Channel Vision Robert Kirby
Whoever he was, the director of the M-Net television coverage of the Currie Cup final deserves to have his knackers passed slowly to and fro through a very tight mangle. If ever cruel and unusual punishment is due, it is for this infuriating effort. For television viewers the game was utterly ruined as the director indulged his penchant for visual “business”. For most of the match we had little idea of the overall game being played.
The action in rugby is complicated and intense. What television viewers need is as spacious and ordered a view of it as is possible. The director should not do his utmost to make the game even more difficult to follow. In other words, he should not add synthetic excitement to an already exciting game. What is called for most of the time – in both rugby and soccer – is a medium long shot from an elevated camera to include the main action and its surrounding players. Both are tactical games. We want to see the chessboard, not the individual pieces.
What we do not want is frenetic cross- cutting to extreme close-ups, low-level shots from the touchlines, reverse angles, reaction shots of players’ faces, all thrown helter-skelter at us. We don’t know which way is up. We can’t work out who’s going where. It’s like watching life from inside a high-speed washing machine.
When the referee blows his whistle for an infringement we want to see immediately how he’s awarding scrums and penalties. That extended or raised arm is an integral part of the game. We hardly saw it last Saturday, we were too busy looking at Teichmann’s tortured visage or closely examining someone’s knee.
I hate to have to explain the patently obvious to the M-Net commentary team – bless their shrunken brains – but it’s quite clear someone needs to. The reason the referee is fitted with a radio- microphone is so that we, the television viewers, can hear what he’s saying. Otherwise why transmit it? The ref’s mic adds a fascinating extra aspect to the game and its laws. So when the ref is bollocking a couple of players, we want to hear what he’s saying. We do not want the commentators wiping him out by blathering on with their own explanations of what he might be saying. Please would someone from Russell MacMillan’s office explain this very patiently to the commentators in question?
It is curious how this fashion of overcooking visual sports coverage has taken on. Like most televisual excess, it stems from the United States where watching sports programmes is an ordeal. There the medium all but suffocates the message, as in envy of fools, sports producers and directors everywhere are abandoning their primary brief which is to show the game, let it speak for itself.
Snooker is a case in point. If ever there was a game designed for colour television it is this. All snooker requires is a single camera showing the table from high angle, another in case the player gets in the way. In this way viewers can enjoy the subtle control, the intricate geometry of the game. But, oh no. Nowadays they’ve installed miniature cameras in the pockets, they have cameras in the roof, ranged around the table, so that the vision-mixers can shuttle feverishly between close-ups of the players’ acne, inspections of the interior of their ears, magnified views of the tips of the cues. While they’re doing that, they flash up scores, statistics, and generally go to extraordinary lengths to do anything but let you see what’s going on.
Be it cricket, rugby, tennis – or that memorably appalling French television coverage of the World Cup soccer final last year – the purpose these days is to be as “creative” as possible, and so the sport has become of secondary importance to the pretensions of the television directors and their minions. Which wasn’t the case in the first-rate SABC coverage of the opening ceremony of the All Africa Games. Here it was clear directors and producers had imposed discipline all the way to the top. The speeches were kept to a bare minimum (for you can be sure that if a politician can, he will devastate anything he can lay his tongue to), the commentary was intelligent, informative, the cameras and the sound gave us a feeling of participation in what was a very moving occasion.
If ever you had doubts about the sheer enthusiasm for a healing continent, this would have put them to rest.