Can entertainment be measured? It certainly seems tricky in a world where George Lucas and Oprah Winfrey — jointly responsible for doubling the amount of schlock currently swilling about — were the two highest-earning ”personalities” of last year. Indeed, the couple responsible for Jar-Jar Binks and Dr Phil took home a combined $350-million last year.
It has certainly kept Lucas in hairspray, and even those most ardent fans of Oprah are starting to suspect that her appearance on the cover of every issue of O magazine might not have been a cost-cutting tactic as originally thought.
But bottom lines — and speci-fically those in sports — don’t always provide a real measure of how much bang audiences have got for their buck. For instance, it seems reasonable to suggest that most of the people who go to watch cricket Tests at Bloemfontein’s Goodyear Park are being entertained, yet when the gate takings from all five days add up to R39,50, it’s hard to be sure.
Sports broadcasters such as SuperSport and Sky Sports (the most convincing arguments yet for eugenics) encourage those viewers not yet suffering brain haem-orrhages to believe that when crowds of people surge in unison off their seats or chant along to the monosyllabic musical flatulence of Right Said Fred, they are people undergoing entertainment.
In the world of the sports broadcaster, entertainment is measured in decibels and degrees of depravity. Indians igniting a cricket stadium or South Africans going at each other with bottles and chairs at a soccer stadium are simply reflecting their love of the game and the vibrancy of the human spirit, albeit with unnecessary zeal.
All of which has relegated into obscurity the notion that entertainment is a form of relaxation, a way of getting away from things like smouldering stadia and concussed Amakhosi.
For most sports fans, sleep is something they do between spurts of work that allow them to pay for their satellite dishes, and once this aim is achieved, it becomes an irritating intruder, kept at bay with Red Bulls and Sokkie Dans Treffers set on repeat. If only they knew, these red-eyed, twitchy slaves to novelty, of the delights that await those who are willing to surrender to sleep, to realise that sport and shut-eye can be combined in the most decadent of entertainments.
Take, for example, BBC radio’s Test Match Special (TMS), found in the murky middle regions of the South African FM dial. Those who have not yet fallen under its soporific spell might imagine they have stumbled into an AGM of the Royal Society for the Preservation of Cracking Watercress Sandwiches, an impression encouraged by Henry Blofeld, a commentator of such exaggerated eloquence and panache that all parodies are rendered dull by comparison.
Blowers, Aggers, Bumble, the unfortunate lass known only as Schilper, who is sent to enquire after the state of Darren Gough’s blisters, all combine in a murmuring spell quite impossible to resist.
Nothing better illustrated the length and solidity of Graeme Smith’s monumental effort at Edgbaston than drifting off during a mellifluous Jonathan Agnew spell of commentary and waking up two hours later to Blowers describing a seagull, with Smith still undefeated. Short of snoozing under a news-paper in the shade of an oak tree, sport simply cannot be any more soothing than this.
The TMS crew are in a wonderful barbiturate class of their own, but there are other contenders for the determined sports sleeper.
Now that Murray Walker has retired to torture his cat with malapropisms, formula one races offer the chance to drift off to the whine of Martin Brundle, whose voice, despite having the plaintive air of a retriever left in the rain overnight, combines with the ambient racket in a lullaby that is almost irresistible on a Sunday afternoon.
South African commentators, still labouring under the misappre-hension that they are trying to rouse their audience, continue dutifully to talk about sport, sport, and only sport. Those like Peter Davies, who are, uh, employed as professional speakers because they make everyone else feel like orators, have potential as sleeptalkers — but for entirely the wrong reason.
So roll on the second cricket Test and the sandmen of the Beeb.