’d like to ‘stop the world’ where it happens to be at any particular time.
First, as kids but then also as adults – rather like all other living creatures – we find out ‘how the world works today, here, now …’ and thus learn how we might eat and drink, gain employment, start a business, make a living, enjoy our leisure time, in fact do anything and everything worth doing … and then apply ourselves to do all of these, or at least as many of them as we feel we need or attract our interest. A hoped-for precondition of all of this is that none of it will ever change (well, not too much anyway).
But the world doesn’t quite operate like that – it might be far more boring but easier if it did.
Let me give an obvious perhaps facile example. At some point in the 1970s (I don’t actually know that, it’s just my guess) cassettes, videotapes and VCRs were invented. Suddenly these were ‘the next best thing’ and became a fashionable phenomenon – everyone had to have them.
Simultaneously people started new businesses, and made themselves careers, in the brave new cassette, videotape and VCR world. One of them became the Blockbuster chain of high street video shops, hiring videos to the public for a few quid at a time. It became very successful.
And then suddenly videotapes and VCRs were old hat – replaced initially by CDs and DVDs and then later by the internet and downloading etc. I hope I’m not doing it a disservice, but I don’t think Blockbuster exists anymore. It’s time has been and gone.
Fast-forward a few more jumps. Today television – whether delivered terrestrially, or by satellite and cable – is under siege from all sorts of new aggressive businesses supplying entertainment (live and recorded) content via the internet. Of course – from a human point of view – if you worked in ‘old-style classic television’, it would be nice of no new technologies ever came along and rendered you (or at least the organisation you worked for) obsolete. But sadly life just isn’t like that.
Now to the nub of my post today.
Sports administrators have their problems with television and the internet. How the deuce do they keep their sport relevant when the biggest money is to be had in providing itself potentially to audiences of billions around the world? Take Premiership soccer, a case in point. Plainly untold riches are to be gained from providing blanket, brilliant, wall-to-wall live television coverage of the Premier League.
But they also need tens of thousands of enthusiastic, passionate fans of both teams involved filling the stadia to provide the TV viewers with ‘atmosphere’.
Suppose that one horrible day in the future the average fan gets fed up paying for his seat (and the rising cost of travelling to matches) and instead stays at home – like everyone else – to watch the match at home on TV or the internet?
Empty seats, or empty stadia, would presumably give an unhappy impression of the sport and destroy the quality of the product …
It’s a problem.
We’ve now got the game of cricket, a game of traditions if ever there was one, wrestling with the various commercial and other complications of its various different formats – Test matches, ODIs, T20s – and the ‘bite size’ obsessions of modern spectators and audiences.
We’ve got golf – worrying about potentially falling interest in playing and spectating – trying out ‘short golf’ formats (I understand three or six-hole competitions are being mooted) and other gimmicks, the better to retain its position in the firmament, this because in the modern world the concept that you might block out an entire four-day weekend to watch a 72-hole tournament perhaps doesn’t necessarily ‘cut it’ with modern television audiences.
Lord Coe has recently proposed bite-sized athletics meets and other ways of cutting down the time it takes to run track and field meet … simply because TV audiences tend to get bored watching e.g. a high jump or discus competition taking three days (qualifying for the final etc.) to bring about a result: research has apparently shown that, ideally, they’d far prefer to watch a single day of nothing but finals.
See here for an article by Martha Kelner on Lord Coe’s thoughts that appeared on 4th October 2017 on the website of – THE GUARDIAN
I came to this subject because of an article I came across today, also upon the website of The Guardian.
It was on the subject of horse racing – and, I felt, indirectly also gambling (betting). I should add here that neither are pastimes of particular interest to me, but that’s my problem.
It seems to me that a significant proportion of the TV audience for horse racing – I haven’t a clue, but let me hazard a guess that it is 50% on any given day – is primarily interested in the betting aspect of any race meeting. They’ve either already placed bets on the races, or they plan to, or (in the comfort of their home living room) they are fantasising about doing so.
For these people, most of the TV coverage – featuring horse betting punditry and the bookies’ odds, but also recorded interviews and mini-documentaries on specific stables or horses taking part, and maybe live chit-chat with (or about) owners, trainers, jockeys and ladies fashions etc. – is merely froth that fills in the time before the racing starts, and then the periods between the individual races on the card.
My contention is that they’d be just as (or even more) happy watching an afternoon of racing that featured every race being held on every course in the country, with maybe just five-minute intervals between the end of one race and the start of the next.
This is the reason that I was interested to read the article I’ve referred to above – on the subject of the apparently disappointing audience ratings for ITV’s coverage of Ascot’s recent British Champions Day meet.
It seems to me that many sports are being forced to face the fact that – apart from their obsessed fans, who will contentedly watch four hours of build-up e.g. to a football Cup Final if they were being broadcast – more and more of their potential TV audience is only interested (as our American cousins would put it) in the ‘beef’ in the sandwich – in other words, the denouement … the race, the game … or the final round.
What are sports to do these days? Spend their time trying to tailor their product to the perceived demands of modern and future TV viewers – or stick to their cores rule and traditions and trust to the hope that ‘the people will come’?
See the article (by Greg Wood) that I’ve taken as my text for today here, on the website of – THE GUARDIAN
