Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
It’s time France brought back the guillotine and its first client must be whoever it was who directed the television coverage from Roland Garros stadium of the French Open tennis tournament. I don’t know whether sabotage is regarded as a serious crime in France, but it certainly is in many of the countries to which this burlesque was transmitted.
For sabotage is what it certainly was. The presentation of some first-rate tennis was entirely secondary to the director’s pathological need to show off, to demonstrate how kin- etic he could be in the way of ingenious camera angles, chaotic intercutting, dizzying reversals, overlays, focus-pulling and any number of intrusive visual trickeries. And it has to be a he. It takes a male to wank this floridly.
Tennis is easy to televise. Watch Wimbledon in a fortnight and see that a couple of cameras mounted at the appropriate angle at either end of the court are all that is necessary. It’s almost as though the game was designed for television, as indeed snooker seems to have been. Two or three extra cameras at court level can be used for close-ups of the players and the obligatory searching of the spectators for famous faces. But nothing else is necessary to give the viewer a perfect presentation of the game.
Not so at Roland Garros, where there must have been about 15 different cameras, a ridiculous overabundance, and there mostly as a means by which the director could display his pathetic need to be flashy. In the women’s semifinal his touch was especially irksome.
I recorded some of the coverage. In the space of four seconds, leading up to and including the toss-up of the ball and the momentary serve itself, there were no fewer than nine different camera shots: a high twisting zoom down from a tower above the server; a close-up of the server’s face; a close-up of the receiver’s face; a shoulder-high shot across the court; a close-up of the ball being bounce; a medium shot of the receive;, a medium shot of the server tossing up the ball; another shot of the receiver’s face; and then a shot from ground level at the other end of the court as the ball came over the net. A quarter of a second each. We did not see the serve, nor where it ended up, nor the fate of the return. We ended up with no idea of what had happened, eventually relying on a distant shout from a line judge. The next shot was of some spectator clutching her face.
It was a deliberate and spiteful vandalism. All considerations of entertainment were swamped by the director’s need to flaunt, to be arty at any cost. Things weren’t improved much by commentators employing the tedious Bob Hewitt tradition of merciless technical deconstruction of every point.
Does hope lie in what is called “interactive television”? Already in Europe you can choose which camera output you want from a For- mula One race. I am told that, if you want to, you can watch the entire race from one of the car cameras. Will the time come when with televised tennis matches we’ll be able to select the view from only the necessary cameras, listen to the court ambience uninterrupted by any commentary, be allowed to enjoy the sport its own sake?
When they drag that French director out to his just deserts, I hereby formally apply to drive the tumbril. I want to strap him down, I want to be the one releasing the relieving blade. I’ll be doing it on behalf of millions.
The monster of reality tele- vision takes more awful shape. As I write M-Net is finishing the construction of a house in which 10 young people will be imprisoned so that millions of fortunate South Africans may daily be entranced by the gravity of their worldly perspectives, the finesse of their wit and detailed views of their visits to the lavatory.
A commentator writing in Le Monde observed recently that the way it’s going “reality television” soon will be able to offer a live murder. They’ll do anything for ratings.
More on reality television in a later column. Meantime, brace yourselves for the local Big Brother. You only have to look at the M-Net promos for two minutes to see how low they are aiming.